web crawling

Posted on 04-30-2008 under NOT politics, web crawling

The caption on Reuters’ website reads

“A boy looks at bodies of four Palestinian children and their mother at al-Awda mosque after Israeli fire hit their house in the northern Gaza Strip April 28, 2008. Israeli fire hit a house in the Gaza Strip on Monday while a family was eating breakfast, killing six Palestinians, including four children and their mother, residents and medical officials said…”

Sometimes you just forget how much your life is different just because you were born in a different place.

Brothers lie in shallow graves.
Fathers lost without a trace.
A nation blind to their disgrace,
Since he’s been here.

And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.

—James Blunt

Posted on 04-21-2008 under best practices, web crawling

If you’ve uploaded photos to facebook, this could be a security risk. Anyone on your friend list can copy the location of your images, and then possibly release them to the public.

Here’s how to test this. Its pretty simple really. Open any photo in facebook, right click it and select “Copy Image Location” in Firefox. (I don’t see any option for this in Internet Explorer 6, but your mileage may vary). Now logout of facebook, and paste the copied url in your location bar. Press Go. See?

Pretty simple, but possibly quite horrifying. If you don’t want people out of your friend circle to see your photos, you better not upload them at all. Anybody in your clique may release this url to anybody else.

I was actually alerted to this risk, when someone pasted a url to a photo of one of his friends in a chat room. Suffice it to say, the photo was not what that particular person would have wanted everyone to see.

I’ve been paranoid for some time so I removed most of my profile from facebook about a month ago. You, however, have been warned. Choose for yourself.

Posted on 04-16-2008 under web crawling

This book logging idea has caught on good. I wrote about this earlier in my post on Goodreads. Recently I found out about Librarything, which pulls information on titles from 60+ online resoures.

A couple of days ago, I received an email to join this new site Shelfari. At first I ignored it, but I got a repeat email today. (Later I find out this was part of the evil mess.) So I registered.

According to Thingology (Library Thing’s blog), Shelfari has been accused of spamming its users’ contacts. It gets the contact list from your email account during registration and then (horrors!!) stores it, using it later to spam your entire contact list. Everyone. Including mailing lists.

Thank God I didn’t give those people my email password. And thank God, I thought of doing a search on the site’s validity.

 /me shudders

So guys. If you’ve been invited to join Shelfari, DONT! Join Librarything, or Goodreads, or some of the other fine book logging sites out there. You have been warned!

Posted on 04-11-2008 under web crawling

Go here first

Something’s Fishy

Heck yes it does!

Now go here

Got the idea yet?

Here’s a little helper. Go to Yubnub, and enter

 20g10 my text

(Does not work with special characters though. Only alphanumerics please. )

Enjoy

Posted on 03-26-2008 under web crawling

… without having to be reminded of it.

Here’s a website that lets you record what shows you’ve watched, want to watch, and need to get. Its pretty cool  in the way that it takes off a (not-so-huge) load of organizing what you watch. Just what we needed, eh? More organization. So now, in addition to the time I spend watching TV shows, I can spend yet more time logging it too :)

Seriously though, this is a very nice idea. And it really does save some time tracking down all those episodes you haven’t seen. Web design is smooth and sleek, not like most bloatware sites, that just assume you have a sewage pipe sized internet connection. It loads fast, and has a sufficiently easy interface. And almost everything links to a summary on tvrage.com, which is also fast to load (unlike tv.com).

The feature I like the most though, is the “Time I’ve Wasted” page. Blooming brilliant. According to the site, I’ve wasted 1 months, 1 days, 14 hours of my life watching TV. Of course, thats just the stuff I’ve logged. Who know how many hours I’ve wasted on shows that I haven’t logged.

Kudos to the creators and hope it keeps running.

« Previous entries