Category Archives: webstuff

bad google!

Posted on by

googlebot decided to index the entire linuxtroubleshooting.com site. Alot. 800 megs worth of spidering.

Bad googlebot!

Robots.txt to block the whole site for now. Apparently the prefered solution is to do some url rewriting and
only block special pages and scripts and whatnot. But I’m not much for correctly writing htaccess files in that awesome RandomApacheConfSyntaxWePulledOutOfSomeOrifice.

I’ll take a look at it tomorrow.

emegency podcast network

Posted on by

Visiting my parents place, and the power went out in the middle of the night. And I started thinking about what devices do and do not work. And I had an idea: The Emergency Podcast Network.

The idea being a localized (say. by zipcode) podcast that contains emergency info. It could include police/fire, utilities like power/water/gas/telephone/cable, evactuation info, etc.

For devices that can show text the info would be included as text files. Other devices could do the “text as filenames in playlist” trick. Devices that can show images could include maps.

You could do a map trick, and figure out the zipcodes a trip will take you through, and download all the approriate info.

Since it would be a huge number of localized podcast, the audio info could be generated with speech synths or phone menu style prerecorded snippets.

It might actually make a podcast that would be useful.

google proxy/cache/accelerator

Posted on by

Google has launched a web accelerator services (aka, a distributed caching, compressing proxy services). It seems to use a browser plug-in. I haven’t seen any dissection of whats going over the network, but I assume its adding some id tracking info along.

Which is kind of scary. Not so much because of the obvious privacy concerns (though, thats probably something to keep in mind), but because I think it might be closing the last chance for a competitor to compete with google. Why?

It seems the obvious way to gather a huge amount of interesting information about the web, and more importantly, how people use it. With a intelligent proxy setup, it’s very easy to track peoples paths though a web site, which link on a web page people actually follow, etc. And for google, thats very useful information to use when trying to return useful search results. And if nothing else, it gets them an easy way to see what links off of a google search result page people actually follow.

Since it’s not exactly easy to setup a large distributed proxy caching network, thats a pretty strong entry barrier to competitors. Not to mention it’s all but impossible for anyone to get a significant number of users to start using a system like that. OS and browser vendors and maybe AOL and google could do it. So something to possibly be worried about.

But theres also alot of interesting things you could do with it. Both for the proxy user and provider.

Throw in a browser plug-in, and you can easily add web site citation handling. Or Tivo style thumbs up/thumbs down. It’s a great place to plug-in a language translation layer. Or inserting “smarttag” style additional information. Or adding “whats related” info. And with a browser plug-in (or *cough*, a browser) you wouldn’t need to change the pages themselves like “smarttags”.

Maybe add in some bookmark sharing/syncing features for even more web meta info.

For the proxy user, you can provide a fair number of interesting value adds. Akamai style caching of large content. Pre-fetching of web sites based on likely paths though a web site. Site path based searching (find “cheese” in the pages people follow from this page).

things to remember

Posted on by

Recently, I’ve been thinking about things that I should know, but do not. Like all 50 state capitals, all the U.S. presidents, world capitals, metric/non metric conversion factors, etc. Basically, things that it would be handy to have memorized.

So I got thinking about what would be the best way to do that. It seems for remembering that kind of info permanently, you really need to be forced to recall it multiple times over time. So it might be interesting to do some sort of software to do just that.

Which then gets morphed into doing it as a website. You could set it up so people could choose what they want to memorize, and then randomly send them email/im/textmessage/phonemessages/etc asking them to recall part of the info. You could setup a blog that would ask “Whats the capital of Wyoming?” or “Whats cosine equal to?” or whatever people want to burn into there brain.

You could provide various canned memory techniques (mnemonics, pegging, memory palaces, etc) as well.

You would have canned sets of things people want to memorize (the above mentioned capitals for example) and could allow people to add there own lists. You could allow people to customize the way they want to be quizzed.

You could get all buzz-wordy and allow people to add associations to info (aka, tag it). You could use said info to attempt to automagically build trees of associations to help people remember stuff. That would probably never actually, work, alas.

eye in the sky

Posted on by

So been poking around maps.google.com recently, inspired by Google Sightseeing.

So far, only one of places I lived at as a child has a high resolution image. But heres some random other pics:
Local Stuff

Other