The latest works – optical illusions

Don’t look at this page if you tend to get migrane as some of the images here will probably set off a major headache if you look at them too long! These optical illusions look great, and I wonder why all those demo coders spent so long doing mandelbrots and full-screen anims. They could have simply used an optical illusion and let the viewers eyes do the work!

Book Recommendations

Here’s a few of the books I’ve read over the past Summer. These are “un-put-downable” and I stayed up many a late night reading for as long as possible.

  • High Society by Ben Elton. This was the first book I read by Ben Elton. It’s about the drug society in the UK. Great read, and terrible what happens to some people affected by drugs.
  • Emporer – The Gates of Rome by Conn Iggulden. Just glancing over the reviews on Amazon this book is controversial! It might not be 100% historically accurate but the author states that at the end of the book. Here’s a video interview with the author. I haven’t looked at it yet.
  • Life Of Pi by Yann Martel. I was not expecting the story that unfolded when I started reading this. This book was recommended by a friend and and I’m passing on the same recommendation!
  • Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain. I’m not sure why I picked up this book in Waterstones last year but I’m glad I did. I don’t usually read non-fiction or biographies but this is a great read! I just wish I had called to the restaurant he works in now in New York, but we didn’t have the time.

Sneaky, sneaky ..

While investigating errors in my php_errors log file yesterday I stumbled across someone leaching data from one of our sites. I blocked him with a .htaccess entry but by the time I left work yesterday they hadn’t noticed that their application wasn’t working.
I came into work this morning and saw that the requests had stopped. Good! Then I grepped for libwww-perl and was disappointed to see requests going to our main server for the same data. A .htaccess file stopped that too but it’s tiresome.
I should check referers but that’s not guaranteed to work and that method actually bit us hard a few years back when a partner couldn’t access data from their site. 🙁
Are there any apps out there for detecting this sort of thing from the log files? I’m guessing that a statistical analysis of the logs would show up lots of the same or similar requests over a short period and/or repeated on a regular basis.
Anyway, thank you 66.33.193.57 for adding one more job to my list of things to do. I’ve already mailed abuse at your ISP. They may be in touch soon.