I wrote a Bad Transcript for the new Star Trek movie. It's pretty good, you should read it.

The transcript, that is. The movie isn't good.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2013/01/04/building_dtwenty_org/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2013/01/04/building_dtwenty_org/ 2013-01-04T21:03:31-07:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Linux 767 days ago, I commented on a HN submission about a random number generator:

3.) Providing random numbers as an advertisement for your fine line of hardware random number generators. Here it doesn't matter how much money you make [providing the numbers], you just want people to buy the hardware that made them. Oddly enough, none of the random number services (and there are quite a few) do this, for some inexplicable reason. There's not even an argument-from-proprietary technology, since HRNGs are supposed to generate perfectly random noise, and there's no way an attacker could stage a replay attack.

I left it there, because I was lazy. But last month, notorious badass Maciej Cegłowski created The Pinboard Co-Prosperity Cloud.

What is it?

The Pinboard Co-Prosperity Cloud is a startup self-incubator. Six successful applicants will receive a modest amount of funding and as much publicity as I can provide for their sustainable and useful business idea.

Is this a joke?

It is not a joke.

What are the requirements?

You must have a good idea that you are capable of building, a willingness to build it, and a plan for making it mildly profitable.

How much funding will I get?

Each successful applicant will receive $37. This will cover the cost of six months of hosting at prgmr.com and a productivity-enhancing hot beverage.

So I entered. Ha ha why not?

The more I thought about it though, the more I realized that I wasn't getting the joke. The idea was trivially simple. I already had a web server. I didn't need all that mad cash. I could just... build it.

So I did. It's right here. (EDIT 2013/3/22: I let the domain name lapse, and moved the content to bbot.org)

It was amazingly easy, even though this was pretty much my first major (har) piece of programming. I had never used python, javascript, or jquery before.

Web programming in the year 2012 has the smooth, well polished feel of something that has had the sharp edges worn off by the passage of thousands of other people. Getting nginx to talk to the WSGI server was a snap. Installing bottle.py was easy. JQuery was no problem.

Any time I had a problem, googling the error message would return a helpful, relevant page, explaining how my "build it as fast as possible, while learning as little as possible" design methodology had screwed me over again.

At the time, of course, it seemed a vast edifice of impossible complexity, but in retrospect it was painless. "It's easy to do if you know how to do it", maybe.

The only difficulty I faced was the hardware random number generator. The numbers had to come from it, since that was the whole point of the site; but my server was a virtual machine on the east coast, and my HRNG was sitting on my desk.

The "money" solution would be to buy a rackmount server, plug the widget into it, then slot it into a colo, but I didn't have money, and instead I had to be creative.

I couldn't just run the web server locally, since my ISP blocks port 80. Enter the ugly hack: I plugged the entropykey into a spare laptop, ran the application server on that, then ran a SSH tunnel to my web server, which communicates with the front end via JSON. It works, at the cost of an extra 150ms of latency per roll.

There's room to improve, of course. You could probably list off a dozen features dtwenty.org needs without pausing to draw breath, (starting with "make it less ugly") but, the ideal of the minimum viable product shines bright.

The second biggest problem after integrating the HRNG was the ad copy that makes up most of the page. It was originally twice as long-- ruthless editing has reduced to it merely "too long" from "far, far too long." This too could use improvement.

But! It's done and it works! Programming is fun.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/12/09/how_would_i_get_started_and_the_problem_of_truth/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/12/09/how_would_i_get_started_and_the_problem_of_truth/ 2012-12-09T23:49:30-07:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, nerdery I've been meaning to write about Hacker News again, but have held back, since it's a pretty boring subject outside of HN's rather shallow pool of users. But recent events have forced my hand.

"How would I get started?"

Last night on Hacker News, someone asked a simple question with a complicated answer: “I want to build a cable company. How would I get started?”

I’m really disappointed in the universally pessimistic and generally unhelpful answers this question received. Some people pitched some interesting ideas and helpful analysis, but most of the replies reinforced the notion that Hacker News readers are predominantly male know-it-alls and on the average, a bunch of snarky dicks.

Lots of emotional content here, but not much meaning. The attitude behind these two paragraphs becomes clearer if we look at some other quotes:

"Black Swan Farming"

In startups, the big winners are big to a degree that violates our expectations about variation. I don't know whether these expectations are innate or learned, but whatever the cause, we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing.

That yields all sorts of strange consequences. For example, in purely financial terms, there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business. [1] I haven't really assimilated that fact, partly because it's so counterintuitive, and partly because we're not doing this just for financial reasons; YC would be a pretty lonely place if we only had one company per batch. And yet it's true.

To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. [2] You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.

It's a constant battle for us. It's hard to make ourselves take enough risks. When you interview a startup and think "they seem likely to succeed," it's hard not to fund them. And yet, financially at least, there is only one kind of success: they're either going to be one of the really big winners or not, and if not it doesn't matter whether you fund them, because even if they succeed the effect on your returns will be insignificant. In the same day of interviews you might meet some smart 19 year olds who aren't even sure what they want to work on. Their chances of succeeding seem small. But again, it's not their chances of succeeding that matter but their chances of succeeding really big. The probability that any group will succeed really big is microscopically small, but the probability that those 19 year olds will might be higher than that of the other, safer group.

The probability that a startup will make it big is not simply a constant fraction of the probability that they will succeed at all. If it were, you could fund everyone who seemed likely to succeed at all, and you'd get that fraction of big hits. Unfortunately picking winners is harder than that. You have to ignore the elephant in front of you, the likelihood they'll succeed, and focus instead on the separate and almost invisibly intangible question of whether they'll succeed really big.

"Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News"

raffi 114 days ago | link

Most companies fail. It's a safe bet to predict failure. It's pretty lame to celebrate that failure from the sidelines.

Vision is not "how is this guaranteed to fail?" but how could it possibly succeed despite the odds?

A core tenet of hacker ethics, the zeroeth law perhaps, is being right, having correct perceptions regarding the universe. A map that matches the territory.

Under this ethical system, the above statement makes less than no sense. The most likely outcome is failure... but you shouldn't predict failure?

However, the way startup financing is currently organized, a VC fund can shrug off a dozen miserable failures to chase the one Google or Intel.

The purpose of Hacker News is to advertise Y Combinator startups, such as 9gag. The purpose is not to act as a prediction market. In fact, since one of the major routes of of startup profitability is being purchased by another company, accurate predictions of value are contrary to Y Combinator's interests. Y Combinator wants valuations as high as possible.

Someone starting a new cable company in 2012 is very likely to fail. This is the correct prediction: it is the outcome with the highest probability.

But a new cable company which somehow isn't immediately crushed, would have an enormous customer base, and could potentially make billions and billions of dollars.

To someone steeped in the Bay Area Startup lottery culture, this isn't an insanely stupid idea at all. It's almost a safe bet. With the force of millions of dollars behind you, being right is irrelevant.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/08/25/ntpblogging_ii/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/08/25/ntpblogging_ii/ 2012-08-25T19:00:25-07:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Linux (previously)

So now bbot.org is a Stratum 2 NTP Pool server. (Its wiki page.)

Joining the pool is pretty easy: You create an account, give them your server's IP address, wait for the monitoring server to decide you're stable enough (~8 hours) and boom, you're in.

(The interface is a bit awkward: you paste the address in there, you don't click the "Add a server" link, which apparently doesn't do anything.)

I found four upstream servers by pinging 0.us.pool.ntp.org repeatedly, and choosing the one that were closest to me. Since bbot.org is in a datacenter right on the internet backbone, close can be very close:

# ntpq -np
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
-72.26.198.240   209.51.161.238   2 u  273 1024  377    2.320    3.100   1.201
+69.164.217.193  128.59.59.177    3 u  825 1024  377    3.713    0.239   0.371
-108.61.73.243   209.51.161.238   2 u  237 1024  377    3.174   -1.069   0.398
+128.113.28.67   18.26.4.105      2 u  383 1024  377    6.828    0.382   0.141
*128.118.25.5    .WWV.            1 u  426 1024  377   11.537    0.225   0.310

I had hoped that <10ms ping times would result in magically low offset numbers, measured in the tens of microseconds, but apparently jitter becomes a bigger problem when you get that low.

My reference stratum 1 server is wwv.tns.its.psu.edu, an open-access tier 1 server that John Balogh runs. Thanks John!]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/07/17/how_to_pass_the_washington_state_drivers_test_on_your_second_try/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/07/17/how_to_pass_the_washington_state_drivers_test_on_your_second_try/ 2012-07-17T05:00:18-07:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Etc

I've been spending a lot time recently negotiating various state agencies to acquire licenses, and I figured I would write up what I did, because this is a goddamn blog.

Electrician's License

This was more or less easy. I have a weirdo subtype: Nonresidential lighting maintenance and lighting retrofit (7A). Getting this required two years of on-the-job experience, having the supervising electrician witness that I had that experience on a form, getting that form notarized, paying a fee, and then taking two tests.

In the United States, all the states have been bullied into adopting a uniform electrical code, imaginatively titled the National Electrical Code. Every couple years it is updated to phase out certain old practices of electrical work, and institute new safety methods. The individual states often lag by a year or two when adopting: the latest version is NEC 2011, but Washington is still on NEC 2008, for various amusing political reasons.

One of those is money. The NEC, despite being, essentially, law; is actually produced by a for-profit industry association, which means the code will cost you money, and not a small amount of it: NEC 2011 costs $75. Perniciously, when a state updates to the latest version of the code, every single electrician in the state has to buy a new copy, and take various courses on the updated rules. The perverse incentive for the NFPA is to issue updates as often as possible, to extract the maximum amount of rent from their legal monopoly.

The licensing tests are open-book, but I didn't want to give the NFPA my money, so I pirated a PDF copy of NEC 2008, and studied that.

That's the first test. The second test is on 19.28 RCW, the Washington State law governing electrical work.

Both of these tests are administered by PSI Exams, a company that apparently exists solely for state governments to outsource test administration to. Presumably there's all sorts of kickbacks and bribe-taking involved here too, I didn't really want to dig too deeply.

So. I paid my fees, scheduled the test, and studied the Law. Finally, the big day came. I took the test, and passed the NEC portion, but failed the RCW portion.

The proctor printed out the sad evidence of my laziness and incompetence, and handed it to me. I looked at the paper, read it, then instantly forgot the information.

This was one of the most egregious failures of rationality in my adult life, so listen carefully: Somehow, after all that, I became convinced that I had failed the NEC portion, not the RCW.

This is partially explainable by the fact that the NEC part had pitched a couple slowballs over the plate regarding wire marking trivia. These would have been really, really easy to answer if I had a paper copy of the NEC with me... but I was trying to save money! Whoops. So I got those wrong, but still passed the test. My failure haunted me, somehow metastasizing in my head to "I flunked the entire test".

Wrong.

There's a waiting period before you can retake the test. In the time I purchased a physical copy of NEC 2008, and studied the heck out of it. I show up for the retest, code in hand, ready to trounce this test. I sit down at the computer... and the test is for 19.28 RCW.

I am confused. I complete the test, easily passing it. (It picked a different random set of questions, ones I knew the answers to this time, apparently.)

I pick up my book, walk out of the testing room, and tell the proctor that there is A Problem. I've been given the wrong test! I am absolutely, unshakably certain that I had failed the NEC part the first time, not the RCW part. A Mistake Has Been Made.

The proctor is not having a good day. To be precise, she is not having a good first day on the job. She is not familiar with PSI's computer system, but figures out that I had taken the test that had been assigned to me. She calls PSI technical support (for apparently, the fifth time that day) and we investigate. The conclusion is reached that everything is working fine.

I am still not convinced, but this is obviously not the place to resolve it. (The PSI testing center is a single, two-room office suite in a office park in a Seattle suburb) I'm holding things up for other people who actually took the right test, so I drive home, dreading what is obviously going to be a couple hours of phone hell, navigating the bowels of a giant bureaucracy to correct a weird computer error. This is going to really, really suck.

I get home, open a beer, and spend 10 minutes on hold. I finally get a rep, tell her my name, social security number, blood type, and secret fear; she accesses my file, and tells me that I've passed both tests. I am now a 7A licensed electrician.

"Really?"

"Really."

"Oh."

I thank her. I hang up. I feel like biggest idiot in the entire world, the dumbest man who has ever, or will ever, live.

So that's how I got my electrician's license. How I got my driver's license is similar in the broad strokes.

Driver's license.

In Washington state, if you're over 18, all you need to get a learner's permit is to pass a knowledge test, and pass a simple eye exam. I spend half an hour waiting for my number, while watching a lot of alarmingly old people renew their driver's licenses.

I pass the knowledge test with ease, (It's taken on a computer, which uses a CRT-based touchscreen! Blast from the past.) and receive my learner's permit on April 3rd, 2012.

I don't know much about learning to drive, but I've read a little about learning how to fly, so I keep a logbook.

Over the next month, I rack up 269.35 miles, and a number of hours that I really don't want to go through and add up, watch the instructional videos produced by the DoL, until finally I decide that I'm ready to take the test. It is scheduled for May 14th, 2012.

This is what it looks like when you fail a driving test. I got a 78/100, the passing score is 80/100.

Highlight:

"So, have you ever conducted a test where the guy hit someone?"

"I can't answer that."

"Oh."

So how did I fail the driving test? It's easy: during the test, a specific phrase is used. It is, "rejoin traffic."

When I took the test, it was a beautiful, sunny summer day. 70F, not a cloud in the sky. Driving tests are (almost always) conducted on empty side streets, since of course this is a driving test, and the driver may fuck up.

The street is empty. The proctor says, "rejoin traffic". I glance into a mirror and, duh, see nobody, so I just drive into the street.

No! Wrong! You're supposed to be pretending that there is traffic. They are looking for three specific things:

1. Checks mirror.
2. Physically turns around and checks blind spot.
3. Turns on turn signal.

If you miss any of those, you lose the maximum 4 points on that test, failing the section entirely. Do that often enough, and you fail the test.

Don't do that. Perform those three actions. Even better: say them out loud ("Mirror, blind spot, turn signal") Driving instructors like to be talked to, they want to hear you thinking through things. I also repeated instructions back to them, ("Turn left at the upcoming intersection" "Turning left, roger") which you probably don't have to do, but they didn't seem to mind.

I passed parallel parking perfectly... except for signaling.

Minor point loss: at a stop sign with a blind corner, you're supposed to come to a complete stop before the white line, creep forward until you have visibility, come to another complete stop, then go.

Something I was warned about by a friend who also recently took the test: the rules for parking on a hill are somewhat esoteric. (You have to point your wheels in a certain direction, depending on circumstance) Study them carefully, or else you'll be dinged the full 4 points on that test.

Note: a perfect score on the driving test means that they'll never touch the scoring form. If they write anything at all, it's because you screwed up, and they're deducting points. (If you ask the instructor what you did wrong, they may or may not answer. I think they're not supposed to, but if it's clear that you're going to pass, they may bend the rules. This means that they won't help you when you actually need it, but oh well.)

There's a couple of commonsense tips:

• Drive slow. By default, I drive slowly enough to annoy my mother, so that wasn't really an issue, but still.
• Bring a book to the DMV. Or something, anything. I had to keep myself entertained for a couple hours. Don't be like me. Be smart.
• Don't argue with the driving instructor. That cannot possibly help. Unless it's a very obvious, and very trivial mistake, ("Your headlights aren't on." "Actually, they are." "Oh.") then disagreeing with them isn't going to end well for you.

Anyway, I passed the test with trivial ease on my second try. Anticlimax ending!]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/06/13/biolite_camp_stove/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/06/13/biolite_camp_stove/ 2012-06-13T23:35:54-07:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Engineering So John Biehler just reviewed the Biolite camp stove. The gist is that it's a little wood stove which uses a thermoelectic junction to generate electricity that could be used recharge your phone, or whatever. At $129, it's a cute little gadget, that also happens to demonstrate why the TEC effect isn't used for commericial power generation.

Let's look at the numbers:

Fire power output (peak): 3.4 kw (lo) 5.5 kw (hi)
USB power output: Max continuous: 2W @5V, Peak: 4W @5V

Assume that it only manages the maximum continuous power on the "hi" mode. This gives us 2W/5500W = a magnificent final thermodynamic efficency of .036%]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/06/07/bad_transcript_prometheus_2012/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/06/07/bad_transcript_prometheus_2012/ 2012-06-07T19:13:25-07:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Etc I heard from my sources that Prometheus was not good, so I endured what was probably the worst cam I've ever seen to bring you a Bad Transcript for it.

Spoiler alert: yes, it really is that bad.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/06/04/cod_blops_2/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/06/04/cod_blops_2/ 2012-06-04T18:10:12-07:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Game Design So like any other good drone, I've been watching the E3 presentations, which also means I saw the pretty bland gameplay demo for Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2.

If you watch that trailer, which you shouldn't, you'll get the basic gist, which is that it's 2025, the Army is 50% drones, but surprise surprise, the Russians or someone hacks them, and now you gotta shoot them with bullets. Despite the premise, the gameplay demo showed the player shooting a lot of foreigners with various gadgets. So, a typical Modern Warfare game, like the last five COD games.

This actually a neat premise, kinda like the EMP level from MW2, which they're bungling pretty badly. Here's what it should be like:

First level: Typical hand-holding level. You still have all your fancy gadgets, and are on a mission in Columbia or something, killing the natives. Game makes a bunch of imperialism and "gosh with all this modern weaponry we have, it's like we're on easy mode!" jokes.

Second level: Oh no, we've been hacked! Bad news, Mason: the new guns don't work either. We'll have to use these WW2 museum pieces... the same guns from Call Of Duty 1!

Third level: Old West guns!

Fouth level: The robot factory! You've got to make it to the control room to shut down the production line, or else you'll be hit by endless waves of combat robots coming right off the conveyor belt.

(Explaining the joke: this is how combat works in every CoD game, endlessly respawning enemies that constantly come at you until you hit a checkpoint.)

Fifth level: We're out of ammo... we'll have to use swords! Sudden genre shift!

Sixth level: The hackers are hosting C3 inside a WoW-clone! Mason, take this level 60 warrior we bought off a Chinese gold farmer, and go kill them. Another sudden genre shift!

Seventh level: I don't know. The last five games have ended with killing the viewpoint character, and I don't know how to one-up that.

In 2006, Daniel Rutter wrote about the "genset" option for the t/zero vaporware electric car. The basic idea was this: A plug-in hybrid, but with the gasoline engine on a trailer. If you're taking a short trip, then you don't take the genset with you, because you don't need the weight. If you're going on a long trip, then you hook up the trailer, and enjoy the long range and fast refueling that a gasoline engine gives you. (Note that this scheme means you'll have a fairly large genset sitting around at home, which spends most of its time not being used.) This is part one.

Part two: Heat engines have a surprisingly low maximum theoretical efficiency. The endoreversible heat engine efficiency equation is thus: (units are absolute degrees, Kelvin or Rankine)

The problem is that the Earth just isn't cold enough. Room temperature is 300 Kelvin! You're not going to want T_h to go much above 830K, or else you'll be producing nitrogen oxides in the exhaust. This gives a final endoreversible efficiency of 0.40. That's the maximum thermodynamic efficiency, and there ain't no way to beat thermodynamics.

You can bend the rules a little, though. It's impossible to extract any more mechanical work from the waste heat, but it's still heat, you can use it for things that don't need low-entropy heat sources. Like, say keeping a house warm, or heating water.

This is called Cogeneration, and depending on how you do it, you can get up to 90% total thermal efficiency. A popular home cogeneration system is the MicroCHP furnace, a natural gas turbine that provides hot water and forced-air heating from its waste heat outflow. It can also run as a backup generator during power outages, in which case it vents waste heat outside.

The synthesis of these ideas is obvious: Make a plug-in hybrid whose engine is a cogenerating furnace built around a multi-fuel gas turbine.

A brilliant idea! There are some problems.

1.) MicroCHP turbines are designed to run on natural gas only. The "multi-fuel" version would be a second generation product. The first gen would have problems: the natural gas fueling infrastructure in the United States is a lot more sparse than the liquid-fuels infrastructure.

2.) The turbine is going to want a lot of cooling. Does a trailer get enough airflow?

3.) How well does the turbine tolerate road vibration?

4.) There's a user design problem: for a cogenerating furnace to work well, you want it at the center of your house, where all the waste heat goes to keeping you warm. This essentially means that every user of this car has to have an insulated, attached garage, or else they'll be losing some efficiency.

5.) There's a user interface problem: You can drive out of the garage with the trailer attached easily enough, but you'll then have to back into the garage, trailer first, and then reattach all the connections. Manually. Every time you want to use it.

6.) There's a use-case problem: Every time you drive away with the turbine, you drive away with the house's sole source of heat and hot water. Fine with a single-occupancy home, might be a problem for a family.

7.) It is certain that in the near future, cripplingly heavy taxes will be applied to fossil-fueled vehicles. Will this count as one? Maybe?

8.) This idea isn't terribly original. There's a lot of prior art here. Getting a patent will be an uphill battle.

So, there. Eight reasons why I'm talking about this idea in a blog post, rather than a room of serious men in suits.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/03/11/fun_with_spiders/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/03/11/fun_with_spiders/ 2012-03-11T22:00:39-07:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Game Design So I grepped my logs for everything that asks for robots.txt, and the results were interesting.

Firstly, there's a lot of spiders out there!

$ grep "06/Mar" spiders.txt | wc -l
69

When an article isn't trending, or I haven't posted lately, bbot.org does about 1200 hits and 300 uniques a day. Some spiders request robots.txt multiple times, but cloaked spiders don't request robots.txt at all, so it's a wash. This means that fully a fifth of my traffic is from machines.

This is odd, because in terms of actual traffic, Google is the only game in down.

The traditional social contract between search engines and site owners is that you let them download your site, and in return, they drive traffic to you. This contract is broken, and has been for years. Google provides 99.98% of search traffic.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Gigablast and Blekko maintain fabulously comprehensive databases, updated regularly, which nobody ever uses. (DuckDuckGo strips referrer headers from their outgoing traffic, so they might be super popular, I have no way to know) This doesn't even count the foreign-language search engines, like Baidu, Soso Naver, Daum, or Yandex, who I also never ever see traffic from, since my site's in English.

Now, I don't use robots.txt, but still. What a waste of time and money!

Spiders can be roughly grouped into three groups: Google, Everybody else, and spammers. Brandwatch, Sitexploration, Seoprofiler, Linkdex, and Metadatalabs are all "SEO tools", which want to charge you money to get reports on their vague guess at how many people link to you. Spotinfluence even wants you to sign in via Facebook to begin using their site, and if you're dumb enough to do that, you deserve whatever they do to your profile.

Some spiders don't take no for an answer.

208.115.113.85 - - [01/Mar/2012:14:09:51 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Ezooms/1.0; ezooms.bot@gmail.com)"
208.115.111.69 - - [01/Mar/2012:15:37:17 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Ezooms/1.0; ezooms.bot@gmail.com)"
208.115.113.85 - - [01/Mar/2012:18:24:34 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Ezooms/1.0; ezooms.bot@gmail.com)"
208.115.111.69 - - [01/Mar/2012:19:56:54 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Ezooms/1.0; ezooms.bot@gmail.com)"
208.115.113.85 - - [01/Mar/2012:22:02:14 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Ezooms/1.0; ezooms.bot@gmail.com)"

Some really don't.

107.21.161.122 - - [06/Mar/2012:09:46:53 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
107.21.161.122 - - [06/Mar/2012:09:46:53 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
184.73.70.151 - - [06/Mar/2012:14:31:17 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
184.73.70.151 - - [06/Mar/2012:14:31:17 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
107.20.100.1 - - [06/Mar/2012:22:27:30 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
107.20.100.1 - - [06/Mar/2012:22:27:31 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
107.20.100.1 - - [06/Mar/2012:22:54:24 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
107.20.100.1 - - [06/Mar/2012:22:54:25 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"

I'm not sure what the rationale is for using such a short timeout is, or asking multiple times. Presumably if a robots.txt request returns a 404, and has been doing so for the last two years, one isn't going to appear five hours later. Google, on the other hand, only checks to see if I've changed my mind twice a day.

While I've got my logs open, I'd like to complain about this: (original domain replaced with .su)

91.229.175.130 - - [11/Mar/2012:19:52:39 -0400] "GET /clubwearguru.su/blog/clubwearguru.su/archives/clubwearguru.su/2009/clubwearguru.su/07/clubwearguru.su/index.htmlhxxp://bbot.org/clubwearguru.su/blog/clubwearguru.su/archives/clubwearguru.su/2009/clubwearguru.su/07/clubwearguru.su/index.html HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; ICS)"

This appears to request a valid page on my server, but with a domain inserted after every /. Does this actually work? Do people really automatically post their server logs online? The mind boggles.

If you liked this, you should donate! bbot.org is out of money, and is not long for this world otherwise.