–Francis

PS For the record DNS Made Easy is a good service I just don't need it.

That's as original as I can find it, its a 64x64 px gif that best as I remember came from a PHP-Nuke forum pack. It's been my buddy icon, my profile pic, my tag. It's probably one of the oldest piece of digital information I have. I even lost it at one point and had to find old backups of bthsnews.org to bring it back. Yesterday it was suggested to me by Andrew that instead of just blowing it up I should try to spruce it up a bit. I had tried to "smooth" it out by editing it by hand once. I got about halfway and gave up, it wasn't worth it. This time I enlisted the help of Vector Magic which was a school project turned commercial venture. They've got a wonderful system (best I've ever used.. only I've ever used ;-)) to work out how to take that blocky pixel art above and turn it into this.

Which I happen to like quite a lot. Hopefully it will hold me for another 5–10 years. =)

–Francis

So what's in my non roborooter history?

A man stands in the rubble, and calls out asking if anyone needs help, shortly after the collapse of the first World Trade Center Tower 11 September, 2001, in New York City. (DOUG KANTER/AFP/Getty Images)

Click on it for a full size version. Its the same photo I posted years ago.

https://www.wizardcomputing.com/gpg/wizard-roborooter.com.asc

I've had a few others for my roborooter.com address over the years, but somehow I always loose them. The private key that is. It's usually because I don't use them that much. There are only a handful of people out there I communicate with that know what gpg is, know how to use it, want to use it, and most importantly need to use it. That's actually a tall order to fill.

So what happens to my keys that I loose? Well lets look for the public counterparts.

MIT PGP Public Key Server Search Results for wizard-roborooter.com

Public Key Server -- Index wizard at roborooter.com

Type bits /keyID Date User ID
pub 1024D/C556B1A8 2008/09/02 Francis Gulotta
pub 1024D/2B74810B 2005/01/27 Francis Gulotta
pub 1024D/C6677DA7 2002/01/08 Francis Gulotta

The first one I ever published was back in 2002 (Unless I submitted one earlier elsewhere, damed if I know — but a blog search tells me no different — I need a better search). And if I had the tools with me today I could tell you when it expires if at all. I was probably brash and didn't think I'd ever loose the private key. It's not that hard to make a new key so once a year if I'm going to use it, I can. I can even sign it with my old key (if I still have it) to keep the chain of trust.

–Francis

PS Looks like I've discovered a bug in how wordpress automatically makes email addresses hyper links

I do talk about things in public, to strangers, to coworkers, to family members, there is a place in my life for it. I don't think Roborooter is a good place though. I do however think that Roborooter is a place to talk about abusive copyright practices.

Take down notices are becoming a problem. A big problem. It started with a way to keep people from posting copyrighted materials on their personal servers. Send the server a notice and they take the content down. Sort it out later. No big deal.

When that started there was no way to know, to fathom, that every single person's computer could host content. At the time they were very effective. These days content makers owners who wish to protect their copyrights have to send out thousands of them to keep up with things like youtube and myspace (which is evil and must be destroyed) and the people that run content sites get flooded and instead of assesing what is valid and what is not they cover their asses and remove everything.

This means if I don't like your work, it is very very easy for me to have it removed temporarily and maybe even permanently regardless if I have cause or not. With the nature of the internet if you get removed from the net while you're popular you've lost out incredibly.

This leads me into a video created by the Students for a Free Tibet about their NYC Chinese Consulate Projection Action, which was removed from youtube because the IOC (International Olympic Comity) said it violated their copyrights. It looks like fair use to me, but even so, you can't watch it right now on youtube.

Vimeo on the other hand, has not responded the same way. Vimeo also has nicer higher quality videos that we can all enjoy.

NYC Chinese Consulate Projection Action 08.07.08 from Students for a Free Tibet on Vimeo.

I'll end with a link to the EFF's No Downtime For Free Speech campaign. Those guys owe me a hat.

–Francis

1. Make the Hacker Crackdown Available as a torrent file. (You can just grab the full download if you like.)
2. Educate about what comcast was doing (blocking torrents)
3. Complain that while the torrent's flowing nicely a bunch of specific people had trouble torrenting it. Specifically the Comcast customers.(Not a complete lie, the torrent had about 250 downloads as far as I could tell and at one point 17 seeds. But if you were a comcast customer using torrents you knew what was going on and wouldn't complain to me.)
4. Come clean, off the full download via http and remark that I actually do have the bandwidth to spare to host a large file. Probably enough to spare to host 10 full and popular audio books, but probably not 100, where torrenting could go into the 10,000's easily. If people were so interested.

For the record as of right now the torrent is still on The Pirate Bay and has 2 seeders neither of them are me.

I had goals.

1. To spread the hacker crackdown by Bruce Sterling.
2. To try to do a story arcing blog post.
3. To educate people about torrents and Comcast.
4. To be crazy like that.

I had poor execution.

1. I got distracted
2. I told people what I was up to and then no longer felt like I had to do it. Almost like success.
3. I didn't do it all at once — I'm not sure if that was practical but it would have gotten it done while I had the drive.
4. I never wrote down my plan until now.

For the record even without my help (ha!) Comcast got smacked around by the FCC. It's not law (and we'll have to fight to make it law) but it's a big first step towards net neutrality.

To aid in my tagging I got a wordpress plugin called Simple Tags which lets me see all my previous used tags when choosing tags for a new post. (Which is genuinely useful!) It's also got a bunch of things I don't want or need. Like auto tagging, and suggesting tags. I thought I'd play with them though.

The suggested tags for my post on the Quick and the Dead were: Movies, gene hackman, story overview, life of crime, assassins, ill gotten gains, entertainment industry, and typos.

Fuck you yahoo!

Andrew gave me a neat idea for the header. Never mind I already did a lot of work for what's up there, I'm going to try something out to make it a little more interesting.

I also need to integrate the gallery into it again. My old robot isn't a random gallery image. ;-)

Let me know what you think.

–Francis

find . –type f –exec convert {} –resize 970x140 {}.970x140.jpg \;

And that resized everything. I wrote a quick rand with a sprintf to generate the url. It's not automatic — it wont detect new photos but I can take the time to edit the range the next time I take the time to edit hundreds of photos.

The real joy was finding a 97x14 swash of image I wanted to show. I'm not being sarcastic either. Everything looks different when put though constraints. It highlights parts of the photo that would otherwise be lost. Street signs stick out the most, I'll have large photo of trees and I'll have picked out a swash of photo I want to show and the street sign will be sticking up off to the side, but it stands way out where I didn't even know it was there before. There is even one photo where I took two swashes out of, there were two different photos I wanted to show.

Enjoy =)

In fact let me help you out. I have an edited podcast of Cory Doctorow's reading and a Gutenberg PDF of the book. Both perfectly legal as Bruce not only let his book be distributed for free electronically (since 1992!) he also gave Cory permission to read it as long as he distributed his reading for free. See where I'm going with this? Cory publishes all his work under The Creative Commons License which says as long s I mention it's his work then I can share it as much as I like.

So have it it. I made a torrent, you can download it right here.
DOWNLOAD TORRENT OF THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

What's a torrent? Well I can't blame you it's sorta new, and not everyone knows what it is yet. Go download uTorrent or azureus and read up on how torrents work. Both utorrent and azureus have documentation on how to use them but you basically take my small file and use it to get the set of files for the Hacker Crackdown. It's a large mp3 and a pdf. I'd give you the files right here but they're big and I have to pay for my server's bandwidth! In fact I have a large enough audience that if I offered both files up for download and paid for all the bandwidth that you would all use I'd be in the poor house pretty quick.

So as long as people will "seed" the torrent (as I do at home, but as of this writing so do 15 other people so I don't even have to anymore.) then anyone can download the files free of charge. And it frees me of charges too, because you're getting the file mostly from each other instead of me.

I'm glad technology like this exists.

Update: I don't know how rss readers deal with updates though.. I do that a lot, I make a lot of adjustments after I publish.

Tags, tag cloud, random, popular, and recent changes.

Like say you have this picture here.

I tagged it alex, so if I goto gallery.roborooter.com/tag/alex I get every picture tagged alex (well when you edit a photo it's called keyword but whatever). Flickrish and nifty eh?

Also at the bottom of the main gallery page you have the "tag cloud" which shows the most popular tags bigger.

I already posted about the random but now there's also popular and recently updated. And if you're in an album there's a link on the side that give you these features with regards to an album instead of the whole site.

Ok That's all for now.

–Francis

For now, I got a new gallery feature.

12 Random Pictures

–Francis

http://www.roborooter.com/ftp/rock24/

–Francis

I had reported that I get about 250 nique hits a day, and mostly from a video I posted. (About 4 out of 5 of the hits were for the video opposed to the main page) And so today I check back and I'm now getting on average 500 hits a day.

Why?

Well all this was prompted by me browsing my stats again (same thing happened last time) so lets give some stats.

Emo Kid Is posted on about 4 or 5 myspace pages. That gets me about 30–40 hits a month.
People like to hear long lists of Hobo Names about 30–40 of you a month.
I'm glad to see that someone found my favorite mashup of all time, the Toxic Loveshack and shared it with their friends, who share it with about 20 different people a month.
That stupid car commercial is still up there at 91 hits a month.

The top two requested pages are the "cool" archive page and the robots.txt which is well.. unimpressive. In fact while my traffic may have doubled, now almost half of it is web robots!

So while there are more people viewing my site, I have a lot more robots visiting too. Indexing and categorizing and all sorts. And hopefully, determining that I'm just a stupid blog and only relevant to specific searches. The top search that finds roborooter is "volvo logo" followed by "ghosts" and then "emo kid". (Wtf emo kid?) I take pride in not incessantly repeating other people's posts and linking to them. Which is what most blogs seem to do these days.

The Gallery should run marginally faster now, if I get some free time I'm going to try out eaccelerator and compile it for dreamhost (they run my servers) as that should give it quite a boost and make it.. well responsive. I also let google back in, I had them blocked on the IP level due to them sending my processor usage through the roof while they indexed me. But I signed up with google's webmaster services and told them to take it slow, and that my gallery need them to be sweet, kind and loving. Otherwise it will freak out and I'll get emails saying I'm using too much of the processor. Also the pages get cached now, but they have to be visited at least once to cache and since there are so many pictures, when google indexs me it hits thousands of pictures and generates a cache for each one. So when you go to visit that obscure photo later you'll get the cache and it will load faster and not use much processor, but it doesn't protect from google until next time.

I also continue to have plenty of bandwidth and server storage to spare (thanks to dreamhost). I think I'm gonna try making another gimic site (I had a link exchange for Kings of Chaos a while back. But I'm officially retiring that today.) maybe "am I shoopdawoop or not" or something…

Anyway thanks for partaking in another one of my meandering "Francis dumps his mind" posts. No plan, no process, just writing. Just like they taught me in school. (I'm swear to god.)

–Francis

Recently they had the idea to have lots of ads as their main set. You know, the Sunset Strip.

Well, I shouldn't have any more comment spam, my blog isn't the sunset strip.

–Francis

This time I bring you ratings! Not that I can give you a list of top rated photos yet (I should make myself a bunch of top 10 pages — Top 10 views, top 10 rated), but you can rate photos, and I think I can sort albums by rating. (Sarah's internet findings album may be a good candidate for this. Here's the link, and it's most definitely nsfw, so kiddies stay away.) By default every album has ratings enabled, but you can edit the album (under the "album" tab near the bottom) you can turn off this cool new feature if you don't want it in your album.

Another cool feature you'll never even see is caching support! This means pages will load faster overall, and especially if more then one person is looking at the same thing. Things like view counts won't change as fast for guest visitors but with a 90% decrease in processor load, I don't care.

You might notice RSS feeds for albums too… play with them if you like but I haven't done anything cool with them yet, I haven't played with them.

Oh and we have a new album too! My girlfriend Jen now has her own Roborooter Gallery Album, Pie's stuff :-). And I probably never announced a while back when Caroline started her own album too.

That's all for now folks!

–Francis

Here's why.

Roborooter's own FU image generator!

That link can have any filename and any message (even blank!) and it will return a random FU image! I'm going to work on a way to encode the messages into the url so people visiting the link don't know what they're in for. Anyway, I'm off!

–Francis

I get a lot of hits to roborooter.com, a lot of lot. And it's not because I'm so interesting, (I'm not) it's because some car website for the month of december, google says (yea, you might have noticed the google analytics java script) I had 5,315 visits from them, which is a lot more then the 1,141 of you that put in the roborooter.com address directly. That's an average (after you count people who found me from a search engine) of 241.13 unique visitors a day. ;-)

So what do 5 thousand people a month want to see?

Some Car Commercial

Btw, MyCarSucks.com, you're visitors can now hotlink, I've got more bandwidth. Before they'd get the post that the movie came from and could watch it from there.

BTW, there are some other video's people might want to see here.

Man, so many hits a day, even if that was off by like.. 200 I'd still be impressed. Go stumbleupon something more interesting. ;-)

–Francis

–Francis

Also, I forgot to include another England Trip album on my last post so you get two this time.

House on Harrow on the Hill and St. Paul's Cathedral.

Oh man I loved that Cathedral. They wouldn't let me take photos of the inside so you're only going to get the outside and from the dome. The paintings and sculptures were amazing. I figured it probably took 10–15 years and hundreds of people to complete the building but it only took 5, good planning I guess. If you goto london go here. Trust me.

–Francis