The Substantially Similar Weblog

Maybe I missed this the first time around, but I just noticed that craigslist is providing an opportunity to have free postings sent into outer space·.

From the FAQ:

Q: Is this a hoax.
A: No.

I also noticed that craigslist is supporting the Spread Firefox campaign by posting links to the campaign on just about every page.

Go craiglist!

Update (2/26/06): Someone associated with the ‘nipple huggers’ site has written to complain about my accusations here. She also has left a couple of comments below. Just to be clear, there is no evidence that the site sends email spam, uses obtrusive popups, or installs spyware/adware, etc., on your computer. It appears simply that someone has attempted to optimize their position in search results by generating HTTP requests to other popular sites with their domain name in the referer field.

I used to have a big problem with “referer spam.” What is referer spam? My weblog lists “inbound links” on the right column so visitors can see who else has linked here. Since many weblogs provide a similar list, spammers began to create “spurious” inbound links so their URLs would appear in the right column of many weblogs, thus boosting their Google PageRank·. Usually, if you went back to the site that ostensibly linked to my weblog, it would be a porn or gambling site with no true links to my weblog.

This was easy enough to fix: I wrote a handmade filter that regularly checks all the putative inbound links and verifies that they do, in fact, link to my site.

Just today, I found my first instance of a spammer adaptation: the inbound link came from a site selling “nipple huggers” — some sort of jewelry that I don’t quite understand. I was curious how the site escaped my “referer check” script, so I checked it out. It turns out the “nipple hugger” site does link to my blog, with the link text “PopUp Scam – Click X to Close.” The linked page on my site has nothing to do with popup scams, but it is an interesting workaround to my filter. Rather than generating fake/spurious links, apparently real visitors to the “nipple hugger” site click on the link to my blog, and generate “real” referer links. Just today, I received inbound links from ten different hosts from the “nipple hugger” page.

I can’t think of any clever way to automatically filter these sorts of inbound links, because they really don’t look any different from genuine inbound links. At this point, I’m just inserting a keyword filter for known bad referers (just the “nipple hugger” at this point). Suggestions for more clever ways to escalate this arms race are welcome.

(I really hope my site doesn’t become a top search result for “nipple hugger” now. If it does, please, look elsewhere, I don’t even know what they are!)

Interesting evolving blog/article on The Future of Legal Blogging on Between Lawyers, a legal weblog I strongly recommend to lawyers and law students but for one problem: they only include a snippet of each blog entry in their RSS feed. In fact, all of the Corante-hosted weblogs seem to do this. I understand that they have commercial sponsors and would like you to visit the website so your eyeballs can be exposed to those sponsors’ names, but it seems like such a backwards way to do it. I usually read blogs offline through my aggregator (for example, on the train), and not being able to read the full entry means I often won’t see it at all.

slashdot seems to have recently solved this problem by including an occasional advertisement in the RSS feed itself. Why hasn’t anyone else figured this out?

Update: I stand corrected. Strangely, http://www.corante.com/betweenlawyers/index.xml gives the full text in the feed; http://www.corante.com/betweenlawyers/index.rdf does not. I was automatically subscribed to the .rdf version by my newsreader. I wonder if this is intentional.

Update 6/25/06: This page has strangely become quite popular. It wasn’t supposed to be a serious attempt at anything. It was an initial experiment to see if I could do video workflow — from camcorder to linux laptop to the web.

Update: Oops! Apparently the syndicated version of this post had the wrong movie URLs. Fixed now—please try again.

I’ve been learning Linux Video in anticipation of a digital camcorder that I’ve ordered—a Panasonic NV-GS400. My understanding is every new parent needs a digital camcorder or will never be able to remember their child’s childhood. So here I go.

Anyway, here’s my first feature-length (well, one minute) film, entitled Scary Cat. It has a fair amount of dramatic tension, so you may want to get a cup of chamomille tea first. It is available in three versions:

• Scary Cat (Broadband Version 8.8M)
• Scary Cat (Dial-up Version 0.8M)
• Scary Cat (Huge Version – T1 – 26M) — encoded with ‘fourcc’, the new name for DivX, you may need a new player to view

The only license restriction is attribution—see the “by” Creative Commons license.

Created using Kino, which deserves to be boosted at least two positions in its Google placement.

I’d welcome feedback—especially let me know if you can’t play the video. Be gentle, though, it’s my first attempt.

I often need to randomly sort a file. I’m not aware of any standard bash or GNU command that does this, so I just wrote this very short script. There may be an even shorter/faster/more efficient way to do this, but I thought I’d post this as it might be helpful to a Linux newbie trying to accomplish the same task. Just put this in a file—e.g., “randomsort”; make it executable; and then pipe whatever you want to randomize into it (cat file_to_be_randomized | randomsort or randomsort file_to_be_randomized), and voila, you’re done.

 #!/usr/bin/perl my @array = <>; while (@array) { my $element = int(rand(@array)); print $array[$element]; delete $array[$element]; } 

Feel free to comment if you’ve got an easier solution.

Spring is here, with a vengeance. I hear it got over 80 degrees today, although I was in my office and couldn’t tell through the window.

These flowers appeared in our front yard overnight. Click for bigger versions.

My hope is to add more multimedia content to my blog. I don’t have a lot of time to write these days, but at least I can post images, audio, and eventually video.

Hat tip to Steve: Some genius has integrated Craigslist and Google Maps. Better, even, than chocolate and peanut butter.

(especially if you’re allergic to peanut butter)

Maybe I’m the last one to know, but I just discovered the origin of the name “Bluetooth.” According to CNet’s Quick Guide to Bluetooth Headsets:

What’s in a name?
In case you were wondering, Bluetooth gets its name from a 10th-century Danish king, Harald Blatand (or Bluetooth) who unified Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. According to legend, he had an affinity for teeth-staining blueberries. Oh, and the logo combines the runic alphabetic characters for H and B.

I thought that was pretty cool. I had always assumed it was just a fanciful made-up name.

(By the way, this entry obviously follows from the last few—with a newborn baby, the more hands-free and cordless appliances you have, the better!)

Not only do I have a beautiful baby daughter—but she already has a number one Google PageRank! How great is that?

By the way, as a new father I think I’m going to need a three month “low frequency blogging” pass.

Esther Naomi Rosi-Kessel, born 4/6/05 at 4:13am, 8 lbs 9 oz, 20 inches.