Category: technology

Kuro5hin has a neat article today about mechanisms for combating Referrer Spam. This kind of Spamming involves hitting websites while facking the referrer info in the HTTP request. Often referrer information is publically or privately available through webserver log analyser packages such as webalizer. However, even if you’re not worried about pollution of your weblogs and published usage stats Referrer Spammers have an irritating habit of DDoSing your site into oblivion while they taint your logs. Charming people I’m sure.
One of their suggested methods for blocking these wonderful folks involves blocking their URLs using your .htaccess file. I use the following voodoo with my movable type weblog and it’s very effective.

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ".*(credit|texas-hold-em|holdem|viagra|sex|more-naughty-words).*" BadReferrer
order deny,allow
deny from env=BadReferrer

The process of maintaining up-to-the-minute blacklists in your .htaccess files can be automated using the catchily titled Referrer SPAM FUCKER 3000. Quality code that does exactly what it says on the tin 😉
Hasta la vista texas-hold-em. Just trying to plant a few seeds here and help reclaim the internet from these Grade A 1u53r5

I got thinking about the implications of IM-Bots when I worked for the TSSG research group in Ireland. IM-Bots are pseudo-intelligent automated IM buddys that responds to queries using greater or lesser degrees of Natural Language Parsing (NLP) and knowledge inference. One of the most famous is the Alice-Bot which uses Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) to associate semantics (like running a program) with parsed syntax. I’ve written a paper about using IM-Bots as virtual shopping assistants which is available here

Sometimes stock control & point-of-sale systems need to generate barcodes. Xyling java blog has a recent article on how to achieve this in your JFC and J2EE applications. This software is licensed under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL). JBarCodeBean supports all major barcode formats including:

• Code 128
• Code 128
• Code 39
• Extended Code 39
• Codabar
• Interleaved Code 25
• MSI
• EAN-13
• EAN-8

I’m supposed to be working on documents today but I must admit that I’ve got other things on my mind. One of these is how to turn my microwave oven into a personal foundary. I have a hankering for another japanese ceremonial blade (a nice new katana). but I haven’t figured out how to smelt in my house yet. However home based metallurgy is being brought a giant step closer using the Reid Technique (RT)

“a simplified ceramic-shell procedure for the casting of non-ferrous metals, patented in 1990. RT was first developed to avoid the problem of heat loss, which makes the the pouring of small melts very difficult – these difficulties arise however the metal is heated, and while the microwave technique set out here can be used for heating small amounts of metal in open crucibles, its greatest potential lies in its use as a flameless furnace in processes such as the Reid Technique. The crucial discovery, made during extended tests with various susceptors – materials which heat up when exposed to microwaves – was that two substances, graphite and magnetite, working together were required to achieve the kind of heating we were looking for.”

So there you go, clever use of microwave heat susceptors stuccoed to ceramic shells enables a mould to be created where small amounts of bronze, silver, gold and iron can be melted/cast in your very own home microwave oven. The whole process is described more elaborately here