Category: Geekery

And the horse you rode in on, too!

For the past couple of days, this “Willow Internet Crawler by Twotrees V2.1” has been agressively crawling my site. And I mean agressively – they download every single page as quickly as they can, with no pause between them. This is a bit of a pain, because it means they are sucking down my bandwidth that I’d rather use for live human beings or better behaved applications.

But today was the last straw – I have a robots.txt file because when web crawlers hit my image gallery, they tend to cause errors in the php code that gets logged in /var/log/messages. So today I noticed a “Last message repeated 147 times” message scrolling by, I looked and sure enough “Willow Internet Crawler” isn’t obeying the spider guidelines – they haven’t even looked at my robots.txt.

first thing I did was go to their web site – and discovered that under “Contact Us”, you can only see their email address while your mouse is hovering over the title – once you move the cursor away to actually type in a mail program, it goes away again. And the address isn’t in the same place as what you are hovering over. Making it a (probably purposely) difficult to cut and paste the address into mutt.

So fine, you want to be an asshole? I can be an asshole too. I opened up /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, found the “allow all” line, and added a “deny 68.244.166.8” after it, restarted the web server, and now I’m watching “Willow Internet Crawler” get a lot of 403s. So fuck you, Twotrees.net, and the horse you rode in on too.

Dammit dammit dammit dammit

Since I got back from the cruise, my PowerBook has been occassionally showing the “no battery” icon. The first time it happened, I had to reboot in order to fix it. But when it happened the this time, I tried taking out the battery and putting it back. And it worked. Hooray. But unfortunately while I was opening the Powerbook again, the left hinge broke. Waaah.

Pictures:


Man, I sure hope it holds out until the next qpromo.

Dissonance

It was very weird to walk out the front door this morning to see a FedEx Ground truck parked on the road, and find that it wasn’t going to us but to our neighbour. We buy so much stuff on-line that the UPS driver once joked “Here’s your daily delivery”.

What’s even weirder is to see Brad Choate misusing apostrophes. I sent him a link to Bob the Angry Flower’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots, but then I realized that it doesn’t say anything about the little quirk that you never use apostrophe-s as a possessive form with the word “it”.

Oh well.

Update: Brad saw my trackback ping and changed his blog entry. So if you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about: where it now says “is on its last leg”, it said “is on it’s last leg” when I wrote the above. Sure, it’s nice to score one on a much better writer than me once in a while, but since he fixed the error, I look like a dick for pointing out an error that isn’t there. Thus I’m taking the unprecedented (for me) step of going back and updating this entry.

Seen in my web logs today

159.115.185.165 – – [03/Jun/2004:12:54:48 -0400] “GET /~ptomblin/spam.html HTTP/1.1” 200 62881 “http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=how+make+spam&y=y&e=15316877&f=0%3A2766678%3A2718086%3A254845%3A9156085%3A91953%3A91989%3A15316877&r=Society+and+Culture%02Food+and+Drink%02Countries+and+Cultures%02Hawaiian%02Recipes” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”

Decoded, that means that somebody went to the Yahoo directory pages for “Society and Culture/Food and Drink/Countries and Cultures/Hawaiian/Recipes”, then searched for “how make spam”, and ended up at a page of mine that describes how to stop email spam (now extremely out of date). I’m pretty sure that isn’t what they wanted.