Author: Peter

Yep, it’s different. I’m finally a WordPress user. The only reason it’s taken this long is that I’ve had the silly idea that I’d have enough time to redo the original Petroglyphs stylesheet… which, as you can see, I’ve given up on for the time being.

There may be glitches as I redo some of the MovableType plugins I was using. Please bear with me.

Clueless or satirical? You decide! (via e-mail from John)

Today’s experiment is to see which search engines follow URIs found in the cite attribute of the <q/> and <blockquote/> elements. Like the last experiment, it’s not exhaustive and hardly scientific; this is just to satisfy my own curiosity. There’s a slight oddity that I’ll point out: I insert the cite and title attributes on <blockquote/> elements into the DOM dynamically through the use of Javascript. To my knowledge no search engines attempt to process scripts of any sort so this shouldn’t affect the results.

The data:

This page is part one of a search engine experiment.

This page is part two of a search engine experiment.

To see the results, search for the page titles as phrases in your favourite search engine: there are no hits for them at this point and I believe they’ll remain unique for some time to come.

Another similar experiment might be to see if the text in the title attribute of any element that supports it is indexed by any engine.

Music to experiment by: And The Stars Keep On Shining, from Roam by Lisa Patterson.

I hear those guys at Google are pretty smart, and gots lots of computers. I’m betting they could… establish a common protocol where anything wrapped in a certain tag/id/class (like the whole list of comments) would have no URL’s indexed by the Googlebot. [emphasis mine]

Hmm, that sounds familiar. Why hasn’t some enterprising Googler made use of her/his 20% time to do something like this? The idea’s been around for a while now, not only, and not first, in my post–in fact, the second quote is from GoogleGuy. Seems doubly puzzling given that in a matter of months, working on my own, [one is] able to go from a lunch table conversation to launching a new service.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Lycos and Google were in cahoots. From my webserver logs yesterday:

209.202.221.139 - - [10/Dec/2004:02:41:35 -0800] "HEAD /LenniFan/Discography/Audio/tensongslive/Perhaps%20Perhaps%20Perhaps.mp3 HTTP/1.0" 200 0 "-" "Lycos-News-Xml-Fetcher"
66.249.66.100 - - [10/Dec/2004:02:41:38 -0800] "GET /LenniFan/Discography/Audio/tensongslive/Perhaps%20Perhaps%20Perhaps.mp3 HTTP/1.1" 200 91810 "-" "Mediapartners-Google/2.1"
66.249.66.100 - - [10/Dec/2004:02:41:39 -0800] "GET /LenniFan/Discography/Audio/tensongslive/Perhaps%20Perhaps%20Perhaps.mp3 HTTP/1.1" 200 491649 "-" "Mediapartners-Google/2.1"
61.11.93.167 - - [10/Dec/2004:02:41:52 -0800] "GET /LenniFan/Discography/Audio/tensongslive/Perhaps%20Perhaps%20Perhaps.mp3 HTTP/1.1" 200 445050 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"

And a little later:

209.202.221.139 - - [10/Dec/2004:10:00:15 -0800] "HEAD /LenniFan/Discography/Audio/tensongslive/La%20Chanson%20Triste.mp3 HTTP/1.0" 200 0 "-" "Lycos-News-Xml-Fetcher"
66.249.66.100 - - [10/Dec/2004:10:00:23 -0800] "GET /LenniFan/Discography/Audio/tensongslive/La%20Chanson%20Triste.mp3 HTTP/1.1" 200 2568777 "-" "Mediapartners-Google/2.1"
195.68.12.162 - - [10/Dec/2004:10:00:43 -0800] "GET /LenniFan/Discography/Audio/tensongslive/La%20Chanson%20Triste.mp3 HTTP/1.0" 200 623058 "-" "NSPlayer/8.0.0.4487"

Strangest of all is that every time they appear, those paired hits are followed closely by a single request from an unrelated IP address using a different browser. I’m certain that they’re related, because there are no surrounding page hits and those files aren’t something that one would just stumble upon.

This has been going on for at least a week, with each crawler retrieving only MP3 files. If nothing else, Lycos’s so-called “News XML Fetcher” is way out of its league.

God, I’m just so tired of the Captain… all the Make it so this and Make it so that, I’m just about ready to make him so….

Oh. Umm… never mind.

When I got my Macintosh in July, I half expected that it would become my primary workstation, as I’d seen detailed by a number of (often surprised!) bloggers like Tim Bray and James Duncan Davidson. Despite my initial bad experience, once it resolved itself I was gung-ho to use OS X–I even impressed myself by fixing a problem to which even Google couldn’t find a solution.

The more I used the Mac over the next several days, though, the more I found myself wanting… something. I’m still not sure exactly what it was–I tried all of the built-in applications and liked features of them, particularly Mail’s ability to combine IMAP accounts–but I found myself using the X server and terminal window to connect to my Linux box more and more often. (It didn’t help that Mac’s X server doesn’t antialias fonts.) Finally I gave up: I reconnected the monitor to the Linux host and Switched back.

I still use the Mac from time to time when I want to check websites in Safari and IE5/Mac, but mostly it’s just a CD ripper for my iPod. It’s not even as good at that as my Linux machine: the iPod seems to choke on some iTunes-generated MP3s, even with error correction enabled and having the encoded files “optimized for Velocity Engine”, but I haven’t had a hiccup playing back the files I ripped and encoded in Linux.

One final irony–much to John’s chagrin–is that because I don’t use the Mac as my desktop, my primary means of using its UI is through a virtual display running on X under GNOME. It’s just easier that way.