Friday, July 17, 2009 - Posts

Friday, July 17, 2009

a day in a life 2009.07.17

via @fractalnavel: in the last 24 hours:
  • 2009.07.17 14:03: RT @klaatu Biomass-Eating Military Robot Is a Vegetarian, Company Says http://ur1.ca/7gc8 yeah, but a simple hack will fix that.
  • 2009.07.17 17:07: @klaatu
    Hey if newspaper websites are too dumb to setup a robots.txt file, they deserve to be crawled & aggregated to death.
    not that it would stop anything; that file is merely advisory.
  • 2009.07.17 17:15: the point in letting tv go is getting rid of the actviity (if you could call it that), not the device. dtv merely created an opportunity.
  • 2009.07.17 17:23: @klaatu
    RT @macroron: Tell Legislators You Want the Right to Self-Quarantine in the Event of a Pandemic, Not Forced Vaccinations! http://tr.im/sNSs
    i have to tell legislators that?! friggin' lawmakers need to start myob, that's what they need. or is it my nosy neighbors' fault?
  • 2009.07.17 17:24: @craigg75
    good luck @fractalnavel
    thanks.
  • 2009.07.17 17:25: @craigg75
    doesn't happen overnight
    i did spend about half of '98 not watching any tv. got a lot of reading done.
  • 2009.07.17 17:26: @craigg75
    tv is really a lazy way to entertain yourself.. takes work and different perspectives to go another route for entertainment
    is there a need for "entertainment" ? or is that a modern marketing ploy ? historically, life seemed more to meld all activities.
  • 2009.07.17 17:27: historical "entertainment": was rarely a solo thing, i think. more often, it was social, maintainng the community, and had a kind of purpose
  • 2009.07.17 17:28: need smaller communities for that sort of thing
  • 2009.07.17 17:29: @craigg75
    @fractalnavel good blog article.. "Why do we watch tv?"
    um - link ? did you send that along earlier this year ?
  • 2009.07.17 17:34: @craigg75
    blog article -- a suggestion for you to write
    ohhh duh. i'm so quick ;-) and for a moment, i also thought you were saying i had written one like that already. brain off.
  • 2009.07.17 17:36: @craigg75
    shall we build a barn for Jeremiah this weekend? have a hoe down afterwards?
    yeEE-HAaaaww ! hey, no kidding, i spent a lot of time in the woods in scouting, other camping. far more fun than piloting a couch
  • 2009.07.17 17:40: thing is, i don't do music either. it's the sounds of the weather, birds, insects that accompany me - and server fan whine & lawn mowers ...
  • 2009.07.17 17:44: jeep - no radio. no doors or roof either. year 'round. and yet, here i sit, year after year. nothing rational about any of this.
  • 2009.07.17 17:45: @klaatu
    @fractalnavel
    @klaatu
    Hey if newspaper websites are too dumb to setup a robots.txt file, they deserve to be crawled & aggregated to death.
    not that it would stop anything; that file is merely advisory.
    Yeah but Google claims to respect robots.txt & related meta headers which should cover most of newsies complaints.
    sure, i think most search engines obey. but not all, and certainly not those crawlers just out to get a data fix.
  • 2009.07.17 17:47: @craigg75
    @klaatu google doesn't respect robots.txt, they abuse our site all the time, we just block their more aggressive ips
    abuse how ? or perhaps you haven't been clear, as far as the bots are concerned. robots.txt, nofollow, noindex errors ?
  • 2009.07.17 17:50: there's a reason i (and most others) like waterfronts - the waves speak an unending reassuring tone, accompanying nature's visual effects
  • 2009.07.17 17:51: damn landlocked location...
  • 2009.07.17 17:53: @klaatu
    @fractalnavel
    @craigg75
    shall we build a barn for Jeremiah this weekend? have a hoe down afterwards?
    yeEE-HAaaaww ! hey, no kidding, i spent a lot of time in the woods in scouting, other camping. far more fun than piloting a couch
    @craigg75 Funny, was about to suggest amish barn building myself there. its the social community building aspect literally.
    i have considered living like that, monasteries & such, but these would be a bad match, and appearances can be deceiving
  • 2009.07.17 17:55: @craigg75
    we've even raised a stink with them but nothing changes.. we did notice there are some ips that behave much differently than the rest though
    you're sure they're all google ? and how does a bot know that your site is "special" ? nah, something else is going on there
  • 2009.07.17 17:56: @craigg75
    by blocking the "rogue ips" things have improved a lot
    yes, that's ultimately the surest recourse. worst one i saw a while back was a search bot that executed javascript - ! yuk.
  • 2009.07.17 18:01: http://mobot.org/robots.txt - geez, dude - that reads more like a roadmap than a blocker ;-)
  • 2009.07.17 18:03: @craigg75
    nah mobot.org is the garden site, tropicos.org is the one
    figured as much, but i hit the first one that came to mind
  • 2009.07.17 18:04: there is no "allow" in the robot exclusion protocol
  • 2009.07.17 18:06: also - it matches strings, not regular expressions or wildcards (except in a couple of specific limited ways)
  • 2009.07.17 18:10: hmm - allow is an extension, eh...
  • 2009.07.17 18:27: @craigg75
    perhaps we should just create googlerobots.txt, they seem to define their own rules anyway
    no doubt. as for having more bot specific sections, i was going to mention that, since they all interpret extensions differently
  • 2009.07.17 18:28: not sure you should have "Allow /" though - at best, it does nothing. at worst - ?
  • 2009.07.17 18:29: robots.txt: no standard is starting to hurt. also, varying interpretations seem to be changing too quickly
  • 2009.07.17 18:30: my all time favorite re bots: http://bit.ly/17dp8l
  • 2009.07.17 18:33: @craigg75 have you guys considered using canonical link directives ? another tool for the box.
  • 2009.07.17 18:58: @klaatu
    @fractalnavel
    hmm - allow is an extension, eh...
    shitty example: allow is being used as a placeholder 2 avoid 404 errors if spiders look for robots.txt file. Still invalid.
    which is silly, becasue you can just use an empty robots.txt for that
  • 2009.07.17 20:22: @klaatu
    Paulson Threatened Great Depression, Food Riots To Get Bailout Bill Passed http://ur1.ca/7guv Hanging's too good for him..
    and yet - it could still happen (becasue of ? in spite of ? does it matter at this point?)
  • 2009.07.17 21:21: the weather here the last few hours just got amazing ...
  • 2009.07.17 23:12: whoa - opened a bottle of dogfish head's palo santo marron, and just started sipping - dang - stuff's 12% ! gotta be careful with that.
  • 2009.07.17 23:45: years after the last update, scifi.com's short stories section disappears - or is it a url problem ?
  • 2009.07.17 23:46: on the other hand, years after its inception, 365 tomorrows just keeps going http://www.365tomorrows.com/
  • 2009.07.18 00:39: i think you can tell the non-tech folks like this: they're the ones who try a piece of published code, and are skeptical if it'll work.
  • 2009.07.18 00:41: like, stupid: if it didn't work, nine times out of ten, it's you. and the normal assumption is that things do work.
  • 2009.07.18 00:43: ok: it seems like you're more - something - if you're a skeptic. takes one to know one, sure. but don't assume the trappings are the reality
  • 2009.07.18 00:44: thing is - people often do just accept the behaviors of "expertise", because they have no way of validating the reality od such
  • 2009.07.18 00:45: and so you get the morons who play to that ignorance - wunnerful little vicious circle we've got going there, wot ?
  • 2009.07.18 00:47: in skepticism, the burden of rationale is on the skeptic, not the other way around. interestingly, the converse is also true.
  • 2009.07.18 00:48: bottom line: self-doubt first. then attack like a hell-dog - but not before
  • 2009.07.18 00:50: still too simplified. the problem is that the great majority (more than 99%) do not know how to reason validly - but are not aware of that.
  • 2009.07.18 00:50: they reinforce their mutual self-deceptions and bad practices
  • 2009.07.18 00:52: wait: i think another word people use for that is "love". or "alliance". or "business". or "government".
(pulled direct from twitter via custom job)
Posted by fractalnavel at 11:30 PM | with no comments