Category Archives: Internet

GasPriceWatch is a great idea: harness the power of crowds to identify the cheapest gas station in an area. Help markets be more efficient! Strike back against temporary locational monopoly and impulse purchases! Make the oiloligopolists fight for your dollar!

GasPriceWatch claims 105,690 “Volunteer Price Spotters” who turn in 43,762 prices per weekly, covering 126,860 US Gas Stations.

But none, it seems, near where I live.

When things go wrong with university computing, we don't exactly get full disclosure. More often than not, it's hide the fact, pass the buck, issue turgid self-exonerations later.

Here's how my commercial host deals with issues:

We experienced a brief period of downtime around 4:30pm this afternoon. The problem was caused by a misconfiguration on one of our routers that subsequently required us to reload our main switch as well, and caused some other sporadic outages for approximately the last half hour. While there was intermittent downtime with our private network, access to your websites was largely unaffected with some people seeing more of an effect than others. We're currently in the process of kicking the responsible parties in the butt and working on preventing such problems in the future.

Happy DreamHost NetNotWorking Team!

It's a bit flippant but I'll take it over denial and obfuscation any day.

By this metric, I rate .209448819 brooksies. That will do.

[If I google “Michael Froomkin” then I get “about 26,600” hits (“Froomkin” gets much more, but much of that's due to my famous brother). But the MTGoogleRank plugin in the right margin 'only' sees 18,800 hits for the same search. I have no idea why. Perhaps the smaller number excludes multiple pages on the same site?]

Update: Kevin Drum wants “one brooksie” to be a fixed metric of 127,000 google hits, like the meter. But why shouldn't this flucturate like a currency given the rise and inevitable fall of the increasingly lame columnist?

Oh how Borges would have loved the Kamelopedia. The English-language version of this online user-contributed dictionary defines German as follows:

A German is the counterpart of a Gerwoman. The Germans are a very clever people, having discovered the Kamel. They are very similar to the Americamelian people, which is to say very friendly and kind when they are not in a mood to take over the world. In Germany there are no palm trees.

What's going on? Joi Ito (who got it from Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales) explains:

Kamelopedia, originally a German parody of Wikipedia, has launched in English. Kamelopedia uses the same MediaWiki software that Wikipedia uses, but it is a joke encyclopedia based on puns and mistakes. Wikipedia has an english language description of Kamelopedia. I just signed up, but I'm not sure which is more fun… trying to be funny, or writing in the Wikipedia deadpan tone about something that is funny. (I'm working on this style on the Stealth Disco article.) There is also the Wikipedia Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense page.

Wow, you do find some amazing stuff online. Consider Who's A Rat, which bills itself as the “Largest Online Database of Informants and Agents” and comes complete with pix of “rats of the week”.

I'd be more tempted to think it's a spoof site were it not for this warning to law enforcement agents to avoid the site for fear of having their IP addresses logged.

Daniel Brandt argues that Google is dying: its index is failing to keep up with the growth of the web. And he thinks he knows why—Google hit the 4,294,967,296 limit on 4-byte ID numbers in C. (Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, Google claims to index more than 4 billion web pages.) If this is true, fixing it isn't trivial when you need to fix a large number of machines that are working in parallel

On sites with more than a few thousand pages, Google is not indexing anywhere from ten percent to seventy percent of the pages it knows about. These pages show up in Google's main index as a listing of the URL, which means that the Googlebot is aware of the page. But they do not show up as an indexed page. When the page is listed but not indexed, the only way to find it in a search is if your search terms hit on words in the URL itself. Even if they do hit, these listed pages rank so poorly compared to indexed pages, that they are almost invisible. This is true even though the listed pages still retain their usual PageRank.

…this became a problem that I first noticed in April 2003. That was the month when Google underwent a massive upheaval, which I describe in my Google is broken essay. When that essay was written two months after the upheaval, it would have been speculative to claim that the listed URL phenomenon was a symptom of the 4-byte docID problem described in the essay. It was too soon. But sixteen months later, the URL listings are beginning to look very widespread and very suspicious. It's a major fault in Google's index, it is getting worse, and it is much more than a mere temporary glitch.

Google is dying. It broke sixteen months ago and hasn't been fixed. It looks to me as if pages that have been noted by the crawler cannot be indexed until some other indexed page gives up its docID number. Now that Google is a public company, stockholders and analysts should require that Google give a full accounting of their indexing problems, and what they are doing to fix the situation.

If it turns out that google is missing huge quantities of stuff there will be a lot of angry IPO buyers. And I will have to change my one-stop-search habits.