Category > internet
The wonderful world of networked networks
Blogger API V2
Interestingly, the new version of the Blogger API fixes every complaint I had about the old version, and turns it from being a very much centralised bespoke format to being a generic thing I can impliment here without too much hackery, and the promised extensions look even better. Yay, another thing to add to the list of Things To Impliment :-)
Clever Spam.
I get quite a bit of spam. Spamassassin catches about 40 pieces per day. I look at most of it, mostly to see what types I'm getting most today. Yesterdays totals were:
- Misc: 21
- Leads, 100 Time Dated..FREE! (Cheap pencil refils with best-before dates)
- Colon Cleanse (Cheap, Clean punctuation)
- Viri: 4
- Search Engines: 2
- 419: 1
- Unrenderable Subject Lines: 14
- False Positives: 1
- Porn: 4
- TIGHT VIRGIN TEENS ON CAM (Young employees of Richard Branson go punting)
- free amateur xxx (Cheap remake of Vin Diesel movie)
- Safe sex with a bored housewife (Be still my beating heart)
But my favourite one is this one:
You're probably thinking to yourself, "Oh geez, not another
miracle diet pill!" Like you, I was +skeptical at first, but
my sister swore it helped her lose 23 pounds in just four weeks,
so I told her I'd give it a shot. I mean, there was nothing
Because the code - which Mutt displayed, not being a HTML Mail reader - was like this:
You're proba<!--PPSOjQ-->bly thinking to yourself, "Oh geez, not another<BR> mira<!--PPSOjQ-->cle die<!--PPSOjQ-->t pill!" Like you, I was +ske<!--PPSOjQ-->ptical at first, but <BR> my sister swore it helped her lose 23 pounds in just four weeks, <BR> so I told her I'd give it a shot. I mean, there was nothing <BR>
Meaning that Spamassassin failed to catch it because it contained the words "miracle diet pill", and was resorted to... lets see...
SPAM: -------------------- Start SpamAssassin results ---------------------- SPAM: This mail is probably spam. The original message has been altered SPAM: so you can recognise or block similar unwanted mail in future. SPAM: See http://spamassassin.org/tag/ for more details. SPAM: SPAM: Content analysis details: (15.9 hits, 5 required) SPAM: Hit! (2.4 points) 'Message-Id' was added by a relay (2) SPAM: Hit! (1.0 point) From: ends in numbers SPAM: Hit! (1.0 point) Subject: contains a question mark SPAM: Hit! (2.8 points) BODY: Offers a full refund SPAM: Hit! (1.9 points) BODY: Contains word 'guarantee' in all-caps SPAM: Hit! (1.5 points) BODY: Asks you to click below SPAM: Hit! (2.1 points) BODY: FONT Size +2 and up or 3 and up SPAM: Hit! (3.2 points) HTML-only mail, with no text version SPAM: SPAM: -------------------- End of SpamAssassin results ---------------------
Spamassassin good. I like Spamassassin :-)
Those who spoke on this:
We've struck pure moron
So, Today I was surfing, and discovered...Welcome to The Buffy Network. It has come to our attention recently that a lot of visitors to this website do not have the correct setting on their computer when they try and access the site. For example, 0.82% of visitors are using Netscape - which does not support the kind of html coding we use. 2.10% of visitors dont have Java installed and/or turned on, Java is essential for some of the pop up windows we use. And 40.76% of vistors are using the wrong screen resoloution. Anything larger than 800 x 600 is too large, and the pages do not diosplay properly. Please try and use the right settings on your computer before entering the site, in order to make it look on your screen, how we intened it to look on ours. Thank you for visiting The Buffy Network. Please click 'Ok' to close this window."
Those who spoke on this:
Laurabelle:
Wow, there are just so* many things wrong with that site. Typos and misspellings galore, and they have *help pages for glods sake, purely for problems with the website itself (not at all about Buffy). And their help pages are on a different “sever” [sic] because Geocities keeps shutting down various parts of the website for breach of TOS. And take a look at that source! I really wonder if whoever wrote it has ever looked at a HTML book or even website.
dearg:
Scary.
I guess some people have never heard of accessibility. I wonder if they’ll complain about blind people not being able to read it, disabled people not being accurate enough to click on things etc.
Dive into Accessibilty should be considered compulsory reading for web designers.
Laurabelle:
For that matter, HtmlGoodies should be considered compulsory reading. Nested
, , and even tags! Sheesh!
Another Tomorrow
Motherboard still here.
Memory & CPU are not.
Too many orders yesterday, It'll be there tomorrow. Don't worry! We won't charge you for the next day delivery you especially paid for!!
.
In other news, Spamassassin caught my 1000th piece of spam this year (I get too much spam
Those who spoke on this:
MP:
You seem to be having my week…
Monday: Mobile phone died
Tuesday: Nothing died, at least, not that I’ve discovered yet
Wednesday: Something in PC died, seems to be motherboard, but could be CPU or memory… Motherboard on RMA to be collected Friday, considering RMAing CPU and memory…
Thursday: Orange deliver replacement phone, which is actually a replacement for old one, despite being told that they were upgrading the handset instead because it is rubbish. This one has shown signs of crashing too…
Friday: Not happened yet. Predicting job rejection letters, replacement phone to die, and motherboard collection to turn up in the 1 hour slot of day when no-one is in the house…
Fair Use
SteveD:Gary NicholassCan't see the issue.Google have archived pages that, for various reasons valid to myself and others, I have removed from websites. That is my decision, taken according to my morality, the opinions of others, or due to changing circumstances.
More to the point I own the domain names and all the content therein. What right have Google to cache and serve pages which I have deleted?I accept that anything I say on a ng will be recorded, and act accordingly.
I absolutely do not agree with Google cacheing and providing from their db something that I have written and subsequently deleted, for whatever reason, from the sites that I maintain.
I can.
My posts on usenet, and my entries and articles on Aquarionics.com come under an implied (but soon - in the case of the website - explicit) licence to be quoted or reproduced wholesale, provided both context and attribution are provided and no commercial worth is given to the post in particular. I retain copyright on the items, yet grant the world at large permission to quote and use my works, on those provisos. This is the implied statement you give whenever you post anything to usenet, (the stuff about "Commercial Worth" allows people to sell NNTP services without ownership getting in the way, without someone being able to collect all my posts - for example - and sell them as a book whilst gathering royalties. That I could get moderatly intense about) (Note: The contents of this post do not imply a legal statement, it wasn't designed as such and shouldn't be used as such. If you want a watertight legal document, ask a lawyer).
I don't really have a problem with Google caching all that, because people are free to quote it. I'd prefer them to read the original source, because it will have any corrections or removals I may have made, but I assume that if they are looking at Google's cache, this isn't possible.
On the other hand, I write short stories (and currently novel, but that's another point) which it would be nice to get published some day. A couple have already been so (Well, Fan/E-Zine published, which doesn't pay as well, but is still very nice), but one day it might be legally necessary for me to take them down from the site, and at that point I run into problems with the Google Cache, because it's now costing someone money, in that people who would buy the thing to read the stories are instead reading them on Google.
The two sides of this could be thought of as follows:,
Neal Stephenson (of Snow Crash, Zodiac and Cryptonomicon) wrote a novel
called "The Big U" (I belive it was his first, but could be wrong) which
hadn't been reprinted in years, and showed no signs of ever being so.
This being so, Neal didn't object too much when copies of this started appearing on the net. Then the sucess of Cryptonomicon (Which has a sequel 'Quicksilver' out this summer) brought The Big U back into print, so sites were asked to take it down.
On the other hand, Cory Doctorow published his first novel, 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' simultaniously online (via his website, http://www.craphound.com/down/) and via Tor Books (Get it, by the way, it's very good). This he did because first authors don't tend to get a lot of publicity, and this way many people would hear of and read the book (and hopefully enjoy it) because:
- It's free from the website
- People might see discussions about this odd publishing method
- Quarter of a million people a month read his weblog at
- http://www.boingboing.net, and his the novel has been widly and positivly recieved. That's an awful lot of word of mouth.
SteveD:You put information into the public domain [1].
On purpose. Someone made a copy of that information and will show it to people who ask. If you don't want the information to go public, don't put it in the public domain in the first place. Google is not the only webcrawler in the world, nor the only archiver. I'd suggest researching the actions of the Wayback Machine and thinking about how many other people do this kind of thing as a hobby.
Beware the terminology. "In the public domain" and "readable by the public" are differant things. You can see Mickey Mouse, watch his films, but try to use him unless you work for Disney and you'll find yourself in la-lawyer land.
SteveD:If you merely don't want the reputable archivers to record your information, I suggest you look into the use of a file called ROBOTS.TXT.
Personally, I would like Google to have a seperate useragent string for the archiving as apposed to the crawling, so I can tell it to index the site for searching, but exclude certian bits from caching. When I get back online properly, I'll email them about this.
To sum up my entire post, I make this point: Just because it's on a website, doesn't mean it isn't copyrighted. If it's copyrighted, you should get permission before you use it.
Those who spoke on this:
Dorothea Salo:
Unless what you are doing is FAIR USE.
Fair use. Remember that? Oh, yeah, it’s that bit where you’re allowed to use copyrighted works in certain ways and/or for certain purposes WITHOUT BLOODY ASKING PERMISSION FIRST.
In fact, check the Chicago Manual of Style on this point and it will tell you (paraphrased) “Go for forgiveness, not permission.”
I apologize for the sarcasm, but cavalierly ignoring fair use REALLY FROSTS MY BRITCHES.
dearg:
I’d not heard of fair use before. For those too lazy to search, you can quote stuff partially while commenting on it/reviewing/referring to it, as long as you don’t quote too much and infringe the owner’s copyright and do give correct attribution.
Still, asking permission beforehand doesn’t hurt. However, I’m inclined to agree – caching things and serving them second hand, yes with an attribution, does, I feel, infringe copyright. There should be a way of telling places like google and archive.org “don’t archive this page” (or possibly better – “archive this page”), for things that are going to be removed later.
(I think it’s funny that I had to /use/ google’s cache during my research to learn about fair use…)
Aquarion:
Okay, yes, fair use is an issue. Fair use isn’t the issue with the archive, though. Google isn’t caching a certian percentage of the data, it’s grabbing all the data it wants.
I admit I didn’t remember Fair Use while I was writing the article (Not, I point out, cavalierly ignoring it) though.
Martin Wisse:
Don’t put your novels/stories up before you’ve sold them!
As you should know, Bob, publishers like to have first publication rights for anything they buy from you; when you’ve published something on your website, these are no longer available…
So, please take care in what you put up.
Marie:
Hi. Nice dialogue. I’ve given this some thought too, but have yet to do anything about it. It occurs to me that if one’s entries, once archived, are placed in a separate sub-directory, an .htaccess file could be set up for just that sub-directory whereby Google’s caching IP would be denied access. Does that make sense?
Attachment
I hate HTML4
So, the way I'm supposed to do inline objects is the <object> tag is it? Well, to quote someone famous, Duck that. Of the roughly sixteen million possible attributes it has, six million are just rephrasings of the opposing six million, and the last four million are obscure and pointless. Why is the HREF called DATA or CLASSID anyway? It's not an id, it's a URL FFS. Grr. Anyway, so my attempts to do an attachment system were foiled by HTML4 being crap, coupled with the fact that of the mirriad of possible combinations of DATA, CLASSID and whatever, only one works in both IE and Mozilla.
So I went to the other idea, which was to feed the file after sending the right content type. This was easy to program, and as all things that are easy, it didn't work. IE accused me of being an unrealiable source, and Moz just crashed. Both worked fine with image/jpeg, but borked on application/ogg, which was the problem in the first place.
So attachments are partly broken. Bah.
Muppets in web-space
As forwarded by AFP's Gary Nicholass, A message to clueless website authors
by someone called "Night Owl", which is sorta like the Wasp manifesto only with more swearing.
Those who spoke on this:
Pol:
It goes on about bad colour schemes, and then uses black on deep lilac, which is a really bad contrast pair – I have a migraine from just trying to read to the bottom of it.
Time to practise what he preaches really.
Simon Willison:
From an HTML comment on that page:
You may have noticed the outrageous.css file, it’s deliberately set up to look hideous, as an example of picking inappropriate colour schemes, even if you might think that they look good.
Aquarion:
outrageous.css is an alternate stylesheet, with bright green on olive text.
lonecat:
What’s wrong with black on lilac?
sulks
If it had actually been deep lilac, that would have been bad. I found it quite tasteful. My main complaint about that page is the fact that it contains the text "When I find a new equivalent, I’ll put it’s address, here."
Cheques for Free
So you remember "Save Karyn"? Karyn is a valley girl who ran up about $20,000 in credit-card bills before somebody, somewhere stopped giving the stupid bint money. Her reaction to this was not - as society dictates - to get two jobs and stop paying for cable, but to sell some stuff (Good move), Keep her current job (good move), and ask the Internet to pay her credit card bills.
Hmm.
Didn't do anything, wasn't offering to do anything, just straight out asking for money. Now, I can understand people asking for money for things, when I was employed I made a point of putting something in the tip-jar of the comics I enjoy reading, but that's slightly different because it's a two way thing. Piro draws comics, I buy Megatokyo blankets; Randy draws comics, I pay paypal; Keenspotters draw comics, I buy Keenspot Premium service. Now, I'm not sure what I find more disturbing about this whole thing, the fact that Karyn just asked for money, or the fact that she got it.
Because she did. As of November 2002, Karyn raised the full $20,000 ($13,000 from donations) and finished paying off her debt.
She isn't alone.
Now, some of these people are asking for help for stuff that either isn't their fault, or is generally due to Bad Stuff Happening like Rob who got run over, and Karyn lists more of them, but there are others like HelpAGeekGetLaid.com who are just asking for money for the sake of it.
New latest one to be doing the rounds is GiveBoobs.com, where you are asked if you really supported a persons right to modify their personal image (or "get big tatas" as the site puts it) you are now given the ability to donate money so that an unnamed American can pump herself to look like Lara Croft for just for and a half grand.
And people say you can't make easy money out of the Internet...
And Karyn? Karyn's writing a book, due to come out Autumn (It'll be the funny story of what happened,
she says sort like "Confessions of a Shopoholic" meets "Bridget Jones." Welcome to my wacky world! So look for it then! Buy it up!
) and a new clothing-selling website at Prettyinthecity.com.
Those who spoke on this:
christina :
I think it is sad that the world has come to people cyber begging but for someone like me that can not work, it offers some hope.
Rick Sparks:
I’m not asking for a handout—but a loan!
Fixing the wrong problem
The problem with Open Anything is personalities, or the lack of them.
Syndication has a number of personalities, ranging from the "Do as I say" Dave Winer to the Aaron Swartz's namespace-polluting stance. (Apparently my RSS is "funky", because I actually /use/ the extension specification that Dave specified in RSS 2.0. I am patently an evil, evil man.
On the other hand, Mozilla appears to have the problem of a great deal of small gods, and no large ones. Firebird is doing well, partly - IMHO - because it has a person who sits at the top and manages it.
My single biggest pet hate about Mozilla is that it doesn't render ­ properly. Nice problem to have, you might think, but it's not the fact of non-support that annoys me, it's the fact that the non-support of is a bug that has been known about since "this time _four years_ ago":http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9101 and yet has not been fixed purely because they are arguing about how it should - or shouldn't - be displayed.
Meanwhile, the browser lacks this fairly important feature for in excess of four years (Because I really doubt it's going to be fixed in the next 13 days), when all that needs specifing is a policy decision on whether the thing should be rendered or not.
Currently, though, the top two vendors appear to have decided not to fix bugs like this, which is annoying. Breakdown of agents over the last month for Aquarionics is interesting, though. Apparently 1% of my visitors are using NS4. This is good, because it means I can hate them indervidually.
Anyway, stats:
Platforms
Platforms are groups of Agents. Anything I don't recognise is "Other", anything I can't find out any details about (is it a browser? a robot?) are "Unknown"- Internet Explorer - 103916 - 48.5%
- Robots - 47209 - 22.03%
- Mozilla - 40513 - 18.91%
- Other - 6484 - 3.03%
- Opera - 4634 - 2.16%
- Netscape - 3854 - 1.8%
- RSS Readers - 3057 - 1.43%
- KHTML - 2459 - 1.15%
- Wget - 1252 - 0.58%
- Unknown - 897 - 0.42%
Agents
These are things that I could positivly ID via a series of regexes- IE 6 - 67026 - 31.28%
- IE <5 - 36890 - 17.22%
- Firebird - 16868 - 7.87%
- Mozilla - 16848 - 7.86%
- Inktomi - 9271 - 4.33%
- WebCrawler - 8838 - 4.12%
- Google - 7804 - 3.64%
- Scooter - 6756 - 3.15%
- Other - 6484 - 3.03%
- Mozilla 1.4b - 3703 - 1.73%
- Ask Jeeves - 3600 - 1.68%
- Grub - 3159 - 1.47%
- Phoenix - 3094 - 1.44%
- LARBIN - 3023 - 1.41%
- Opera 7 - 2305 - 1.08%
- Opera <7 - 2279 - 1.06%
- Netscape <4 - 2196 - 1.02%
- KHTML - 1726 - 0.81%
- Netscape 4 - 1658 - 0.77%
- Archive.org - 1284 - 0.6%
- wget - 1252 - 0.58%
- PHP - 1226 - 0.57%
- Python - 966 - 0.45%
- WeblogMonitor - 772 - 0.36%
- QuepasaCreep - 765 - 0.36%
- Konqueror - 733 - 0.34%
- SharpReader - 708 - 0.33%
- NPBot - 598 - 0.28%
- KNewsTicker - 500 - 0.23%
- Zao - 386 - 0.18%
- linkhype.com - 298 - 0.14%
- NNTP://RSS - 257 - 0.12%
- Radio Userland - 227 - 0.11%
- FeedOnFeeds - 178 - 0.08%
- Syndic8 - 167 - 0.08%
- PostNuke - 134 - 0.06%
- Mail Sweeper - 132 - 0.06%
- rssSearch Harvester - 114 - 0.05%
- Opera pretending - 50 - 0.02%
- SiteCheck - 0 - 0%
Unrecogniseds
Anything that didn't match a regex is here.- - - 1972 - 0.92%
- libwww-perl/5.63 - 895 - 0.42%
- NutchOrg/0.03-dev (Nutch; http://www.nutch.org/docs/bot.html; nutch-agent@lists.sourceforge.net) - 228 - 0.11%
- http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/crawler [wf84] - 186 - 0.09%
- sitecheck.internetseer.com (For more info see: http://sitecheck.internetseer.com) - 171 - 0.08%
- RPT-HTTPClient/0.3-3 - 118 - 0.06%
- linko/0.1 libwww-perl/5.65 - 102 - 0.05%
- synerge asyncrawl/0.5 - 100 - 0.05%
- dloader(NaverRobot)/1.0 - 99 - 0.05%
- NetNewsWire/1.0.2 (Mac OS X; http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/) - 75 - 0.04%
- HTTP agent - 74 - 0.03%
- AmphetaDesk/0.93.1 (linux; http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/) - 72 - 0.03%
- Java/1.4.1_02 - 71 - 0.03%
- Java1.4.0_03 - 70 - 0.03%
- Java/1.4.1 - 66 - 0.03%
- htdig/3.1.5 (root@localhost) - 59 - 0.03%
- lwp-trivial/1.35 - 55 - 0.03%
- PolyBot 1.0 (http://cis.poly.edu/polybot/) - 53 - 0.02%
- Java1.4.0_01 - 52 - 0.02%
- TurnitinBot/1.5 http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html - 50 - 0.02%
- Zeus 2.6 - 46 - 0.02%
- Aggie 1.0 Release Candidate 5 - http://bitworking.org (Microsoft Windows 98 4.90.73010104.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705.0) http://bitworking.org/AggieReferrers.html - 44 - 0.02%
- User-Agent: NG/1.0 - 41 - 0.02%
- MSProxy/2.0 - 38 - 0.02%
- appie 1.1 (www.walhello.com) - 37 - 0.02%
- rdflib-1.3.0 (http://rdflib.net/; eikeon@eikeon.com) - 36 - 0.02%
- contype - 35 - 0.02%
- Microsoft URL Control - 6.00.8862 - 34 - 0.02%
- Feedster Harvester/1.0; Feedster, LLC. - 33 - 0.02%
- vspider - 31 - 0.01%
- NetNewsWire/1.0.3 (Mac OS X; Lite; http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/) - 30 - 0.01%
- Lynx/2.8.4dev.16 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 - 29 - 0.01%
- Popdexter/1.0 (http://www.popdex.com/) - 28 - 0.01%
- WebCopier v3.4 - 27 - 0.01%
- Mozilla/5.0 - 26 - 0.01%
- Privoxy/3.0 (Anonymous) - 25 - 0.01%
- EbiNess 0.1a - 22 - 0.01%
- Jigsaw/2.2.0 W3C_CSS_Validator_JFouffa/2.0 - 20 - 0.01%
- Frontier/9.0 (WinNT) - 19 - 0.01%
- junkbuster - 18 - 0.01%
- psbot/0.1 (+http://www.picsearch.com/bot.html) - 17 - 0.01%
- MovableType/2.62 - 16 - 0.01%
- MovableType/2.64 - 15 - 0.01%
- Feedster Harvester/1.0; FS Consulting, Inc. - 14 - 0.01%
- WebGather 3.0 - 13 - 0.01%
- RealPlayer G2 - 12 - 0.01%
- Under the Rainbow 2.2 - 11 - 0.01%
- HenryTheMiragoRobot - 10 - 0%
- unknown/1.0 - 9 - 0%
- parabot paracite@ecs.soton.ac.uk - 8 - 0%
- oBot - 7 - 0%
- Links (2.1pre9; Linux 2.4.18-19.7.x i686; x) - 6 - 0%
- NSPlayer/8.0.0.4477 - 5 - 0%
- JPluck 2.0 pre2 - 4 - 0%
- DoCoMo/1.0/N504i/c10/TB - 3 - 0%
- amibot - 2 - 0%
- Lynx/2.7.1ac-0.102+intl+csuite libwww-FM/2.14 - 1 - 0%
Code for this is online, search for 'case: "agents":'
Firebird Extensions
This is why I use Firebird (Which once was Phoenix, and is a browser-only version of Mozilla):
The primary reason, and the thing that stops me from going back to IE even if I ever had the option, is tabbed browsing. It sounds so very minor, but the ability to middle-click on a link so it loads in the background on a new tab changes the way you use the web, it really does. Also, because they are tabs and not windows, you don’t have fifty things on the task-bar too, having to be closed one by one. Also, if you have a set of tabs open you can bookmark the lot of them as one group.
The extensions.
The extension system is the main reason of Firebird over Mozilla traditional, it enables you to install all these little things that someone thought were cool and wrote. For example, these are the extensions I’m currently using:
Download Statusbar
adds a bar at the bottom of your window with the status of all your current downloads in it. Automagically goes away when it’s empty.
Firebird Icons
Turns the Firebird extensions into cool flame-based ones instead of the dull Mozilla ones.
GoTo
Adds functionality to every link as follows: Given the URL “http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2003/07/07/Interview_Meme_redux”, you get the options:
- http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2003/07/07/
- http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2003/07/
- http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2003/
- http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/
- http://www.aquarionics.com/
- ftp://ftp.aquarionics.com/
- http://aquarionics.com/
Giving you the ability to get to any level of the site below you.
Linky
Gives you a menu per page allowing you to:
- Open all links in tabs or windows
- Open all links in selection as new tabs or windows
- Open all picture links in tabs or windows
- Open all picture links in selection as new tabs or windows
- Open all picture links in one tab
...and so on. allowing you to drag-select a whole load of links and open them at once, so they load in the background while you read. (This is good for, for example, blogrolls, lists of webcomics, galleries…)Live HTTP Headers
Headers the server sent. Useful for developers :-)
MozEx
Allows the user to modify Firebird’s view-source functions, so you can view source in your text editor. Also allows you to edit any given text-area in your text editor, and change settings for mail, ftp and download links.
Tab Browser Extensions & Tab Browser Extensions Extra Prefs
Extensive upgrades to the tab system, including grouped tabs (by colour), ability to drag and drop tag order, close all other tabs, close tabs to the right of this one etc.
User Agent Switcher
Feeds sites differant agent strings so that sites which prejustice against Mozilla/Firebird users for no apparent reason can be accessed.
Web Development Toolbar
A whole new toolbar that gives you touch-of-a-button access to things like disabling all stylesheets, images, javascript and java. Resizing the browser to standard resolutions, validating, viewing contents of cookies etc.
So, there we have it, a selection of cool things for Firebird.
- 2003-07-07 23:28:42
- By Aquarion
- From Catrion Towers, Reading
- More Journal Entries
- Filed under Internet & Useability
Those who spoke on this:
beaneater:
Um, but extensions in general is not a reason for Firebird over Mozilla. Many useful extensions are either available for both or work on both.
yo mamma:
Umm this page does NOT validate to W3c HTML 4.01 as is intimated at the bottom of this page. I’d put those web developer tools to work…
Very sin
As of a little while ago (it is around 7:45 PM US Eastern on Mon 15 Sep 2003 as I write this), VeriSign added a wildcard A record to the .COM and .NET TLD DNS zones. The IP address returned is 64.94.110.11, which reverses to sitefinder.verisign.com. What that means in plain English is that most mis-typed domain names that would formerly have resulted in a helpful error message now results in a VeriSign advertising opportunity. For example, if my domain name was ‘somecompany.com,’ and somebody typed ‘soemcompany.com’ by mistake, they would get VeriSign’s advertising.
(Via ‘Dragonhawk’ on Slashdot via Jeremy Zawodny)
This isn’t new. the .nu TLD has been doing this same thing for years. Still, I’m glad I’m no longer a customer of Verisign, they have far too much control over .COM and .NET, and ICANN should do something about this.
They won’t, but they should.
Those who spoke on this:
Hmm. The latest GoogleDance has done something interesting. For the past three years the top match for “Aquarion” has been the Fuckoff-Great water company.
Now? Now the top match for Aquarion is this site. Somehow I outrank a massive company, prominantly linked to from Yahoo and various other places. Odd.
Those who spoke on this:
Richard Evans Lee:
I think Google really likes weblogs. I’m number one on “amorous” and “sodomite” because they are part of the titles of weblogs I publish.
And I’ve found myself at or near the top for all manner of unlikely things. I’ve sometimes wondered if the frequently refreshed content gives weblogs an edge over static sites.
James:
I think the incestuous interlinking and trackbacking has something to do with it, too :-)
Sorry, I appear to be channelling Andrew Orlowski.
Reasons IE Sucks chipmonks though chainlink fencing, Number 11 in a series of infinity
Given this URL:
http://www.aquarionics.com/gallery/Gid_[and]_Suzi’s_New_Year_2003
IE does the following:
http://www.aquarionics.com/gallery/Gid_%5Band%5D_Suzi/’s_New_Year_2003
Now, I realise the escaping error in the generated URL was my own stupid fault, but the fact that IE automatically reverses any backslashes in a URL - to retain compatibility with Windows’ broken directory seperator – is interesting. It means, for example, we can do this:
@import url(”/assets/cssspecial-ie-stylesheet.css”);
and IE will load it (It will try to “fix” the broken backslash) where Gecko/KHTML will attempt to load a file called “cssspecial-ie-stylesheet.css” in the assets directory is interesting. New browser-hack?
This isn’t news, really. When the first version of the new, all accessible RNIB site went live (And I ranted about it) some of the links contained backslashes, and thus broke for Mozilla, and it’s still annoying, but it might be useful.
What would be really interesting would be combining this with an IIS server. Does the server resolve it as the right path on the system (The Windows one) or as the RFC 2068 compliant one?
My solution, by the way, was to rename the album to “New Years 2003” and leave the escaping problem until I’ve got time to fix it properly.
Those who spoke on this:
Pingter:
I think some ’s have been lost in that post somewhere, and if I write that without the apostrophe it disappears in the comment preview as well…
Peter:
Well, I can’t see any instances of the character causing the problem at all – pingter, in your comment I just see ’s, without whatever character should be before the ’
I assume the little beastie is the diagonal slash that isn’t /, yesno?
Aquarion:
Yeah, half as many as you put in :-)
I wrote the [E]2 commenting system with PHP’s “Magic Slashes” turned on, which caused fun when taking things out of the database and previews. As I recall I strip all escape systems at least three times {stripslashes(stripslashes(stripslashes($string)))} before display, just to be sure.
- Aquarion adds this to the “Bugs to be fixed” list
Selling Out
Google fascinates me.
Somehow, despite gamers over the globe whining about how someone should patch Broken Sword 3, the top match for “Broken Sword 3 patch” is my review of it.
Google UK lists my Driving Test article as number four site, and the first with comments, so the article has become a mecca for people wanting to rant, rave and whine about their own experiences. Okay, so it’s hardly on par with Kottke’s Matrix thread, but it’s still interesting. Well, to me, anyway.
So, the first question is the social one. It’s a good example of how Google is fading away as the Blogs become more and more of the top matches. Sometimes that’s good, because if – for example – Mark Pilgrim’s essay on RSS becomes top match for the format, it provides a good introduction for developers trying to get to grips with the murk.
OTOH, My two year old whinging about failing my driving test due to excessive rain helps nobody.
My ‘That Which Is Relevant’ feature is somewhat circular in this regard. There are a couple of searches which I would not be highly matched for if I hadn’t been a low match last month, printed the exact phrase (as ‘incoming search for’) which Google then indexed on. My solution to this has been to only display searches that have lead here more than three times as of today.
So where’s the selling out? Well, I kind of feel guilty that people searching for driving lesson tips are being led here under false pretences, so I’d like to provide some more relevant links. So, I’m now supplying Google Adsense adverts on any articles/entries over three months old (The age thing is basically because anything recent should *be* relevant somehow, and I’m not really looking to make real money out of this (though it would be nice) and displaying adverts on new entries seems over-commercial).
This is mostly a trial balloon, really. If it works, it’ll stay. If I get accused of being a money-grabbing commercial git, I’ll probably try to rejustify it.
Those who spoke on this:
Jason:
Maybe google should support a “googlenice” meta tag.
Event Share Framework
gilmae alerted me to the fact that someone is creating an RSS 2 extension called Event Share Framework or ESF. This could be interesting.
I’ve just sent them this email:
I’ve just discovered your site, You should probably be aware that there is a syndication standard called ‘ESF’, the Epistula Syndication Format, invented at the height of the ‘RSS needs to be extended’ argument two years ago. It’s more or less obscure, but a high number of people are still generating it (Sam Ruby, for example, at http://www.intertwingly.net/feeds/) and there exists a number of modules and extensions for weblogging systems to use it. The spec is at http://www.aquarionics.com/article/name/esf.
I would – as the creator of an existing syndication standard – prefer it if your syndication standard extension did not share the name, to be honest.
- 2004-02-24 10:18:11
- By Aquarion
- From BrowserAngel, Kings Cross, London
- More Journal Entries
- Filed under Internet & Intertwingularity
Those who spoke on this:
MP:
Yes.
But can you, by any means possible short of spending £200 on a satellite dish and £60/month on a subscription, get away from dialup?
I can’t…
Oh, and I accidentally wiped the boot partition of my Linux box as well. Argh.
Those who resemble spammers from a distance
So, one of my major projects at the moment is to rearrange my online existance away from Aquarionics. Aquarionics remains as it is, mostly, but all the extra things (Like PFd4, ForEver and the forthcoming projects codenamed Touchstone, Threadnaut, and Angelica to move to a whole new domain – and empire – known as .istic.net. .istic.net will have an integrated login system – so if you have an account on one, you have an account everywhere – and with this was going to come logging in for putting comments on Aquarionics.
This was never, and will never, be a requirement to comment here, but registering – which would be beside and an alternative to the “User/Email/Webpage” would give you certian benefits, like an extended triggers interface (Recieve an XML-RPC ping,SMS Message or email whenever this range of things happens) the ability to edit your comments (With revision control) and – if the spam gets too much for me – I can always turn off URL display for non-istic users for a time without losing any actual content.
Typekey, however, I’m against for anything outside Typepad, because it appears – at first glance, so I could be wrong – to be an all or nothing. You have to register to comment. Actually, “You have to register to post comments on anything more than $foo days old” might be better, but we shall see.
How to make Firefox or Firebird use the new personalised google
Google have just released into beta testing the new ‘Personalize’ interface. From mucking around with it this evening, I have to say that it rocks, but most of the time when I’m using Google, it’s though the Search box in Firefox, so here is how to make that use Google personalisation:
- Download this file
- Save it into the
searchpluginsdirectory of your Firefox install directory. - (Optional) Copy the “google.gif” file that is in the same directory to be called “google-personalisation.gif” (You don’t have to do this, but you get the google icon for it instead of the default magnifying glass)
- Restart Firefox
(As far as I know, this also works with Firebird and anything else that has the Mycroft extension installed)
- 2004-03-29 21:22:11
- By Aquarion
- From Casarufus, Letchworth
- More Journal Entries
- Filed under Internet & Web Development
Those who spoke on this:
Jay:
Please send me one!
My email is (Removed)
Thanks,
Jay.
Comment edited by Aquarion 2004-09-11t10:09
Faby:
Do you have any accounts left?
If you do…Send me one!
Thanks
Faby:
My e-mail:
(Removed)
Comment edited by Aquarion 2004-09-11t10:09
Steamed
Yeah, you wait a week for an entry and then two come along at once
I also bought Half-Life 2, because there never existed a universe where I didn’t.
The game is amazing, captivating, well constructed, well plotted and has a gun with which you can throw washing machines at your enemies.
This is Good. It means I need more memory, but hey.
Steam is less good. Steam is Valve’s media distribution technology thingy. It’s blisteringly fast, easy to use, and doesn’t get in the way.
Except, of course, when it does. You see, the technology I can live with, it’s a good example of what can be done. It’s the politics I object to. Because I object to being made to feel like a criminal, and since in order to play the game (which I bought for 32.99 in Game) I have to prove I bought the game every single time I play it by contacting the Valve Authentication servers. And what happens when the servers aren’t working? Or my net connection isn’t working? I’m SOL. Okay, Steam has an ‘offline’ mode, apparently. But without a net connection… I can’t play the game, because I don’t own my copy of the game, I’ve merely got a license for it with Valve, which they can revoke at any time they see fit with no compensation.
Oh, and I still need the CD in the drive to play it. As well as the Internet connection.
Of course, within 24 hours of Half-Life 2’s release, a version with no CD requirements and that didn’t ever talk to Valve was up on bittorrent, ed2k and Kazaa. The only reason for people who don’t care about the legalities to buy the game is because at 5 CDs it’s probably quicker to walk to your local games shop and buy it.
On the other hand, the download version doesn’t take 20 minutes “Unlocking” the files it spent the previous 20 minutes installing.
- 2004-11-21 10:00:25
- By Aquarion
- From Casarufus, Letchworth
- More Journal Entries
- Filed under Computer Games & Internet
Those who spoke on this:
The RSS Problem
“All those icons” says Dave , “Where will it end?”
He then goes on to describe a system that is as overcomplicated as it is reliant on his own OPML spec. Jeremy thinks the answer lies in the browser, but that would rely on users having things installed. This is my solution:
- User clicks on first “Subscribe to this” link.
- User is forwarded to sendtomyaggregator.com or something
- User is asked which web-based aggregator they use (Or “I use my own” which will serve it as a text/xml+rss document)
- sendtomyaggregator.com sets a cookie with this information
- User is forwarded to the “Subscribe to this feed” page of their selection
- User clicks on subsequent “Subscribe to this” links
- User is forwarded to sendtomyaggregator.com or something
- User is automatically forwarded to the “Subscribe” thing they selected last time.
We store no information on the user – we just read the cookie, and maybe the front page has a link to delete the cookie – but that just means it takes nothing to serve it beyond a simple perl script.
Remember: It should be the simplest thing that could possibly work.
Update: So I coded it
- 2005-01-12 09:04:00
- By Aquarion
- From Casarufus, Letchworth
- More Journal Entries
- Filed under Internet, Metablog & SubscribeMe
Those who spoke on this:
Wikipedia as spam validation
So I recieved an interesting piece of spam today:
Interesting, because it uses Wikipedia as a reference point. My first thought was that they had edited the Wikipedia page on their particular field to recommend their own product, which would be sneaky and more interesting. What they have actually done is used it as a real reference on the subject, which is possibly cool. Either way it wended its sneaky way though all my spam filters. Mostly because the subject line is completely accurate and not at all filterable on.
Short Notice.
There is a very special level of hell reserved for hosting companies who issue the 72 hours notice of planned downtime at 11:30 on the saturday of a bank holiday (ie, Long) weekend.
My impressedness level is not high. Pipex, I mean you.
- 2005-05-28 10:53:53
- By Aquarion
- From Casarufus, Letchworth
- More Journal Entries
- Filed under Those Who Evolve & Internet
Those who spoke on this:
Lena:
See, this is what happens if you have hosting provided by The People Who Used To Be HighwayOne. They’re still crap!
Warbussing
I went Warbussing today.
Warbussing, soon to be the next big event in the weblogging/interweb world, involves, having finished todays episode of CSI (the husband did it) turning on Airport as we swish though the countryside, clicking every so often to see if there were any wireless networks open.
There was one. It was called “Silvar” and is fortunately located just outside a set of traffic lights by the College, allowing me to collect my email quickly while we paused. Everything else required a password.
In other news: George Galloway? Wrong statement.
Advert
Since I appear to have forgotten to do this entirely, and I really did mean to:
If you’re looking for an ADSL provider with Actual Real People on the other end, that doesn’t suck in any way, shape or form and will regrade your line upon request within 24 hours.
I cannot recommend them highly enough if you’re just looking for “Bare wire” ADSL without any excess services beyond an outgoing mail server.
Advert ends
We three things
- I am going to Maelstrom for the hotest weekend of the year (Not that there’s a hell of a lot of competition). How would you like your Aquarion: baked, boiled or fried?
- For the They Who Evolve World Cup Sweepstakes, I have drawn the Ivory Coast. Who are doomed, for no better reason than their connection to me.
- Every so often I obsess over songs and grab all the covers I can find. iTunes’ Music Store is bad for me for this reason. I am not, apparently, the only person to do this. T
nattie:
Wouldn’t that be drunken young employees of Richard Branson?
Aquarion:
Could Be…