The Dakar Rally is a desert race that goes on in January every year. But that kind of blase statement doesn’t really do it justice. This isn’t just a bunch of cars, bikes and trucks starting at one end of a track and going as fast as they can until they end up at the finish line later on; Dakar is an insanely difficult two-week, thousands-of-miles rally race through completely unmarked desert terrain.
Dakar was originally the Paris-Dakar, and the course originally went from, yes, Paris, to Dakar in Senegal. These days it tends to start in Spain, wander about through Northern Africa and cross some of the most beautiful but also some of the most difficult terrain on earth. The rally part means that you’re set off on your way overland with vague directions and a finish point some 400KM or more away. No track. Not even roads. GPS? Just for the finish point. No way points. To succeed in the the Dakar its not so much who has the fastest car or bike or truck, but who can navigate the best and keep from cracking under the stress once you get lost, which everyone does. Not to mention the problems of heatstroke, injury, dehydration and bandits. People die on the Dakar with frightening regularity.
The largest teams have full support — trucks that follow along behind with mechanics and food and gasoline. But some really insane people do it as individuals, with no support at all. Which brings us to the point of all this lead up: Canadian Bob Bergman did Dakar this year on a motorcycle and kept a diary of it all. It is long and very detailed but a tremendously interesting read. And it is utterly convincing that Dakar is something that most of us will never, ever, ever want to try.
If you get the Outdoor Life Network (OLN) on your cable or dish they covered Dakar this year and are still re-running the shows. OLN’s coverage this year is really, really poor, but it’ll still give you an idea of what the race is about if you’re not familiar with it.
And to answer your next question, no I don’t watch any normal sports.
Becoming deeply interested in gardening means also becoming deeply interested in the weather. Perhaps not so much as in if its going to be sunny or rainy on any particular day, but more the cycles of temperature and sunlight over the course of the year.
I have a fairly large vegetable garden, and I need to know a bunch of weather facts. I need to know exactly when the last frost is going to happen so that I can get the tomatoes in at the right time. When I lived in the suburbs I could just read the newspaper and the gardening section would say “Plant your tomatoes now!” but up here in the mountains the weather is different; it snows, it gets colder and stays colder and we get more rain. I have to pay closer attention to what actually happens. I also need to know how many hours of sunlight there are going to be every day, which is important for growing onions. I have an Old Farmer’s Almanac that will tell me that. And one other thing I need to know is the number of chill hours we get — chill hours are the total number of hours in the winter below 45 degrees. Lots of fruit like apples is dependent on chill hours and you can’t grow some varieties if you don’t get enough chill.
For a while I had a $10 Target thermometer which measured maximum and minimum temperatures, and for an entire year I would get up in the morning and write down the max and min on a post-it. Every month or so I would enter those values into a spreadsheet and plot elaborate graphs. Sometimes I would forget to write down the numbers and sometimes I would lose a post-it so there would be big gaps in the data but mostly it was OK.
Now you would think that a gadget geek as big as I am would have found a more efficient solution than writing down numbers on a post-it every day. You would think that I would be all over computerized weather stations. You would think. And I have no real excuse for that, other than that I did the research and I couldn’t find a weather station that knowledgable people didn’t dismiss as totally sucky or that wasn’t completely insanely expensive. Also: in the realm of geekery weather geeks seem to be way over the line geeky. scifi geeks…computer geeks…train geeks….weather geeks. Way over the line. I had some kind of weird mental block going over the whole thing. And so I continued to scribble temperatures on post-its.
And then Eric got me a weather station this last Christmas. Its an Oregon Scientific, which knowledgeable people dismiss as entirely sucky. It seems to work entirely fine. It has a bunch of wireless sensors we put up in the yard outside, which send data to the box indoors. It measures indoor and outdoor temperature, barometric pressure, indoor and outdoor humidity, wind speed and direction, rain rate and total rainfall.
Holy freaking shit this is so darn cool.
It comes with a little box that lets you press buttons on a touch screen and see all this data, or you can connect it to a PC with a serial cable and it’ll spit out the data for processing there. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of open source software to read the data and generate complicated graphs. Eric set it up on our main linux box so that we can obsessively look up complicated graphs on our internal web server that tell us its sunny outside. Eventually I’ll get around to setting up a cron job to upload the graphs to lauralemay.com. And, of course, with all the weather data busily being stored and graphed soon I will have enough data to be able to write some scripts to generate the chill hours and other data I need for my gardening. In this household there’s no such thing as a hobby that doesn’t require programming.
We also send the data regularly to Weather Underground, one of about 40,000 online weather sites but probably one of the geekiest. Its not a pretty site and its not an ultra-serious weather science site, but for weather geekery its right up there. We are the Above Lexington Reservoir weather station on the wunder site; you can go there and see our data graphed BY THE MINUTE. Look! The barometric pressure is falling as we speak!
“Your iPod needs legs and cute, beady eyes. It would then like to consume your deepest memories and absorb the ancient ways into the blackness of eternal horror.”
(I got it from Gizmodo. Order it at Mule Design.)
I’ve been getting whacked with a lot of referrer spam lately. A LOT of referrer spam. A LOT.
If you’re unfamiliar with this particular bit of pernicious stupidity, referrer spam is where a spammer will hit your site for the sole purpose of sticking their own web site into your referrer logs so it looks like there’s a link from their site to yours. At first glance this would seem completely moronic — only the site admin is ever going to see any of this — but some sites publish their referrer lists, so the spammer is presumably hoping to find one of these by flooding other people’s sites with links to their own.
Usually the referrer spam on my site is innocuous, I get 50 hits from some casino or porn site once and then they go away. But in the last week I’ve been getting hundreds and hundreds of hits from one site that uses multiple domain names, each a variation on a windows software theme, enough that there’s no real referrers in my top 150.
Enough is enough.
IP banning in Movable Type only works on comments and trackbacks, it doesn’t work for regular hits. Fortunately, there is the wonder of the .htaccess file, and it works for any kind of web site, blog or otherwise. The htaccess file is used generically to make web server configuration changes on a per-directory basis. Using the LIMIT directive you can restrict access to your web site or any part of your web site by IP address or by regular expression.
Here’s the basic template for restricting access by IP:
<Limit GET>
order allow,deny
# referrer spammers die die die
deny from XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
# allow everyone else
allow from all
</LIMIT>
You’d replace the XXX part with the evil spammer’s IP, of course, and you can use the three-byte version (XXX.XXX.XXX) to block entire class Cs (be careful if you do that, though, there are lots of addresses in a class C and you can block folks you don’t mean to).
If you’d rather block by keyword (poker, casino, porn, viagra, blah blah blah), you can use a regular expression (pattern matching) filter with two additional deny lines:
<Limit GET>
order allow,deny
# referrer spammers die die die
deny from XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ".*bestpokersite.com" BadReferrer
deny from env=BadReferrer
# allow everyone else
allow from all
</LIMIT>
If you don’t know regular expressions you can just add more SetEnvIfNoCase lines with more
hostname keywords to kill (note that the .* part is important).
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ".*buycialishere.com" BadReferrer
If you’re matching on keywords more of the hostname is probably better than less so you don’t unintentionally block innocent users. You never know when an actual reader might be legitimately coming from a poker site.
If you do know regular expression syntax, any regex is valid. The case is insensitive. Use the SetEnvIf directive for case-sensitive regexes.
When a site that is blocked in your .htaccess tries to access your site, they’ll get a 403 error (restricted access). The hit won’t show up in your logs at all.
References:
Ever visited a company web site and despite the really lovely site design and lots of seemingly grammatically correct copy, had zero clue what it is the company actually does? Annoying, isn’t it? Which is why Huhcorp works so uncomfortably well.