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Well, it’s about a month late, but DC is finally getting some snow: the forecast, originally estimating not more than an inch, now says an inch or two of fine, fresh powder before the day is done. Some photos taken during lunch break:
More from DCist, CapitalWeather, and the DC LJ community.
No sooner has weblog spam become a significant issue to me than Google steps in with rel="nofollow", a proposal to keep links from being abused by spammers. (Also see the news from Six Apart.) This has applications towards referrer spam as well; all it takes is a line or two of code in our referrer log scripts to render all outbound links worthless to the search engine “optimizers.” Wikis, likewise, and any other system where user-generated links and content are at risk for abuse.
There’s only one major problem: cobweblogs, those outdated sites by noncommittal webloggers who post a few entries, then forget about their Movabletype or WordPress installations, leaving them to gather dust, and spam. Look at these search results, for example. Spammers can still target those people.
If you have a friend who still keeps a cobweblog, do him — and the rest of the internet — a favor, and ask that friend to either upgrade it, or delete it. Every little bit helps. And if you produce or use a referrer log script like Shortstat or Refer, it’s time for an upgrade.
Dear Blog Spammers: Congratulations. Let it sink in: you’ve made an enemy out of Google.
Referrer Spam. For myself and for anyone curious about my inbound traffic, my installation of Refer is public, but hidden from search engines by a robots exclusion <meta>. That, as many of you webmasters may have found by now, does nothing to deter referrer spam.
As of late, this site and many others have been under attack by a persistent referrer and blog comment spammer, with visits from just about every open proxy on the web, plus more than a few zombie machines, linking back to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of domains. Each of the domains uses fake whois info, and showed, until recently, a fake “suspension” notice to throw off any webmasters who followed the link, fooling them into thinking that the spammer had already been taken out. The jubilation was premature, of course: the sites are now flooded with links to all sorts of sleazy online scams, their pagerank artificially boosted by spam posted to unmaintained weblog comment threads and referrer logs. The flood of inbound traffic from this spammer’s zombie network is so heavy that it operates like a DOS attack: consuming bandwidth, sucking up server resources, and slowing — or even bringing down — the victim site. Witness the growing tide of spammed referrers, or see an untended referrer log taken over by pornographic links.
Myself, I’m keeping most of the flood at bay with an .htaccess blacklist. Amusingly, the spammer’s own comment spams, huge strings of domains inside <h1> tags, are an excellent way to generate a domain-based blacklist, since he seems quite intent on flooding comment threads with almost every domain he’s registered. Denying by IP is an exercise in futility, since the zombie network just keeps growing, most likely fed by trojans installed by the unsuspecting clicks of indiscriminate file sharers.
More info on this attack elsewhere:
Update, 25 Jan 2005: Ann Elisabeth seems to have discovered the culprits, and Photodude laments Verio’s poor response to the crisis.
Small, cheap, no display: Daring Fireball on last week’s new Mac hardware offerings. I’m quite impressed with the Mac Mini and iWork: both wonderfully affordable, finally giving the average PC user a cheap gateway into the Mac world. Judging by the buzz I’m hearing on various Internet communities, the Mac Mini is it — the Mac that everyone’s getting, now that price is no longer a barrier in a world where people are weary of insecure, virus-infested, spyware-ridden Windows PCs. Myself, I’m still fine with my iBook G3, now 2.5 years old and still going strong. With the iCurve that Amy gave me for my birthday last year plus a keyboard and optical mouse, it’s just about as good as a desktop system.
The iPod Shuffle is an object of complete indifference. To begin with, I don’t care much for the iPod, or for music players in general, since I’ve never felt the need to have a constant soundtrack running through my life all hours of the day. The “Shuffle” concept is of even less worth to me since I mostly listen to baroque and classical works which are split up into movements played in sequence. Shuffled playback would only disjoint the repertoire. No, if I want music on the go, I’ll listen to it on whatever music-playing combo device I end up purchasing to replace my Palm.
With temperatures dropping below freezing outside, and a chance of snow tomorrow, this was a perfect night to cook up a pot of Manong Ken’s Arroz Caldo — only with one more tablespoon of patis, half the water replaced by organic low-sodium chicken broth, and a lot more ginger than the recipe called for, which is how I like it. Yum.
(It was left simmering a bit longer than it should have, however, thanks to me being distracted by an episode of Futurama, so it turned from porridge into very gooey-sticky chicken rice. No problem: I just microwave every bowl with half a cup of chicken broth, and it goes back to being porridge.)
ESA is finally putting out more Titan data: stitched descent panoramas and color photos, and sounds from the Huygens microphone. The people at Planetary.org people have more detailed Huygens sound data, with processed WAVs and sound spectograms. The sound files are historic; this is the first actual sound we’re getting from an alien atmosphere. Hissy.
ESA Spins Titan Landing Show Into Sludge. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one annoyed at how ESA is dragging its feet on revealing Huygens landing images to the public. When the Mars rovers landed, I was all over their raw image galleries, obsessively poring over every hazcam and navcam and pancam image in sheer amazement. When the Huygens data was received, ESA announced they had 350 photos, showed just one, then promptly switched over to long, fawning speeches by various European politicians. A couple more photos were put out, followed by a notice that no more would be shown tonight, press conference tomorrow, that’s it. What was up with that?
(Fortunately, the DISR data page briefly carried all the raw images from the lander’s DISR package, which I was able to mirror before the 404s attacked. So did Lyle.org. Ha.)
Update: Hey, ESA wised up and published the raw images. Yay!
The photos are coming in from Huygens. These first two were taken during descent, from an altitude of about 16km. Isn’t the second one freaky?
And here’s the first shot from the surface itself:
Check out the Planetary Society’s Huygens Blog for scientific commentary on these images, and a story on Huygens’ first pictures from Spaceflight Now.
Update: More science on those photos. Apparently the rocks are blocks of very frozen water ice.
The Huygens lander has safely touched down on the surface of Titan. Nothing else has been received as of yet other than carrier signals, but data relayed through Cassini will begin arriving in about two hours. If all went well, they should be getting pictures, spectral data on the chemical composition of the air and surface, and maybe even sound from the alien environment of the Fuzzy Moon. SpaceflightNow has a comprehensive pre-landing article.
For those of you not of an astronomical bent, Titan is Saturn’s largest moon, and the second largest moon in the Solar System. It is unique as the only moon with its own significant atmosphere: a cold, dense fog of nitrogen, methane, and other organic compounds. I call Titan the “Fuzzy Moon” because photos of the moon taken by various space probes in visible light always come out vague and fuzzy, owing to the thick, diffuse atmosphere. Photos taken by Cassini on other wavelengths show a relatively flat, mottled, nonreflective surface, indicating some kind of dynamic action at work. While some scientists theorize that Titan may harbor oceans — or at least puddles — of liquid hydrocarbons, I’m more with the theory that the flat, nonreflective surface could be an oily hydrocarbon slush. We’ll soon know!
There’s an enthusiastic Metafilter thread going on the topic.
Update, 1245 (EST): The probe is well, the downlink established, the data being transferred, but it’ll be a few more hours before we get to see any pictures from Titan. The guys at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, who made the DISR Package which took the photos, say they’ll immediately post the first raw image data received to this page. Don’t all go there and start refreshing your browsers all at once.
“Larry, we’re going down, Larry,” “I know it.” This day in 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 took off from DC National Airport, in heavy snow, with insufficiently de-iced wings. A minute after takeoff, the plane crashed into the packed 14th Street Bridge, crushing several cars before falling into the Potomac River and sinking into the icy water.