Monday, August 11, 2008
“We never thought of telling people … ”
Many motorcyclists rejoiced when the $4.99 SunPass Mini windshield stickers debuted on July 1.
Finally, a no-fuss alternative to the box-shaped transponders that are tough to keep from falling off or being stolen, not to mention impossible to shield from the rain.
There's just one problem: The sticker tags don't work on motorcycles.
That's what Gregory Pius of Wellington discovered after he already paid for the tag, filled it with prepaid tolls and stuck it on the windscreen of his BMW motorcycle.
Now he says he can't remove it without damaging the screen's protective coating.
SunPass' new Mini stickers won't work on motorcycles
About two weeks ago my friend Gregory was dismayed to find out that the new SunPass was never designed to work on motocycles, and started to raise quite a fuss about it.
Looks like a few people heard …
Oil, schmoil Part deux
Bear with us. Whaling, after all, was one of the world's first great multinational businesses, a global enterprise of audacious reach and import. From the 1700s through the mid-1800s, oil extracted from the blubber of whales and boiled in giant pots gave light to America and much of the Western world. The United States whaling fleet peaked in 1846 with 735 ships out of 900 in the world. Whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the United States; in 1853 alone, 8,000 whales were slaughtered for whale oil shipped to light lamps around the world, plus sundry other parts used in hoop skirts, perfume, lubricants and candles.
But, in fact, whaling was already just about done, said Eric Jay Dolin, who wrote some of the text for the exhibit and is the author of “Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America.” Whales near North America were becoming scarce, and the birth of the American petroleum industry in 1859 in Titusville, Pa., allowed kerosene to supplant whale oil before the electric light replaced both of them and oil found other uses.
By 1861, whaling was in such decline that the federal government bought 38 old whaling ships, loaded them with stones and sunk them in Charleston Harbor in what turned out to be an unsuccessful attempt to blockade the Confederate port.
They Used to Say Whale Oil Was Indispensable, Too
Yeah, I think I've mentioned this before …
A symphony of music for your listening enjoyment
Now that Bunny is back in town, I can finally post a bunch of musical links for her (and your) enjoyment.
First off, a Muppet duet—the Swedish Chef and Beaker. Carmen perhaps? It's familiar to me at any rate.
Next, a sextet, comprising of Beaker, Beaker, Beaker, Beaker, Beaker and Beaker, performing Ode to Joy.
Third up, everybody's favorite 17th century one-hit wonder Pachelbel. Another solo sextet, but not Beaker this time. Give this one a bit of time, it starts off a bit slow, but gets better.
Fourth up, Theremin music! Super Mario Brothers video game theme music (link via nevesis). In fact, the guy that did that plays a lot of Theremin music.
While listening to those, there's a theoretical paper on the semantic shifts of the Beatles' chords. That is, if you are into music theory.
And just because, a dancing chicken.
Stupid server stats
So I took the IP address mapping program (it can lookup 10,000,000 entries per second on a dual-core 2.6GHz Pentium—5,000,000 per second per CPU) and decided to check some of the server logs—to see where I'm getting most of my network activity, excluding web requests.
Basically, I'm checking sources for spam and ssh
attempts.
First up, sources for email (which includes legitimate emails as well as spam attempts) for the past 28 days:
| Count | Country |
|---|---|
| Count | Country |
| 5057 | UNITED STATES |
| 2413 | RUSSIAN FEDERATION |
| 2413 | CHINA |
| 2005 | BRAZIL |
| 1380 | ARGENTINA |
| 1336 | COLOMBIA |
| 1173 | TURKEY |
| 1035 | REPUBLIC OF KOREA |
| 1033 | SPAIN |
| 897 | INDIA |
| 843 | CHILE |
| 738 | POLAND |
| 721 | UNITED KINGDOM |
| 721 | GERMANY |
| 614 | ITALY |
| 604 | UKRAINE |
| 573 | ROMANIA |
| 554 | PERU |
| 466 | ISRAEL |
| 459 | FRANCE |
| 399 | MEXICO |
| 395 | THAILAND |
| 385 | (no associated country) |
| 309 | TAIWAN |
| 231 | VIET |
| 190 | CANADA |
| 188 | HUNGARY |
| 146 | PORTUGAL |
| 142 | VENEZUELA |
| 140 | CZECH REPUBLIC |
| 136 | JAPAN |
| 130 | NETHERLANDS |
| 127 | LATVIA |
| 124 | KAZAKHSTAN |
| 123 | SAUDI |
| 120 | BULGARIA |
| 116 | INDONESIA |
| 111 | DOMINICAN REPUBLIC |
| 107 | PHILIPPINES |
| 104 | GREECE |
| 102 | SINGAPORE |
Here, I excluded results less than 100. There really aren't any surprises here, except for the “no associated country” bit—I'm guessing here the mapping data I have is somewhat incomplete. It's also amusing to see 38 emails from Iran (marketing to the Great Satan? Unexpected, to say the least) and 1 from the Lao People's Democratic Republic (they have the Internet there?).
Next up, ssh attempts for the past 28 days (all results,
since it's a smaller data set):
| Count | Country |
|---|---|
| Count | Country |
| 43541 | SPAIN |
| 30397 | (no associated country) |
| 21643 | CHINA |
| 17741 | UNITED STATES |
| 5483 | REPUBLIC OF KOREA |
| 4941 | INDIA |
| 4745 | LITHUANIA |
| 4636 | SINGAPORE |
| 3085 | RUSSIAN FEDERATION |
| 2361 | TAIWAN |
| 1688 | SWEDEN |
| 1412 | MEXICO |
| 1087 | ARGENTINA |
| 848 | PHILIPPINES |
| 707 | ITALY |
| 693 | SWITZERLAND |
| 461 | UKRAINE |
| 452 | JAPAN |
| 434 | KAZAKHSTAN |
| 342 | BRAZIL |
| 178 | NETHERLANDS |
| 176 | UNITED KINGDOM |
| 122 | FRANCE |
| 96 | COLOMBIA |
| 26 | BULGARIA |
| 14 | SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO |
| 11 | AUSTRALIA |
| 10 | INDONESIA |
| 10 | GREECE |
| 6 | PARAGUAY |
| 1 | THAILAND |
| 1 | MALAYSIA |
The “no associated country” bit here is an overly generous regular expression accepting domain names in place of an IP address, and the real surprise here is the number of attempts from Spain of all places. China and Russia, I would expect (and I would have expected Russia to be higher than it is). Singapore was also a bit of a surprise here, seeing how it's Disneyland with the Death Penalty.
Go figure.
