Thanks for the notes Ric.

I’ve never encountered this term “scrape” (but I get what it means intuitively) – do you know if such activity is legal (under all circumstances)?

Copyright law would apply. If Anthony squawked, he might get backtype.com to stop access WUWT. (Please don’t – it could be a useful resource for me.) However, copyright law does allow making excerpts of works, though making excerpts of everything would stretch the law quite a bit.

Given the amount of stuff here and elsewhere that is quoted from other sources, backtype is doing something interesting (think prefetched Google searches) but nothing exceptional.

As for scraping in general, search engines do that. I do that daily to create my Baseball Standings on the Run with the knowledge of the data source. It can cause some consternation in that the scrapers usually skip any ads and some odd .gif files used by some web hit counter systems.

Again, providing a link back to the source is good manners.

Some similar issues exist around “deep linking” where I could put a link to a current weather radar image at Intellicast in one of my pages. The result would be a better page for me, but Intellicast would bear the cost of bandwidth for the image and lose the ad revenue from “normal” access.

Friday, May 08, 2009
SITE OUTAGE

My apologies for the site outage. A very rare major disc failure that affected a lot of clients of the hosting service occurred early on the 7th. The fastest way back was to reload the versions from April 29. They are still trying to bring back old server with info from May 6. Unfortunately the solution eliminated the 25 posts between April 29 and May 6.

Rather than post the backlog of new stories and then have them disapppear when (being optimistic) the site is fully restored, I am only going to add this notice this evening and then reassess tomorrow. My apologies. A lot is going on to tell you about.
Posted on 05/08 at 07:18 PM

Thanks for the reply Ric – and my sincere apologies for addressing you in the imperative.

The Paul Vaughan who thanked you for the links in the earlier WUWT thread – that was me.

Thanks to your note about “scraping”, I now see that they were quoting you quoting me. I’ve never encountered this term “scrape” (but I get what it means intuitively) – do you know if such activity is legal (under all circumstances)?

To Ric Werme:

Someone has impersonated me on your site:

http://www.backtype.com/url/wermenh.com%252fclimate%252findex.html?page=6

Remove my name from the comment.

Interesting. My site is wermenh.com, http://www.backtype.com a is Mountain View, CA business that I was unaware of. They appear to “scrape” web pages here and I assume elsewhere and collect people’s comments in one place.

It’s not my site, I can’t remove your name. Looking through http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/22/natural-drivers-of-weather-and-climate/ I accurately quoted from posts marked as posted by Paul Vaughan. He even thanked me for one of posts with links to past blog entries.

Sounds like the month ending backup. Give them a bit of time, they may well be loading the daily incrementals with the system live …

Also, FWIW, The Wayback Machine might have some pages. It’s very useful when all else fails…

One of the major features they provide is that transients and spikes will kill them and not your computer. Yeah, not an “advertized feature” but one I’m really happy to have anyway… No data lives on my UPS …

“My God Man, that One BIG Fuse!”

What I do for my stuff “on the cheap” is each article is on my laptop hard drive and the server. The laptop is backed up via a USB removable hard drive (kept in a metal box mostly – EMP proof) “every so often”. Every so often, the laptop drive is backed up to CD / DVD that are archived elsewhere (fire risk?). So there are 4 copies on 2 media types in 3 physically distinct places… And it costs nearly nothing for the TeraByte slow USB drives and blank DVD’s…

That they have hardware responding to pings is the first step (and it’s IP is configured so it knows who it is ;-) Now they will be working through all those backups… It takes time to put them back together (I know, I’ve done it a few dozens of times…)

FWIW, I’ve done a not running out of STUFF page. Why? Folks on ‘the other side’ often seem to think we are going to hit a resource wall Real Soon Now and I’ve gotten tired of retyping it each time. Besides, this one has pretty pictures and better proof reading ;-)

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff

Maybe I should add a paragraph about the cheapness of hardware and the virtue of RAID-5 with redundant hot swap servers…

Roger Knights (11:14:01) :

“we had a power fault yesterday AM that killed one of our departmental servers,”

I urge everyone to buy a hefty Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) and insert it between your computer and the power line. I’m damn glad I did. (You can get used ones cheap at used PC stores. Just buy new or reconditioned lawn mower batteries and replace the old ones.)

Most computer store UPS are designed to provide enough power for a PC for long enough to properly shut it down if primary power fails. If you have long interruptions and want to continue running, get a bigger battery and install it outside the case. Or if you have sensitive equipment and want to run it continuously through the UPS, then look for the configuration which always runs the inverter. It will have a heftier charging side to support the total load. There are several variations in applying UPS which are beyond what can be accurately discussed in a blog post. See a professional if you have a unique requirement. I presently have 4 running and 2 spares. And don’t forget to test the batteries at least once a month.

Someone has impersonated me on your site:

http://www.backtype.com/url/wermenh.com%252fclimate%252findex.html?page=6

Remove my name from the comment.

Mr. Watts: Thank you for publishing this item and checking up on the problem.

I had noticed the outage and wondered what happened, but had no idea where to turn for information about it.

[1] ‘Sokay — it is hard to say “thank you” too many times.