Logging in to work on this website today, I was greeted by an ugly sight: comment spam! The number of comments on this website had increased by over 150. It appears that spammers have found a weakness in Mollom, and exploited it.

There have been several cases of external websites embedding images from this website directly into their pages. Known as hotlinking, this results in bandwidth being used up on this website, for the traffic belonging to another website. Hotlinking is essentially stealing of bandwidth from another website, which someone else (or me, in the case of this website) has to pay for. Up until now I have been fairly relaxed about this, after all, some of these external pages were discussing projects on this website and providing inbound links. However, I have also had totally non-related websites hotlinking websites. Most recently, a classified listing on another website was using a photo of my old Compaq Presario in order to sell their item. Not only is this non-related traffic, but the photo shown in the advertisement was most certainly not of the item being sold; something that could be misleading to prospective buyers (it's clearly not a company promotional shot, so the assumption would be that it is the second hand item being sold). With this latest incident I decided that I was fed up with others stealing my bandwidth for non-related websites, and any page that hotlinks to this website now shows the following image:

I have just spent a ridiculous amount of time setting up a satellite TV system for receiving Freeview, free satellite TV for New Zealand. A lot of this time was due to my own lack of experience, and the difficulty in knowing whether something is really working, or not aligned. Here are a few tips for anyone else wishing to set this up themselves. This is not a complete guide, just some ideas that should save time. It assumes that you are installing a Ku band dish for digital TV, but a lot of the advice applies to any satellite dish.

Roughly a year ago this website was opened. By opened, I mean first indexed by Google and Yahoo; the web-space and domain name were registered a year and a month ago (the start of June 2008). It took about a month to get this website to the point that it was ready to receive visitors. At that point, I registered a Google Webmasters account, added this website to the list, and started creating external links.

The statistics for June 2009 are:

The statistics for May 2009 are:

... and now, so do I.

Today a section on marketing was added to this website. It may seem strange for marketing to appear on the personal website of an engineer. However, marketing is an essential component of engineering companies. If you build a better mouse trap, the world will not beat a path to your door unless they know about your mouse trap, understand why it is better, and why it would be useful to them. Without a marketing strategy (which is more than just advertising), that better mouse trap will languish in obscurity.

New Zealand is on the Pacific rim of fire, and so has volcanos and periodically experiences earthquakes. This geological activity has shaped the stunning scenery that New Zealanders (and visitors to the country) enjoy. It also occasionally makes you jump when a strongish earthquake hits the local area, as happened recently. Eruptions of molten lava, ash, or just boiling mud happen once every several years, which can close airports due to the danger of fine ash clogging up the jet engines.

I have decided to drop the "month in review" blog posts in favour of simply posting the statistics. The montly reviews seem a bit pointless now that developing and maintaining this website has become routine. The statistics for April 2009 are: