Wouldn’t it be more appropriate if Eric Meyer’s Complex Spiral Consulting were called Complex Spiral Services?
Year: 2004
Local boy makes good
It’s always interesting to hear about (or from!) people you know but have lost touch with.
The beauty of the synchrotron is the fact that it’s not a specialized tool anymore,said Ian Coulthard, a staff scientist at the facility who moved to Saskatchewan from Ontario.
Ian was one of the long-time members of my Reach for the Top team in high school, and along with Murray (now a priest), Jason (now a doctor) and several others was a powerhouse in the competitive trivia game. His specialties were science, as you might guess from the quote above, and… British royalty (!).
(For those of you who are only familiar with the current wannabe-hip RFTT, it used to be a lot better. I should know: I have the tapes.)
Anyway, it was good to hear Ian’s voice again tonight via the national airwaves. It’s been too long….
Greatness thrust upon them
Nominally via Tim Bray (it’s the next article down from the one he links to):
In your heart, you know we have to get Don Cherry elected as The Greatest Canadian…. It would annoy everyone worth annoying in this country.
I’ve never been a fan of Cherry’s, but Cosh points out some of his accomplishments that are often glossed over. Do they make him the greatest Canadian ever? Hardly… but he’s not as bad as he gets the rap for being, either.
The collective thoughts of the West Wing cast
Oh, God, I’m sorry, am I still here?
Super-Size This!
Reported by my parents this afternoon (emphasis mine):
While I was waiting to pay at Wal-mart the clerks were discussing the movie Super-Size Me. They had just taken it off the shelves. Wal-mart (or McDonald’s) had ordered it off the shelves because of the relationship with McDonald’s.
I received an interesting e-mail yesterday. It’s a good thing I check my spam folder from time to time.
Dead can’t dance
On John‘s recommendation I saw Shaun of the Dead last night. What a silly, funny, gory movie… loved it!
Required elements
all you really need in this world is
a glue gun, a bass guitar and a few good punches.
1969-2004
Les Expos sont morts. Vive les Expos!
Bad bots (what you gonna do?)
(Written a month ago, but not posted until now due to lack of editing. I figure if it’s public I’ll be shamed into updating it.)
The following list is gathered from observations of two somewhat-related events. The first event is that I inadvertently sent out Trackback pings from a local copy of my weblog, which set the blogbots all a-twitter; when I realized what I’d done, I began to block access to the URLs in question with HTTP status code 410 (Gone). The second event is an examination of my access logs, in which I discovered (and blocked, generally with code 403) spambots and crawlers that I felt were poorly-behaved.
Each criterion for badness is a violation of an element in Mark Pilgrim’s aggregator behaviour specification. I’ve interpreted SHOULD as MUST, as I’m unaware of any good reason for these agents to not follow the suggestion. This isn’t a complete list of user-agents or errors, it just lists the most common ones I’ve seen. Additions and updates are welcome.
| User-Agent | Flails? | Ignores 403? | Ignores 404? | Ignores 410? | Referrer spam? | Unconditional retrieval? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Googlebot/2.1 | yes | ? | yes | ? | no | yes | |
| Technoratibot/0.6 | no | ? | ? | ? | yes | no | |
| Popdexter/1.0 | yes | ? | ? | ? | yes | yes | Note: unthrottled spider, no robots.txt; adds / to URLs without extension |
| PubSub.com RSS reader | no | ? | no | ? | 403 and 410 processing fixed; if no more issues, will move to good bots list | ||
| Syndic8/1.0 | no | yes | ? | yes | no | no | ignores 301 |
| Feedster Crawler/1.0 | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no | ignores 301 |
| BlogPulse (ISSpider-3.0) | yes | ||||||
| BlogLines/2.0 | ignores 301 | ||||||
| Yahoo! Slurp | ignores 301 | ||||||
| kinjabot beta2 | |||||||
| fastbuzz.com | yes | ||||||
| Slower, Friendlier Spiders (BlogShares V1.36) | ignores 301 | ||||||
| FeedRover 1.0; Headlines Archive | yes | ||||||
| Twisted PageGetter | yes | ||||||
| everyfeed-spider/1.0 | no | ? | ? | yes | yes | ||
| IconSurf/2.0 | yes (by design!) | yes | ? | ? | yes | ? | /favicon.ico is stupid in the first place |
Good bots
Giving credit where it’s due, here are the bots (and aggregators) that have been well-behaved so far:
- NewsMonster
- nntprss/0.4-beta-6
- SharpReader/0.9.5.1