I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
Ooh yeah. I’ve just checked out my hours at the place I’m working next week. 9:30 am ’til 4:30pm. Josh is happy. To make things better, I live a mere 15-20 minute walk from there, so guess who’s going to be sleeping in this week?! ME!
P.S. If you’re a post-HSC unemployed bum, no need to brag about your lack of… anything ;)
I’ve been racking up a few too many 404‘s of late, which I think is due to hits on my robots.txt file falling flat on their face (ooh, alliteration!) — this means that search engines are looking for this page, and getting errors happening. Reduce your 404‘s today, and let search engines use their time (and your bandwidth) more efficiently!
robots.txt is the first file requested by a search engine (or any other robot) as it begins to spider a website. You can use this file to (theoretically) allow or disallow all search engines, or specific search engines, access to certain pages of your website. Each spider should have its own unique identifier, or user-agent string, which can be used to apply specific rules to it in a robots.txt file.
Personally, that’s of little relevance to me: blanket rules seem to work quite nicely. robots.txt files should be placed in the root of your web site directory — so, in the case of this website, the appropriate place to locate it is http://www.joahua.com/robots.txt.
With WordPress, the blogging software in use here, there are some files which spiders have absolutely no need or reason to access — this should not only result in bandwidth reductions, but also in (possible) security improvements.
My robots.txt file, as of around 4:30pm today, looks like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /blog/wp-comments-post.php
Disallow: /blog/wp-login.php
Disallow: /blog/wp-register.php
The contents of it are fairly self-explanatory, I think, but basically this stops search engines from looking in my cgi-bin directory, and from hitting the comment posting page, or trying to login to my administration area for WordPress.
Whether a bad hit on robots.txt from a search engine counts as a 404 error with Awstats, I’m uncertain: at any rate, the number of logged 404‘s (speaking of raw Apache statistics) should decrease now that there’s actually a file there.
More information can be had at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/active.html
I’ve acquired a new scanner today, namely, an Elux U-3620P flatbed. A quick web search reveals illiterate teenagers swearing about a lack of drivers for Windows XP (at least, I hope these people aren’t considered literate and mature in… well… any society on the planet), and a whole lot of not-much information about the actual capabilities/performance of the scanner.
Elux apparently went out of business (cause undetermined) a few years ago, so they don’t have a useful website full of specifications which I can check, either. The whinging would suggest that these scanners are slow and deliver poor image quality, but I’m not compelled to believe them without seeing this thing working first. Which, incidentally, can’t happen just yet, because the only cable I have which’d connect it nicely happens to be packed away in a box taped shut.
Speaking of cables, though, I find it most curious that this device does not have a visible DC power inlet! I’ve been told to “look harder” by various people… but, at this stage, I seriously can’t see it at all! If it weren’t all single piece construction, I’d take it apart to prove it… that said, it is single piece constructed, and I’d rather wait until I had a cable to prove or disprove my point rather than break it trying to discover before-hand.
This is all based on the premise that there is some form of Linux driver support for the damn thing… if not, I’d presume there are Windows 9x drivers out there, somewhere, but I’d really rather not. One of the reasons I suspect it (the scanner) was performing slowly for aforementioned illiterates, is that they were running on a system with a parallel port which made everything grind to a halt when used. This isn’t a problem on my main desktop, but on some of the 9x boxes, it certainly would be!
I’ll see if I can hunt down a spare parallel cable some time this week, and then give it a whirl with XSane (or *shudder* Twain). Worst case scenario, I’m sure there’s something crazy I can do with the lights inside a scanner… we shall see.
Don’t see the movie “Hero”, unless you enjoy constant martial arts fighting with rather poor chroma key work, disjointedly linked to a vague suggestion of plot, which consists of the retelling of three alternate versions of a story leading to an event which does not happen.
The hero is riddled with arrows as a traitor, and given a hero’s burial. There, a spoiler. Now you don’t need to see it, do you?
Several days ago now I posted regarding a story first published on Whirlpool, then making appearances on websites such as The Register (and probably others), which details a heinous act of terrorism taking place: and not on the part of the man who put up the Access Point, but rather by the enforcement agencies, who (so it is suggested) were intimidating in their dealing with the “offender”.
To me, that constitutes an act of terrorism, albeit on a reduced scale — state-published propaganda is arguably inspiring a greater sense of terror and a need for compliance than any so-called “Acts of Terrorism” are (at least in Australia). It should perhaps come as no surprise, then, to learn that agents of the Terror (I do not speak of the French Revolution) are actively searching for sympathising opinions with these victims of terrorism.
Last month, this website attracted a total of two hits from addresses in the .mil TLD namespace: so far this month (we stand but three days into it), there have been twenty-two impressions thus far, as of 04:34 this morning. To clarify, my daily impressions remain relatively consistent with last month — the total number of hits remains relatively static. Proportionally, this is an enormous increase in namespace hits from military networks.
One can only assume that comments made regarding terrorism have been the reason for attracting traffic of this variety. Whilst I don’t consider anything published here to be (overly) inflammatory, I intend to stand by the existing policy of maintaining content in its’ entirety, unless compelling legal reason (or reasonable request) is given to remove it: In this event, the content shall be altered to denote it as changed (or, potentially, censored).