Linkbait is a blog title generator designed to give you inspiration for what to blog about. It's basically Mad-Libs for blog titles, using every blogging cliche imaginable to pad the subject line. That having been said, if you plug the right topic in (such as "British Telecom" or "a raging case of west nile virus"), you can get some pretty amusing titles.

I was doing some routine backups for this blog when I was a bit surprised by the size of the database backup. I had 345 posts and 105 comments yet my database size was 4.9 megabytes - far larger than I had assumed. This isn't a huge difference and it isn't the end of the world, but it bothered me enough to find out.

As it turns out Wordpress acts a bit like Wikipedia in that it saves all the revisions of each post. So every time you change a post and re-save it, Wordpress keeps the original as a backup and creates a new revised post. My best estimate was that I had 1321 revisions which were unused and cluttering up the database.

Luckily there is one SQL command you can use to clear all the revisions out of the database, it is;

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

When I ran it I got the following output;

Query OK, 1240 rows affected (0.43 sec)

So it turns out I had 1240 revisions in my database that I really don't need.

Here is the before file and the after file to show the difference in my database size;

user@localhost:~/backup$ ls -all -h
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4.0K 2009-11-26 15:21 .
drwxr-xr-x 8 user user 4.0K 2009-11-26 15:20 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 4.9M 2009-11-26 15:11 20091125-blog.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1.6M 2009-11-26 15:21 20091126-blog.sql

Much better! Now if shrinking the size of my gallery was only that easy...

user@localhost:~$ du -h
...
687M ./gallery
...

Since I am a curious person I run statistics software on this server so I know how many people visit this site. In addition this software also tells me if they came from a search engine and what they were searching for. Recently I checked the search phrases and was dismayed by what I found:

This offended me greatly and I felt the need to do some investigation.

I did some digging around and found the original entry in the server logs;

193.138.148.215 - - [11/Oct/2009:00:21:53 -0500] "GET /blog/2009/07/ HTTP/1.1" 200 35210 "http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=child+porn &FORM=BIFD" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)"

I then used the IP address, 193.138.148.215, to find the users location and service provider;

Location: RU, Russian Federation
City: Rostov, 88 -
Organization: JSC Rostov-on-Don Cellular Telephone
ISP: JSC Rostov-on-Don Cellular Telephone
AS Number: AS43092 JSC Rostov-on-Don Cellular Telephone
Latitude: 57°18'83" North
Longitude: 39°41'53" East

Which is a bit of a dead end if you ask me. Never the less, I feel a public shaming is in order.

You, sir, are a bounder, cad, scoundrel, and menace to society. This is here so if anyone searches for your IP address, they will see how truly loathsome and odious you are.

Not long ago I had Mikael over and we were regaling stories of what technology was like back in the day. It was an interesting conversation since things really have changed over time.

In the beginning, there were the ISPs. Everyone got ten megabytes of space to build their own website. Back then that involved coding all the HTML yourself in a text editor and uploading the files with a FTP client.

Next came Geocities. Geocities changed the landscape by providing free web space to host your websites, a web form to upload files, and later, a graphical interface to create them. Suddenly having a presence on the web was within the grasp of far more people.

After this the next major innovation was blogs such as Wordpress and picture sharing websites such as Flickr. The blogging platforms allowed people to create content in an entirely visual and intuitive way. The photo sharing services provided unlimited space for pictures which had traditionally been hogging a large portion of the 10 megabyte limit Geocities gave you. More people were able to come online. At this point Geocities began to die off.

The latest major trend is social networking sites such as Facebook. They combine the blogging capabilities of Wordpress with the photo sharing function of Flickr into one central package. At this point nearly everyone and their dog had some presence online. Blogs began to decline as people learned they could summarize their sentiments into 160 characters and Geocities disappeared.

That brings us to today. It's amazing how far we have come and how things have changed.  Generally this evolution of the Internat has followed two rules; whatever comes next will have to be more user friendly and intuitive than its predecessor, and whatever comes next will have an unprecedented adoption rate.  Does anyone want to venture a guess of what will replace Facebook?

I would like to welcome everyone to my new blog.  I have moved everything to WordPress since I have finally admitted that using popular software does not make me uncool (although listening to popular music still does).  Here I will post pictures, stories and links to things that have happened to me or have caught my attention.  The old blog will still be available at http://www.seancarney.ca/old/blog but I won't be doing any new posting and commenting will be turned off.

Over the past month, this blog has picked up a huge ammount of comment spam. Due to a bug in the blog software I am using, when I try to delete one comment, it usually deletes all the comments for the post including legitimate ones. Upgrading the software has proved to be a massive hassel in the past, so I don't think I will be going down that road.

Consequently, I have decided that I need to move to a new blogging platform. Now don't worry, the blog will be right here and the URL won't change, but everything will be fresh, new and empty. I'm not sure what platform I will use since I want a truely flexible setup, but be warned - large changes are coming.

If anyone knows of some flexible, versatile and free blogging software, please let me know. Right now I am considering WordPress or WikyBlog.

EDIT: In an effort to get rid of comment spam, I have deleted all comments posted in the last sixty days. I don't think any comments were left in that period, but if I deleted anyone's comments I am sorry.

A wonderful Linux command is: sudo find /web/sean/blog/content -type f -mtime -60 | xargs rm -f which deletes any file created in the last sixty days in the folder and sub folders of your choice. Yay for time saving!

Last weekend Sara asked me how I knew what people were searching for when they visited my site. Since I am a very curious person, I have some statistics software on my server that tracks the number of visits and what people had entered into search engines.

If you want to learn more you can visit the list of search results here. The list is cleared at the end of each month, but you can choose prior months to view on the top of the page.

Since this site is on the Internet, I get a fair number of people who stumble across it by using a search engine of some sort. The majority of people are searching for 'Sean Carney'; and probably get what they are looking for.

There are, however, several individuals who get here through the search engines and probably don't find exactly what they are looking for. Here are some of the stranger searches that have lead to my site.

• studyi land a plane
  
• broomball strategies diagrams
  
• gun alarm clock
  
• brainiac outhouse
  
• i woke up on the stove runaway jury
  
• rocky horror picture show screen saver
  
• settlers of catan strategy tripod
  
• linux on a dead badger excerpts
  
• fishbowl workshop
  
• art pictures of relaxing in the weekends
  
• trundle bed building plans
  
• kissing seans
  
• garfield without depressing
  
• sean say blog
  
• terrifying

Looking at this list, one starts to wonder what on earth each person was looking for and what possessed them to search for it in the first place.

Hey everybody! Improvements abound on this blog. You may not see anything right away, but look again. Start with the address bar. You probably see "http://understep.dyndns.org/blog" right? *

Now there are easier (and more intuitive) ways to visit this site. Visiting "http://www.seancarney.ca" and "http://www.understep.com" will also bring you here.

I've been feeling a bit sick the last couple of days so I haven't been up for doing anything too intense. Consequently I decided it was time to revise the gallery for this site. It now doesn't look nearly as shifty as it once was. I have to admit, it was downright ugly before. I also added an RSS feed to the gallery for people like me who rather read feeds than check for updates daily (What is a RSS feed?).

The biggest problem is that I am sick, and I can't always think things through properly. It's funny because I can write code just fine, and think out the logic needed as I create the code. The problem comes when I look back at it, and I can't make head or tail of any of it. Meh.

* If you visit this site by typing "http://24.79.157.78/blog" in your address bar you win the nerd prize for today. Actually, you've got it for the next month.

I didn't type "del *.com" into a command line, but according to my cable modem (which is about to acquire a rather rude nickname given its performance as of late) someone deleted the internet. Even several repeated Super Ultimate Power Cycles (tm) couldn't fix it.

I'm done with classes and studying for exams right now, so I had stuff to look at while I waited on hold for tech support. The conversation went like this:

Jeff: "Hello, Shaw Internet, Jeff speaking."
Sean: "Hi, Jeff, my Internet ain't working."
Jeff: "What's wrong with it?"
Sean: "I have a low signal strength issue. Can you send a tech?"
Jeff: "Let's try something, please unplug the modem"
Sean: "Fine."
Jeff: "Plug it back in"
Sean: "Ok"
Jeff: "What lights do you see?"
Sean: "Nothing new isn't that a surprise?"
Jeff: "It seems like you have low signal strength, you'll need a technician to come look at it."
Sean: "Grr..."

I actually didn't growl or talk sarcastically to poor Jeff, it was all in my head. On Saturday a tech is coming by to heal the broken connection.