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.