Friday, May 2, 2003
Passing References «
I had to give up the recent referers (a word I’m still not sure how to spell, and the dictionary is no help, as Chamber’s doesn’t even acknowledge its existence) on the sidebar. It got too busy, in an ugly way.
On Tuesday, I saw neat referrer page on cyborgirl, who is on Jeremy’s referrer list (both use four, not three, r’s), and she seems to have got the script from Textism, who I seem to be following around — he’s written a script to clean the cack out of Word-to-HTML files, and so have I. Mine was for my running club site, and intended for tables of results, while his is for prose. Though I’m sure each could do the other’s work. I haven’t even looked at Dean’s script, but I’m sure that it’s a study in elegance compared to mine, which went through several phases of evolution, first being just a text page of referer(r)s, for my own interest, then the sidebar, and this I hope is the final version.
As it seems that I get far more search hits than I can persuade others to refer to me, I added search terms. I thought of adding OS and browser, but there seems to be a consensus on php.net that browser sniffing slows scripts down like crazy, due to industrial strength regular expression use. So after a late-night coding session, one desperate cry for help on comp.lang.php because I had timeout errors due — D’oh — to forgetting to increment a counter in a loop. (Always a good one.)
I had problems with single word searches, not that they’re all that common. That’s now fixed. In fact, if the early searches haven’t slipped off the bottom (it goes 50 deep and no archive — OK that’s for the next upgrade), the early problems are still visible: search terms either not showing or mixed in with useless information.
So, should you be at all interested, the links followed to this site are now on display at referers.html. I may go with the flow on the spelling, but I suppose I’m stuck with the file name. (Javascript spells it "referrer," but php, and Unix systems in general, go for "referer.")
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:17 pm GMT
Tuesday, May 6, 2003
After the Night Before «
Dry mouth, loss of appetite, mild headache.
You’ve got a hangover lad.
Recovering from a wedding yesterday. Drank too much of too many things for too long.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:17 pm GMT
Wednesday, May 7, 2003
Tell Me More «
Late night in a curry house in Fordingbridge. A mixed group of late-teenagers deciding what to eat.
Girl: "I think we’ve had enough drink-drive incidents for one day…"
You just want to know more, don’t you?
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:37 pm GMT
Thursday, May 8, 2003
Cluster Blogs «
I am, I admit, the ‘ye’ in the phrase ‘ye of little faith.’ I thought that Salam Pax was dead, or was fictional after all, but the BBC announced his return, something I could have discovered for myself if I’d kept checking that link. Dear Raed, is alive, well, and very grouchy.
Let me tell you one thing first. War sucks big time. Don’t let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you don’t think about your "imminent liberation" anymore.
He’s not alone in being unhappy. Margaret Drabble, in the Telegraph, confesses that her anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable.
Gary Trudeau stands up for French Americans with a Doonesbury in French.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:43 pm GMT
Friday, May 9, 2003
Kind Regards «
Are we getting more polite? Our culture has been getting more informal and more casual since the end of World War II, and that’s meant that we’ve gradually lost certain codified ways of behaving. That can seem like a loss of regard for others’ feelings, as if we had become more self-centred, the ‘me-generation’ in Tom Wolfe’s deprecatory phrase.
Certainly, it’s more acceptable to reproduce common speech in print. It seems that the word ‘fuck’ was around before 1963, but you wouldn’t know it from most books. It is possible that what we have lost in formality, we have gained in friendliness, as if we have all become more proletarian, and that’s a good thing, IMO. There’s the term ‘Shut Up!’ for one thing.
Another thing which puzzles me is the valediction ‘Kind Regards’ I keep seeing in business emails. I’ve even seen it trumped with a ‘Kindest Regards’ recently. What’s that all about. I hadn’t stopped to think about it before, but what are regards anyway?
Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:02 pm GMT
Saturday, May 10, 2003
Some Improvements to the Referrer File «
The referrer page, mentioned earlier, now works properly. As I don’thave a database on this site, I’ve been using flat files. I didn’t properly get the differences between "r+", and "w" — the latter deletes the contents of a file, and the former doesn’t. OF COURSE. However, for scripts with counters, it makes no difference. If the counter increments by one each time, and the new count is 999, which is three digits, same as 998, while if the new count is 1000, four digits or more, merely writing over is no problem. If, however, the new text is shorter than the old file, it’s a different story. If the old file contained just "David," and I want the new file to contain just "Dave" and I use "r+" (read file and then overwrite), the file will contain Daved, the new characters have been inserted into the file, like using the <insert> key on the keyboard.
It played merry hell with the table structure; every time a new line was added, an old table row broke, and it took me a couple of days to get why the table had more than my limit of fifty entries and the earlier ones weren’t moving on, and at the same time why it was always the 50th or 51st entry that was the problem. What a great argument for databases. I’ll fork out the fifteen quid one costs from my hosts pronto.
Dave Winer suggests that referring pages should be hidden from search engines using the robots.txt file.
And I’ve gone with two rs.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:08 pm GMT
Sunday, May 11, 2003
Live and Learn «
I mentioned yesterday that Dave Winer suggested excluding robots from the referrer page(s). How right he was: this morning I found my running club site’s referrers page [NB link removed, sorry] had been was full of visits from a porn site. I’ve cleaned out the file, added the referring url to the ignore list (some robots show a referer page, which would only confuse things, so I had that set up already), and banned the IP address from the site with .htaccess, and banned referrers with obviously adult urls. Not convinced that it will do anything, but you live and learn.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:26 pm GMT
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Some Changes of Mind «
"I didn’t do any adult stuff because I don’t believe in that," Shiels said. "I have a 7-year-old boy."
Ah, yes. His son must love All those Viagra and penile enlargement ads.
"Bulk e-mail has the stigma of being trash," he said. "That I don’t want to associate with a legitimate business."
No kidding.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful .htaccess. How to ban porn sites from spamming your referrer pages.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} http://www.anal* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} http://www.nude* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} http://www.adult* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} http://www.mature* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} http://www.lesbian* [OR]I found that my spammer used several IP addresses, so going for the referrer worked well. Not as well as using robots.txt in the first place would have, though.
Also, if you have a referrer script, don’t forget that the Blogdex and Popdex bots give HTTP_REFERERs, so if you don’t count visits from them, you can always add any doubtful referrers to your whatever process you use for that.
Some people can’t make up their bloody minds: Clare Short quits post over Iraq.
Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith said Ms Short’s departure was symptomatic of the divisions and malaise within the Labour Party. He said: "I think this demonstrates what we are seeing over the last few weeks, the government is split from top to bottom on the euro, foundation hospitals, and Iraq. Those splits are hurting the Government’s ability to be the Government in the United Kingdom.
True enough, though the Labour Party has a (commendable IMO) history of fierce internal debate. IDS is clearly trying to imply that the conservatives would be better, but the same is true of them, with knobs on.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 10:57 am GMT
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Not That I’m Knocking Microsoft «
But I had the "May 2003, Cumulative Patch" for IE in my inbox, and Outlook decided that it wasn’t trustworthy, and wouldn’t let me open the attachment.
Not to be daunted, and liking to be secure, I went to the MS site to download the thing.
Hwray [Hooray in Welsh], no problems.
Tried to open the exe file. All I get is an alert saying that I need IE6 installed. I have.
Maybe they’ll fix the fix next month.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:57 pm GMT
Thursday, May 15, 2003
Opinions Are Free «
Very, very long piece in the New York Times about an ex-journalist, under the rather pompous subtitle "Correcting The Record." Indeed to show that NYT does not scruple when it comes to fact-checking the piece "was reported and written by Dan Barry, David Barstow, Jonathan D. Glater, Adam Liptak and Jacques Steinberg. Research support was provided by Alain Delaquérière and Carolyn Wilder." Where’s Uncle Tom Cobley when you need him?
The article seems to be an exercise in:
- point gun at foot;
- squeeze trigger when ready;
- repeat at leisure.
When considered over all, Mr. Blair’s correction rate at The Times was within acceptable limits.
Close scrutiny of his travel expenses would have revealed other signs that Mr. Blair was not where his editors thought he was, and, even more alarming, that he was perhaps concocting law enforcement sources. But at the time his expense records were being quickly reviewed by an administrative assistant; editors did not examine them.
Mr. Blair did not have a company credit card — the reasons are unclear — and had been forced to rely on Mr. Roberts’s credit card to pay bills from his first weeks on the sniper story.
Seven reporters, working on a story in their own paper, and they get away with "the reasons are unclear"? And they pick him up for sloppy fact-checking. It takes them some time to get to the nub of the story:
Mr. Blair had by this point developed a pattern of pretending to cover events in the Mid-Atlantic region when in fact he was spending most of his time in New York, where he was often at work refining a book proposal about the sniper case.
So, apart from his sin of leaving college without graduating (and why bother when you’ve got a graduate job already?), he compounded his crime by having the gall to get a book deal, something the seven dwarves clearly haven’t done yet.
On journalistic self-indulgence, the Western Mail this morning quoted Rob Brydon on BBC bias against the Welsh. Now, this may be true, but as he says "Keith Barratt is a very Welsh character but one of the things I am proud of is that he’s a Welsh character that doesn’t talk about rugby, sheep, choirs," all the stereotypical Welsh nonsense that the Western Mail tries so hard to distance itself from.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:37 pm GMT
Saturday, May 17, 2003
Getting His Own Back «
After he was hounded from his job as editor on Radio 4’s Today, by the Daily Torygraph, Rod Liddle seems to have found his feet again.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:46 am GMT
Monday, May 19, 2003
Difficulties With Girls «
Last night I dreamed about Nigella Lawson.
We discussed joining the Euro.
Sigh.
Today, trying not to buy more books, I chatted to a very friendly girl in Waterstone’s. Opening: not bad. Finishing: poor. Thierry Henry has nothing to worry about.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:55 pm GMT
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
Pax Up Your Troubles «
I’ve said before that I think that Salam Pax is real.
Real, it seems, is not enough for some fool. EdCone first spotted this, anouncing quietly: The Salam Pax backlash begins. I originally wrote a longish post myself, but decided to sit on it, and see what happened.
Metafilter has an excellent thread, Paxattack which hits most of my points, although Warren’s laughable assertion
Now, Salam would never have known any ‘ordinary’ Iraqis, unless he was interrogating one privately.
goes unchallenged. the sound of nails being hit on the head resounds as a consensus seems to emerge that Salam is educated, well-off, and that we knew that before: how else would he write in English, and have internet access? Now I don’t know much about Iraqi social life, but I’d be surprised if the middle-classes live in gated estates. And what the hell is an ‘ordinary Iraqi’ anyway? One who welcomes the US troops, no matter how they behave, it seems.
Most perceptive blogger is soyjoy who points out that "there are two contradictory critiques of Salam Pax." One being that he’s an agent, the other that he’s a hoaxer. These "are in fact mutually contradictory, but they can be (and sometimes seem to be) combined by sloppy thinking into an overall thumbs-down on Salam."
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:27 pm GMT
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Hay «
Yesterday, I went to Hay to take a look at the Book Festival. As I wasn’t that fussed about any of the events, and I spent a lot of time in bookshops, I could have gone at ny time, and I’ll go back soon. I did learn one thing though. People throw out old wine guides like Superplonk after around three years, and booksellers won’t sell it if it’s older than four, so the shops were full of Superplonk 1999.
Found myself tempted to buy books I wasn’t sure I had or not. Old ones I’ve read, and ought to have but have probably lost. Nearly bought a shorter edition of Pepys, but realised in time that it was from the original published text— with all the dirty bits taken out, which would have made it a lot less interesting. Decided I could forgo the biography of Patrick O’Brian too, and just stick with his works, even if it was a fiver.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:34 pm GMT
Excellent piece on spam here. Very smart. Found via /. discussion on this BBC piece. (Though I still use Mailwasher, as it keeps spam away from my computer altogether.)
However, on the same site as the first of the above, is this even better piece on Hackers and Painters.
I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complete program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape.
I learned FORTRAN at school and the only way we could program was on paper, someone else entered the code into the machine. But I took a Computeach course a few years ago, and they insisted on this ‘work-it-out-with-flowcharts’ method, and I never got it at all. I started to think I was weird. In the end, I flunked for the sake of my sanity.
Finally got my car working again. Of course, I didn’t record its death on here, as it didn’t seem significant at the time. But being without it has at least brought back the pleasure of cycling.
All that was at fault was the demise of the battery. And that does seem significant, as there’s some metaphor there which is just out of reach for now.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:54 pm GMT
Thursday, May 29, 2003
Some Say The World Will End In Fire «
The Guardian: US finds evidence of WMD at last — buried in a field near Maryland.
Even more embarrassing for the Pentagon, there was no documentation about the various biological agents disposed of at the US bio-defence centre at Fort Detrick. Iraq’s failure to come up with paperwork proving the destruction of its biological arsenal was portrayed by the US as evidence of deception in the run-up to the war.
The question remains: how are we going to ever get out of Iraq with any dignity? Come to think of it, does Iran have WMD? Though Rumsfeld can be quite consistent now if they haven’t. Oh bugger it, might as well declare war on everyone. Doesn’t make the world any safer, but you could fall under a bus tomorrow.
MeBox. Cool website. Cool idea.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:20 am GMT
Friday, May 30, 2003
Backpedalling «
Great timeline of quotes on the search for WMD, which ends rather anti-climatically in backpedalling.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:58 pm GMT
[^Top]
