Wireless fun

Some months ago I bought a USB-Bluetooth adapter and installed that along with the necessary driver and server on bunthorne (one of our home computers). It worked in so far as my phobile and bunthorne could see each other, but any attempt to send files between them failed. Well, yesterday I had another go, read more web pages, upgraded one or two packages and finally got OBEX (object exchange) working both ways. The software is pretty unpolished but it does work. In case you want to try this yourself, on the PC side I'm using obexserver to receive and gnome-obex-send to send.

I've now transferred a whole load of photos and videos off the phone and started putting those on the web. (There are already a few which I transferred by email, which is much slower.) Going the other way, I installed Opera and PuTTY so I can have access to the web and our home computers from wherever.

Also at the weekend I found out how to make exim route mail for selected "local" addresses to remote servers, so I and anyone else can send mail to a mailbox that will only be picked up by my phone (ben-mobile@...). Since I don't yet have a GPRS account this isn't terribly useful, though it would have been if I couldn't work out to send packages to the phone over Bluetooth.

Debian Party

We went to this year's Debian Party in Cambridge. I took some photos of the party, thanks to the developments in my last entry. tea_cantata has a fuller account.

Why is my web site so popular with Google Images?

There's something very wrong with the web when people get to mine and tea_cantata's web pages this way:

Top 20 of 419 Total Search Strings
#	Hits		Search String
1	156	13.93%	wanking
2	62	5.54%	world trade centre
3	40	3.57%	goth girl
4	26	2.32%	waxing
5	23	2.05%	strange people
6	22	1.96%	idiot
7	18	1.61%	guggenheim museum
8	17	1.52%	village idiot
9	15	1.34%	soubrette
10	13	1.16%	homicide
11	12	1.07%	central park
12	12	1.07%	goth
13	10	0.89%	castle clinton
14	10	0.89%	legs
15	9	0.80%	hand
16	9	0.80%	madison square park-
17	9	0.80%	snowy trees
18	9	0.80%	toronto downtown
19	8	0.71%	chimps
20	8	0.71%	the world trade cent-

These are virtually all image searches.

Number 1 results from a single use of the word on this page captioning this photo (perfectly safe for work). The photo apparently appears on the 3rd first page of Google Images results for the word and the page is the single most popular page on the site. I may just change the text before the site gets put in block lists as porn. I have added a robots.txt that should block indexing of the photo.

Number 3 results in shit like this:

• goth pictures thread (scroll down a bit)
• social networking site (scroll down to comment from "kristin")

I have added the relevant photo to robots.txt.

Number 5 is for this page of photos and seems to have led to a lot of people using the picture of Alastair (who is not included in the "strange people") as a user pic in web forums - without copying it and without asking permission.

Number 8 will probably result in the so-captioned person killing me if he finds out.