Grey Panthers Savannah

Category: web

  • Couple of thoughts about web crawling

    Couple of thoughts about web crawling

    These days crawling the web is becoming more and more difficult with websites trying to ensure that “only humans” access them. While there are some good arguments in favour of these efforts, I also have some good arguments: Anyway, here are some tips to help out in creating a crawler:

  • On the hopelessness of pulling content from the interwebs

    In the last couple of weeks I had at least two cases where I saw a (provocative) post come up in my feedreader, click trough to read the entire piece (BTW, partial feeds just suck!), just to find that the owner removed the post. The first was from the DynDNS blog named “Open Dialogue” (apparently…

  • Unshortifying Cisco “Go” links

    Inspired by a post on the PacketLife.net blog – Cisco "Go" links reference in the wiki – I tried to mine the short links to come up with the “definitive” list, but after running it for a couple of days, it only managed to find 473 links, compared to the 4720 Google estimates it has…

  • Twitter hacked

    It had to happen, didn’t it? I’ve fired up Pidgin with the microblog-purple plugin, only to get an “invalid certificate” error for twitter. I’ve quickly became nervous, since a quick digging indicated that I was getting the wrong IP address for the domain twitter.com. My first thought was: “I’ve been compromised”. After quickly verifying my…

  • One more thing…

    So, if I started ranting on Microsoft, here is one more thing: you should never ever use Microsoft servers if you want to scale. The reasons is simple: currently the best scaling method is horizontal (ie. buy loads of cheap hardware and distribute the load between them). Using Microsoft server software would mean that for…

  • SMOG button removed!

    Almost a year ago I added a SMOG button to each blogpost, which (in a more or less serious manner) evaluated the “reading level” needed to understand the blogpost. However, today the site used for this service came up with a warning from Google saying that it might be malicious. I’ve looked into it, and…

  • A new security provider

    I found out about Dasient via the presentation they did at Google (which you can see embedded below). Their angle seems to be (although this probably will change – them being a young company) that: we check your rating at Google / McAfee / Symantec and if they say that you are bad, we will…

  • FORA.tv

    I discovered FORA.tv just recently, but I’m already a huge fan. If you like TV channels like Discovery or National Geographic, you will certainly find something of interest here. What’s great: it’s free with very little and unobtrusive advertisement the programs are professionally recorded / postprocessed (no volume-to-low-to-hear problems here) link to individual parts of…

  • wpdesigner.com review

    wpdesigner.com is an other blog / resource targeted at WordPress users. It has the usual categories, like webhosting, themes, tips, tutorials and so on. I especially liked the “How to Get Help for WordPress Problems” section, mainly because it starts with “Search Before You Ask” (but the other tips it gives are also good). The…

  • Virtually Hosted SSL – almost there

    Virtual hosting (hosting multiple sites on the same IP address) became possible with HTTP/1.1 because it declares the “Host” header, which specifies which one of the (possibly) multiple sites hosted on the same IP address you would like to reach (a small side-effect is that when you use the IP address of a site, you…