While checking the logs of The Virtual Bookcase to see if I made any errors in the pages, I noticed another webbot requesting loads of pages, the bot related to Webclipping.com. I looked at their site and noticed that they are no search engine, they just scour the web looking for people having opinions about their paying customers. Which means: those requests by their spider will never result in visitors to The Virtual Bookcase. I only want to allow webbots that result in visitors to the site. So, I wanted to know what to put in robots.txt to stop them.. couldn't find that on their website so I asked via e-mail. The answer is (paraphrased): "We decide on our own which sites to visit.". My answer is to block them.
2006-12-05 (#)
Een popup die zelfs door firefox weet heen te komen (Grrrr! geen nedstat meer gebruiken!) komt met een advertentie voor een sms ringtone dienst met de mooie tekst:De eerste ringtone is gratis. Dit is een abonnementsdienst. De kosten bedragen EUR 3,00 per ringtone (+ sms download kosten), 3 ringtones per week... enge bedragen en ik vraag me af of er nog een verificatieslag achter zit of de eigenaar van het telefoontoestel het er wel mee eens is. Zoiets als dit verstoort natuurlijk enorm het gebruik van de originele site.
2006-11-27 (#)
Ik zat vrijdag op de HCC dagen in de jaarbeurs. Jaarlijkse gewoonte.. hoewel ik dit jaar niet op zaterdag kon wegens andere afspraken. Maar zowiezo is 'de HCC' niet meer wat het geweest is. De games trekken een jong publiek, de hobbyhal trekt een deels jong en deels oud publiek (het middenstuk lijkt ernstig afwezig). Maar de indeling van de hobbyhal was nog meer 'consumentgericht'. Niet iets waar ik echt enthousiast van raak. Je gaat ook naar de HCC voor contact met de gebruikersgroepgenoten en die zijn nu verspreid over de hele hobbyhal zodat ze elk in hun eigen stukje consumentgerichte eiland staan. Als netwerkgroep hadden we ook niet echt een hot item dus hadden we ook niet veel ruimte geclaimed (uiteindelijk was er een tafel, een stoel, een stopcontact en een netwerktouwtje met gratis Windows-virussen).
2006-11-19 (#)
Spam (ongewenste e-mail) komt in vele vormen, soms ook van bedrijven die een 'marketing mogelijkheid' belangrijker vinden dan 'goede Internet gebruiker' zijn. Eerst merkte ik dat de Telegraaf reiskrant elk op hun website ingevulde e-mail adres graag van een 'electronische nieuwsbrief' wilde voorzien zonder enige verificatie of dat adres dat wel wilde (en de 'afmelden' link hield de nieuwsbrief niet tegen). Nu vandaag krijg ik weer een 'nieuwsbrief' van het Kruidvat omdat ik een keer hun fotoservice heb geprobeerd (die trouwens heel slecht beviel: fotos waren verlaagd in resolutie, en je mag in een bak in de winkel een zak fotos uitzoeken), terwijl ik daar ook alle vinkjes had uitgezet en al een keer de 'afmelden' link had gebruikt. Dames en heren 'marketeers', u bevindt zich in het gezelschap van Russische criminelen en Nigeriaanse oplichters. Of dit nu het goede gezelschap is ...
2006-11-07 (#)
Dear Sun: Seeing 'no keyboard attached' as the last console message when I attach a Logitech usb keyboard to a blade is not the right answer.
2006-07-24 (#)
Paul McNamara writes in an article Could that be the wireless police knocking? about a condominium/hotel developer in Tucson, Arizona, US including in the regulations for owning a condo that wireless networks have to be secured. I'm not sure I see why the developer would get involved in this subject unless they also happen to be the ISP (in which case I would consider 'no choice in ISP' a big downside to the whole deal). Wireless security needs to be addressed. In the right place: informing the public about it. Having security by default (like in siemens gigaset access points) and not hiding behind a load of unexplained acronyms in a page of the manual (seen in a recent linksys manual). I really don't think a homeowners association is the place. Although it does fit the profile of the 'homeowners associations sticking their nose into everything' which seem on the rise in the US. They make the homeowners association of the flat I lived in before look very sane (even when they did do dumb things on account of 'saving property value').
2006-07-18 (#)
This building site I visit daily has everything! Including a university. Maybe I should get some pictures. The building I work in is being renovated (not the part I sit in, I just get the noise). The bus-lane in front is being redone, they just finished demolishing the old one.
2006-04-14 (#)
Another problem with a public NTP server: Poul-Henning Kamp runs an NTP server on the Danish internet exchange DIX. He found out D-link routers all hammer on that NTP server (and lots of others) without any prior agreement. Read his Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism and Richard Clayton's write-up on how he researched the problem and found the source in the D-Link equipment. NTP was one of the last services that you could run cooperatively and assume your clients would play nice, now with 'home broadband routers' everywhere out in the world who like to keep the right time (and use sloppy-programmed client software to get that time), this trust in cooperative clients has been broken several times. Yes, this looks a lot like the former case with the University of Wisconsin - Madison and Netgear routers. At least, that case was solved with a good fix and an apology from Netgear.
2006-03-17 (#)
The little annoyances in life: today I wanted to change the fontsize of the context menu in Firefox. I tried, and tried, and tried, and never found it. It has to be done somehow in userChrome.css. I can change the font-size for one item:#context-back: { font-size: 8pt !important; }but I never found the right code for 'all context menu items'. Well, now I just have* { font-size: 8pt !important; }to make the entire Firefox UI a bit smaller on my laptop, but I still haven't found the right css name for just the context menu.
2006-02-14 (#)
From a news.com article about Intel making a deal with skype to limit the functionality of skype on non-Intel x86 hardware asks: Would you avoid buying a PC with an Advanced Micro Devices chip inside because it wouldn't let you host an Internet conference call with six of your friends?. No. I'd buy a PC with AMD inside and drop skype completely.
2005-12-19 (#)
Today I tried to actually install mysql and make it do something. I had a negative opinion about mysql before ("not a real database" and associated things).. and it got even more negative trying to make it actually do something useful. This was mysql 4.1 (default stable version with centos). The help did not match the actual database version (ok, this is more a package problem than a mysql problem probably) and what I think are normal commands for user management aren't supported. Creating users is a side effect of granting them rights (like wtf?) and user@localhost has different rights from user@% (the rest of the hosts, where you can also use other hostsmasks, including those depending on dns.. brrr!). Time to get back to real databases.
2005-12-02 (#)
In August 2003 I already ranted about unhelpful anti virus software replying to the faked From: of virusses. It seems like some anti virus software has slowly learned that this is wrong. One piece of software is still doing a special type of this bad behaviour: Norman Virus Control. Today, more than 2 years later, I still get mail with the announcement: Norman Virus Control heeft de oorspronkelijke e-mail verwijderd omdat deze door het virus is geonfecteerd W32/Sober.AA@mm (in Dutch, wrong grammar is their original). Which translates to something like Norman Virus Control removed the original e-mail because of a virus... And what is the info to me, besides increasing my annoyance at Norman? GRRRRRRR! I will continue to tell anyone who mentions Norman Virus Control that it is BAD software that is VERY ANNOYING and shoud be removed immidiately and replaced by less annoying antivirus software (or upgrade your OS to something that is better by design).
2005-07-26 (#)
Picked up a package through GLS (formerly Nederlandse Pakket Dienst) today. I keep wondering why those package delivery companies have depots somewhere on some outer industrial area. When you're gone during the day (working, for example) you'll have to find their depot (in this case only open during daytime). Hard or impossible to reach by anything else than a car. Oh, I did meet the delivery van the first try, but I could only pay in cash for the package, not using pin. This does make TPG post look reasonable with their post offices with not completely working-person-friendly opening hours. At least the post office is within the same part of town (for most people..).
2005-07-11 (#)
After more than 6 (yes. six.) years, microsoft has fixed the begin bug. A bug with seniority, and a long-standing example of how interested Microsoft was in fixing bugs.
2005-07-11 (#)
The Coffeecam at work is back on-line. The harddisk in the machine died (a 1995 harddisk that had been in use most of the years) last Friday. Re-installing the OS and getting stuff running again (especially the philips webcam driver) was a bit of work as the stock debian is compiled with gcc3 (tsk! the README says to use 2.95), the debian kernel source seemed to be inflicted with some gcc3-isms (tsk! again) and the philips webcam driver is discontinued (I understand his reasons, but the other choice in webcam is 'no webcam at all'). But, I dug up a somewhat compatible kernel, gcc-2.95, waited for the kernel to actually compile (takes quite a while on hardware this old), a binary of the webcam decompressor and now it's back. The one and only Original coffeecam (The Trojan Room Coffee Machine) is now rackmounted at Spiegel online.
2005-07-04 (#)
One of my pet peeves: abusing excel as a database. Just because it looks like a stack of cards doesn't mean it is a good idea to use it as such. Maybe a European version of excel would be nice: rip out all this calculating stuff almost nobody uses, just leave the sheets with nice squares. Found in relation: Rory Blyth cartoon about excel abuse and the official word from microsoft After all, Excel is not a database management system. It is spreadsheet software, and it stores units of information in rows and columns of cells, called worksheets..
2005-05-23 (#)
Een serieus probleem: lokale supermarkten hebben regelmatig geen Grolsch beugels in de winkel. Een zwaar tekort! Diverse supermarkten waar ik langskom getest.
2005-05-19 (#)
Yes, Windows can be educated to accept the onboard clock in UTC. It's just not documented (duh). But Casper Dik has the answer: how to set solaris and windows to have the onboard rtc in UTC.
2005-05-12 (#)
Gadgetry delayed: Ordered Tuesday, sent Tuesday, first delivery attempt Wednesday, second attempt will be Thursday, so I can pick it up (but not too early, and with very 1950s opening hours) at the post office Friday. So much for that 24 hour economy.
2005-05-11 (#)
Bad advertising ideas: You know how there are lots of cars driving around with no sign saying you can't put advertising banners on them? All missed advertising space, and with the daily traffic jams they will be seen. (The same kind of reasoning used by the people invading our e-mail box daily..)
⇐ Newer news items for tag rant Older news items for tag rant ⇒