(You’ll want to follow the link to see it in proper perspective.)

I think this was my most sinister corner of the shoot. Mu-ha-ha-ha.

I should have put in the cabling a little bit sooner. But other than that, I like this basic setup. I’ll probably do a couple more of these before fall to stash away as gifts and emergency headwarmers.

*sigh*

As Kelly is fond of pointing out, sometimes I just get focused on some weird-ass thing and cannot let it go. If only I could apply this in a deliberate fashion, I’d be in charge of a small country by now.

A while ago, one of my pals sent me a somewhat alarmed e-mail after her hosting provider sent her an abnormally large bill for her site’s bandwidth usage. After poking around a little bit, we both agreed that one possible suspect was external sites hotlinking to her images. That is to say, someone else put a URL on their website that linked directly to an image on hers. While this might seem like an innocent enough thing to do, it’s terribly rude.

Why? Because when you do that, you are wasting the original site’s bandwidth. Most of us have to pay for data transfered from our web sites if it goes over a certain amount each month. So if you’ve got a just unbelievably cute OMGLOLWTF picture of a little fuzzy kitty (for instance) on your blog, and a dozen mouth-breathing keyboard-drooling MySpace tweakers decide to put a link directly to that picture, then every time those MySpace pages get viewed, your webserver is going to get the request for the picture and send it to the browser that’s requesting it. This means your servers’ bandwidth is being used without your site getting the benefit of being viewed in its entirety.

Not cool. The decent thing to do in this situation is download the picture and upload it to your own site. Or, if you’re a really well-adjusted member of society, you might actually ASK if it’s okay to use the picture in the first place.

So what does this have to do with why I’m still sitting in front of the computer in my skivvies and not at the Yarn Barn yet? Well, when this episode originally unfolded, I set up some rules for my friend’s webserver to use which would automatically deny any request for an image that came from another website. The rules were implemented using something called a RewriteRule which the Apache webserver supports. And after setting it up on her site and testing that it worked, I decided to add it to mine too. My blog doesn’t get nearly the traffic hers does, but I do have an awful lot of images on my site and I’d just as soon not have too much bandwidth wasted by people who aren’t coming here to read my entries.

Well, I’d noticed lately that the amount of bandwidth that was being used to serve images was staying pretty consistently high. For a while I just figured that this was because I have images in almost every post (not to mention the site graphics), and images are a lot bigger than text is. But this morning I went through my log files on my server and noticed that there were a LOT of MySpace referers that were getting single images. That is to say, there are MySpace pages (and others) that are hotlinking to my images but not my posts.

Grrr.

Okay, so I opened up the Apache configuration files on my server and found the Rewrite section. Everything was turned on and active. I went to one of the sites that was hotlinking to me and sure enough, there was a famous picture of Morgan in the middle of the page. Grrr.

At this point, since your eyes are probably already half-glazed over, I’m going to skip ahead to where I started reading the Rewrite Engine documentation and found that Rewrite rule don’t get inherited by virtual hosts. See, my server hosts a couple of websites, SweaterProject being just one. Since I wanted to give all my users the same protection against hotlinking, I put the Rewrite rules in the general section of the Apache configuration file. But it turns out that does not work. So I moved the rules into the section that defined the rules just for SweaterProject, and lo and behold – no more hotlinks.

And it only took an hour and a half. I could be done with Zach’s baby’s hat by now. (Of which there will be photos later this weekend here, and only here, on SweaterProject.)

These are destined for the AmpuT, who was so delighted with the previously-blogged about throwie adventure that she asked for some for her wheelchair. In exchange, she’s going to send me some Lorna’s Laces AND she promises not to beat me to death with her fake leg. (You do promise, right?)

You’ll notice that this batch has little pull tabs on them. Those are pieces of a cut up index card, inserted between one lead of the LED and the battery so that there’s no current. This way, the throwies don’t light up until AmpuT pulls the tab, hopefully extending their battery life by a couple of days.

I actually did a little knitting last weekend. I cranked out a few rows of boring-ass garter stitch for one of the baby hats. Maybe it’s the 90° heat we’ve been getting down here, but I just haven’t felt the knitting muse in me lately. I need to take a field trip up to Nova Scotia or something to get motivated again.

Witness the geekness:

I’m really happy with the whole kilt hose project. Seriously. I set out to challenge myself and I succeeded. I had a good enough grasp on where I’m at in this craft to know that the hose were the perfect 16-day project. And the finished objects were pretty decent looking. I wore them to work (with the kilt, of course) the Monday following the Knitting Olympics.

But there are some problems. As Cari rightly suggested when I first announced this project, socks that are 50% mohair are not all that comfortable for all-day wear. And as you can tell from the photos (especially the front view), the socks are a little loose. They won’t stay up by themselves. So they don’t give you that good supporting/massaging feel you get from snug calf socks.

The hose, I’m afraid, are on a one-way trip to frogville.

Um, no. Froggy isn’t getting the hose.

Nope, the yarn’s too good to be left in FOs that I’m never going to wear. I could try to modify them a little bit so that they’d stay up, but I don’t know of any way to get them to fit snugly all the way up. So they’re going to get washed, ripped out and hung to straighten. Maybe come Autumn they will live again as a shawl for someone. I do need to work on my lace techniques . . .

I am happy, but not content. I’m still running about two days behind in my goals for the Kintting Olympics, but I think I might be able to pull this off it time. My joy is indeed frabjous.

But, as long-term kiltwear goes . . . eh, these may not be the thing. Some blocking will definitely be in order. My next pair of kilt hose (oh yes, there will be more) will have to include some amount of ribbing in the leg and some cabling. These will be good socks, but I can improve upon them.

And now, a gratuitous photo of the frozen Texas Hill Country:

Once more, with feeling. I never received the package with the last pair of socks that I attempted, so I can only assume that someone stole the package when they broke into the mail boxes at my apartments. But I’ve got more than enough Duet in this hank to get a pair done, so here we go again. I’m going to try and finish this pair before the before the 10th as training for the Knitting Olympics.

Last night I stopped by a Sunday evening stitch ‘n bitch at the Candlelight Coffee House and saw my old friend Yvette and some other knitters – and met Jana from S.A. in the flesh. (Hi guys!) If I’m going to be serious about a knitting binge for the Olympics, I’m going to need to start hanging out at these things more often.

My original plan was to make a cabled garter for the top of the sock that would be knit perpendicularly to the body. I’d make a circular top, graft it together, and then pick up stitches on one side of the cuff to create the body of the sock. I think that in theory this could work out quite well, but my first attempt was problematic enough that I think I’m going to try a more traditional approach.

Here’s the start of the project, done on the lovely Namaste needles that Kelly gave me for the holidays.

It doesn’t help that I picked up the provisional cast-on incorrectly. That created a few headaches when it came time to pull it out.
But you can see that the fabric picked up nicely from the cast-on.

I figured I’d make this test swatch into something handy – a tam, perhaps. So I made the band long enough to go around my head.

When I was ready to do the grafting, I started to replace the working needles with some bamboo dpns.

And this is where things went amiss. Like I said, I didn’t pick up the provisional cast-on correctly, so I had to snip all the stitches to pull it out. (The stitches in the purple yarn, not the white.) But once I had the live stitches free, I couldn’t quite figure out how they matched up to the live stitches at the other end of the strip. The yarn was all wonky and weird. After a couple of attempts at getting a needle into those loops, it just kind of disintegraed.

I can salvage this, but I don’t know if I’m going to be able to graft the ends together to produce a seamless cable, which was my original goal. I’ve got time to give it another shot before the games begin, so I may still try this technique. But I’m planning on trying others as well.

I really need to start reading Nature and biology journals to find out if researchers are really trying to find “the gene” that causes x or y trait, or if that language has just been dumbed down for mass consumption. Trying to find a single gene which causes a complex trait or behavior is like trying to find the bee that causes a swarm or the nerve that causes sight.

Genes encode nucleic acids, and it is in the interaction of nucleic acids and proteins that most of the complexity of genetic expression arises. It’s timing and environment that we need to be studying, not the gene sequence. The gene sequence is very handy to have, but it’s just a rough guide. The article mentions that dogs and humans have almost the same genetic compliment. Duh. I could have told you that. Yams have more chromosomes than human beings do, but that doesn’t make them more complex organism. Although maybe they’re just snuggled down in the dirt thinking deep yam thoughts. Who knows.

I remember a segment of Bill Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything (at least I think that’s where it was) which described the practice in the scientific community of designating a particular skeleton as being the canonical reference for an entire species. That’s handy, but it would be a mistake to say that a particular skeleton is what all skeletons of a species should look like. Take any two humans and you might find a different number of bones in the hands and feet. In the same way, no two individuals in the same species have the same genes or even the same number of genes. With the possible exception of identical twins, and I bet even they have different non-coding DNA.

So it comes as no great surprise that dogs and humans are very close in the composition of their genomes. We’ve both got hair, similar muscles, bones, skin, connective tissues, saliva, blood, and a bunch of other stuff I won’t go into because I haven’t had breakfast yet.

I suspect that if you really want to get in to the complexity of mammalian life, you should spend more time looking at the placenta and less time looking at the genes. It would be really interesting to create an artificial matrix capable of taking a zygote to maturity. I may be wrong here, but I’m pretty sure that all animals develop to a state of independent maturity inside a matrix of some sort, be it an egg or a womb*. That means that the environment that the single cell develops inside of is an aspect of the species. What happens if you remove it to another environment that allows the zygote to develop into an embryo, but isn’t constructed with the species’ genes?

*Not sure about clams and sponges. I’ll have to look that up.