I love irony!

It turns out that some of the suspensions my account had been getting were kinda valid. I was suspended the last two nights so I checked my access logs (again) and found something fun:

208.80.195.121 - - [24/Aug/2009:00:18:15 -0500] "GET /boejekwaejoqgr.html?bffqg HTTP/1.0" 404 19961 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; FunWebProducts; Assiniboine Community College; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)"
208.80.195.121 - - [24/Aug/2009:00:18:14 -0500] "GET /boejekwaejoqgr.html?xcrger HTTP/1.0" 404 19961 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YComp 5.0.0.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)"
208.80.195.121 - - [24/Aug/2009:00:18:15 -0500] "GET /boejekwaejoqgr.html?xazpc HTTP/1.0" 404 19961 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Avant Browser; Avant Browser; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.1)"
208.80.195.121 - - [24/Aug/2009:00:18:14 -0500] "GET /boejekwaejoqgr.html?seoibbaqm HTTP/1.0" 404 19961 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Ringo)"
208.80.195.121 - - [24/Aug/2009:00:18:14 -0500] "GET /boejekwaejoqgr.html?symaor HTTP/1.0" 404 19961 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; FunWebProducts; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; IEMB3; yplus 5.1.04b)"

There are a few hundred entries like that. It seems that a bot somewhere has been running so many requests against my host that it triggered the CPU limit for my host. The irony comes in if you run WHOIS on the IP address, it goes back to Websense. That gave me a good laugh this morning.

Forgotten Eyesores

Landfills may soon be a thing of the past as trash may become a new source of relatively clean energy. Since the plant is actually online in Florida, we can’t really call this vaporware… and it is nice that one of the “great things for the environment” wasn’t mysteriously shut down before it started. Scientific American and Popular Science have some articles explaining the tech. Basically, they use the electrical grid and capacitors to create a massive electrical arc in a gaseous environment which creates superheated plasma which is around 10,000 deg. F. These temperatures are enough to vaporize most materials in a self-sustaining reaction. The resulting superheated “syngas” is then processed through turbines and filtered for unstable elements. The turbines produce enough energy to sustain the arc and feed back into the electrical grid. In this case, 60MW, which is huge!