crazed monkey

This sounds fun. Joe Gregorio of Bitworking has issued a Pascal String Challenge which requests weblog entries of precisely 255 characters. Those who programmed in Borland Pascal will remember that strings could be no larger than 255 characters in size.

Posted on May 5th, 2004 in computers, internet - No Comments »

An online poll recently appeared on The Globe And Mail website asking the question “Do you vote in on-line polls?”. The best part is that some people chose the “no” option.

Posted on November 14th, 2003 in computers, internet - No Comments »

I grow weary of constantly reloading sites which lack RSS feeds to determine whether they contain new content. If I was still using Syndirella as my news reader I would be able configure those sites as web feeds. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I switched to SharpReader as it allows for grouping of feeds and contains a number of other neat features which Syndirella does not have. To solve my problems, I am now hosting RSS feeds for a few external sites until they are able to get their own.

I have chosen to start with two weblogs which are focussing on the Toronto election. They are:

• Andrew Spicer’s weblog (RSS feed)
• Rick McGinnis’ Last Chance City (RSS feed)

The feeds are updated every three hours, are not guaranteed to validate (they almost certainly do not) and are created by a script based on one written by Sam Ruby. These feeds are only temporary, available until the content authors create their own. They may disappear at any time, so if you use them be sure to nag the content authors into creating their own feeds.

More feeds to come.

Posted on November 3rd, 2003 in computers, internet - No Comments »

Here’s another annoying robot to add to Mark’s list of robots which should be told to go to hell: NaverRobot. This robot ignores the Robot Exclusion Standard and rudely downloaded 200 pages in five minutes. It’s banned.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} NaverRobot
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Posted on July 25th, 2003 in computers, internet - No Comments »

Feedster:

If you’d like to use an image you find with Feedster Images, you should remember that it is considered bad blogging form to embed images from other sites in your own blog, thus using their bandwidth for your blog. Check with the author of the blog to see if its [sic] ok and then copy the image to your server if that’s ok.

I wholeheartedly agree. However, Feedster does not seem to follow its own advice, particularly on its page of images included in current weblog posts. (I found this out after I started to receive hits for the image contained in my Becel Ride for Heart post.) The obvious and easy thing to do would be to cache resized copies of the images being displayed. Instead, your browser is forced to download the original image from each weblog, which is then resized to fit the thumbnails. As a result of this disgusting display of hypocrisy, I am blocking all images which have Feedster as their referrer.

Posted on May 27th, 2003 in computers, internet - No Comments »