Or at least my perception of it has been tainted by a website I am attempting to maintain that has been bolted together using dreamweaver. Note I did not use the word “constructed” or “built”. I prefer bolted because its a mess.
First:
Javascript is everywhere, most of which is bug ridden crap. Its being used to load images and has replaced the humble “link” on half the website. This has meant Google cannot see half the website which from a business point of view is critical. If the search engine cannot see your website then no one will find it!
Second:
Images everywhere. Every time a page was requested over 40 images were requested from the server. This is mad, on what appears to be a plain text website. with no adverts. 25% of the images happened to be used as 1 pixel spacers. This is absolute madness!
MAD MAD MAD BLODDY MAD
Political Bias swayed by Moon
The subject heading of this entry sounds a bit mad dosn’t it. I mean, who the hell would believe that the position of the moon could possibly affect the outcome of an election. It dosn’t, but there are those characters who are basing their election decision on the design of Mr Kerry and Mr Bush’s website. Now isn’t that fscked up. For those that don’t believe me take yourself over to slashdot and have a look around……
Does this mean we are seeing the entrance of the designer website. I can see it now
1. Websites by Gucci
2. Menu’s by Prada
3. Footers by Nike
Or, as a dialogue!
Manger
“Ohhh, love your hit counter”
Webmaster
“Yeah! we got Armani in to do it, worth every penny!”
Who the hell could possibly be that shallow?
Wait, we have Hello magazine, Cosmopolitan ( feminist trash ), FHM and Eurotrash that answers that question, the brain dead.
George W. Bush is an Idiot
As far as I am aware he now prevents foreign users from visiting and viewing his website. I am not making this up. Unless you are on a North American ip range you are forbidden from viewing his website.
This is the most powerful man on the planet who has more affect on foreign governments and their economies than some of the local governments do yet if you ain’t American ( an infidel ) you are not allowed to view his website.
The reason for this dumb ass decision is apparently due to his website getting cracked a few times. Do they really think that banning mass IP ranges is going to stop a real cracker, bollix. Its not hard to crack another PC from inside their borders then launch from there.
All this episode has done is made him and his administration look like people who don’t care about us foreigners. But then, why should he care now he hasn’t really given a damn before.
I hate getting involved in politics but some things are just too dumb to abstain from commenting on them.
Blog Shares
I seen the blog shares website several months ago before I had a blog and wondered what it was all about. I have just noticed that I have an entry on it
Mad. So what makes my blog worth more money then 😉 ?
Lexicon
I have started the process of building the lexicon for my search engine. Its actually surprising how slow the list of words increases. This is partly due to me being quite strict in my definition of what constitutes a word. A normal search engine would need to be able to work with all sorts of arbitrary strings (I am not even considering encodings yet) but due to hardware constraints I have limited myself to Perl’s
m/\w/
if it doesn’t match this it won’t go in the lexicon. I know this is a bit harsh but unfortunately I don’t have several hundred machines in a cluster to play with like the other search engines ;). I think if I get over one million terms in the lexicon I will be doing OK.
New species of Tiger found! Honest!
Tiger Pig.
You learn something new every day 🙂
bOb7waRe b0b7waRe
I got a text message today from someone and the phone number was displayed as
bob7ware or b0b7ware
weird. I can only assume it’s spam.
I have been receiving some spam from some dodgy company with a text message saying that someone close to me fancies me dial this number. Why does our government tolerate this type of nonsense. Its harrassment on a global scale and now that its working its way onto the mobile phone we are not going to be able to get away from the crap.
What is a DSO Exploit
I have noticed that a few people came here to find out information on what exactly a DSO Exploit is so I put together the following. If you need more leave me a comment and I will see what I can do.
Most of you are wondering why spybot is reporting a DSO Exploit. First, there is a bug in spybot at the moment that means it will always report this error. The bug will be fixed in a newer version of spybot.
Don’t panic, your system may be as clean as a whistle.
What is a DSO Exploit.
DSO stands for Data Source Object. So a Data Source Exploit can be very severe when you consider your hard drive is a data source or pretty much anything else for that matter and can be accessed using a method called data binding. A DSO Exploit is where someone maliciously uses data binding techniques to gain access to material they are not meant to access. This was a bug in some versions of Internet Explorer, Outlook Express etc. Note I said old versions, the new versions no longer have this problem and I suggest you upgrade to these to avoid the bug.
This does not mean you have to go and buy the latest microsoft software. Microsoft release service packs that come with the necessary patches required to fix this problem so get the latest service pack for your system and install it and you will be safe from this particular bug, or at least until some smart arse finds another way to crack it
To stop SpyBot reporting the error do the following
Open SpyBot in advanced mode
Select: Settings
Select: Ignore Products
On the “All Products” tab scroll to “DSO Exploit” and check it.
sorted.
Secure Email Obfuscator / Catchpa
I am sick to death of spam! Its a pain in the ass but there does not seem to be much we can do about it.
One thing spammers do is harvest emails from the internet. This is surprisingly easy to do because people want to put their emails online and its very easy to write a spider. This is further compounded by the requirement of some applications that you put your email online ie Movable Type is one although it can be turned off but this then means I would get more spam.
One partial solution would be to store emails as a security image. I wrote this utility to create my own email images as png’s. If other people find it useful then I will extend the functionality of it. I know it is not unbreakable as has been proven by those clever cloggs at Berkeley who have managed to crack the gimpy catchpa.
There are a few other methods to do this but the hardest ones to crack are those that use some form of Catchpa mine is almost there but has a bit to go. Any suggestions welcome.
Using a secure image is another way to make it harder for spammers to collect emails.
Obfuscated Email addressThe image above was created by the email obfuscator tool.
The following email was not produced by me but by BobG. One of the guys who left a comment. I have displayed the image here because I don’t want to allow images to be displayed in the comments otherwise we would give the blog spammers another avenue of attack. Anyway, Bob suggested I add the facility to create color for the background so I suppose I will have to do this over the next few days.
Obfuscated Email addressDefenestration
Throwing someone out a window is not something I often do. In fact I cannot remember the last time I threw someone out/through a window. I imagine if I was to take part in such an event I would be able to remember it taking place. How do I know this? Well, throwing someone through a window is commonly known as defenestration, how could one forget such such a term.
I wonder how many Judges have been regaled about accounts of defenestration. I can see it now, some smart arse lawyer:
Well, your honor my client did not partake in the defenestration itself he was occupied with the carrying of the 3rd party, the defenestration took place after the defendee left the clients hands. My client has no knowledge of what happened to the defendant after the launch but can recount a crashing sound in or around the time of the event.