Here comes the little toy bot from UMBC that's trying to figure out the semantic web and sure enough, my anti-semantic site booted the little fucker.
Here's the 411:
130.85.34.29 [eb2.cs.UMBC.EDU.] "Swooglebot/2.0. (+http://swoogle.umbc.edu/swooglebot.html)"Since my site is anti-semantic, does that make me an anti-semantite?
OK, everyone knows I'm a big Nutch fan.
Everyone should also know the above statement is sarcasm laid on thick like peanut butter.
Anyway, back to the topic...
I saw this supposedly Nutch user agent in my logs today which is pretty slimy claiming to be MSIE, Opera, and Nutch all in the same UA.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en) Opera 8.01/Nutch-0.9 (http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/about.html; http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/bot.html; mail@dev.null)Whoever thought that was clever enough to slide under my radar was wrong as that word Nutch set off alarms and tossed your crawl into the online equivalent of the pit of despair.
If you missed this news item it bears repeating just because it's a cautionary tale about how some people are real lowlife scumbags.
Someone posted an ad on Craigslist for a location in Tacoma telling everyone to "Please help yourself to anything on the property." and they took it, literally took everything including the front door and the kitchen sink.
Who in the hell takes anything posted on Craigslist that seriously?
Obviously common sense flew out the window when the first person on the scene encountered a locked building and had to remedy that situation before they could start helping themselves to everything else, so I assume the door was the first to go.
Wonder what could happen if someone posted something like this for a local WalMart for the "2am giveaway, everything you can carry in 1 trip you can have!". Would people be that stupid to think WalMart was endorsing looting their own stores?
After what happened with the LA riots, anything is possible.
It's just another reason to weep for the future.
Don't know what porn spammers hope to gain from this, but they're adding a parameter to an actual URL on my site and cloaking this information to Google.
You may see requests like this in your log file:
http://www.domain.com/mypage.html?ref=spammerdomain.com
Today my content tracking bugs led me to something in the worldwebwide.net which originated from LookSmart.
The IP address where the data was originally crawled from:60.88.242.64 -> sv-crawlfw4.looksmart.com
This is nothing new as LookSmart seems to be a scraping target as I've already reported same thing happening with GoodBidWords.com containing scraped LookSmart listings.
Was looking over my log stats today for my site (not this blog) it was surprising to see Microsoft's Livebot crawling very aggressively, possibly taking more pages and returning faster then Googlebot this month. I'll give Livebot this much, the volume of crawling is pretty impressive compared to what it used to be so it looks like Microsoft is in this horse race to win and not just play 3rd fiddle.
Then of course we have our pals over at Ask slowly poking around my site. If Yahoo's Slurp is taking a nap this month, Ask must be in a coma or something. Slow as a snail and information seems to take forever to show up on their site. Maybe they cater to the dial-up crowd.
Then good old Gigabot seems to be crawling from a new bank of IPs and I don't even care.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see how quickly some of my new site changes show up in Live because crawling that fast and not updating as quickly would be silly!
Finally got around to upgrading to the new Blogger layout today and even managed to organize some of the posts with labels just to see how that works. The archive section is much easier to navigate and I think people will find this a whole bunch easier to use once I'm finished with upgrading.
Now to find a nice stretch template I like that fills my full 1680 x 1050 display and doesn't look like shit on the laptop's 1024 display!
Sometimes I just have to take a little time out to make some freak'n money people. I'm not ignoring you, I'm still here, but there are days when I get so focused on doing actual work that the rants go unpublished. Besides, not all of us have the stamina to read such long winded minutia, let alone the time to write it.
Additionally, I'm getting prepared to go out and rub elbows with people that have venture cash tonight and see if there's any interest in my little project to take back control of the web. If I don't come back with a bunch of biz cards from tonight's little party just shoot me.
A few topics on my mind:
Local search solutions and the contextual ads that appear with those searches have some wrong thinking about how they geotarget ads to the customer.
For instance, I don't live in Alabama but I'm trying to help someone I know locate a service in Alabama, such as a plumber. Go to Google and search for an "alabama plumber" and you get the proper results and appropriate ads displayed.
Now let's trying clicking on one of those ads in Google that takes you to some specialized local service which claims it's taking me to "alabama.whatever.com" on their site.
Do I get listings for Alabama related sites?
Hell No!
The local site picks up on the keyword plumber but shows me a page geotargeted to MY IP, not what I was actually searching.
Let's assume for a second that Alabama wasn't enough information, so I changed the query in Google to "Birmingham, Alabama plumber" and clicked through and got the same stupid results from the local site pointing me back to my local area.
What's worse is that Google AdSense will show you local advertisements when you're clearly on a page researching another location. In all likelihood you would NOT click ads for your local area when it's painfully obvious, even to dense people, that it's not what you're interested in finding. Google can't claim they don't know you were interested, or it's too complicated to geotarget in that way, because Google was the search engine that found that page in the first place and passed the query information to the page you clicked which contains AdSense that reads the referrer!
Yet, here you are looking for Alabama things, on a page all about Alabama, with a referrer and query passed by Google about an Alabama search, and there's AdSense showing ads about Nevada, California and the SF Bay Area.
HELLO?
Anyone can plainly see that THOSE ADS AREN'T RELEVANT to the topic!
Obviously the local search services have a way to go and Google is just losing money with inappropriate ads on those sites.
They better get it together on local sites before someone smarter steps in and fills the gaps.
Don't know how many people out there that read this blog are running sites with AdSense, but I posted a thread on WebmasterWorld that may be of interest.
Go read Unlock the limits of your AdSense earnings potential and you can see that I shared quite a few things you might find useful.
Here's a random thought of the day to ponder.
Assuming you were cloned, if you have sex with your clone is it incest or merely masturbation?
I've been watching my scraped content in all the search engines and just recently most of the junk sites vaporized from Yahoo and MSN yet Google is still knee deep in scraper results for my sites. Obviously this is nothing scientific yet as this is just a casual observation, but Google is getting a little butt kicking in the cleanliness of content department from where I'm sitting.
Additionally, Google is still crawling proxy sites that cloak lists of links to them like a kid in a candy store, they just love those cloaked links, so nobody seems to be interested in fixing that problem.
Ever have a week or two when you just say "fuck it" to everything?
So the blog goes unpublished for days, emails piling up unopened, voice mail flashing non-stop...
Took a mental health day and went to play some no-limit Texas Hold'em and came away with some winnings, so that was a bright spot. Had a few lunches out with a friend and pounded a few pints as well which is always good for what ails you.
Then an old friend popped into town the other day to interview for Google of all things. Ah yes, there's 2 nights of dragging my ass out to dinner. Oh the horror of it all, having to pull myself off the sofa and get dressed and engage in small talk 2 nights in a row.
What could happen to put the funk back on after snapping out of it?
You guessed it, the kid calls and she's blown her engine and of course needs Daddy to pay to get her a new engine or a new car.
Also, what should've been a bright spot was the new decked out Vista laptop which of course doesn't run all of our software and we're thinking about shoving it up Costco's ass for a refund.
Fuck.
Well, despite my best efforts to lay on the sofa all day again today basking in the glow of the plasma TV I managed to clean off my desk, do some web work and even post a blog entry.
Perhaps it's issues with big oppressive corporations trying to tell people how to run their businesses that makes it harder and harder to get off the sofa, who knows.
Current Mood: the world can kiss my ass
You know they're stupid, I know they're stupid, so why don't THEY know they're stupid?
I was just going through my Inbox today reading more stupid emails, some are even replies to auto-responders which told them exactly what to do, yet they ask again.
My first thought was to install yet another auto-responder to automatically answer replies to the first auto-responder that would clarify the situation.
Dear Customer,Not that I would actually send such an email, but god knows there are days I really truly want to send that.
If you replied to the previous email you're stupid.
The email was written at a 3rd grade level so even a school child could follow the instructions. If you don't have any children look outside and there's probably a child , age 8 or above, playing ball in the vicinity that can help you out with your current problem.
Please read the simple instructions and just click the damn link in the previous email.
You did see that link, right?
It's not hard, click the damn link.
Regards,
Customer Support
Not that I pretend to know what in the hell is going on at MyBlogLog with all the security holes being posted, but it looks like they shot the messanger and banned ShoeMoney.
You people at MyBlogLog are out of your fucking minds.
You don't ban people that tell you where your flaws are, you fire all the incompetent programmers that keep making the flaws and thank the customers that use your service for pointing out serious issues before they become a crisis.
I was considering using MyBlogLog but now that I know it's MyFlawedBlogLog with a big chip on their shoulder I think I'll just pass on this bullshit.
Many of you know I run a directory site and may be interested in some tips I posted on scrubbing links over at WebmasterWorld in their Directory forum titled "Directory Listing Hijack Detection". It's a bit off topic from my normal bot busting posts, so there isn't much of an audience for it here, but for anyone interested in the topic you may pick up a few tidbits from things I've been doing.
Somehow, at the end of the day, busting stealth bots and hunting links hijacked by domain parks doesn't feel all that different as they're both trying to slide in under the radar to make a profit without being noticed.
Some of my "scraped" content kept showing up in places not expressly authorized to have my content. This was making me a little batty as I'm pretty sure the bot blocker wasn't letting these people through, that my code didn't have holes like swiss cheese, then I figured it out. Finally there was a clue embedded in some of the data, as it included one of my tracking bugs, and it turns out the data originated from Gigablast.
Knowing it came from Gigablast, I looked up Gigablast's list of partners and VOILA! there was the site in question listed in their partner list.
Now comes the dilemma of what to do about this situation as I'm not happy with a couple of their partners and by allowing Gigablast, I'm permitting the partners access by default.
Worse yet, Google indexes the Gigablast data that's present in their partner sites, like Eurekster, so here you are competing with your own content in Google yet again via the Gigablast connection.
Since I really don't get any noticeable traffic from Gigablast or any of their partners, maybe it's time to cut the umbilical cord just to keep my own information from being used against me to rank their partner sites in Google.
Looks like we need some robots.txt commands that we can use to tell search engines like Gigablast it's OK to index, but not share with Snap for instance.
Maybe implement something like this in robots.txt for search engine partner control:
User-agent: GigabotIt's feels almost as bad, if not worse, than battling a scraper but this time I let this one in the front door with my blessings.
ShareDeny: SNAP
ShareDeny: Eurekster
This is an open letter to all the incompetent drivers out there on the roads of the world.
You know who you are and we know who you are too, which is why we're honking our horns at you, flashing our lights at you, and most likely slamming on our brakes to avoid your masterful maneuvers when you're showing off your true talents on the road.
Lanes, pick one and stick to it.
Follow those little dots and dashes on the road and stay between a pair of them, it's not that complicated. When making a 2 lane turn into a 2 lane road, stay in the lane you started in unless you want to explain your incompetence to the mechanic, insurance company and the Dept. of Motor Vehicles.
Even if a road jogs at a funny angle as you cross an intersection, and the markings aren't too clear, it's not rocket science. If you're on the far left or right in a 3 lane road, stay to the far left or right. If you're in the middle lane it can't be that complicated to figure out where the middle is in the road across the intersection but sure as shit, 9 times out of 10, you end up in the far right lane with people honking (often me) and screeching brakes to avoid your dumb ass.
Aren't the cars in the lanes next to you any clue that it's unsafe to change lanes at this time?
Turning Signals or Blinkers, Use It or Lose A Fender.
It's that little lever on the side of the steering wheel that you either never learned how to use or it's too inconvenient to use because your fucking cell phone is currently in that hand. I'm not a mind reader, and even if I have a clue what you're about to do, I'm going to completely ignore it because you're too stupid to expressly tell me. Maybe I'll even speed up just to make sure I'm in the way and completely justified for blasting my horn and scaring the shit out of you which will probably cause you to then over steer to avoid me and careen into a bus load of kids on the other side. Signal your turn or die, your choice.
Turning Lanes, Get Out NOW!
If you're in a right or left exit only or turn only lane, can you explain why in the hell you wait until you get up to the end of the lane, often at a stop sign, before you decide to change lanes?
Never mind the long line of cars behind you now waiting since you fucked up their lane.
Never mind the long line of cars in the lane next to you because you're fucking up their lane as well. Most often you veer into that lane as you try to change lanes, without a turning signal (see Turning Signals or Blinkers above) and then panicked and stopped so now they can't get around your dumb ass either.
Doesn't the sound of those horns honking behind you give you a clue you're a pinheaded fucknut?
Space, Keep Your Damn Distance!
If I look in my rear view mirror and you're tailgating then you might want to pray your brakes, airbags and seatbelts all work properly.
If you're driving an expensive and well polished German car, I might just put on my windshield washers which will send a spray of water over the top of my car onto that wax job you just paid for and put spots all over your car. Some of you are smart enough to back off after my washer pisses on your Porsche a time or two, others not so bright.
Maybe I'll just drop from overdrive into drive and completely let off on the accelerator so the engine will suddenly slow my car down real quick, no brake lights, not a single clue I'm slowing, and scare the shit out of you when you almost plow into my car.
Hell, you want to be in my backseat?
Maybe I'll just help you out...
Maybe, if I'm all alone in my car, and you're all alone in yours, and there's nobody else around, just maybe I'll slam on the fucking brakes so hard that you'll smash into the rear of my car with enough force you'll pop your airbag like a balloon, fly through your windshield, smash through my rear windshield, where you can lay bleeding to death in my backseat assuming you aren't already dead from the impact.
Pulling Into Traffic.
Why in the hell do you watch the other cars coming at you, sitting there with your thumb up your ass, and suddenly pull into traffic at the last second?
You must realize it's a bad idea as you hear the screeching brakes and honking horns that greet your entry onto the road yet you do this every time!
If suicide is your wish, use a gun or rope in the privacy of your own home and leave me and everyone else on the road out of it.
Handicap Placards.
Let me give you a hint: those blue handicap placards or handicap stickers on your license plates do not make you invincible or give you carte blanche permission to do stupid shit on the road without repercussions. If you think you're handicapped now, just wait until 3 thousand pounds of screaming steel fucks you up worse that you already are. Just look at what happened to Christopher Reeves and that was just a single horse power, so imagine what my 455 horse power can do to mangle you further.
Summary
The difference between a drunk driver and a your bad driving ass is that at least the drunk driver can sober up but your bad driving is dangerous 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Take a fucking cab before you kill yourself and take innocent people with you.
Just get off the road now, stay off the road, and we'll all live longer and happier lives.
The scientists now yammering about global warming had better go get some parkas and brace for the ice age instead.
Lot's of evidence all over the place that the earth's ice has been melting for a really long time such as the undersea stone age sites located off the British Isles or the Tybrind Vig off the coast of Denmark.
I'm pretty sure these settlements didn't start under water so you have to ask yourself just how much ice had to melt to put them under water?
I'll bet Neanderthal man tried to limit greenhouse gases by banning fire.
Personally, I'm banking on the theory of ice age cycles. Theory hell, there's a lot more evidence in the scientific community that supports crap in the atmosphere ultimately causes cooling than it does warming in the long term. As a matter of fact, many contend that all the fresh water dumping into the ocean causes the ocean currents to stop moving the way we're used to which will disrupt our current weather patterns.
Note that Geologists agree that Egypt was subject to severe flooding at the end of the last Ice Age and that evidence is found on the bottom of the Sphinx in the form of water erosion, opposed to the wind erosion on the upper half, which makes the Sphinx much older than originally speculated.
Either way, it's not going to be pretty, as being too hot or too cold both suck and it looks more likely that cold is in our future.
Needless to say, the landscape will all change, and soon it will be places like Mexico screaming about illegal immigrants as North America is engulfed in a sheet of ice and snow.
Time to go bunk with some Eskimos and learn some basic Ice Age survival skills while there's still time!
The plasma TV did arrive on schedule, as promised, no surprises there.
No surprises until they brought it inside and started to "hook it up" and then give us our "15 minutes of instruction" on how to use it. This was a real fun treat as the "trainer" didn't speak very good broken-English and had no clue how to make the remote and TV all work properly with our cable box which surprising as it's the dominant cable provider in our area.
Luckily I've wired up just about every TV configuration known to mankind and programmed dozens of remotes, so after the INS (working on an anonymous tip) came and collected the delivery men, I got busy getting the system to work together.
OK, we didn't call the INS, but I can dream after being left holding the bag with a TV that they were supposed to connect and show us how to use, can't I?
Now we're having a battle of the remotes and it went from one remote that ran all our gear flawlessly on the old TV to needing 3 remotes just because a couple of special features on each device aren't universal. For instance, I can't seem to get the cable remote to adjust the surround sound volume, it always resorts back to the TV volume regardless of the device selected. Then there's the little issue of the plasma TV aspect ratio, which the cable remote doesn't appear to have when driving the TV. Then of course there are some things the cable DVR remote does that doesn't seem to work on the plasma or surround system remotes. Of course it's possible there's some other codes or crap to feed into the remote that resolve some of this nonsense so perhaps after a little research I'll have more answers.
However, I think it's all a bunch of bullshit, that's what it is.
All these companies that build all these TV components and remotes know exactly what the fuck their customers will be doing with them, there's no surprises here, unless you're the consumer that buys all this shit just to find out you're fucked in the ass yet again. I feel like the girl in the porn video getting double penetration, but since I'm using 3 remotes, it's triple penetration.
The other thing that pisses me off is all of the channels that claim to be HDTV yet put out a 4:3 signal with colorful borders on the side. Sure, it's an HD signal, looks really pretty and all that, but do I really need to see ESPN with the letters "HD" running up both sides of my fucking television?
Then there's the major networks that broadcast full screen HD programs yet the commercials and news are in 4:3 format and you're just sitting there watching this fucking thing bounce back and forth all night until you're about ready to fucking scream.
Drinking helps.
Don't forget those lovely cable movie channels I pay for like HBO and Showtime which have a bunch of channels but only one HDTV channel per brand on Comcast.
Last but not least, we have to mention some of the cable channels that look like complete shit on HDTV and should just be ashamed of themselves.
On the bright side, UHD (Universal's HD channel) showed a preview of the new season of Stargate Atlantis in full blown 1080i and it was absolutely gorgeous.
Now the part you wouldn't expect at all, my Comcast dual-tuner DVR and the HDTV channels have aspect ratio problems with each other. For instance, you're watch Grey's Anatomy in full screen mode and hit pause, there's a little box on the bottom of the DVR status bar that goes off screen. Additionally, if you check the Comcast TV Guide while in full screen mode it chops off some from the top and bottom of the TV Guide because it doesn't know what mode you're in. The two devices, the TV and the DVR, and out of synch and it's damned annoying but you just get used to having a partially hacked off TV Guide on your screen.
Come on all you HD promoting asshats out there, get with the program and fix your shit!
My advice for people that rarely watch DVD's, cable movie channels (HBO, SHO) or regular network TV programming (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX), would be to skip HDTV as you're just throwing money down the crapper to watch a grainy signal on a big bright TV screen. However, if you watch all those things also available in HDTV on a regular basis, like I do, you'll enjoy it immensely and wonder what took you so long to get on the HDTV bandwagon!
Overall I give HDTV a big thumbs up, but the TV industry still has room to improve.
