Automation promotes action
I've written before about the advantages of scripts ,but my own recent experiences have reminded me of another one, whichI can snappily phrase as automation promotes action . Or in otherwords: when you've scripted something so that it's easy to do, you do itmore often.
I build Firefox from CVS myself, for various reasons, but I run it ona different machine than I build on. Bringing up a new build up on theright machine involves about three or four steps;
Stupid web spider tricks
In the spirit of earlier entrants , but not as bad, here's some stupid webspider tricks.
The first stupid trick: crawling 'Add Comment' pages. Not only are the'Add Comment' links marked nofollow (so good little spiders shouldn'tbe going there), but it's also a great way to make me wonder if you'rea would-be comment spammer and pay close attention to every CSpace pageyou hit. CSpace gets sufficiently few pages views at the moment that
Some regular expression performance surprises
Part of the fun of performance tuning is all of the unexpectedthings you find out. Since I spent some of yesterday doing work in the guts of DWiki 's DWikiText toHTML conversion, what I've been finding is some regular expressionperformance surprises.
My big surprise was the relative performance of ' [A-Z] ',' [A-Z][A-Z]* ', and ' [A-Z]+ ' for scanning text where they didn'tmatch (the
An interesting IDE to SATA migration problem
A coworker here ran into a novel problem migrating a system from an IDEdisk to a SATA disk: he ran out of partitions. He had 16 partitions onthe IDE disk, and on Linux you can only have 15 partitions on a SATAdrive. (Fortunately he found a partition he didn't really need.)
On the surface, this limitation is because SATA drives on Linux areconsidered to be SCSI disks , and all SCSI diskscan only have 15 partitions. Of course, that just
Fun with control characters and the web
Yesterday, I broke WanderingThoughts ' syndication feeds (and madethe main page not validate). I did this by accidentally putting a ^Dcharacter into an entry ; oneof the editors I use makes this unfortunately easy to do by accident,and hard to spot.
Neither HTML 4.01 Transitional nor XML (which the Atom syndicationformat is a dialect of) allow control characters (apart from tabs(and linefeeds)). A lot of things are forgiving of crappy HTML, butthings that eat Atom
An advantage of using a non-standard shell
One of the surprising advantages of using a completely non-standardshell (in my case, Byron Rakitzis' Unix version of rc ) is all of the things that are not automatically set up for you by modern systems. As someone I read found out recently ,these days this includes colourized ls listings, colourizedsuper-intelligent vi , and so on.
(I might not mind colourization so much if it paid any attention to whatthe baseline terminal colours were, but I haven't seen that happen yet.
GNU bc for the birthday paradox
So that I don't have to redo this again if I ever need it, the GNU bcmagic for the Birthday paradox stuff isas follows. First, you need to start GNU bc as bc -l to load the mathlibrary, then:
define p(n, m) {return 1 - e( (-(n * (n-1))) / (2*m))}define p32(n, m) {return p(n, 2^The problem with <pre>
Generally,
is a fine thing, and it's become the de-facto way ofwriting any number of 'computer' things; code, Unix sessions, evenequations, as as various WanderingThoughts entries illustrate. Butthere's a problem with it:text doesn't line-wrap .The consequence is that if you write a long
line, the browser willhappily force a line wider than the browser window, making the readereither widen their browser (
Weekly spam summary on February 11th, 2006
Hotmail has been startlingly quiet this week. The numbers:
- One message accepted.
- 24 messages rejected because they came from non-Hotmail emailaddresses.
- 68 messages sent to our spamtraps.
- 23 messages refused because their sender addresses had already hitour spamtraps.
- 10 messages refused due to their origin IP address (two in the SBL,one in the CBL, and then the rest from an assortment of places wepretty much don't talk to any more).
Hotmail may actually be dealing with its
The return of how to get your web spider banned
Today's entrant is
'Uptilt Inc', uptilt.com, aka64.71.164.96/27. Let's see how they did on my scale :Important update : it turns out I was fooled by out of dateWHOIS information and Uptilt Inc isn't involved; for the fullstory, see UptiltUpdate . Remember that when you read thehistorical references to them in the rest of this entry.
- 1,159 requests in one day.
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