Richy's Random Ramblings – Page 141 – Random ramblings and ravings of Richy B

Techy: RAM Revisited

April 23, 2003

SDRAM memory upgrade Just a quick update on the RAM shortage I blogged about earlier.

For a while at work, we’ve had a massive 1Gb of RAM just “sitting around” the office: we came across it in the office move, but it isn’t compatible with any of our work machines so it had just been looking for a home. My boss tried it in his home machine, but it wasn’t compatible, so I decided to try it in my new Dell… 200Mhz DDR RAM won’t work in a 333Mhz FBR bus DDR requiring machine. Drat and double drat.

So I’ve been forced to actually get out my credit card (yet again) and purchase some RAM…. I managed to get a 333Mhz FBR suitable 512Mb DRAM SIMM thingy (hey, I’ve given up trying to remember how many different types of RAM there are) for a total of £89.41 from PCUpgrader and hopefully it should be arriving tomorrow or Friday. And boy do I need it! 256Mb RAM running Windows XP, Digiguide, Norton Antivirus, ZoneAlarm Pro, Mailwasher, MySQL, Apache, PGP, EditPlus, various drivers for the display, ADSL modem, printer, dual cameras, and Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer doesn’t go too far.

It seems odd that now I’ve having to upgrade up from a quarter of a gigabyte of memory as it “isn’t enough”, when just over 10 years ago I was happy with just 32Kb of RAM and floppy discs which could store a maximum of 400K of data (double sided, double density 5¼ floppies!). And has my “productivity level” really increased? Hmmm….

Net: Quick Bucks On Blogshares

April 21, 2003

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Go on, have a look at the “Blogshares Top 100 Blogs” and see who appears in position 92.

Yep, it’s Richy’s Random Ramblings showing that all 10,000 shares (I’ve done a “share split” to double the number of available shares) have been sold in my blog and that each share is currently worth $3.92. Doesn’t sound a lot, but it means my lowly little blog is worth a whopping $11,738.24 and beats other well known blogs such as “Davezilla” and “Scriptygoddess”.

Now, if my shares in blogs I don’t read such as Deirdre on the WEB, MyDimension # unDefining Reality and JNalpak.com were to make sudden rises as well (as I’ve got 1000 shares in each of them worth just $233.33), then I’ll be able to sell them and hopefully buy some of my own stock back. But since each outgoing link from my blog is currently worth a massive $257.35, then hopefully me just mentioning them here will cause them to increase in value…

However, I’ve got a very strong feeling that my share price is going to slump by around $9,000 shortly for a short period of time – so I would advise people reading this to sell their stock in my blog now!

I’ve you’ve got no idea what I’m gabbering on about, go check out Blogshares, it’s still in beta (launches on the 1st of May), but it’s a whole lot of fun (for free!) and like me you could increase your initial $500 of virtual money up to $20,246 within a week. Now, if only I had the real life money to play the real life stock exchange….

Polls: Pucker Up!

April 21, 2003

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Surprise Kiss After coming across the What Sort Of Kiss Are You? quiz via Tracy (who found it via Brenda), I thought I’d see what sort of kiss I am (I personally thought I was a human, but it just goes and shows that nowadays you can’t be sure what sort of corporeal form you are!).

Allegedly, I’m a “Surprise kiss”:

You have a surprise kiss! Your partner is always pleasantly pleased to have you jump outta no where to dote them with a fun peck on the cheek or more passionate embrace. super markets and work places are your favourite places to attack your loved one with all your love =p

Hmm, maybe….

TV: Oneiric Accord Advert

April 21, 2003

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You may have seen the new Honda Accord advertisement on television now (if not – have a look at the Macromedia Shockwave versions for 56k, 100k or 300k connections or the Quicktime version) – but were you aware that the advert is “real” (hence not computer generated as you’d expect nowadays), and that it took 606 takes to get right?

It’s a fascinating two minute long advert for the new Accord car and I’ve watched it dozens of times already (at least 6 times tonight) as it’s just amazing – from the counterbalanced tyres going up hill, to the way everything just interacts perfectly. If only I had a complete drivers licence and money I’d probably go out an buy the new Honda Accord because the advert is so good (at least Honda are getting lots of mentions for the new Accord because of it – there’s two threads on Metafilter about it).

According to what I’ve read about the advert, the music in the background near the end is “Rapper’s Delight” by “Grand Master Flash and the Sugar Hill Gang” and is probably based on the 30minute long 1987 French short film “The Way Things Go (Der Lauf Der Dinge)” by Peter Fischli and David Weiss amazoncom:B00005UW7W which also shows items moving in a domino effect – one thing “topples” another, which causes the next to move etc etc. But like many others, when I first saw the advert I was reminded of a childhood game called Mousetrap amazoncom:B00000DMFD where you used to set up the pieces and then turn the first wheel to start the trap going – I don’t think myself and my sisters actually played the game properly, but we got plenty of enjoyment just making it “work”.

Like Ext:Circ, I’ve also ordered (from Honda) a free copy of the DVD which includes a documentary, music video and illustrated guide to how it was made (you can fill out the form on Honda’s site or call 0845 200 8000 if you want one yourself) – but if you aren’t UK based, watch the advert anyway, it’s amazing!

PS: “Oneiric” means “Of, pertaining to, or suggestive of dreams; dreamy” which is certainly one way of describing this advert!

Search: New Microsoft Search

April 20, 2003

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At the start of April, a Reuters news article came out which quoted Bob Visse, director of Marketing for MSN:

We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience.

Sounds ominous doesn’t it? Many people expected Microsoft to therefore create their own search engine (instead of just using Looksmart, Inktomi and Direct Hit), but it seems things have happened a bit quicker than expected!

Yep, a few people have noticed a new robot or crawler indexing the internet and all signs point back to Microsoft at the moment.

Whilst it hasn’t yet hit my blog, I have been hit by it on one of my other sites with the following details:

131.107.163.49 – – [20/Apr/2003:12:54:56 +0100] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1” 200 763 “-” “MicrosoftPrototypeCrawler (please report obnoxious behaviour to newbiecrawler@hotmail.com)”

The IP address 131.107.163.49 falls within the 131.107.0.0-131.107.255.255 (in otherwords a 131.107.0.0/16) netblock which is allocated to a certain Microsoft Corp of One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052, USA.

Using that information, I was then able to look at the logs again and saw quite a few page requests (I stopped counting after the 200th request made in the first 9 hours of today) from the IP address 131.107.65.225 (also owned by Microsoft) with the “Browser User-Agent” of “Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.2;+.NET+CLR+1.1.4322)”.

So, it would appear Microsoft has launched a new spider/robot out on the Internet and its name is MicrosoftPrototypeCrawler, but Microsoft want to keep it slightly quiet for now by mostly hiding the user-agent string (which states what sort of computer and web browser you are using) as being Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 on Windows NT 5.2 (Windows XP claims to be Windows NT 5.1, so I would guess the new crawler is pretending to be on Windows .NET or 2003).

If the results from the crawler will be made public or not (or if they are just for internal Microsoft development for some reason), or what affect it’ll have on the Internet and the way people search – especially considering that according to Alexa Research, MSN.com is the 2nd most popular site world wide (Google is only 5th). But I’m wondering why MSN/Microsoft is so concerned about trying to semi-hide the crawler for now and why they are using a @hotmail.com address instead of a @microsoft.com one (the former doesn’t really give a lot of “respect” on the internet due to the fact anybody can get them for free).