Here's a couple of (anonymized) examples from our own logs:

255.255.255.255 - - [20/Jun/2008:15:03:52 -0400] "GET /article/92572/js/js/gui.js HTTP/1.1" 500 624 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)"

255.255.255.255 - - [20/Jun/2008:15:03:33 -0400] "GET /article/77673/js/js/js/js/js//""+sWOUrl+"/" HTTP/1.1" 500 624 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)"

I would like everyone to do like we did and redirect their User Agent so that AVG gets the message.

This is what we now have as our first htaccess rule:

AVG Linkscanner uses 1813 to identify itself so as long as they keep a unique identifier we can cut them off.

The problem is how aggressive the program is. From avg's own forum:

You'd think a business that's entire reason to exist is to stop maliciousness wouldn't pretty much spam every site on the web and drive up their bandwidth costs like mad (and slow down google a lot).

I suggest you put that htaccess access rule if you don't want to end up like this poor guy:

That comment was posted on this blog entry and it's that blog article (actually, one of the comments) that first tipped me off. Everything else I found elsewhere just confirmed it. One of the best articles I've found is from TheRegister. It's called AVG scanner blasts internet with fake traffic.

I figure if AVG wants to chew up other people's bandwidth, they can chew up their own. I can't seem to register on their forum and their technical support form requires a product license so while we're at it might as well send them a message in case they actually monitor their access logs.

UPDATE: I've been contacted by AVG. They're putting together a group to address the concerns of webmasters and asked me to be part of it. If you have any comments or suggestions on what they can do to improve LinkScanner let me know and I'll pass it along once I get the group invite.

It started off rather uneventfully with a haircut. Then I headed off to the old port to check out the Eureka festival. It was an entire afternoon of science prevailing. I even got a plaque carved with a laser! At first I met up with Vijeta but Skrud, Kyle and Heather showed up a little later. After beating the heart (who's in charge now, heart? You think you can flatline on me? I don't think so) and lifting matter with my mind (I still think that one is bullshit.. I want an explanation!) we headed off to Chinatown for some food. Harley joined us at Pho Bang and I had a tasty dinner.

After dinner we headed back to the festival for the laser show. I guess I built it up too much in my mind (we were debating who would win in a fight between a laser and lightning since a storm seemed to be coming) and it was my only letdown of the day. We stuck around for a while amusing ourselves and we tried out the pedophile trap but got bored and managed to get out unarrested.

By now it was getting a bit late so Heather, Kyle and Vijeta headed home. Skrud, Harley and I headed up to the fringe park to wait for the 13th hour show. On the way though, I broke a flip flop. On St-Laurent. At 10:30 pm. Crap. So I ended up walking up and down a good part of St-Laurent on one flip-flop and one bare foot until Clare called and her brother had the great idea of using a shoelace to try and fix it somehow. So we found an open grocery store (after going by 2 closed pharmacies which is where we were actually trying to go) and I bought some shoelaces, MacGuyvered my flip flop and had a temporary walking implement. Science prevails!

We met up with Clare, her brother, Sean and Bridget at the 13th hour and it was amazing as usual, plenty of dance parties and lots of funny and entertaining acts. I'm definitely going to be seeing a lot of fringe stuff this week (next time is probably on thrustday) so if you're interested in comedy or just an all-around good time give me a call or leave me a note and I'll let you know what we're up to in the near future.

The best fringe of them all, is the fringe in Montreal.
The fringe in Montreal, is the best fringe of them all.

There are really two types of files. There are files that are private and there are files you don't care about. No one wants to save their company's word and excel docs in a vague cloud you're not quite sure you'll ever get the files back from because of the security concerns. Not to mention people won't understand what happened. Where did the file go? I don't see it? Oh no my file is gone! How do I get it back? I have to search? Why isn't it on the computer? etc.

The other files are.. well.. just random stuff. They're photos of your summer vacation, photos that are already on facebook and flickr because you wanted to share them. They're mp3s you bought *cough*, but those are already synced between your computer and your ipod and maybe you've even moved past files and use something like deezer or, if you're american, pandora to get your music fill.

And what other media do you really want? Most of it is probably on youtube unless it's a full movie or tv episode in which case you can probably get it off a torrent or an flv streaming site. Soon enough (if the stupid media industry ever wakes up) it'll be cheaply available on-demand.

So what's really left to back up? I'm an outlying case because I have source code files I want to keep but even then I have a subversion server running on my pc and I can check my code into google code (or sourceforge if you prefer or any hosted service if you prefer to keep your code closed source) whenever I want.

I think Joel makes a very compelling point that it's a service we just don't need. It's something we will hopefully very soon be taking for granted. Something every developer will have to deal with if they expect their app to get any sort of market traction. The app will have to work on the web, on the phone, offline, etc. If it doesn't people will instead scratch their head and go for another that's maybe not as good but provides what people will by then consider basic features. An actual service to do this for consumers just won't work.

Of course it's really only partly aimed at consumers. It's mostly aimed at developers. I suppose it's another try to control the API developers mainly write code with but it's not going to work. No one trusts Microsoft. While some people might have their reservations and go ahead anyway because they consider the platform to be better, it certainly won't be the majority. The vast majority will say no thanks I'll develop my app on my own. Then I'll add in some backend "cloud" features. (Which really isn't hard.) Then I'll make a mobile version that works with my "cloud". Then I'll know my stack up and down and be able to fix any problem that comes up (provided I'm competent enough) and won't be dependent on the good graces of any other company, especially one that has proven itself to, time and time again, have very little grace.

Political campaigns are well known for slandering the other candidates but it seems Apple is descending to their level more and more. The Mac vs PC commercials were a very good idea but their execution is terrible. Up until recently I was mostly indifferent to the commercials. I don't like negative campaigns (who cares if the other product sucks? I don't want to know why I shouldn't buy their stuff, I want to know why I should buy your stuff) in general but it was fairly mild stuff.

Until this latest one.

Watch this:

Isn't that terrible? It doesn't even make any sense! How the hell did Vista, an operating system, break billing software? After being subjected to that commercial I was actually angry. How is that effective advertising?

I know HuddleChat is supposed to be a demo of the Google App Engine and not an actual product but they could've put at least a little effort in and not just ripped of 37 Signals.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Back?

Ok.

See a problem with the article? I'll give you a hint.

Paul Graham is a human.

Paul Graham likes startups.

Therefore, humans like startups.

Given the above, humans not in startups are obviously sub-human.

That was pretty much the article, just not in so many words.

EDIT: Ok, maybe not sub-human, just unhappy.

EDIT2: Paul wrote an explanation of what he was really trying to say in the essay. I guess this was another issue of the missing body language and non-verbal queues causing people like me to get the wrong message.

I guess if you follow him on twitter it's not too hard to guess who in that list is the mysterious new partner though. =)

Case in point

I tried calling in several times after that but it always said that they weren't accepting calls at that time and eventually the show ended. So instead I wrote an email. This email I wrote on Feb 25th and still haven't gotten a reply. I don't expect to ever get one but if I ever do I'll add the response. It's largely inspired by Jeremy Zawodny's blog post here. This is what I wrote:

Writing a minimal blog is ridiculously easy. The longest part was doing the layout (because I suck at graphics). I did the whole layout myself too. =)

Let me know what you think.

Oh and if you're interested in the source you can get the full blog source here and a somewhat out of date version (I'll commit all the changes I made to the framework for SmokinnBlog soon) of the bare bones framework here.

The one thing I'm proud of (everything else is pretty simple) you'll notice if you try to comment. I got the idea for that kind of spam filtering from here. I still need to make a simple search box though. I used to use that pretty often.

If you run across any bugs you can let me know in the comments or by dropping me an email.

To give you an idea of what the overall blog structure is like, here's a tree view of the source:

(You can click for biggerization)

Also, you'll have to update your rss feeds. There's a link to the new feed on the right or you can just right click here. Sorry about that, I know updating feeds is annoying but I don't have a choice, I'm going to be dropping my other host in a month.

EDIT: Fixed IE bugs.

The first time I couldn't boot into the ubuntu live cd. It would just keep spitting out error loading something or other over and over on the console. I couldn't get to any choices so I was screwed. I figured I'd just make do with vista but eventually couldn't stand it anymore.

The second time around I decided to try fedora core 8. It installed itself fine but screwed up on installing the boot loader. I could boot into fedora but not windows. No big loss I can live with that, I didn't try to fix grub. I however failed miserably at getting my wireless card working. The reason why linux is having so much difficulty is because I bought an HP dv9000 laptop this fall. Amd 64 dual core processor (bad start) and, since it's a laptop, all kinds of random crappy internals and wireless problems. (The audio which used to always be a problem with linux a few years ago seems to generally be fine now.) After playing around with a bunch of things I read off forums and how-tos I eventually just gave up. At one point I had 3 wlan0's, none of them functional obviously. It was sad.

So I figured I'd try ubuntu's "alternate" cd, with the regular text-based linux installer. It worked fine. No problem. When I first logged in I got a little popup saying hey there are non-free drivers you can install. I click and tell it to install the nvidia graphics and broadcomm wireless drivers. It explains what non-free is and means and lets me decide whether I want to do it anyway. Then it just installs the stuff no problem. I then download updates to all the installed software and the system is good to go.

Linux is generally still freaking hard to get right but Ubuntu is way ahead of the pack. Everything is just so easy.

I'm sorry I strayed Ubuntu. <3