OPML Files
I have been looking at ways to make my People / Places links on the right dynamic and decided on putting it into a OPML file.
Weblogs by Tube Station
I came across another great example of the location-based nature of weblogs and webloggers today.
It is called London Bloggers Tube Map and allows you to track down bloggers by their nearest station.
Tube Rage
After spending Saterday going to Camden and having to do the usual bashing and bumping to actually leave the tube I thought this was a very good Haiku that I saw on Going Underground's Blog
Let people out first
Not "charge through the doors first thing"!
Die, you bastards, die.
I took the bus home via Piccadilli and picked up a copy of Content Syndication using RSS instead of doing that again.
Open Guide to London
While searching for random things on Feedster I came across The Open Guide to London.
It is a wiki about London and by the looks of its Index Page it is getting along nicely. Some of the interesting nodes I found are:
They also provide all their pages in RDF and RSS formats.
London Peace Rally
There were a big peace rally today in London. Some people say 10 000 people showed I think it may have been more, these things are always on media black-out and the spin doctors are doing their best to downplay it.
As usual the London traffic cams were all "not available for operational reasons" so no-one could even watch it to get a good feel for the size of it.
The theme was maybe more one of hate directed at Blair than anti war protest but there were a good deal of anti Israel sentiment too due to the on-going occupation of Palestine.
I took some photos
UPDATE:
According to Sky the organisers says 100 000 people showed up, the police says 20 000. I guess that puts it around 50 000.
Fighting email harvesters and other unfriendlies.
Since I put up this site I have been paying attention to my log files to see how it gets accessed. One of my main motivations for putting up a personal site is not to publish content or personal ideas etc but to study the blogging world, how it communicates and how information flows.
Obviously RSS [1, 2] and other XML technologies are the underlying technology that enables interesting services such as Technorati, Feedster, Blogosphere, Geoblog, Blogshares and many more and a study of this is essential. I have been looking for the RSS book for a while and might have to resort to ordering from Amazon.
There are however a lot more to a website than a XML file. The net is constantly being trawled by unwelcome guests these range from Email address harvesters, services that "monitor" your server, badly behaved search engine crawlers and bad people like the RIAA.
Here I present some strategies for combating these services from simply asking the well behaved ones to go away by using a robots.txt and by forcing the bad ones to go away by using mod_rewrite and other such methods.
Anti Spam laws
A number of countries are announcing laws against spam, today alone there are news articles about Australia and The UK both introducing laws against it.
FreeBSD Base Packaging
There is a very interesting discussion on the FreeBSD Current mailing list about packaging the base system.
OpenSSH Vulnerability
I first got first word of the OpenSSH vulnerability via Barry's mention of it. I updated my FreeBSD machines quite quickly thanks to their excellent security team.
When it came to RedHat, of course, it was a mess.
Tracking visits from RSS feeds
One thing that is annoying about RSS feeds and feed readers is that you do not know where they are from or how many people actually follow through reading full articles based on RSS feeds. I noticed via Lockergnome a nice idea for modifying the URLs that you send out to RSS clients as a means of tracking.
Links
- @ripienaar
- Flashpolicyd
- Flickr
- London DevOps Group
- MCollective Plugins
- R.I.Pienaar
- Ruby PDNS
- The Marionette Collective
- Wiki
Tweets
- Caffiene infused. 2am to bed day before delivering the last talk of the day is not recommended
- Once again discovering that something as simple as correct MX and NS records is a very effective CAPTCHA to weed out idiot hosting companies
- I love the E4 ipad ripoff ad http://srt.ly/epad
- RT @garnaat: The only accurate model of the system is the system itself. All other representations are a compromise. <- what he said
- Parallels announces support for Google Chrome Operating System http://bit.ly/aCXXCJ
- RT @brunns: RT @jaywgraves: This is pretty awesome. http://bit.ly/aJ12Gb
- Kelway are totally wicked hardware suppliers. Threw away a £100 cable by accident, they gave me a freebie replacement
- Police stop runaway Toyota Prius http://bit.ly/904jED
- Vagrant: EC2-Like Virtual Machine Building and Provisioning from Ruby http://bit.ly/cttcgQ
- RT @lochii: http://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic <-- mosaic now on github, yay!
Reading
Planned books:
- The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner
- Relentless by Dean Koontz
- Mind Over Ship by David Marusek
- The New Space Opera by Gardner Dozois
- The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan
Current books:
-
Ariel: A Book of the Change by Steven R. Boyett
Recent books:
- Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to Get the Most Out of the Latest Vim Editor by Kim Schulz
- Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design by Diomidis Spinellis , Georgios Gousios
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