This will be a three month experiment.

I never claimed to be a MySQL expert.  

In fact I stumbled across “order by rand()” completely by accident while doing research on Postgres.  I had no clue similar functionality was available in MySQL.  This changes – and simplifies – a lot of code.

And speaking of stumbling upon things, I did finally find the kitchen sink.

I think I’ll pass on that Google Site.

But the result was worthwhile.  Unfortunately, this place has just as many infuriating idiosyncracies as BlogSpot and Google Pages.

One thing I noticed straight off was the lack of colors.   If you want to go changing font colors willy nilly you have to work at it.  It’s a good thing, though.  People get carried away and make their sites look like crap.  I suppose I can live with that.

I am slightly wanked that I can’t capitalize the titles the way I want.  This e.e. cumstains crap is for the birds.  If I want to shout, I’ll SHOUT.

And linebreaks!  How the Hell can I get a double linebreak around here?  That was bad enough on BlogSpot but I eventually got around it with a few well-placed <br>’s – which would always disappear if you toggled between html and WYSISWG mode.  The trick was not toggling.  No such trick here.  The editor throws your <br>’s in the bit bucket.

And if you have Internet Explorer 8, get out of town.  The editor jumps all over Hell.  Chrome seems to be the only way to fly.

Now I have the task of going back over everything and adding tags.  Not sure if I want to tackle that one quite yet.  

Anyway, we’re here.

I’m halfway there. Please excuse the mess.

The original Google Pages site is archived here.

In all I have collected over 5,000 URLs since I started.  Of these, about 200 are top-level links.  I have just begun to pull these out at regular intervals to re-scan.  So far that has been very productive.

You may or may not have noticed Google Page Creator (this site) is going down soon.  Google has graciously decided to force me into a Google Sites redirect.  Hopefully Google will notice I already have a Google Site (http://www.mrhinkydink.net) and they will put it all there.  Are you listening, Google?

However I have found over the years that when you expect someone to do the “smart thing” you are always sadly disappointed.  With that in mind, I’m keeping a backup.  But without the WYSIWYG editor it’s doubtfull I’ll be able to keep the project journal updated.

I’m keeping my options open.  I’m not entirely impressed with Google Sites.  In fact, it sucks.  As an option I have reserved a spot at WordPress but I’ve done nothing with it so far.

But be advised the next time you come here it may be someplace else.

I had to find it first.  The last time I was hacking around with it, I was doing all the coding on an old Ubuntu 6.06 VM, which apparently I lost track of.

I finally found it, moved the code over to the new Xubu 9.04 VM, installedAnjuta, and recompiled it.  It still works.  And it’s still ugly.

Right know it’s looking at all the port 1080 proxies gathered in the past two weeks, just over 4,000 addresses.  And, as usual, I’m getting about a 0.001% success rate.

None of them are very usable.  In fact, the second one I tested gave me an X-Forwarded-For: header.

WTF?  SOCKS proxies shouldn’t do that.  Period.  Is this some new trick?  That sucks.

The others have just been slow as fuck.

Anyway, I’m looking into it again.

It’s going to be a long march to the second million, but we’re well under way, boys and girls!

Since most of the proxy harvest happens over Google these days, I added a URL tracking table to the proxy database. A lot of URLs get hit over and over again. I don’t really care about proxy lists from 2003 (those were the days), but there are hundreds of those out there. 99.9% of the address/ports are already in the database, so scouring those old lists is a simple waste of resources.

This table puts an end to that. All it has is three columns, the url, the sha-1 hash of the url, and a count of how many times the url is seen.

This helps a lot for harvesting proxy forums with long histories (clean that old shit up, guys!). It doesn’t help so much when the current list is at the top level of the site (such as, for example, “http://www.niceproxy.com” – which is a parked domain so don’t bother with it).

As those pile up in the table I can chop them out and do some dedicated runs.

The first time through on this I finally discovered why the “.net” TLD (top level domain) was always the most fruitful. I found a cgi proxy page that is updated hourly! No graphics, no crap, just an ASCII list of addresses and ports!

Nice. That site is now in the daily 4AM schedule.

Those were the days, boys and girls!  Alas, those days are long gone.

It turns out they’re seriously pwn3d.

See the update on my blog for more.

Catching up on the hourly runs right now.  The next page update will be at noon EST.

I came down with a bad case of “Upgrade Fever” and did a couple of other VMs concurrently.  I have an ESXi server at work that I tunnel into over ssh.  That had an Ubuntu 8.10 VM on it, so I upgraded that.

I also have VMware Player on my laptop, with an 8.04 Ubuntu VM.  That one glitched on the 8.10 upgrade.  It came up without a keyboard or mouse.  Not very useful that way.  But I ssh’d into it and twiddled the xorg.conf file.  For some reason the upgrade commented out the keyboard & mouse section!

I was lucky I was able to ssh into it because the old 8.04 image always booted with networking screwed up, but apparently 8.10 took care of that problem.  That upgrade has a way to go yet and I might just wipe and copy over the 9.04 test VM I installed yesterday.

Anyway, Hinky’s back in business.