February, 21, 2003 archives

there's a nice long discussion following up on mark pilgrim's robots.txt support for über-aggregators. it's never fun dealing with abusive robots, or even worse, software which encourages abusive behavior. it always happens when you have better things to do, but it never seems to happen often enough to make dealing with it in advance a big priority.

i like mark's step of making rssfinder.py observe the robots.txt standard. i'll try to find time to finally get my own robots (scraping news feeds and polling a few sites for blo.gs) to do the same.

(and some day i'll start crunching my own logs again, to figure out what bozos need to get blocked for bad behavior now that i haven't been paying attention for the last couple of months.)

mysql> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM my_news;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|    59995 |
+----------+

that's about ten month's worth of data for all the feeds i collect. i should figure out something interesting to do with the data.

them: is this james winstead?

me: yes.

them: i'm calling from kay jewelers, and your account is overdue. you need to make a minimum payment of $25.

me: i don't have an account with kay jewelers.

them: is your addresses p.o. box 12345, burbank, ca?

me: no. but i recently got a call from another retailer about an overdue account at that address.

them: what are the last four digits of your social security number.

me: 1234.

them: okay, that doesn't match what we were given. thank you.

this one (7pm tonight) is through the american cinema foundation, and is taking place at the american film institute. this one has moveable type and blogger users, but no radio userland or manila users. (no back problems to use as an excuse this time. i'm just not going because i'm lame.)

i seem to have an obstacle in upgrading my tivo. the pc i'm using to do all the hard drive chicanery doesn't handle hard drives bigger than 40GB (or whatever—it doesn't handle the 120GB drive i'm using for the upgrade unless i set the hard drive to pretend it is smaller, which sort of defeats the purpose). i was able to at least back up the existing drives, clone that to the new drive, and confirm that the tivo could boot from the new drive.

what a pain. i guess i'll have to reconstruct another computer out of the parts i have laying around to see if it handles bigger drives. i have a bunch of old hard drives i've been meaning to hook up and check for interesting data, anyway.

it was interesting to crack the case and find out i had a two-drive tivo. the perks of being an early adopter, i guess.