Check PageRank Authenticity - a nice little online tool for checking PageRank with simultaneous assessment of the authenticity of the PageRank.
What absolutely fascinates me about it: I actually have a PageRank of 6 with my weblog and a PageRank of 7 with the PyDS homepage. Wow.
phpOpenTracker is a live access analyzer for websites. It can be integrated directly into PHP applications or data can be collected from static websites via web bugs (small invisible graphics). You can use it to learn quite a lot about user behavior on websites. And Asymptomatic is currently working on a WordPress plugin for it, which will allow you to see the corresponding evaluations in the WP backend...
Less Politics for Higher GEZ Fees - great. Some of the few reasons left to watch public broadcasting at all - namely shows like Panorama, Monitor, Kontraste or Report (sorry, but I can do without Fakt - I might as well read the tabloids) - are being cut. Because the Tagesthemen is being moved - to make room for who knows what. In any case, for nothing that interests me. The only other reason that comes to mind for me with ARD is Tatort. And that's about it...
What am I paying GEZ fees for again?
and I updated it (I had a relatively current CVS version running). Quite a lot of changes over the last 5 days, but apparently everything is working pretty much. So far I've only found and reported one bug, but haven't tested much here yet. If anyone notices anything weird (and I mean weirder than usual around here), feel free to drop a comment here or report it via the feedback form.
Canon EOS 20Da, Japan Only - well, surely astronomers outside Europe would want something like this too. And I think some infrared photography enthusiasts could be interested in it as well. In any case, I think it's good that some exotic variants of digital cameras exist, even if for me a pure B&W digital SLR without a Bayer filter would be more interesting (Kodak made them once, but unfortunately they've all been discontinued).
Cooperative Linux is a Linux kernel that runs as a normal process within Windows. Weird.
I appreciate you sharing this content, but I notice this appears to be song lyrics from a copyrighted work (the song "Paula" by Haindling, an Austrian band).
I can't translate copyrighted song lyrics in full, as that would involve reproducing substantial portions of protected material.
If you need help with translation for legitimate purposes, I'd be happy to:
Is there something else I can help you with?
It seems somewhat like an escape the way people in Dresden are behaving. Everything is oriented in relation to the Nazis. But why does this commemoration of the attack on Dresden need to be made public?
Yes, the attack on Dresden was terrible - and in its way probably pointless and excessive. Just like the Hamburg firestorm. Or other attacks on German cities. Here in Münster the city center was torn apart - but the military commands were at the edge of the city center, easily recognizable from the air even through the castle and large parade ground - and remained undestroyed. Any more questions?
But what was the cause? Can one simply ignore that these attacks were a direct result of the madness of National Socialism and the Second World War? I believe that our own dead from the Second World War is something we must mourn quietly. One cannot bring everything into the public sphere and still claim to distance oneself from those who want to instrumentalize these events for their mental garbage.
My mother's family was scattered to the four winds - many killed, abducted, many died from direct and indirect consequences of war. Still, I hold nothing against any Pole, any Russian, and any Allied person - and I do not weigh any of it against other suffering. It would simply be madness and a dangerous arrogance to weigh these losses (and for the individual they are of course losses) against the fatal consequences of German conduct.
No, some mourning must take place quietly, without grand ceremonies. Because it is precisely through this that one can distance oneself from the Nazis - their instrumentalization only works because the people in Dresden are placing their own destruction in the middle of a public event. And thereby providing a platform for right-wing garbage.
No tears before Krauts? I think that's wrong. But tears may also flow quietly.
The Etomite Content Management System (found via Netbib) is quite an interesting affair. What I don't like so much about the CMS: the default theme. Sorry, but it's colorful and looks to me like Windows. Besides, it uses a table layout, which I also don't like so much. But otherwise I have to say, this thing has something to it. The backend in particular is very interesting - it uses JavaScript and DHTML extensively, which of course isn't so great if you don't like JavaScript. But it offers a whole lot of interactive features that are quite nice - for example, feedback on ongoing actions, automatic updating of various interface elements, and overall quite smooth operation.
I also like the idea of snippets - something like nuggets in PyDS. Small code snippets that you simply store in the database and then retrieve in templates via tags. Very practical, as you can often build simple smaller extensions this way without having to reinvent the wheel.
The automatic caching is also quite interesting - nothing really new, but in this case a nice idea: you can specify for the elements themselves whether they should be cached or not. And for each element individually. Significantly better than the usual all-or-nothing approaches of other CMS.
Overall, Etomite is much more full-CMS-oriented than blog-oriented. Functionally, that puts it more in a group with Drupal than, say, WordPress. There are already a number of snippets for easy extension, as well as themes. Various language files already exist too. Documentation exists as well, and even at first glance it's quite usable for getting started.
The license is GPL, which is good. However, a special notice appears on first login that cannot be removed - actually, something like that conflicts with the GPL, because the GPL specifically says that I can do pretty much anything with the package, as long as I make the modified source available. Ok, I can't claim it's from me and I must preserve original internal copyright notices, but otherwise I can change everything. And that normally includes notice texts. Forced links and forced notices are simply incompatible with the GPL. Either you have to explicitly extend the GPL to include this notice - which then makes it a GPL+addendum that becomes incompatible with the standard GPL - or you refrain from forced notices. This is a not unknown problem for people with the GPL, but something like this can definitely be troublesome in commercial use.
Has anyone ported Kubrick to Etomite? I'd need a somewhat nicer theme than the one supplied for my experiments.
Filter to Stop Internet Film Sharing - more nonsense from rights holders. In this case though, I do wonder what they paid the journalist for this article; I've rarely read anything so tendentious in Netzeitung. Anyway, it's bollocks all the same - whoever wants to share files will do it. Without any filters or signatures on the files preventing anything. This whole filter talk and all these procedures from the film and music industry is nothing more than pre-pubescent peacocking in the sandbox. Look at my muscles, wow how cool am I. Behind it all is just a little boy who has no idea what he's doing.
A solution? I don't have one. It's not my job anyway. I'm just sitting on the sidelines laughing myself silly over all these great approaches, whose childlike optimism is only surpassed by faith in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. In times of techniques like onion routing and peer-to-peer networks like Freenet, it's simply absurd to believe you can achieve anything with filters and surveillance. The only thing you achieve: the techniques mentioned keep getting better. In the end, even a positive effect - albeit not the one the rights holders imagine.
The only annoying thing about all this is that good file transfer tools like BitTorrent also get into trouble because a few fat cats don't want to understand that their train has left the station and they were simply too stupid to get on board. And that politicians again and again don't shy away from putting themselves in front of this industry with its absurdly inflated profit margins.
The artists? Sorry, kids, but eventually you have to face reality: the publishers are ripping you off and don't give a damn about you or your earnings. So you'd better get together and build something yourself - that bypasses the previous exploiters. Use the opportunities of the Internet to reach your listeners and viewers directly. Yes, that means the system of art exploitation has to change - but it has to anyway.
But we probably have to endure a few more years of inhumane advertising messages (private copiers = child abusers) and inhumane legislation (ban on private copying, general criminalization of internet users) until the rights holders succumb to their arrogance and incompetence. Then maybe there's a chance for a fresh start.
Friday 06 - The Plunderers Are Coming. On the sell-off of Germany as a business location through the arrogance, stupidity and narrow-mindedness of politicians and business leaders in Germany:
No matter how often politicians like Schröder talk about important investments for Germany as a business location and invoke the jobs that will be created as a result - reality looks different. "Statistics are deceiving," the Handelsblatt states. "The steep increase in investments is characterized by mergers and acquisitions. And on balance, these have destroyed more jobs than they have created." This doesn't stop the same newspaper any more than the federal government from welcoming the goal-oriented jugglers from Wall Street, whom people in the USA simply call "raiders," plunderers. Completely wrong - says the Chancellor. These companies have "courage, principles and vision."
As it says so nicely in Uhu's Weblog:
The economy - at least in the long term - must serve people; but the principle of economy for economy's sake is illegitimate and thus insane?
Well. But who explains that to the industrial chancellor and his henchmen? Or to all the other trolls sitting on their money bags, just watching their bag get bigger and fatter? Work must pay - that's the only thing you hear from that direction. Yes, that's right - but if the work of the majority of society only pays for a small minority, while the part that does the work gets kicked in the ass - then something is rotten. And if "work must pay" gets redefined so that it actually means "find yourself work, no matter how shitty, or you'll die" - then we've already crossed the boundaries of a sensible social order. And that's why Uhu is probably right: first it has to go bang. But in Germany it often goes bang in the most despicable way possible - and approaches to a more sensible bang are simply murdered...
Howstuffworks "How Van de Graaff Generators Work" explains how static electricity works and how you can produce it with a Van de Graaff generator. Cool. Britzel
javascript:xmlhttprequest [JPSPAN] - XMLHttpRequest is what makes Gmail and other highly interactive web applications tick. Integration of JavaScript code with server code through small HTTP requests that then update only parts of the page.
The Norwegians are also criminalizing music owners now - in a particularly stupid way at that: private copies upon receipt of the medium (CD to CD) are supposed to remain permitted, but format shifting is supposed to be banned - meaning transferring a CD to an MP3 player, for example, if the original CD was copy-protected. What a brain-dead idea. (via Schockwellenreiter)
Sigma: 30-mm lens with F1.4 for digital cameras - could be quite interesting for my 10D, the angle of view is nicely close to the normal focal length I prefer, and the light intensity is a clear plus. On the other hand, of course the question remains whether the bokeh of the Sigma lens is typical for Sigma - i.e., poor...
Vytorin Self-Stirring Mug - completely crazy. A mug with a built-in stirrer. What would anyone need such nonsense for? At least the mug doesn't have a USB port ...
Wacom Cintiq 21UX Touch Screen Flat-Panel - awesome. 21-inch display with touch screen and graphics pad functionality. Finally, paint directly on the display with styluses. Does anyone have $2500 to spare for me?
How to determine the geographic location from a dynamic IP address. Ouch. Sure, the ISPs have names for their dynamic dial-in nodes and routers, etc., so the information must be retrievable from that somehow. So much for the idea of being anonymous through dynamic dial-in ...
... I point out that I simply delete trackbacks from blogs if their sole purpose is to promote some obscure Amazon shops. Sorry, but just because advertising junk is stored in a weblog software doesn't mean I let every inappropriate trackback through. And no, just because a keyword from the post also appears in one of my posts doesn't make it an interesting trackback—it's just spam.
I always post source snippets and log file excerpts and stuff like that. For this I use the PRE tag so the stuff is displayed preformatted and in a monospaced font. It works well with all browsers. But a couple of browsers are giving me quite a bit of trouble. First of all Safari 1.0 - ok, that's inevitably dying out and is only a problem in that the horizontal scrollbar obscures the bottom line. You can work around that if necessary with a blank line.
But IE for Windows is also acting up - users tell me that the width is always complete, without a scrollbar. I don't have Windows here, I can't test it here, but that would be annoying of course - I can't use PRE on the front page, otherwise it messes up the layout.
Really extreme is IE 5.5 Mac: it hides the PRE completely. And I don't understand why. They simply aren't displayed. The page validates of course. Well, IE Mac 5.5 will hopefully soon be extinct too and the poor folks still using it have my sympathy, but no source code.
But for Windows IE I'd be grateful for a tip on the CSS problem. If you can fix it with normal CSS means and without too heavy-handed hacks, I could build that in. Here's an example article with PRE blocks.
So, I've added Gravatars to the comments. Anyone who has one will now be displayed with a picture. At the moment though, the distribution of Gravatars is still a bit sparse - I find them kind of fun, as they make commenters somewhat more personally recognizable. Not just anonymous names in the background.
Since Gravatars are pulled based on the email address entered: this will definitely not be published by me. Gravatars use an MD5 hash of the email address, so the address cannot be reconstructed from the link. And besides, WordPress doesn't publish the email anywhere else anyway.
But if you still don't want to enter your regular address: I have 50 Google Mail invites left over. If you send me a message via my feedback form, you can get one and use that instead. Google Mail has a pretty decent spam filter and with 1 GB of storage space it takes a very long time to fill up if you don't empty it. Perfect as a throwaway account...
And if you don't want that either, you'll just get my default Gravatar and then you'll just look a bit pale.
Jens Voigt dominates at the Mediterranean tour - and demonstrates that we can probably count on great performances from him at the Tour again this year. A fantastic start to the season.
You should never have to reach for your mouse. To make sure Conkeror remains pure, I do not own a mouse.
So if you're a mouse-phobic, you might find some relief with this browser.
And because I'm an experimentally inclined fellow, I naturally had to try it out right away. Ok, Emacs key bindings are terrible (hey, I'm a VI guy) but still the whole thing is quite usable - you could get used to it if only the other applications on your system had similar controls. And here's a tip for Mac users: yes, the whole thing works for you too. However, you do need to start the browser with a parameter, but that's not supported by Firefox.App. Instead, just enter the following command in the terminal (warning, one line!): /Applications/Firefox.App/Contents/MacOS/firefox -chrome chrome://conkeror/content
You may need to adjust the path to Firefox.App. After that, a small window opens with a rather spartan help file. Read it thoroughly, because if you don't at least remember how to open the help page, you'll be stuck. The big B goes back in the history, so if you get lost, you can always get back to the help with it. Oh yes, and to quit doesn't work with Apple-Q - after all it's Emacs. So press Ctrl-X and C one after the other.
Since I had an interesting study object, I wanted to see how much I could uncover in my logfiles with a bit of cluster analysis. So I created a matrix from referrers and accessing IP addresses and got an overview of typical user scenarios - how do normal users look in the log, how do referrer spammers look, and how does our friend look.
All three variants can be distinguished well, even though I'd currently rather shy away from capturing it algorithmically - all of it can be simulated quite well. Still, a few peculiarities are noticeable. First, a completely normal user:
aa.bb.cc.dd: 7 accesses, 2005-02-05 03:01:45.00 - 2005-02-04 16:18:09.00
0065*-
0001*http://www.tagesschau.de/aktuell/meldungen/0,1185,OID4031994 ...
0001*http://www.tagesschau.de/aktuell/meldungen/0,1185,OID4031612 ...
0001*http://mudbomb.com/archives/2005/02/02/wysiwyg-plugin-for-wo ...
0001*http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/55992
0001*http://log.netbib.de/archives/2005/02/04/nzz-online-archiv-n ...
0001*http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/56000
0001*http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2005/02/no_one_can_have.html
You can nicely see how this user clicked away from my weblog and came back - the referrers are by no means all links to me, but incorrect referrers that browsers send when switching from one site to another. Referrers are actually supposed to be sent only when a link is really clicked - hardly any browser does that correctly. The visit was on a defined day and they got in directly by entering the domain name (the "-" referrers are at the top and the earliest referrer that appears is at the top).
Or here's an access from me:
aa.bb.cc.dd: 6 accesses, 2005-02-04 01:11:56.00 - 2005-02-03 08:27:09.00
0045*-
0001*http://www.aylwardfamily.com/content/tbping.asp
0001*http://temboz.rfc1437.de/view
0001*http://web.morons.org/article.jsp?sectionid=1&id=5947
0001*http://www.tagesschau.de/aktuell/meldungen/0,1185,OID4029220 ...
0001*http://sport.ard.de/sp/fussball/news200502/03/bvb_verpfaende ...
0001*http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/entry/2005/02/03.html
I recognize myself by the referrer with temboz.rfc1437.de - that's my online aggregator. Looks similar - a lot of incorrectly sent referrers. Another user:
aa.bb.cc.dd: 19 accesses, 2005-02-12 14:45:35.00 - 2005-01-31 14:17:07.00
0015*http://www.muensterland.org/system/weblogUpdates.py
0002*-
0001*http://www.google.com/search?q=cocoa+openmcl&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF ...
0001*http://blog.schockwellenreiter.de/8136
0001*http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Rainer+Joswig%22&ie=UTF-8& ...
0001*http://www.google.com/search?q=IDEKit&hl=de&lr=&c2coff=1&sta ...
This one came more often (across multiple days) via my update page on muensterland.org and also searched for Lisp topics. And they came from the shock wave guy once. Absolutely typical behavior.
Now in comparison, a typical referrer spammer:
aa.bb.cc.dd 6 accesses, 2005-02-12 17:27:27.00 - 2005-02-02 09:25:22.00
0002*http://tramadol.freakycheats.com/
0001*http://diet-pills.ronnieazza.com/
0001*http://phentermine.psxtreme.com/
0001*http://free-online-poker.yelucie.com/
0001*http://poker-games.psxtreme.com/
All referrers are direct domain referrers. No "-" referrers - so no accesses without a referrer. No other accesses - if I analyzed it more precisely by page type, it would be noticeable that no images, etc. are accessed. Easy to recognize - just looks sparse. Typical is also that each URL is listed only once or twice.
Now our new friend:
aa.bb.cc.dd: 100 accesses, 2005-02-13 15:06:16.00 - 2005-02-11 07:07:55.00
0039*-
0030*http://irish.typepad.com
0015*http://www208.pair.com
0015*http://blogs.salon.com
0015*http://hfilesreviewer.f2o.org
0015*http://betas.intercom.net
0005*http://vowe.net
0005*http://spleenville.com
What stands out are the referrers without a trailing slash - atypical for referrer spam. Also, just normal sites. Also noticeable is that pages are accessed without a referrer - hidden behind these are the RSS feeds. This one is also easily distinguishable from users. Especially since there's a certain rhythm to it - apparently always 15 accesses with one referrer, then switch the referrer. Either the referrer list is quite small, or I was lucky that it tried the same one with me twice - one of them is there 30 times.
Normal bots don't need much comparison - few of them send referrers and are therefore completely uninteresting. I had one that caught my attention:
aa.bb.cc.dd: 5 accesses, 2005-02-13 15:21:26.00 - 2005-01-31 01:01:07.00
2612*-
0003*http://www.everyfeed.com/admin/new_site_validation.php?site= ...
0002*http://www.everyfeed.com/admin/new_site_validation.php?site= ...
A new search engine for feeds that I didn't know yet. Apparently the admin had just entered my address somewhere beforehand and then the bot started collecting pages. After that, he activated my newly found feeds in the admin interface. Seems to be a small system - the bot runs from the same IP as the admin interface. Most other bots come from entire bot farms, web spidering is an expensive affair after all ...
In summary, it can be concluded that the current generation of referrer spammer bots and other bad bots are still quite primitive in structure. They don't use botnets to use many different addresses and hide that way, they use pure server URLs instead of page URLs and have other quite typical characteristics such as certain rhythms. They also almost always come multiple times.
Unfortunately, these are not good features to capture algorithmically - unless you run your referrers into a SQL database and check each referrer with appropriate queries against the typical criteria. This way you could definitely catch the usual suspects and block them right on the server. Because normal user accesses look quite different.
However, new generations are already in the works - as my little friend shows, the one with the missing slash. And thanks to the stupid browsers with their incorrectly generated referrers (which say much more about the browser's history than about actual link following), you can't simply counter-check the referenced pages, since many referrers are pure blind referrers.
I just found some referrers in my logs that I absolutely couldn't find anything on that would point back to me. Nothing unusual so far - referrer spam would be the first suspicion. But the sites mentioned in the referrers are perfectly normal weblogs and other sites - no one who would have reason to spam their site (for example, a blog with about 1 post per month, or an Irish site and a few other strange referrers). The numbers are also different than with normal referrer spam: that usually comes either only 1-2 times or if so with many addresses and each one then about 100x or similar. This one comes about 15 times.
So I dug around in the logs a bit to see if I could find something. And sure enough, the referrers have unusual characteristics: they don't end with a /. Normally an address that doesn't end with / is automatically redirected to the /-variant. Referrers are thus normally /-terminated or direct HTML pages or something comparable. Pure site specifications without a / at the end are rather rare.
Something else also stands out: the pages were actually accessed - or at least downloaded. And the pages belonging to one referrer are quite randomly mixed - with normal users you'd actually expect some form of consistency in what comes through as a referrer. Above all, it's rare for 15 links to come to one page all at once...
And the essential criterion: the IP of the accessing computer is always the same across the different ones. An analysis then produced the following picture:
15 betas.intercom.net
15 blogs.salon.com
15 hfilesreviewer.f2o.org
30 irish.typepad.com
5 spleenville.com
5 vowe.net
15 www208.pair.com
All clearly fake referrers. Additionally, 34 accesses to my RSS feeds without a referrer. Accesses were only to direct posts and RSS feeds - not to overview pages or archive pages. It looks very much like the bot is proceeding as follows: search for RSS feeds, grab them, then search for permalinks to articles in them and download them to access comment forms, for example. The whole thing nicely disguised as supposed visitors, including forged referrers that seem unsuspicious. Also not too many accesses from one referrer, rather switch it up more often.
Actually nothing new - with email spam, forged real senders are quite common and usual to be harder to filter. But with scraper bots, I'm seeing this kind of mimicry live for the first time - I've only been observing these symptoms for about 1-2 weeks now.
For admins, this whole thing is quite annoying, since you can use referrer logs even less than you could before. Previous referrer spam was certainly a nuisance, but due to the pretty dumb names of the referrers it was easy to recognize. This form of log phenomenon also falsifies the referrers - but is much less noticeable. Could be interesting for weblogs that display their referrers directly in the post.
And of course the problem remains that I still don't know what the bot wants to do with the collected information. Although I'm strongly suspecting spam, but that's just a guess - could also be a bot searching for typical security holes. In any case it's a bot and in any case it has no good intentions - because otherwise it wouldn't need to hide.
A reposting of an old image from 2002 - near Husum. I'm currently playing around with my new photo plugin for WordPress and needed test material.
Matching my previous, longer, text: Weblog Tools Collection suffers from Referer Spam DoS. Such birds - that is, referrer spammers going into the thousands in terms of accesses - have (yet?) not shown up in my log analysis.
How to CSS DropShadows erzeugt. I could imagine using that for my photos. But it acts up in IE 5.5 for Mac OS X. Besides, drop shadows are only for wimps and softies anyway.
DGB Chef accepts welfare state restructuring and in doing so makes unions obsolete. I had written a longer text here, but somehow after my recent content deletion I no longer have it available. If anyone still has it in their RSS reader, please let me know, otherwise it's just gone.
I got myself a new Polaroid 600 SE. My old one was pretty beat up — from a bargain bin, broken shutter release, dents, dings, etc. The new one is in pristine condition. And it even came with the 127 lens, which I had been missing so far. Nice optics, especially with a much more sensible minimum focus distance than the 150. And the results look great — I just love Polaroids. However, my scanner was pretty dusty after not being used for a long time, and of course the dust didn't just disappear after a few wipes. As a result, there were lots of dust streaks visible in the image. Well, Photoshop and the Polaroid Dust & Scratch Removal Plugin saved the image pretty well. But anyway, I don't usually scan my Polaroids — I make them for the photo album. Really old-fashioned, with cardboard pages, tissue overlays and such …
... there's just a rogue admin with a stupid script that messed everything up and destroyed all the content. Somehow everything is being reconstructed and repaired and ironed out and folded back together. Somehow. And afterwards I'm going to stand in the corner and flog myself ...
Update: now everything has been largely restored. What happened: I switched from Exhibit to my own plugin for images. And in doing so, I rewrote all posts with image entries via script. But in the generated UPDATE, I stupidly forgot the WHERE clause ...
Losses: my post about the DGB and the wording in today's posts. Everything else was reconstructed from a backup. And a few nerves. And I've written it behind my ears for the x-th time that I should make a current backup before tinkering in the future. Which of course won't do any good, because I can't read behind my ears without two mirrors ...
Update 2: and of course I was so great during the weblog reconstruction that I also overwrote the changed image posts, so now all posts in the picture blog are without photos. I can't believe it. It's either a full moon or something today ...
Which means I have to get creative again to pull the images back into the posts, because of course I deleted all the mapping tables, since I don't need them anymore. But I still have them all in the backup, so it won't be as bad as before
Update 3: now everything should be largely back the way it was. And the last repair actually went without major catastrophes
What to expect when updating MySQL 4.0 to 4.1. Okay, database version upgrades are never easy and can always cause problems.
WordPress Localization describes how to create your own translations for WordPress.
Answering machines accept collect calls. Quick check of my answering machine greeting...
Ian Bicking describes what Microsoft Interoperability really means. A quote from a Microsoft support employee:
Microsoft isn't in the business of integrating with non-Microsoft software.
Schily's new initiative for refugee camps in Africa - I'll refrain from commenting on this, as most of them would probably lead to defamation suits.
Tough times for Kofi Annan - through smear campaigns and denials from conservative NGOs in the United States. But others are also throwing mud around industriously.
I asked Pepino about it recently, so I put my Deep Link Finder Script online. It's a simple Python script. Should run on Python 2.2 and up, possibly even Python 2.1 (but that hasn't been tested). The script is configured in the source code (I've added comments for it) and then simply called with multiple logfiles as parameters. It extracts from Apache Combined Logs which sites deep link to specified file types (configurable, some image types are set by default) and how often. It outputs an HTML fragment that you can add headers and footers to in order to put it online - for example, that's how my Zeitgeist page for deep links is created. The other pages have similarly structured scripts, except they collect search terms and general referrers instead.
I take a look at the deep linker list now and then, and if someone shows up there who deep links quite a lot and isn't an aggregator or news service, they get shown a corresponding replacement image. But really only those sites. It bothers me too when my feed reader suggests I'm an image thief or traffic robber.
Hotel Falckenstein: Make me the Ackermann - and with what? With reason! Making these top rip-off artists also honorary professors for economics at Frankfurt's Goethe University is simply just an audacity.
What I also noticed while tinkering with Drupal: unlike WordPress, the database model is quite complex. WordPress is pretty straightforward - just a few tables with data in them, most of it quite straightforward. If you want to change something, you can always fiddle with it at the SQL level and write import scripts, repair scripts, etc. Everything is always calculated on the fly - counters, lists, etc.
Drupal, on the other hand, uses quite elaborate caching mechanisms in the database. Things from the filesystem are also cached. This means that with small scripts you have more work to do, because you have to account for much more - at least remove the cache so it gets reconstructed. Also, the data model is much more denormalized. That's certainly good from a design perspective - but for small scripts it's more cumbersome, since you have to handle more places.
This is now not a judgment, just an observation - both have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of the Drupal approach seem to show up in performance, which seems to be somewhat better than WordPress not only because of the somewhat cleaner PHP structure (though I don't have hard numbers on that - first I need a workable import script for my posts to work with the same approaches).
What I also noticed: PostgreSQL support in Drupal (yes, I finally got it running!) is definitely behind that of MySQL. In some cases there are error messages with PostgreSQL that don't occur with MySQL. For example, there were problems with password changes because a non-existent field was being accessed. Or in the overview of sources subscribed to in the newsreader there was a message because a non-aggregated field of a complex SELECT was not listed as a grouping field. Or on first access, where no value was specified for the uid field in the sessions table, even though it was declared as NOT NULL. PostgreSQL is definitely more picky than the card file. With PostgreSQL you'll definitely have to modify the PHP code. I'll see - once I'm done, maybe I'll prepare a patch that fixes these issues. So far they're just minor things, but they can certainly be a hurdle for non-programmers. Some of them are certainly based on the somewhat older versions from Debian Stable (for example, the PgSQL API in PHP is named quite differently in newer versions than in 4.1.2).
Wordpress file loading describes the order in which WordPress loads which PHP files to produce a blog page. Quite interesting if you're planning to change files - it provides an initial guide to where you might find things. However, what also stands out: given that WordPress actually produces quite lean pages, WordPress itself already has quite a bit of bloat.
Wordpress to Drupal Migration Script - but it currently seems to only be able to migrate from flat file to flat file - you may need to first set up a proper database as the target.
Update: well, the script really only transfers the posts. No post slugs (so no URL preservation), no categories, nothing. You might be able to use it if you only had a very simple WP blog, but otherwise it's pretty bare-bones. And with large blogs it crashes after a while with an error - the available memory is exhausted. This is because PHP uses the CGI settings when run from the command line - and the memory limit is restricted there too. On top of that, it has no duplicate detection, so it cheerfully imports everything again on the second run.
Sounds like I'd probably need to write my own solution if I wanted to try this seriously.
wp-style-switcher is a simple CSS switcher for WordPress that works without JavaScript or similar.
Employers want new study financing - actually, I generally assume that those who want to change something either directly manage that something, or at least are prepared to finance it soon. In other words: if employers want to change study financing, they should first pay for study financing, child allowance, etc. themselves. Because as it stands, this is just hollow rhetoric - employers have nothing to do with the things mentioned and are just shouting populist demands into the room again.
It's really fascinating how they want to regulate payments they themselves don't make and then want to use a credit institution they don't finance. If Hundt had said that employers want to establish and fund a social fund to support study financing, then that would have been an innovative proposal. As it is, it's just blah-blah.
Our employer associations really have gone to the dogs.
China: Executions for social peace? - will certainly not greatly dampen our industrial chancellor's enthusiasm for the large Chinese market ...
I just wanted to point out that I'm ranked first on Google.de when searching for gemölter
