by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 20, 2003 | Front Page
Wired has a interview with Bill Joy – co-founder of what used to be called Stanford University Network aka Sun Microsystems, Grandfather of lots of sexy hardware and also Java – where he makes quite a few interesting remarks.
Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It’s a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that’s beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux.
Later on he has this to say:
I’m figuring out a meditation wall for my apartment in New York. Eight feet high by 12 feet wide, with an array of overlapping rear projectors, each with a tiny Linux box and connected by gigabit Ethernet.
Even more sexy would have been Apple G4 Cube machines ๐
On Open source he says the following:
Open source is fine, but it doesn’t take a worldwide community to create a great operating system. Look at Ken Thompson creating Unix, Stephen Wolfram writing Mathematica in a summer, James Gosling in his office making Java. Now, there’s nothing wrong with letting other people help, but open source doesn’t assist the initial creative act. What we need now are great things. I don’t need to see the source code. I just want a system that works
As always I think he has his head on in 100% the right way.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 18, 2003 | Front Page
Another annoying vector for spamming bloggers is comments. The bots now do google searches for typical signs of Movabletype comment forms and then go spam them. They do this to up their google pageranking.
A few weeks ago Jay Allen wrote a system called MT-Blacklist that blocks based on blacklists. While blacklists isn’t the best way to blog spammers they are so far the best option that bloggers have due to the lack of unspoofable meta data in the HTTP protocol.
I installed the plugin into my Movabletype and have stopped quite a few comment spam attempts using it so I am quite happy with it and would recommend it to any MT user.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 18, 2003 | Front Page
I have been noticing in my referer log a couple of hits that looks to me like hits simply to spam my logs.
217.73.164.106 – – [13/Oct/2003:17:49:35 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 21978 “http://www.kwmap.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [13/Oct/2003:17:49:35 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 21978 “http://www.kwmap.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [14/Oct/2003:10:12:31 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 21978 “http://www.kwmap.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [14/Oct/2003:10:12:31 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 21978 “http://www.kwmap.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [04/Nov/2003:08:13:52 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 26409 “http://www.websearchde.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [12/Nov/2003:22:42:50 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27410 “http://www.wr18.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [15/Nov/2003:10:41:49 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27053 “http://www.malixya.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
141.85.3.130 – – [16/Nov/2003:21:34:49 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27053 “http://www.worldnewslog.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
141.85.3.130 – – [17/Nov/2003:03:23:07 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27053 “http://www.mikesspot.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
141.85.3.130 – – [17/Nov/2003:10:15:22 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27053 “http://www.a-b-l-o-g.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
141.85.3.130 – – [17/Nov/2003:17:12:02 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27360 “http://www.teoras.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [18/Nov/2003:04:10:25 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27323 “http://www.websearchus.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [18/Nov/2003:22:25:51 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27323 “http://www.saulem.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
The thing that makes me think they are spam bots is that all they ever do is ask for the main page, none of my images, CSS or anything like that – and the obvious fake user agent.
I looked a bit at the IP addresses in various databases and they are from Romanian educational networks and all the sites being advertised are from Romania.
So I think it is time I add user_agent = “MSIE 6.0” to my deny lists.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 17, 2003 | Usefull Things
I am sick of Newzcrawler. It used to have a really useful liberal parser that would work with most things, now is using the MSXML as its core parser and it has been turned into the worlds strictest parser. This is all fine and well in a perfect world however we do not live in one. Earlier today I posted a quote about the Technorati growing pains and it stated that it has 1.2 Million weblogs and is adding 4 000 to 5 000 new ones every day. For a feed reader to expect all these blogs to have valid XML is ludicrous.
The developers of Newzcrawler has stated that they are working on this problem and have released a Beta that has a new parser. Their previous “stable” release was a joke of crashes and instabilities and regardless of these being reported on their forums they still released it as a stable version. Now we are back in Beta stage and it is even worse.
So my search for a replacement reader got me to Sharpreader a rather nice looking aggregator for windows, it is written in .Net so you will need the 20 Meg worth of .Net framework but so far its been well worth the hassle. Sharpreader – while still Beta – is very usable and attractive and it is a lot better at parsging dodgy RSS but still not perfect, it has issues with sites like Rootprompt but their feed does indeed suck. The only feature that I am going to miss in newzcrawler so far is NNTP as I read quite a few mailing lists via Gmane. The Author believes in Parsing At All Costs so that is encouraging.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 17, 2003 | Front Page
Anyone who checks out their Technorati profile regularly will have noticed the slow-downs, David Sifry has some updates on things. In the article he mentions these amasing stats:
Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we’re adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We’re also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.
I wonder how many of these update regularly since there has been much talk around the fact that the typical blog is run by a 16 year old girl who gets bored of it after 30 days.
And while on the subject of technorati profiles, its rather depressing that about:blank has larger link cosmos than many blogs ๐
