It's awesome when your joke takes off

Monday, July 14, 2008, 10:49 PM
Thoughts by John

First, some background: today this guy was posting on Digg.com looking for people to stress test his 486 Linux box. He's running some thing called WebLua, plus some Lighttpd. The website is http://foureightysix.go-beyond.org.

Overall a pretty cool project, so I have no issue sending some linkage love out into the world to a total stranger. He lists the top referrers and how many hits from them and what percentage of overall hits they constitute.

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Of course, because I'm a dweeb who reads crap like XKCD and such, my first idea was this: referrers are notoriously deceptive. It isn't hard even with Firefox and a few plugins to change your referring URL to whatever you want.

If you know Linux well, you should know cURL, which allows you to send and load data across a number of protocols, include http.

Now, I'm not the first person to realize that the referrer on his page could be tricked out.

I was the first to realize that cryptic is better than some form of accusation of homosexuality or some hardware driven joke (386isbetter.com is a good joke).

I went for www.fbi.gov as my referrer. When I had left the joke go, it was in the middle of the pack with like 150 hits, all mine. When I came back, I was impressed to see 12,000 more hits! Haha! Joke delivered + joke shared + joke repeated = joke accomplished!!!

6.45% of the folks hitting the stress test thought fbi.gov was funny enough.

I only mention this, because internet humor tends to be more than a tiny bit boyish, usually tossing about an indictment of someone's gender, sexuality or their preferred hardware. It's funnier to hint lightly that the FBI is watching you.

Just my small contribution to a slightly dumber world.

UPDATE: 7:59 AM

His system is finally showing some slowdown. I think it is probably fair to say a lot of that is the product of running 16 Mb RAM on a system running non-stop.

Understandably, most of the inefficiencies in a web server stem from the scripting languages. PHP, while easy-to-use and easy-to-prototype, isn't always a blazing fast system. And that was his point using something like WebLua.

It's kind of a "let's get back to basics" message.

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Thank you,
John Crawford
Pro Content and Design