Today was web geeking day for me. I had a few things on my todo list that I’ve wanted to take care of forever. The first was to start rebuilding rules for blocking bad web spiders (as I posted about earlier). Mark Pilgrim posted a great article on blocking spambots and spotbots a few months ago that is a great starting point. So first I started building up my rules. I’m mostly watching my logs to look for things that don’t look like they are behaving well and adding rules based on that along with using the article as a guide for things to look for. So far so good.

The next thing I wanted to do was block people from hotlinking to images on my machine. More and more people have been grabbing images this way and it’s getting on my nerves. I could care less if they copied them down to their own server and used them. I just don’t want them using me as a hosting service. After looking around for a bit I found this article on using mod_rewrite to block hot linked images. For now people who do this will get a very nice image. After I get bored with that it’ll just give them a 404 or something like that. Maybe I’ll redirect them to where they came from just to confuse things even more.

And finally, I set up a redirect rule to point from some of my old archives to the current ones. It isn’t perfect and doesn’t catch everything, but does catch some things. It also tells search engines that the page has moved, so my old pages should vanish eventually. One thing I’m curious about now though is the 301 status for pages. 301 means that the page has moved to a new location and provides that location. Search engines should respect it when crawling (and many do I believe). One thing I think would be cool is if browsers would notice that a bookmark has changed that way. So you follow a bookmark to a page and it gives a 301, it should prompt you to change the bookmark or something. I also think RSS aggregators should do something like this too. It would be nice not to have to worry about keeping old redirect rules around forever.

I found this over on MachineGirl’s LiveJournal. It’s the Lemon Jelly Ducks Video. I did some more looking around and found the web page for the video also. Very cool. Requires Quicktime, but worth it.

This morning I was glancing at my log files and noticed something quite odd:


193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:16:40 -0400] "GET /cgi-bin/MT/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=3218 HTTP/1.0" 200 939 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:16:51 -0400] "GET /2003/07/09/because_everything_is_better_with_bukkake.html HTTP/1.0" 200 6390 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.0rc3) Gecko/20020524"
193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:16:56 -0400] "GET /cgi-bin/MT/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=3217 HTTP/1.0" 200 6006 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (SunOS 5.8)"
193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:16:59 -0400] "GET /cgi-bin/MT/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=3217 HTTP/1.0" 200 961 "-" "Mozilla/4.61 [en] (OS/2; U)"
193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:17:06 -0400] "GET /2003/07/09/qotd_07092003.html HTTP/1.0" 200 5166 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; en-US; rv:0.9.8) Gecko/20020204"
193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:17:09 -0400] "GET /cgi-bin/MT/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=3216 HTTP/1.0" 200 4912 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (Windows XP 5.1)"
193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:17:12 -0400] "GET /cgi-bin/MT/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=3216 HTTP/1.0" 200 877 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows XP; U) Opera 6.01 [en]\""

Notice anything interesting? Take a look at the referrer string User-agent. The ip is the same, but the referrer changes with every query. What an ass. Thanks to the power of mod_rewrite that person will no longer be crawling my site (Though it’s looking like I may just have to block his whole network).

Edit: I had to change the IP# because for some reason mod_rewrite of remote addr was catching the IP# in the log snipped above and screwing with the whole page. Hmm. Sounds like a bug?

Another Edit: Oh yeah, and the other thing they were doing was ignoring my robots.txt

Lewis Carroll: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.” [Quotes of the Day]

Nights where I can have the windows open and not be sweating all night. Last night was amazing sleeping weather. Let’s hope we can go a few days without having to run the a/c, it’s just too expensive.

Over the holiday weekend i watched a ton of anime

Stellvia 1-13
Gundam Seed 1-38
Tenshi na mainiki
Scrapped Princess
Ultra Maniac
Lupin Movie First Contact

Stellvia RULES. I like the character designs and story a lot. Kids trying their best to do well always gets to me. i watch this for pleasure and entertainment.

I am not a Gundam fan but the relentless viewing of 38 episodes in a weekend did get to me. I’m going to keep watching this one to see how it ends. The captain looks kinda like Misato. Woo woo.

Ultra Maniac is cute. I like Yoshizumi Wataru’s storytelling and artwork starting with Marmalade Boy. Ultra Maniac had cute girls in it but was a little too Magical Girlie for me to want to devote time watching it. Greg wore me down though so now I am resigned to my fate to keep watching this show. Did I mention how cute it is? It’s really REALLY cute.

Yesterday I watched Stellvia 14 and of course enjoyed it, wondering where the story is going. Then I watched Last Exile 14 and realized how high I hold Last Exile in regard. Last Exile is like me putting my psyche aside and just totally be immersed into the Last Exile Universe. This is going to be one of my lifetime favorites. The sensation of flying, the backstory just hinted at, the plot at stake, the character interactions…

Maybe it’s just because I’m starting to learn how to fly but i just get so into Last Exile. LAST EXILE RULES!!!!!

Ernie the Attorney has just purchased a new Powerbook and been writing about his experiences with it. It mirrors my own a lot. While I’ll be the first to admit that OS X isn’t perfect there are just so many things it does right. I do feel like I need to at least try out WIndows XP though, just to have an accurate comparison.

I just got through episode eight of Kaleido Star and I’m really enjoying it a lot. It’s the story of Naekino Sora, a 16 year old girl who has come to America to join the Kaleido Stage. The Stage does all kinds of performances that seem to center around acrobatics. The show itself is one of those shows that is just fun to watch. I don’t know that there is anything really groundbreaking about it, but it is just done very well. GONZO did the animation and it is some of their best work yet. Most of the time it’s hard to believe it’s all done on computer. It’s also interesting seeing the range they have with their work when comparing it to other shows they are doing currently, like Last Exile. Oh yeah, and there’s this strage supernatural creature in the show called the Fool of the Stage or something like that. Only Sora can see him and he seems to be there mostly to try and see her showering.

Anyways, check it out. I’m sure it will be showing up in the states soon enough since I believe ADV helped in producing it.

Andy Warhol: “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” [Quotes of the Day]

There’s this strange bird somewhere in my neighborhood that won’t shut up at night. And it seems to imitate other birdcalls. So I’ll hard loud chirp chirp, then something that sounds like a seagull, etc. And it is on this endless loop. I not normally one to go about killing or hurting animals, but if I could find this bird I’d tape its mouth shut.