Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

n item I have just come across (hat tip Justin Moore) speaks about excluding MSNBot based on poor performance. MSNBot (and Yahoo! likewise) consume a great deal of bandwidth, but are barely used as search engines by the Internet audience.

From Justin:

• Exhibit A – MSNbot Crawl hits = 9561
• Bandwidth used = 124.43 MB
• Visits to wantmoore.com as a results from searches @ Google = 683* [sic.*]

• Exhibit B – Googlebot Crawl hits = 3415
• Bandwidth used = 51.74 MB
• Visits to wantmoore.com as a results from searches @ MSN = 41 [sic.*]

…

So, effective immediately:

  User-agent: MSNBot
  Disallow: /

* Order of the visits is wrong and should be reversed.

I spotted similar statistics on my domain, with Google as the top referrer at almost 20,000 visits/month. MSN remain at a miserable 200 and take almost as much bandwidth as Googlebot. I have plenty of bandwidth to spare; So, I might as well let Microsoft spend crawling time in vain.

Ever wondered how much you listened to a particular song?

XMMS possesses a great extent of flexibility. It provides facilities which, when customised appropriately, can dump complete song descriptions. XMMS can then progressively, accumulatively add song data to log files. Timestamps imply the duration of listening, which lead to possible future extensions, e.g.:

• Automatically parse (scan, hash, then analyse) the log file/s
• Compute an average listening time — that is before skipping to another track — for each individual song
• Erase music that is frequently skipped or just output a ‘prospective deletion list’ to another file

Input/output operations are made quite simple. These can be invoked as command-line strings whenever a new track begins. It is a built-in XMMS plug-in, which can be found under Preferences » Song Change » Configure (see illustration below)

Add the following line to the “Song change” Command field:

(date; echo %s) >> ~/My_playlists/playlist.log

I am providing an example log file, assembled naturally (not artificially. Honest!) over 20 minutes or so. I still need to get rid of the doubly appearances, apparently caused by xmms-kde in my dock (screenshot on the right). As well as giving a minimal user interface, xmms-kde enables control of the player with CTRL+SHIFT+keypad even if the player is neither visible nor in focus.

A music log file results in even more redundant data to store. According to a rough calculations, I will see it growing by 1 megabyte every month or so. Compression, however, should make it only 10-20% of its original size.

UPDATE 26/06/2005: The following command, which can be set to become a nightly cron job, will slice the large log file so that it is composed of daily ‘chunks’:

mv ~/[Path]/playlist.log ~/[Path]/playlist-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.log

This can be extended to form an annual and monthly hierarchy of directories.

See the later extension: producing history spreadsheets

Some months ago, an automatic and effective way of obtaining music was described: no need to run any heavy graphical program; no need to select music (only sources of music of the desired genre); no limits on bandwidth or volume.

Taking this further, Dr. Scott Tobkes explains about his method of bringing commericals to a halt.

Something I’ve had fun doing lately is recording live of archived streaming audio from radio stations around the country

There are innumerable subjects and programs. I record it to mp3 or wav, and listen in my car or PC, while fast-forwarding through the commercials. I know that there are aggregators that will make this a seamless process like Ipodder.

I don’t like to call them podcasts. I use this program…

It wasn’t long ago that the Internet Archive was mentioned. This amazing, non-profit resource has been storing snapshots of the Web since 1996. It is now revealed that the entire system is Linux-powered. It can hold over a petabyte (1000,000 gigabytes) in volume and yet remain affordable.

ne issue is particularly detrimental to OSS: the issue is branching. Implementation takes different directions (often due to third-parties involved) and compatibility begins to break. Linux and its distros are one valid example. Here is an example taken from skinning (AKA themes) to support the argument.

Different unique ‘skins’ for an application get distributed or different stylesheets written for a Web-based application. This gives a rich variety to choose from, but here is the snag:

• The user gets accustomed to the new interface
• A new version of the application comes out
• The user might have to re-install a new ‘skin’
• The user relies on the ‘skinners’ to carry on maintaining the project

Some may have heard of GIMPshop, which wraps the GIMP in a Photoshop-like environment. It can serve as a practical example for the pitfall.

The take home: it is safer not to be ‘distracted’ by minor components or release variants of main-stream systems.

discovered this long-standing site with a large number of links to just about any emulator type for a variety of operating systems. The ones of interest to me were Palm, Super Nintendo and Megadrive emulators for Linux.

I then took screenshots of some favourite old games: Mario, Street Fighter and Sonic.

The hard-drive peripheral in for the Playstation 3 will run Linux. This news is by no means surprising as Sony’s direct opponent in the realm of home gaming is Microsoft. This news item, as usual, opens the door to common jokes (snippet from my post at Slashdot):

Who wouldn’t buy the Playstation 3, even just to play a game that no-one can resist: compiling the Linux kernel. That sure can keep one up until 5 AM.

…

Salesman: Here you see the latest Xbox which renders a zillion polygons per second.

Customer: Does it come with gcc?

Salesman: Is that one of the latest patches?

Customer: *sign* Not interested…