Monthly Archives: July 2003

BlogShares tip

Ha! almost a day gone without updates! It’s busy here at work. I picked up my tickets and I’m heading back to Chicago on Saturday!
Anyway, for all your BlogShares users, here’s a tip I’ve noticed other players doing.
Buy all the stock of a blog. If you like, buy the last 250 in more than 1 step. That increases the price of the blog slightly.
When it comes to selling time, sell off 44 shares first and you’ll see the stock price rise about $1. Now sell the rest of your shares in that blog!

Linux & POS

Owen Kelly just called from a POS show here in Cork. They suffered a power cut for a few minutes.
As the lights and machines came on again Owen spotted some weighing scales booting up. At closer inspection he noticed Linux boot messages and mentions of Red Hat scrolling up the small screen!
When booted, the scales have a touch screen interface and also display movies of food being cooked. I presume the interface allows the user to select the food being weighed, which dictates the movie shown.
Internet on your toaster anyone? Nah, that’s old news! Movies on your weighing scales is in now!

I'd love to test Mozilla Thunderbird except..

I’d love to give Thunderbird a spin for a few days but there’s a problem. It doesn’t support the Maildir format!
Currently I’m very happy with Kmail and lots of my mail folders are in Maildir format. I’ve over 1GB of mail (yes Mark, I still keep almost all my mail!) so having an easy way of exporting it to another format is important.
There is a feature request in the Mozilla bug database but it hasn’t seen any developer attention in a few months. 🙁
I could always start from scratch again with Thunderbird. Copy over the contents of my inbox and archive the really old mail in a tar ball. hmm. Nah, the last time I moved mail clients it was to move from the Netscape 4.7 client (used for years) to Kmail. I don’t know that there’s as much of a reason to move from Kmail now. (Well, besides the fact that I don’t use any other KDE application!)
Before you think, “He’s going to write a script to convert those formats!” No, I have too many plenty of other ways to scratch an itch!
I’ll let this one up to someone else.

teergrubing referrer spammers

Justin Mason posted a message to the ILUG complaining about referer spam on his blog. I replied with a few ideas, and hopefully we’ll get more ideas on that thread. Unfortunately I forgot to include a link to a useful feedster search on the matter but JM will see it here I’m sure.

  1. Load up the referering page. If it doesn’t load then ignore the referer (removes private pages on intranets). Check the page for a link to your site, and in particular, checl for the url the refering ‘browser’ visited. If it’s not there, then ignore the referer.
  2. Setup a moderation system and manually filter the referers.
  3. Only print a referer after they’ve refered more than a couple of visitors. (Only mildly effective however.)
  4. Dave Winer at Userland added a robots.txt to his referer log page. It stops
    Google indexing that page. He then notified the world of what he did, and hopefully the spammers got the message.