Wow, it's this web site's 14 millionth hit. The people and the robots, they keep showing up.
118.237.143.134 - - [06/Jul/2009:04:35:09 -0400] "HEAD /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 0 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11"
Let's see, 118.237.143.134 means a machine in the domain gyao.ne.jp. When I try to find information about GyaO, it seems to be an internet portal specializing in video.
When I look at my records for the day, I think that this machine at GyaO visits my site once every 10 minutes, each time checking on that file /favicon.ico. That seems like a web robot-y thing to do. I guess this is a robot, not a human. Looks like it started about six hours ago, and is still trying. This web site doesn't have a /favicon.ico file, but the robot keeps checking for the file's existence anyhow. It's making HEAD requests instead of GET requests--that gives it metadata about /favicon.ico without the data itself. Though in this case the metadata is boring: 404 not found. (You might wonder what a favicon.ico file is. It's a tiny icon. It's common convention to have one. It's reasonable of GyaO to assume I'd have such a file. More about favicon.ico.)
The idea of writing a web robot to periodically check web sites for the presence of a /favicon.ico file seems strange to me. I can't figure out why you'd want such a robot, but it's fun to think about. Some of this site's robot visitors are more interesting than some of the humans.
If only there were some way to combine humans with robots. On the internet, nobody knows you're a cyborg. Or something.
I attempted to find out what makes my writing voice unique. To this end, I of course looked at letter frequencies. Maybe something I could build a web robot out of.
You might recall that my daily nonsense page daily generates random text based upon Markov Chain patterns--frequencies by which one blob of text tends to follow another. E.g., if one character of some English text is "q", the next character is probably "u".
What if we look at the frequency data of my writing and then subtract out the frequencies of "typical" writing?!? Surely that would result in the essence of my writing voice--as determined by science, math, and statistics. This is serious. I tried it out, and the following gem of text emerged from the process:
Getty guarand trize talked a mt reard sun't withey saill. Platereng all yourealkere tood so nice ne clogres phoulatchfriguy? Elly, hat to trying thenihis inkind, quile blany ingibs. Seem nock seen some it gaven wit fun't hey some dayelseep of ork cloo car thiceople. Pat be hady. I an imm bit donew's funce maker. Some woketty do ke rog, somay dowon't for of ming.
You might look at that and say "That's totally incoherent," but that might mean that it's totally captured my writing patterns, you know?
OK, that's pretty incoherent. But I kind of like that sentence "Pat be hady." I'll try saying that the next time someone asks me how it's going. "Pat be hady."
Anyhow, wow. 14 million. Dear reader, thank you for reading.