Auto Linkback

If you take a peek over to the right you'll notice a box of reciprocal links and search engine queries which have lead people here in the past. It's part of my latest project which I'm calling Auto Linkback. By simply adding a JavaScript snippet to any site you too can have automatically generated referal links. The possibilities are endless. I'm gearing it towards being a companion tool for weblogs. What you see running here is my first prototype. It needs some work, but over the next days, or weeks I'm planning to develop a website to deploy it with a full member configuration system and remote administration.
It's just cool to see what kinds of things people have been searching for that brought them here. It also gives a feel for what the search engines think your site is about.
I can see privacy issues being raised by people who don't particularly want their search queries immortalised on every search result they visit, which is why members will easily be able to configure how many hits to display, or not to display them at all. Loging into the main site will give complete detailed stats anyway. Besides, the queries are completely anonymous. Fun for the whole family!

geek

for want of a better place to put this, I feel the need to make a record of my endeavour to finally after maybe 2 years upgrade my linux distribution.

I was running the stable "potato" distribution of Debian. At least I think it was potato. Anyway, I use Firefox, Thunderbird, Bluefish, Quanta and a bunch of stuff that doesn't have up to date packages in the stable branch, so I was just forcing them in from the testing branch, and in the process I killed kdelibs4 which took quanta down with it. I decided it was time to upgrade to the testing branch.

I just followed the debian upgrade guide using dselect and while it took my a day and a night, all said and done it wasn't that hard. I first had to add testing repositories to my /etc/apt/sources.list and then run apt-get update. That was a mission actually becuase my sources list was all messed up, but I got an updated list in the end. Then just did dselect update, dselect select, dselect install. And then dselect install again... and again... and again... in the end I ran dselect install 6 times before it finally decided it was finished and offered to clean off all the .deb files. Reason being that there were some minor errors along the way. The first being that sawfish-gnome wouldn't uninstall. I had to find it's pre-remove script and comment out some guff to get rid of it. Then it was just the occasional dependency problem which all got sorted out in the end.

I then had to go back into dselect select to get back all the stuff I was using from testing, becasue for some reason it all got removed in the update process, but it was totally painless getting it all back, was I found and selected them. I found it easier to search debians packeges which tells you where the package your looking is located, like utils, graphics whatever. I few more runs of dselect install later and I was back in action. After setting everything up and being quite impressed that kde apps were back, and anti-aliased, and decided to try a reboot. (I'd been basically upgrading the entire system all day, but that's no reason to reboot linux...)

Reboot, bios check, LI...
Strange, reboot, bios, LI...
For some reason lilo had been shafted. I have windoze on a partition and linux on some others, but lilo was dead. I booted from a linux rescue disk which then booted from the hard disk automagically. I then just checked my lilo.conf file to make sure it was ok. Lilo itself had been updated in the process, so it needed to be run again to update the mbr. Ran lilo, rebooted, and all's well.

I'm now a firm proponet of dselect, which calculated all the dependencies and instead of just telling you about it goes and downloads and installs them for you. All I have to do now is geat UTF-8 working with Quanta and I'm away...

I noticed from my referral logs that someone stumbled across this site looking for pics from Larks in the Park. Well I stumbled across the Porkers web site and who's melon did I spot in their very own crowd shot? Well, I don't remember that guy waving his shoes around in front of me, but the guy in his undies is unmistakable, especially after having jumped up on stage at one point and going the full monty. Porkers!!!

all better, apparently...

There was some confusion this morning when I arrived at the clinic with Tyler. They seemed to think I should have visited the doctor again, so I ended up calling Misaki and passing my phone to the good people. (it really sucks not being able to use the local language effectively sometimes) Turns out they thought we should check to see if he was over his chicken pocks, already. Huh?! It hasn't even been a week yet, but anyway, to the doctor we went.

Dr. Tada's great. He's a rugby fanatic and named his clinic the Wallabies after the Australian team. A while back he brought the Wahroonga Tigers to Japan for an exchange with the local team. So he takes one look at Tyler and says, yep - he's better... can I see his bcak too?... yeah he's better. (that's my translation anyway). Ok, so he's fully recovered apparently and back to the kindergarten tomorrow.

No wonder I can't remember having it, it was nothing for Tyler. Not itchy at all, just some spots mainly on his back and tummy, and a few on his arms and legs. Nothing on his face at all really. I've heard of some kids getting them in their throat and horrible stuff like that.