Will the search requests for “dowloads” ever end? Just browsing through the latest zone38.net server logs, I’ve come across hits for “blog dowload”, “spelling dowload”, “dowload spelling bee”, and “proofreader dowload”. Those last three are incredibly ironic, I must admit…

Grah. If you’re wondering where my site has been for the last twenty-four hours or so, you’re not alone. Apparently, some other user of cobra.nocdns.com (the machine on which zone38 is hosted) has been running a process on it which would eventually incapacitate the server, causing a Denial-of-Service attack. Each time the server was rebooted, it would become accessible for several minutes– and then the evil process would take over once again, necessitating another reboot, ad infinitum.

However, the malicious process seems to have been killed now, and the problem appears to be fixed. <crosses fingers> It’s about time, AletiaHosting…

Yet another inexplicable search request culled from my server logs: “funny proofreader marks”. Now, I’ll openly admit that I’m quite easily amused, but even I’m not that bad…

When it comes to the ins and outs of instant messaging, some people just don’t have the slightest clue. Take, for instance, the rather confused AOL user in this transcript who apparently thinks my screen name, registered for about five years, belongs to someone else…

The only thing I can think of is that the person in question had an e-mail address of codeman38@[some e-mail provider]– either that, or it was an elaborate prank by a friend with an AOL account…

Yes, I know that zone38.net was inaccessible for most of last night. And yes, there’s a reason.

Apparently, some users on the server on which I’m hosted were running processes which hogged the system’s resources, causing the server to eventually become incapacitated. As you can see, however, the server has since been rebooted, and everything’s back to normal now.

Little did I know, when I added the Proofreader’s Hall of Shame entry about “experienced litary agents“, that someone would actually stumble across my web site by searching for “litary agents” on Google.

Yet that’s exactly what happened, according to my server’s access logs. And not only that, I’m the first result for that search string.

I guess that’s up there with all of those “dowloads” people are searching for…

But that’s not all. On a whim, I did a Google search for “litary” by itself, and the first link was, ironically enough, a page on Mercer University’s site! Maybe I should point it out to them, y’think?

I simply must share one of the quotes which resulted when I ran my blog through a Markov chain text generator:

Woohoo. I’ve apparently helped to make friends with quite a few exceptions (and what great exceptions those are!)…

What great exceptions, indeed. I wish I could find more such exceptions.

News flash: Audiogalaxy forced by RIAA to share songs only on an opt-in basis. This is a sad day for those of us who discovered obscure bands and little-known tracks through the power of peer-to-peer sharing– sadder, even, than the day Napster was forced to implement filtering, as that was a far more lenient opt-out system.

Now where, pray tell, will I get my underground European techno fix?

News flash: Some high school graduates have never seen record players or heard of Atari.

Wow, I’m starting to feel old. I mean, sure, I just graduated from high school last year. Nonetheless, I actually had a record player when I was young (heck, I often listened to my dad’s and my sister’s old LPs!). No 8-tracks, though–that’s just a bit before my time. But I did, however, play Pong, along with other such classics as Pac-Man and Frogger, on the family’s Atari 2600…

Of course, there are people within my generation that aren’t entirely out of touch with the ’80s. After all, I know of quite a few people who, though they’re still in high school, have seen and/or heard of most of these things first-hand.

But then again, I’ve also discovered that there are kids who’ve never heard of the Speak & Spell, or if nothing else, recognize it as “that red thing from E.T.“. How sad.

Trivial facts can be entertaining. But they’re only more entertaining when they’ve been scrambled through a Markov chain algorithm [Link changed 2006-05-24 to Wayback Machine, as the original post has disappeared]. (“What’s a Markov chain”, you ask? Well, here’s a description of the process.)

Want to create your own Markovized texts? Perhaps the most famous Markov chainer is the punnily named Mark V. Shaney, for DOS/Windows systems. There’s also a version of Mark written in the Python scripting language (note: for more recent versions of Python, you’ll have to change all occurrences of “rand” into “random”), as well as a GPLed C source by Tim Musson that’s based upon it.