Friday, May 30, 2003

The Accident Group, the UK's largest personal injury insurer, fires 2,500 staff via text messages sent to their mobile phones, the BBC reports. Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer the "here, put all your stuff in this plastic garbage bag and get the hell out now" method. 2:39:25 PM

Thursday, May 22, 2003

"Every day in British newspapers, on television and on the radio, I hear the same tedious stereotypes about loud and stupid American gunslinging bullies." -- the BBC's Gavin Esler, writing in the Independent. I know how you feel, buddy. Thanks to another Gavin for the pointer. 10:44:35 PM

Thursday, May 15, 2003

I've sung the praises of Harry Shearer's Le Show here before. But the 11 May show is even more of a must-hear thanks to Harry's playing Hiram Bullock's song Bean Burrito. It appears about 30 minutes into the Le Show. I want a bean burrito! Sure can't get them in England. 12:23:28 AM

The grep of the day from the www.ridey.net web server logs: 61.187.156.253 - - [14/May/2003:20:42:29 +0100] "GET http://www.yahoo.com/ HTTP/1.1" 200 7740 which resolves to: China Telecom: Hunan Province Network . I've always liked Hunan cuisine, and hope whoever was visiting (bot or otherwise) found something tasty on our website. 12:04:23 AM

Wednesday, May 14, 2003

Today at the New Statesman, while rewriting a headline (see the 19 May issue), I had cause to google "is it cuz I is black", which is the catchphrase of Ali G, and was surprised to see that none other than Gavin came top of the results list. Gavin, you should be very proud! (although you'll no doubt be hearing from Sacha Baron Cohen's solicitors.) 11:53:12 PM

Saturday, May 10, 2003

The latest discovery from The World According to GREP: 12.148.209.198 - - [21/Feb/2003:05:45:13 +0000] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 300 12.148.209.198 - - [21/Feb/2003:06:08:01 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 7651 12.148.209.198 - - [21/Feb/2003:06:43:01 +0000] "GET /gate/archive.html HTTP/1.1" 401 493 12.148.209.198 - - [21/Feb/2003:07:21:54 +0000] "GET /gate/video.html HTTP/1.1" 401 493 12.148.209.198 - - [25/Feb/2003:11:29:35 +0000] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 300 12.148.209.198 - - [25/Feb/2003:12:00:44 +0000] "GET /gate/album/index.html HTTP/1.1" 401 493 12.148.209.198 - - [25/Feb/2003:12:31:26 +0000] "GET /gate/archive.html HTTP/1.1" 401 493 12.148.209.198 - - [25/Feb/2003:13:04:24 +0000] "GET /gate/video.html HTTP/1.1" 401 493 12.148.209.198 - - [09/May/2003:20:18:32 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 300 12.148.209.198 - - [09/May/2003:20:18:32 +0100] "GET /gate/album/index.html HTTP/1.1" 401 493 12.148.209.198 doesn't resolve on a reverse dns lookup. but further investigation turns up this, which leads to this interesting company. Which numbers among its clients Warner Bros and Microsoft. Interesting to see the words they are looking for: album, archive, video. at least they first look for robots.txt Chris has now created a blog about these creepy crawlers. 10:08:20 AM

Thursday, May 8, 2003

Hey, we've been Blurred. I submitted Charlie Cam to the rather cool collection of webcams on Blur's website and there it is middle row, right, on the very first page when you go to the Think Tank! My 15kb of fame, to paraphrase Warhol for the digital age. 11:22:44 PM

OK, so I GREPed my access_log and, sure enough, the Cyveillance bots had been visiting on two consecutive days in March, only accessing about six pages in all. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for me, most of what is hosted at www.ridey.net is password protected, so the bots got a 403 for their efforts . Then I ssh'd into Chris's machine, where ridey.net and this weblog are hosted, and found Cyveillance had been to the weblog about 355 times in the matter of a few days. I'm sure they found lots of interesting stuff. Especially on Charlie, my three year old's weblog. I suppose the most worrying thing about all of this is that Cyveillance is obviously something that lots of people already know about. Just imagine the things going on that we have yet to uncover, keeping in mind that the CIA has a venture capital outfit in Silicon Valley. And closer to home, there's Autonomy, once one of Britain's dotcom darlings, now, with more than a little help from Doctor Evil (aka Richard Perle), making profits by helping Dubya & Co trample our civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism (those terrorists including among others, Seymour Hersh). 12:52:21 AM

Wednesday, May 7, 2003

Chris has had another unwelcome visitor to his blog. Scary stuff, but I think they've definitely met their match in Chris. It appears the Cyveillance bot has been here too. Will have a good grep through /var/log/httpd/access_log. 12:11:17 AM

Friday, May 2, 2003

The answer to a web design headache? Maybe you've noticed, particularly if you are a Windows PC user, that this weblog sometimes doesn't display photos and other elements properly. Browser bugs are the reason. And when you work on a Mac and your website looks just fine, you have no way of knowing how it looks on other platforms. Until now, that is. Browsercam let's you see how your pages will display in just about any combination of operating system and browser you can come up with. I've just started a free trial and think it's a pretty darned good idea that should save me a lot of headaches in future. The screenshot shows how this blog's navigation disappears in IE 5.5 on Windows 2000. Now all I have to do is figure out why! 9:10:45 PM

US troops kill 3 Iraqis, Rumsfeld in Baghdad A classic howler of a headline that I found via Google News. A case of bad headline writing? Or just wishful thinking at the Palestine Chronicle (or perhaps even within the Pentagon)? 8:49:56 PM

Thursday, May 1, 2003

NPR: "Thirty years ago this week, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon hit No 1 on the Billboard charts." You can listen to several tracks, including the still amazing Great Gig in the Sky, in Real Audio or Windows Media format. Thirty years! How old does that make me feel? I seem to remember getting Dark Side of the Moon and ZZ Top's Tres Hombres as a birthday present from my brother, Mike. 11:26:59 PM