This morning I found one of my sites had been subjected to a deep crawl by a bot naming itself "Francis/2.0 (francis@neomo.de http://www.neomo.de/)". The site seems to be an experimental but legitimate German-language search engine. The first hits from the bot were to robots.txt, the although the site's crawler information page doesn't indicate what entries it interprets, if any. Requests look like this:

85.10.204.13 - - [16/May/2006:19:19:09 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 206 390 "-" "Francis/2.0 (francis@neomo.de http://www.neomo.de/)"
85.10.204.13 - - [16/May/2006:19:19:09 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 206 390 "-" "Francis/2.0 (francis@neomo.de http://www.neomo.de/)"
85.10.204.13 - - [16/May/2006:19:19:24 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 206 1949 "-" "Francis/2.0 (francis@neomo.de http://www.neomo.de/)"
85.10.204.13 - - [16/May/2006:19:19:25 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 206 1949 "-" "Francis/2.0 (francis@neomo.de http://www.neomo.de/)"

Interestingly all requests returned with HTTP status 206.

Some relatives, for whom I provide email aliases fromone of my domains, have been complaining about increasing amounts of spam. Well, don't we all. Unfortunately the relatives in question live in a sort of telecommunicational black hole which apparently has at least some telephone wires made from aluminium and which date from the immediate post-war period (Second World War, that is). DSL won't be available until the whole village is rewired, and even dialup can't max out a 56k modem. Understandably even a few spams make email access a torture.

The former technical news forum Slashdot, currently masquerading as a repository for duplicated posts, has adopted HTML 4.01 and CSS.

The move comes as flying porcine creatures were seen being ejected at speed accompanied by clouds of dry ice from a deep shaft signed "to Purgatory" near Andover, Massachussets, USA.

"Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs.": blogsearch.google.com

Another Google product celebrating the Decade of the Beta Web Service.

Wow, exciting times! I get an invitation to participate in the next step of Google's strategy of Non-Evil World Domination™.

I've been using Google Talk and thought you might like to try it out. We can use it to call each other for free over the internet. Here's an invitation to download Google Talk. Give it a try!

Cool! Free chats via the intarweb! But there must be a catch, ah yes:

Google Talk is a downloadable Windows application that offers: ...

Curses. Three different OSes at my disposal, all of varying degrees of non-evilness, and still they can't get it right.

Update: in all fairness I should point out that the download page does at least explictly address the woes of heterogenic operating system users: Mac and Linux users can connect to Google Talk using other IM clients

Thunderbird (the mail client) took it upon itself to crash and refused to start up again.

Attempting to launch it from the command line with thunderbird & produced the rather unhelpful error message:

/opt/MozillaThunderbird/lib/mozilla-xremote-client: Error: Fail ed to send command: 509 internal error

Hmm, interesting. More info from Google here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html and there's also a Google group.

Webmaster World has a thread in its Supporter's Forum.

An interesting (if not very easy) mod which should help prevent those dirty patches the off-white plastic is prone to:

• http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=241814

So, there I was wanting to double-click on a .rtf file and have it automatically open in NeoOffice/J (instead of the default, OS X's Preview, which isn't very good at text files). As that would be a system-wide setting, I spent some time looking in System Preferences - to no avail.

A mystery: a SmartMedia card in a camera mounted via USB. Photos deleted (i.e. moved to trash), but no space on the card was released, even though no images were visible on the camera's index. Reformatting the card initially appeared to solve the problem, as it had previously been used in another camera (RIP), but as soon as the next lot of photos was downloaded, yet again no space was released.

Poking about with good old fashioned command line tools (ls -la) revealed a folder named .Trashes (sic) on the SmartMedia card, which was where all the deleted images were hiding. Obvious when you think about it - I hadn't emptied the trash for some time - but beeing a literal-minded person I assumed "deleted" files landed in some central trash folder (the trash icon is on the desktop after all).

Emptying the trash did then of course reclaim all the free space.

Not quite sure why, but after running smoothly for a few days the OpenBSD DSL router suddenly started having problems reconnecting after the daily disconnect (it's attached to Deutsche Telekom's T-DSL service, which forces a reconnect after 24 hours). The log filled with messages like this:

Apr 16 10:02:36 akita ppp[18390]: tun0: IPCP:  IPADDR[6] 2xx.x.1xx.x 
Apr 16 10:02:36 akita ppp[18390]: tun0: IPCP: deflink: Oops, RCR in Initial. 
Apr 16 10:02:39 akita ppp[18390]: tun0: IPCP: deflink: RecvConfigReq(12) state =
 Initial

Killing ppp and manually redialling resulted in an instant reconnection.

Um, yes. One compelling reason for OpenBSD (apart that it actually boots from the install CD on the Frankenstein PC ^[1] I use as a router / gateway) is definitely its musical accompaniment.

Also, its mailing lists can sometimes be delightfully surreal, such as this thread here: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=111387450800001.

^[1] PC made from bits which were probably worth a lot of money when new, but now even the eastern European junk handlers who stand outside the municipal recycling stations here in Berlin won't take.