Stan’s Obligatory Blog

This morning when I got to work there were a lot of news trucks parked on the street by my office. Usually this happens after earthquakes, but I knew nothing big had happened last night. But then I found out they were all there to visit Planetary Science because the news had come down that Pluto had been de-listed as a planet.

But the bright side of this is: Back in 1997, when my friend and I attempted to see all the planets in one night, we actually succeeded. We just didn’t know it at the time.

Remember the last big Internet boom? That was the time when ‘dot-com’ meant ‘instant millions’, rather than ‘miserable failure’. And it was the time of the classic Web Economy Bullshit Generator.

I’ve got a collection of 400 screenshots of dead dot-coms, just in case you want to reminisce about Webvan or Kozmo or any of the others.

And now the web is back, so there’s a new Bullshit Generator:

The Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator

So let’s all harness citizen-media blogospheres. Yow!

I just noticed today that someone is using the email generated by my pet project to feed a blog:

http://thequakequack.blogspot.com

Now this person is just taking the default mail profile. This is for earthquakes M5.5 and larger worldwide, and M4.5 and larger within the United States. The system allows for users to set up custom mail rules. Maybe I should figure out how to post here by email. Then I can set up a rule to have it display all earthquakes in the Los Angeles area.

Last week I sent a link to a picture of an octopus tattoo to P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula. I thought he might find it amusing, since he’s a big fan of cephalopods. He included the link in one of his posts, and today I noticed just how many people came to have a look at it. I guess P.Z. has a very substantial readership, since that little link made a big impact here. I know from experience that only a small percentage of people will follow any particular link on a site, so I can just imagine what his daily traffic is like. It was our first day in a long time of over 3000 site visits, and our first-ever day with over 1GB of traffic.

It’s not quite the “Slashdot Effect“, but it’s still interesting to see.

On Friday we took out our old Sun Enterprise 5000 server. This was the big refrigerator-sized computer that was the main Southern California earthquake system for many years. It was a bit of a dinosaur, as it required a special 220V circuit in the computer room to feed it. We got this system back in 1997, and this particular computer has been nothing but trouble. If they had a ‘lemon law’ for computers it would have been sent back. But we finally got it to work, and it served us reasonably well for all these years.

Still, this machine had more than its share of stupid moments. One time it crashed mysteriously. When I went in to see what had happened, one of the small heat sinks on one of the CPU boards had fallen off and fallen onto the back of the CPU board below it. That shorted out things on the second board and caused the machine to freak out and die. Another time I had a set of new memory SIMMs to put in it, and it kept failing self-test. So I ended up having to reseat the chips about a dozen times, each time having to sit through the 20-minute self-test. I spent the whole afternoon shivering in the computer room, watching Das Blinkenlights. Fun times…

So Tammer and I got the machine unbolted from the floor, and we removed the CPU and IO boards to keep as spares for the E4000 we still have. Then we wheeled the carcass out of the computer room and down to the junk-collection room in the basement. It was a lot like the last scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. We dropped the computer carcass off in a big room filled with other big computer carcasses. And thus ended an era.

Have I mentioned recently how much I like my job?

I just noticed this link on the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program site today:

New USGS Website and Earthquake Notification Service Simplify Ways to Get Information You Need

“The new Earthquake Notification Service will replace the old system. Now with a user-friendly interface, users will be able to define their own multiple regions of interest, enter various notification addresses, set magnitude thresholds for day and night, and opt for “Aftershock Exclusion,” among many other options. The system can be found on the “Earthquake Center” section of the site.”

So it’s official now. It’s been public for a little over a week. About 1,000 people have signed up for accounts on it so far. We moved about 5,000 more over from the old ‘Bigquake’ mailing list. So far it’s been working like a champ. And today I found and squashed one little bug that’s been bothering me for months. So I’m pretty happy with it, even as I’ve been so obsessed with it that I’ve actually had dreams about PHP and Perl this week.

So check it out.

I don’t usually write much about work here, but today was a momentous day. It was the most excitement I’ve had since the last M6 earthquake.

My project is the Earthquake Notification System. This is a system for automatic email notification of worldwide earthquakes. We’ve had public mailing lists for earthquake notification since about 2000, but they were ‘one size fits all’ in that people could choose only to get either M4 or M3 events, and they had a choice of Southern California, Northern California, or the whole world. This new system is the first time subscribers can pick their own custom geographic boundaries and notification thresholds.

This all started a bit over two years ago as my pet project. People have been asking for something like this for years, but it’s only recently that I figured out how to do it. So for the past two years, it’s been my little office pet. Every so often, I would trot it out and show it to people. They would suggest some more features they’d like to see, and then I’d put it away.

But about a year ago, the people at the National Earthquake Information Center took an interest in it. And it went from being a pet project to being a real project. They even got some web designers to help it look pretty. And today it went public. Yikes. There’s even a link to it off the front page of the Earthquake Hazards Program web site.

It’s kind of fun seeing something I invented being used by lots of people. At the same time, it’s kind of scary, since if it fails, I’m the one who will look stupid.

Have I mentioned recently that I really like my job?

I have a home-made CAPTCHA on my pages to keep out comment spam. It uses an image with a random character string. I noticed that once in a while, the image would be broken and have unprintable characters in it.

I finally figured this out, so I figured I should write it down for my records and just in case anyone else ever has this problem.

There is a function that makes up a random string like ‘DGQZA’, which is then run through mcrypt to turn it into garbage. This renders it as an encrypted string that may or may not be printable. So then I run it through base64encode to make it into a fully printable string so it can be passed to the image-generation script to make up the image. The problem was when the base64-encoded string had a ‘+’ or ‘/’ or such in it. These characters break the URL. So the fix was to run it through the urlencode function to render the string as something like ‘wDhn8h%2BI2hg%3D’.

Nota Bene: The act of sending the encoded string through to the image-generation script automagically decodes the special characters in the URL, so it is not necessary to send it through ‘urldecode’. In fact, doing that breaks it.

So now it works.

I think.

If anyone notices it behaving badly, please let me know.

I was reading Digg today at lunch, and they had an article about another method of stopping bandwidth theft by hotlinking:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/bandwidththeft.shtml

So I went and implemented this in my blog photos and also in my photo albums. Take that, myspace.com.

Here are the most popular photos with the hotlinkers:

http://1134.org/blog/images2005/IMG_0667a.jpg
http://1134.org/gallery/albums/random/ace.sized.jpg
http://1134.org/blog/images2005/IMG_0453a.jpg

All together, these three photos account for 2.6% of my total bandwidth for the month. Hmm. Maybe this isn’t as big a deal as I thought. Still, it’s annoying.

I upgraded my WordPress installation to the latest version. I’d read yesterday about the XML-RPC worm. I had a look at the WordPress site and found this:

http://wordpress.org/development/2005/11/wordpress-is-secure/

They said not to worry if you’re running 1.5 or later. But I was on 1.2.mumble. So it was time to bite the bullet and do it.

The actual upgrade was pretty easy. I did a practice run on my practice web server at home. Then I hacked my home-made CAPTCHA and got it working with the new WordPress. So here it is. Yay.