So yesterday morning, one of my webpage articles got liked from Make: Magazine’s online site.

Holy crap. It was like the world was ending.

My personal webpages are all saved and served from the servers at my work. Server space isn’t a problem, there’s dozens of gigs free, and I can always install another hard drive if I want. Our internet connection is a T1, which I never thought would be a problem either. Wow was I wrong!

It’s like waking up one morning to discover a major freeway has been rerouted to go to your office’s front door. Instead of the normal 20 or 30 visitors an hour, you’ve got 50 people a minute trying to come through the doors. Traffic jam! Now nobody can get in, and customers are complaining!

So, I had to shut my whole site down. Later I thought hey, I have free webspace from my ISP from home, I’ll use that. I set up a mirror of the one page everyone and his brother was trying to view, put a redirect in Apache, and restarted my site. Geocities pulled the plug in about 5 seconds. I don’t know what their rules are, but seriously, I checked the Geocities site was working, then I set the redirect, and when I went to look at the site, it was offline.

So then, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, I thought hey set up a mirror at home here. I have a linux box with a web server program, and a dynamic ip tracker set up. So I mirrored the page, changed the redirect, and was nearly knocked off the internet by the incoming surge.

As soon as I did it, I was trying to un-do it. It took me 15 minutes to turn off the redirect, and by the time the traffic was gone, I’d logged over 2000 http requests on my home server.

I checked the logs at work and saw over 12,000 hits were attempted on the web page in question, during the few hours in the morning before the I suspended the site.

So last night, about 9pm, I figured the dust had settled enough and it was well after business-hours anyhow, so I re-activated the site. Things were ok over night, it logged another 2000+ hits, but that wasn’t too bad. Then this morning, pow, everyone was at it again. And the redirect wouldn’t work any more!

Yeah, you folks out there are too clever for that! I redirect the one web page, but Geocities crashes it, so you grab the text of the page off Google’s cache then start grabbing the images one by one off my server!

So I had to yank the whole site again. Today I’ve got it keeping count. From 9:30 this morning to 4:30 this afternoon, so far there’s been 10,400 load attempts. Combine that with the 14,000 from yesterday. That’s more hits, in two days (well, day and a half really) that I’ve had on my whole entire website since I started the counter, back in 2004!

Looking through the log, I see that it’s not just Make, there’s a bunch of other folks too, who saw the link in Make and have linked to it as well. Someplace in Spain. A bunch of peoples’ blogs.

I don’t know what to do! I want everyone to be able to see the page and enjoy it and all, but I can’t let it affect the company or our customers. And if the traffic is too high for something like Geocities, what then? I mean, you’re swamping a T1! I don’t have buckets of money to spend, so if anyone knows a high-volume free or cheap hosting solution, I’d love to hear about it.

The page is nothing, just over 1MB with all the pictures. It’s just the amount of traffic that’s the problem.

The link that started it all.

For no reason at all, here’s a picture of the three red lasers I made out of computer DVD burner drives.

Heard last night on TV:

Officer, there’s a man in a butterfly costume shooting lasers at my robot!

– Dr. Thaddeus Venture, The Venture Bros.

Something about that line just cracks me up – despite the geeky parallel in that I have both lasers, and a robot.

The Venture Bros.

More tinkering with lasers. I’ve pumped up my DVD laser even more. A better lens gives it higher output. From 180mW to 205mW, on week-old batteries.

Enough power, when focused, to cut through electrical tape in 6 seconds. Enough power even, to burn the wood-like-finish of my desk!

Stephanie likes lasers.

6-Second Tape Cut Movie

Here’s a great link, everything you want to know about how laser diodes work.

Laser diodes are super tiny but can be surprisingly powerful. Find out how, and why. Warning: Linked site may contain science, physics, and education.

How Laser Diodes Work

Photo from Wiki

When playing around with electrical or electronic stuff, it is important to note that 165volts at 330uF is very different than 330volts at 165uF.

And the results from applying 330v to something that probably is only rated for 200v, can be spectacular.

I was doing a bunch of cleaning and a little redecorating today, and for a break in the middle of it all, I made another high-power laser.

In this case, I took an old low-power laser pointer apart, removed the 2.5mW diode, hot-wired the driver board, and replaced the diode with a high-power diode from another DVD burner.

This pointer is old, more than 5 years, maybe as much as 10 years old. I know it cost me about $50, and it came from Radio Shack. But they don’t appear to sell anything like it any more. I like it though because of the tiny size, only 3 inches long and 1.5 inches wide. It runs on two AAA batteries, but they go in side-by-side.

Anyhow, now that it’s been pumped-up and had a diode transplant, it’s now pumping out about 100mW, as much as the low-end Pulsar. Enough to pop a balloon or light a match, with the help of a focusing lens. Without a focusing lens, it’s just a really, really, really bright laser pointer.

Update: As a pointer, this laser has a switch to select between dot and line. The line was produced by a little optic. I’ve removed that optic and replaced it with a focusing lens from a DVD player. Now, at the flick of a switch, I can select between well-collimated long-range dot, or close-up burning power. Now I’m thinking if only I could have put a 150mW diode in there instead of the 100mW, this could become my favorite pocket-laser.