Reflective Surface
Still powered by a contradiction in terms
Archive for Geek Stuff
November 24, 2004 at 2:19 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
Preparing for the upcoming full-page Firefox ad that will appear in The New York Times next month, the Spread Firefox campaign organizers are asking the site’s users to create quips or small stories to persuade people to switch to Mozilla. The three best quips will be used in the ad.
I was browsing yesterday through the quips already suggested, and had a lot of fun. There are some really interesting phrases, and also some that made me laugh out loud when I read them. Some, I can’t really know what was in the mind of the person who created them.
For example:
“I use Firefox because it’s so self-contained. Everything it installs goes into one folder.”
As if readers of The New York Times will know what a self-contained executables is… Also, the fact that Firefox installs itself to a single folder has no importance whatsoever for users. I can’t even imagine what the person who invented this quip was trying to demonstrate with it.
Another fun example, from someone who wants to rule the world:
“Would you be a puppet, if you could be a puppeteer? Use Firefox and get control back!”
From the series “Doesn’t make any sense”:
“Spreads like wildfire. Runs like a fox. Firefox.”
The next one caused my mind to turn around itself. It’s like that thing Bilbo said in his birthday party — you think you understood what it meant, but you didn’t, not really.
“It does what you want it to do, and it doesn’t do what you don’t want it to do.”
I laughed out loud at the next two. Mixed metaphors are really painful.
“Stop just exploring the web, grab it by the tail. Download Firefox!”
“The web is a jungle. Don’t explore it; dominate it. Be a Firefox. Free.”
A Zen moment — or a Yoda moment — depending on your preferences:
“Spreading I am, Fire I can be, Fox here I come”
You know what just occurred me? Considering the large number of research about pornography, indicating that it’s responsible for a big part of Internet’s total traffic and that it’s addictive, a quip suggesting that Firefox is good for this kind of browsing will be very, very successful.
I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Just kidding.
All right. I’m just having some fun at the expenses of the Spread Firefox’ users, but I think their efforts are truly valuable. If I could come up with a good catch phrase, I would surely contribute it. Since I can’t, I will leave that to more imaginative minds than mine. I guess they will do fine. Before people say I liked none of the phrases, I found some quite interesting, like those two:
“Freedom of Information starts with the freedom to access it. Use Firefox!”
“We gave them the product. We asked them for $50,000. They gave us $250,000. Any idea why? Get Firefox.”
Now, I will just wait for the ad. I’m really impressed by the terrific dedication shown by the Mozilla community. The results are wonderful. Eight million downloads of a preview release and six million downloads of another release just a few weeks later are quite a remarkable achievement. Here in Brazil, I’m quite satisfied to see a major newspaper putting out article after article about Firefox, including a switch guide and a very positive poll. If things keep going like this, I’ll finally start believing standards have a real chance to succeed in the Web.
November 22, 2004 at 10:40 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
That’s probably true for most blogs with a heavy technical content, but I was surprised to find that over 50% of the visitors of this blog access it through a RSS reader. I guess that has something to do with the fact that all feeds for the blog have the full text of the entries, eliminating the need to visit the site, but the number was above what I would expect intuitively.
Most of the RSS accesses come from the big centralized aggregators like Bloglines and Kinja. The rest is split up between dozen of client aggregators, with Newsgator, FeedDemon, and NetNewsWire being the most used. There are even some people using Konfabulator applets. Interesting.
With regards to browsers, responsible for 40% of the remaining hits, Internet Explorer is still the lead. A little more than 50% of the visitors use IE, and 35% use any of the Mozilla variants. Considering the site’s profile, the numbers seem about right. IE numbers are high also because a good percentage of visitors coming via search engines use it. Nonetheless, Mozilla usage is growing, as expected. If Mozilla’s adoption rates continue holds to what the logs show, IE will be overcome in a few months.
I was a bit disappointed by the kind of search queries that lead to visits to my site. None of them was interesting. I think I’m not writing enough strange entries to attract this kind of crazy searches. Also, most of the people visiting the site via a search engine must be frustrated when they come to my site. Most of the entries related with the search phrases have nothing to do with what people where looking for. More than often, a random combination of keywords triggered the inclusion of the site in the search results. People looking for analysis of books and movies also leave the site dissatisfied: my reviews rarely contain spoilers, which limits analysis — even if I wanted to do them.
Referrer spam is coming back after a long winter. Many of the spam URLs that appear on the logs also appear on spam in comments. Since the problem is still small, I’m not bothering with it know.
Well, that’s enough statistics for today. I should be doing something more useful now, but such is the nature of bloggers — navel-gazers all of them.
October 26, 2004 at 5:51 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
Thinking Machine is an artificial intelligence program that plays chess, and creates a visual map of the moves it’s considering while choosing the next one. The thousands of calculated moves become “lines of force” on the chessboard, generating interesting graphics. The program also shows “waves of force” radiating from the pieces, representing their influence. The result is a complex mosaic of the calculated positions. Very cool stuff.
(via Nemo Nox)
September 6, 2004 at 11:43 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
I broadcast myself through virtual worlds,
making of code my dwelling place.
I lose myself among a billions of references in the global network,
multiplying myself at the speed of light.
I am the mutated byte and the imperfect parity;
the lost datum and the incorrect information;
the fruitless search and the meaningless question;
the ending of what has not yet begun.
I am the broken link.
January 22, 2004 at 5:28 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
From the series “Things that only your hosting provider can do for you.”
A few weeks ago, some strange e-mails reporting delivery errors started arriving in my inbox. At first, I thought they were a resurgence of an old spam technique of forging mail delivery errors to distribute spam and/or viruses. However, those e-mails didn’t contain any spam message or payload whatsoever. Since they didn’t look like the usual error messages my mail server provides, I didn’t bother with them, thinking they were just the result of a crazy spamming surge meant to fool filters. Of course, I was mistaken in presuming so.
The problem started to become clear when some of the e-mails I sent in the next days returned undelivered and flagged as spam. As I never engaged in such activity, I couldn’t understand how that had happened. But as I share an IP address with other sites, I presumed that one of them had done something that had been considered spam by some blacklist. Anyway, I decided to investigate the issue and soon found the cause of the problem.
As it turned out, the hosting provider I’m using today maps a special CGI path in all sites it hosts, apart from the usual cgi-bin path, which contains a bunch of scripts that can be used by any site to implement some simple functions like contact forms, hit counters, and similar things. But — that’s where the trouble beings — none of those scripts is protected. All of them can be used by anyone, whether they are customers of my hosting provider or not.
From the logs, I found that one of the scripts, a formmail clone, is being constantly used to send small amounts of spam, which resulted in my site being included in some spam blacklists. Also, I also found that some networks have completely blocked access to my IP address — permanently in some cases. To make things worse, I host eleven other domains that are probably marked as spam senders as well.
Needless to say, I’m looking for a new hosting provider — for the fourth time since I started this blog. I’m also considering a change in my primary domain name to avoid future problems, which will be a huge inconvenience.
I guess that will teach me to choose my hosting providers more carefully — and to be willing to pay more for better service.
December 12, 2003 at 9:08 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
I bought a new machine for home, and it arrived today. The new “toy” is an Athlon 2.6GHz, with 1GB RAM, a 80GB HD, and a GeForce 128MB 8x videocard. Now I will have some fun. 
Amusingly enough, all main components in this new machine are 4 times more powerful than the ones in the old machine. My old machine served me well, but I was beginning to feel it lacking in some areas — gaming, especially. Anyway, who can resist the chance of buying a new machine?
December 9, 2003 at 7:36 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
A few days ago I was surfing in my own blog, reading some old entries. Following some of the links on those entries, I found that a good deal of the links in them didn’t exist anymore. Some of them returned 404 errors, others just redirected to the main page of the site under which they were previously hosted or returned server errors.
Curious to see what was the proportion of dead links linked from my blog, I cooked a small Python program to check the issue. The program was simple: it collected all URLs found on the files present in my blog (a local copy, of course), and sent requests to the servers, asking for the status of those pages through HEAD requests (it also tried to do a GET request if the HEAD request was not allowed).
After running the program, and printing some statistics, I found that I had linked roughly 1200 URLs in the two versions of my blog (Portuguese and English). A few URLs came from comments, but I included them in the statistics as well to save the trouble of separating them from my own links. Also, some URLs were incorrectly parsed given the relative difficult of properly identifying URLs in raw text.
The results were not much a surprise, considering the impression I had surfing around in the blog. From the 1200 requests, 45 returned a 404 error. That represents 3.75% of the links, which is just a small part of the links. Considering the Web’s mobility, that is not bad. However, 48 other requests, which add up to more 4% of the links, returned various other error codes. Together, they represent a good part of the links.
Checking the results, I also found out that some sites are serving customized 404 error pages that return incorrect HTTP status codes. Some even return a 200 status code when they are just a warning that the page doesn’t exist anymore. The main culprits are online newspapers and magazines.
The full (and completely unscientific) results were:
- 43 unreachable domains (3.58%)
- Some of those errors are likely temporary conditions, although I checked some and they are really expired domains (sites of political candidates, for instance).
- 1064 successful requests (88.67%)
- Pages that were correctly served, and some that had been moved to elsewhere. Some of those results, as mentioned before, are incorrect, which increases the number of errors.
- 93 unsuccessful requests (7.75%)
- Those include pages not found in the servers anymore, server errors, and pages that are protected now.
Considering the period in which the links were posted (one year and two months), something like 10% of the pages I linked to in my blog are now returning errors, or inaccessible. Of every ten links in my blog, one is going to results in an error. I think that’s too much. Obviously, it’s not reasonable to expect that everybody will preserve the URL spaces they created. Sometimes that’s not possible — or even desirable. On the other hand, sites that could be taking a lot more of care with their data are simply allowing their links to get broken. Quotes are made with the expectation that they will point to permanent resources, and the resources will simply disappear after some time.
Anyway, it was an interesting experiment. As there is no way to prevent the problem, there are no measure to be taken. The only thing that remains is the feeling that all the links in this site are slowly being absorbed by a great black hole in the center of the Web.
November 4, 2003 at 11:54 am · Filed under Geek Stuff
I’m stating to believe I’m a victim of a conspiration to keep me out of the Internet.
I’m without Internet at home because I moved recently, and nobody from the phone company showed up so far to reconfigure the phone line, even tough I requested the transfer a few days ago. Now, I’m without at Internet at work as well. According to our ISP, the remote server we use to connect to the Internet via radio is out of order due to a power surge last Friday. That was almost five days ago, but they still don’t know when the server will be operational again. Now, I’ve been online almost everyday for the past seven years. I can’t live without Internet connectivity. 
Well, that’s all. If I’m not back in a few days, you know what’s going on.
May 17, 2003 at 12:09 am · Filed under Geek Stuff
There are a lot of bad database engines out there, but Informix is surely one of the worst I have ever used in my whole programming career. I’m using a 7.x release in one project here at work, and I think I’ll go crazy if I don’t finish it soon. To tell the truth, it’s the second time I had to use Informix in a project, but the first was long ago and I had already forgotten how abominable it is.
Just to begin with the list of problems, support to SQL-92 ranges from minimal to non-existent. There are severe inconsistencies in the SQL support all over its parser. For example, I had one view that didn’t work as expected until I changed the select statement to use the default Informix syntax instead of the SQL-92 syntax I was using. The view kept bringing null values where none was should appear, but when I run the standalone select statement against the database it returned the correct result set.
Another big problems is the limit in the length of the identifiers, which are restricted to 18 characters. This is simply laughable, and makes naming keys and fields a nightmare — especially when working with a internal standard that requires fields to be prefixed with mnemonic type indicators and uses underscores to separate words wasting further space.
Also, blob fields are not directly support in inserts and updates. Granted, many other database engines do not support this feature, but it doesn’t matter. If one database engine supports it, all others should support it as well.
Informix also allows auto-incremented fields but doesn’t provide any direct way to retrieve the last inserted value atomically. (I couldn’t find any reference to such function, but I’d be glad to be proved wrong.)
To add insult to injury, the OLE-DB driver doesn’t work at all, and the ODBC driver is terribly inefficient and hard to configure. Also, as I couldn’t manage to install the ODBC driver in my machine, I have to access the server (a SCO Unix) via a telnet connection using a very archaic interface.
After the past days, I give myself the right of self-pity. 
April 29, 2003 at 4:28 pm · Filed under Geek Stuff
The Degree Confluence Project is an interesting initiative to take an organized sampling of the world by visiting and photographing each point of Earth’s surface where latitude and longitude intersect in integer degrees. The project obviously excludes points on the oceans and near the poles, but there is still more than 13 thousands points to visit. The pictures and stories are interesting.
In Brazil there are 728 confluence points, of which 62 where visited. In the state where I live, Minas Gerais, there are 53 and 10 were visited. It would be interesting to go to some of the points near my city, but I don’t own a GPS device and the points seem to be in places of difficult access most times. To those who enjoy geocaching, however, the project seems to be a good alternative to have fun and contribute.
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