Miragorobot

I have seen plenty of robots spider my site but by far the most polite as far as time goes has got to be the miragorobot. It waited a full minute between each page request which is almost unheard of.

New Perl Module

I have just registered another Perl Module or at least I have asked if the name is correct / suitable.
Text::Convert::ToImage
I have been wanting to write another module for a while but CPAN is big and its getting hard to find a suitable idea that has not already been done in some way already. I had a good look around because I am not a fan of re-inventing the wheel and simplest method of doing what I wanted is by using PerlMagick. PerlMagick is not a simple module so I decided to write my own wrapper to it to simplify things a bit for this specific task hence the new module.
Just hope someone finds it useful.

500,000 Pages

The spiders have now collected over 500,000 pages. Considering I have been taking it easy it was surprisingly fast. I now need another 500,000 to get my goal of 1 Million for testing.

Recruited

I spoke to someone today who expressed an interest in the distributed search engine. I am hoping that he is able to start taking on some of the work which will speed the project up and give us a total bandwidth of 1.2Mb which although small it has doubled my current spidering capability. I may also have perked someone elses interest but I need to chase that lead up so its all good fun cultivating people who are a bit bananas.

More Google Adsense

I have actually managed to make a little bit of money via Google adsense. I am not at liberty to say how much but its nice to actually have made a little to help pay for the costs of hosting my sites. I have decided to put google ads on most of my websites to see if I can increase it enough to pay the hosting outright. Its a long shot but the sites are cheaply hosted so it is possible.

Top 10 Worlds Best Singers

I found a website the other day that had the following results from a pole of who was the best male and best female singers ever. Anyway the results where
Top 10 male singers
Frank Sinatra 21.2%
Elvis Presley 8.7%
Garth Brooks 5.7%
Luciano Pavarotti 3.6%
Elton John 3.1%
Bing Crosby 3.1%
George Strait 2.4%
Nat King Cole 2.3%
Perry Como 1.8%
Luther Vandros 1.7%
Top 10 female singers
Barbara Streisand 14.0%
Celine Dion 8.6%
Whitney Houston 7.5%
Reba McEntire 4.5%
Dolly Parton 3.5%
Shania Twain 3.2%
Ella Fitzgerald 2.8%
Aretha Franklin 2.5%
Mariah Carey 2.5%
Loretta Lynn 2.4%
I know this was a pole about who people thought was the best singers but I can’t help thinking that its should have been called a pole of the best known male and female singers not the best ever singers.
How did I come to this conclusion? Well to start, Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby are lower than Elton John, I am sorry, Elton is a fantastic singer but he was not a better singer than Nat or Bing by any stretch of the imagination. Personally I would have had Elvis Sinatra and Nat and Bing in the top four with Nat pipping Sinatra at the post ( Nature Boy is always good for a smokey room if you know what I mean ).
As for the women. Jesus christ they have Ella and Aretha coming in under Dolly Parton. For gods sake are they deaf as posts ( after an hour of Dollys high pitched voice they may have lost some hearing at certain frequencies), don’t get me wrong I like Dolly but much more for her writing than her singing ( “Whitneys” I’d do anything for you was written by Dolly) or my favorite 9 to 5 written by Dolly while on the set of the movie. I particularly like the line ” “Pour myself a cup of ambition”.
I am not even about to start on classical singers.
I know its all subjective but I would be interested to know who each one of the singers thought was the best.

Its about time

For years unscrupulous recruitment agencies have been getting away with shafting people left right and center but some new laws have been passed to prevent this. I doubt if the laws will have much impact on the agencies that are making money doing what they do but at least we now know that the brass have noticed.

Another HTML Lesson

I was visiting Rob this weekend and Melanie wanted a lesson in HTML. The reason for this is that she would like to create a website for their wedding which is a damned fine idea. Considerig I only spent half an hour teaching Mel the basics of an HTML document and ftp she took to it like a duck to water.