Hold onto your hats folks… it’s the Millenium Falcon X-Box.
(via Phil)
Author Archives: daniel
Interview with a spammer
The Register’s Interview with a link spammer.
When Sam begins a spam run, he has one target, though he’ll accept any of six. Principal one: come top of the search engines for his chosen site’s phrase. “But you’ll accept coming in at 1,2 or 3, or if you come at 8,9 or 10. Actually, 8, 9 and 10 have better conversion rates. I don’t know why. Maybe the eyes fix on it when you scroll down the page.” And the cost of doing it? Once the code is written, pretty much zero. “Bandwidth is cheap,” he says. “You set it going in the evening and come back in the morning to see how it’s gone.”
So what beats them? Sounds like captchas (those distorted images requiring a human to type a letter)
So what does put a link spammer off? It’s those trusty friends, captchas – test humans are meant to be able to do but computers can’t, like reading distorted images of letters.
There’s several WP plug-ins that will do them; I haven’t tried it yet. But I will soon.
Quickies
There’s something of a backlash against the NoFollow initiative setup by Google.
Mark Pilgrim paints a sobering picture of the power and tenacity of spammers.
Which sounds better, or more like something you’d say? “I googled it” or “I A9 dot commed it” ? Have you actually used A9.com, anyway? (I have. Once. Yesterday. After I read that story.)
Unix for Windows
Want to grep, sed, awk, ps, kill on Windows? Try Microsoft’s Services for Unix.
(via Raymond Chen)
Life at Google
A guy called Mark Jen is blogging about his life at Google. A couple of his early posts included a bit too much financial info, and were pulled, but are quoted here. Didn’t look that compelling to me, but then, I’m not a stockbroker.
Unlike the official Google blog, he gets a little critical of the company at times, such as taking a swipe at employee benefits.
then look at all these other fringe “benefits”: on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes… the list goes on and on with one similarity: every “benefit” is on-site so you never leave work. i’m not going to say this isn’t convenient for us employees, but between all these devices designed to make us stay at work, they might as well just have dorms on campus that all employees are required to live in.
One to watch.
The Google blog has announced they’re starting to index TV, by the way.
Google desktop search
So I finally got around to downloading and installing Google desktop search (I admit it, it was when I needed to find something in Outlook) and I discover it’s incompatible with Vet anti-virus. Oh. There goes that then. So I’ll check out LookOut or Copernic, I guess.
Oh. I found what I wanted. Another time then!
Blogs
ABC Radio blog feature (Real or Windows media).
Pregnant women probably shouldn’t listen to part two.
Office Object Library problems
One of the machines a program of mine runs on is still NT4 and Office 97. It seemed to keep working okay when I was on Win2K/Office 2000, but now I’m on WinXP/Office 2003 it’s crashing when calling the Excel object library to open an XLS.
MS have documented that this can happen after re-compiling with the Office 2000 libraries or later (though I’m sure it didn’t happen with Excel 2000).
“This behavior is by design.” Application errors by design. Yeah. SURE.
Apparently the solution is to use that normally-considered-evil late-binding; DIMming as an Object and using CreateObject.
But it didn’t seem to work for me. So I dug out an old copy of Office 97, installed it into a separate directory to Office 2003. Removed the reference to Excel 11, added Excel 8 instead (EXCEL8.OLB), recompiled and all is well.
The joys of .htaccess
For those who merely dabble in Apache, .htaccess seems a little like black magic. Yet it’s so useful… it can do default (index) documents, redirection, password protection, custom 404s, blocking image stealers… everything! This set of pages serves as a useful tutorial for doing it all.
No auto whiteboard
When you’re away on a weekend for a workshop, at a location off the beaten track with no provided technology other than 240 volts… and your IT resources are limited to what you bring yourself — a couple of laptops — and your group spends 48 hours scribbling notes all over butcher’s paper…
The way to capture that in its pristine, messy, original form is to bring along a digital camera with a decent resolution. Put the papers on the floor in the light, turn the flash off to avoid a strong reflection, and snap away. Worked wonders. Rotate them all to face the right way, rename them to something sensible, burn to CD. Presto, all the scribbling, to accompany and cross-check with the notes typed-in as it went.
Doesn’t help people’s messy writing though.
Gatesy-baby! Argh! My eyes!
Well, I think we now have proof that Bill Gates is not a crazed megalomaniac billionaire. If he was, he’d have had all copies of these pictures destroyed, and anybody involved killed.
Apparently these pics were taken for a magazine called Teen Beat, around 1985.
(Via Monkey Methods, whose commenters are debating whether it was 1983 as first claimed, or if the fact that there’s a Mac in the background means it must have been after 1984.)
Update 19-Oct-2005: Snopes says these were publicity shots taken for the release of Microsoft Windows in 1985.
Comment spam vs nofollow
More comment spam hitting us at the moment, but curiously the comments don’t seem to have URLs with them, so I’m not sure what the point is. They’re all purporting to be from non-English-speaking e-mail addresses, and many in broken English, with a generic compliment about how marvellous your web site is. Odd.
Meanwhile, Google have come up with a new <rel=”nofollow”> attribute for links to help fight comment spam. And they’ve got a bunch of blogging heavyweights to back it, too, including the MT/TypePad, Blogger (duh), MSN Spaces and the WordPress gang, which might well cover a good proportion of blogs running today.
Now, W3C ratification, anybody? Oh pah, who cares?