Technology

This guy popped up in my referer logs the other day, and it turns out that he actually links back to an old post of mine. I’ve changed my opinion a bit since then, after I realized that it’s fairly trivial to write a script that validates referers. All need to you do is grab the page listed as a referer and check to see if it really contains a link back to your site. It’s only a first level technique — there are ways around it — but it would certainly catch what Joel is doing. Thus, while Joel says there’s nothing that can be done about his technique… he’s wrong. Admittedly, I haven’t integrated my script with my general purpose log analysis scripts but in the cases where I have noticed referer spam I just update my config file and tell the scripts to ignore those referers. I stuck my script in after the cut. It runs over an active log file, tosses out referers it’s seen before, validates new referers as per the technique above, and emails me a note when it sees a valid new referer. It will not work out of the box on your server, but it should be kind of clear what needs to be updated if you’re a perl coder. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

So I’ve given the new Safari beta a quick test-drive. It still doesn’t support title attribute tooltips. On the other hand, the nicetitle trick looks gorgeous now, so that’s something. My MT bookmarklet still needs the tweak found way down in the comments of this post. Basically, you chop out everything before “void(window.open” and you’re good to go. Dunno about Blogger bookmarklets but I bet the same kind of approach would work. Some sites look like shit. I don’t remember Tacitus looking this bad on earlier versions of Safari. ...

There’s a new Safari beta out. I won’t be able to try it out until late tonight, but it includes tabbed browsing and autofill for forms. I’ve been using Camino lately because Safari was crashing on me a lot, but Camino’s pop-up blocking happens to block pop-ups on one’s bookmark bar. This includes the Movable Type bookmarklet. Total pain. Hopefully this Safari build will be a little less crashy. Hopefully the various bugfixes mentioned by Dave Hyatt are included, too. I am particularly hot for the cookie fix and I’m crossing my fingers for the title attribute fix.

serious vulnerability present. all doomed. over. is I think my favorite 4/1 posting of the day. Possibly the best of all time. The brilliance of it is that it’s completely accurate. A distributed denial of service condition is present in the election system in many polypartisan democratic countries. A group of determined but unskilled and not equipped low-income individuals, usually between 0.05% and 2% of overall population of the country, can cause serious disruptions or even a complete downfall of the democratic system and its institutions, and wreak havoc and destruction without using any force. ...

If you’re using Brad Choate’s Textile plugin for Movable Type, you’ve no doubt noticed it’s a pain to edit the pre-formatted tag that’s generated by your MT bookmarklet. And if you haven’t, well, I have. Here’s how to patch your MT installation to make it all pretty and Textile-like. Edit the file lib/MT/App/CMS.pm in your MT installation Go to line 631, which should read: $param{text} = sprintf qq(<a title="%s" href="%s">%s</a>\n\n%s), Replace that line with: $param{text} = sprintf qq("%s":%s\n\n%s), ...

CafePress wants to know what size books you want (original). They discuss the sizes they’re considering, and it looks to me like the consensus will settle in around the right area. I continue to be excited about all this. There is much discussion elsewhere on the message board about the need for CafePress to support Word documents. Five years from now, there are going to be countless CafePress printed volumes of badly formatted poetry at yard sales across American. I hope we’re ready for that as a nation.

Danger has released a developer SDK (original) for the Sidekick, with some interesting restrictions. Namely, user-developed applications can’t be transmitted to the Sidekick over the air unless they’ve been approved by both Danger and (at present) T-Mobile. Let the recrimination phase begin! I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it’s hard to deny that part of the Palm’s success was the open SDK and the resulting flood of applications. I want to play IF on my Sidekick… oh. OK (original), then. (I swear I did not find that link before I chose my sample desired application.) Still, you get the point. ...

The good people at CafePress have finally added data CDs and audio CDs to their product list. You have to send in a master, but they’re working on allowing you to upload MP3s instead. CafePress stores will include audio samples for audio CDs, and the packaging is full jewel cases with inserts. I can’t tell if CafePress’s CDs are commercial grade or CD-Rs. The base price for CDs is $4.95, and shipping and handling is $5 for the first item — so pricing is pretty competitive. You could get slightly better prices going with a specialized CD fulfillment house, but the interfaces there are not as slick. ...

The EBay auction I blogged about earlier turns out to be blocked for a bunch of people — including myself, when I check it from home. EBay has voluntarily blocked German IP addresses from accessing auctions of Nazi memorabilia. Now, the item in question is an Enigma machine, which is not exactly prime fetish material, but I guess it counts under German law. It’s interesting how wide EBay’s net is, though. I’m in Worldcom IP space at home — I wonder if EBay blocks all of Worldcom? Or if not, why the chunk of IP space I’m in?

So I wonder. I’m on some mailing lists which get a fair amount of noise mixed in with the signal. But it’s hard to tell whether a given piece of mail is gonna be signal or noise before I open it. You can’t tell by person — most people say something intelligent at least some of the time. Besides, I really hate categorically killfileing anyone. I wonder if you couldn’t use spamprobe as an effective mailing list filter? ...