musings from mgb

UPDATE. Changed picture to “original”; although I can’t remember Satan running in a city centre ward. I thought the undead were limited to voting only on the North Side!!!

Initially I thought this was spam. But the link was broken (I had left out the ‘:’ in “http://”, so full marks for identyifying a problem but 0 marks for identifying the actual problem or a solution). And SevenTwentyFour are a real comany with their own website and everything.

Apparently there is such a thing as the Robot Guidelines. Not that you could tell that from the SevenTwentyFour website, which does like to mention that they confrom to the Robot Guidelines, but doesn’t give a http link to them. Who would have thought that a company which makes some of its money by policing sites for broken links couldn’t provide a simple link to the set of guidelines they are operating under. Its http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/guidelines.html

Here is a sample of some of the guidelines

Be Accountable

If you do decide you want to write and/or run one, make sure that if your actions do cause problems, people can easily contact you and start a dialog. Specifically:

Identify your Web Wanderer

HTTP supports a User-agent field to identify a WWW browser. As your robot is a kind of WWW browser, use this field to name your robot e.g. “NottinghamRobot/1.0″. This will allow server maintainers to set your robot apart from human users using interactive browsers. It is also recommended to run it from a machine registered in the DNS, which will make it easier to recognise, and will indicate to people where you are.

Identify yourself

HTTP supports a From field to identify the user who runs the WWW browser. Use this to advertise your email address e.g. “j.smith@somehwere.edu”. This will allow server maintainers to contact you in case of problems, so that you can start a dialogue on better terms than if you were hard to track down.

Announce It

Post a message to comp.infosystems.www.providers before running your robots. If people know in advance they can keep an eye out. I maintain a list of active Web Wanderers, so that people who wonder about access from a certain site can quickly check if it is a known robot — please help me keep it up-to-date by informing me of any missing ones.

Announce it to the target

If you are only targetting a single site, or a few, contact its administrator and inform him/her.

Be informative

Server maintainers often wonder why their server is hit. If you use the HTTP Referer field you can tell them. This costs no effort on your part, and may be informative.

Be there

Don’t set your Web Wanderer going and then go on holiday for a couple of days. If in your absence it does things that upset people you are the only one who can fix it. It is best to remain logged in to the machine that is running your robot, so people can use “finger” and “talk” to contact you

Went to the dentist this morning, for a check up and cleaning. Bright and early at 9am. Filled in a few forms to attest that I am fit and healthy and some benefit claim forms – not that I am entitled to anything after 4 years in college not earning any money; well not paying taxes /PRSI anyway. All in all I think I got away lightly, although I knew going in I shouldn’t have needed any more than 17 fillings/teeth removed. As she was counting out my teeth and their overall state in dentalese it was tooth 8; filling blah; tooth 7; filling blah and so on and it seems I have a lot of fillings in my back teeth, probably as many as 12 out of 17. Which seems a lot. I don’t know she didn’t comment. I didn’t ask.

It turns out I need 3 fillings, two to fix broken teeth and replace existing fillings. And one filling to be replaced in a non-broken tooth. There is some stuff that needs to be watched but probably won’t develop into anything and I need to floss.

And thats it. Some enquiries about the state of my wisdom teeth – one is only partially erupted, and I did notice how the dentist and her assistant ran out of the room while they were taking x-rays. I suppose one or two doses of radiation ain’t too bad but you wouldn’t want to work in an office doing hundreds a year.

Apparently boy eats girl was initially refused a release permit on the grounds that it glorifies suicide. I certainly know I wanted to kill myself after the movie, but I was able to control my self-destructive urges and now I just want to inflict serious bodily harm on the actors, the directors, writers and just about anybody associated with the movie, the families, friends, neigbours and pets. Thats the last time I let someone else select the movie!!

For those who don’t know; boy eats girl is a bad American High School horror/zombie movie that happens to be set in Dublin and starring Irish zombies, I mean actors. Certainly its the only zombie movie I’ve ever seen where zombies can run! Yes run, not just shuffle along really quickly – I know zombies are supposed to be slow yet they always seem to be able keep up with the fleeing hero/heroine/car/whatever. Maybe zombies move fast only when no-one is looking. Not in this movie however, they were moving fast all the time. Nor should zombies have facial expressions and certainly not ones that change, well not change unless their head is half chopped off or their lips rot away or something.

Although the movie did do a good job of capturing the vacuous lifestyle of american-style teenagers in mixed private school that is probably the same the world over, so you had aspersion (and aspirtation) towards casual sex, girls who were (had been) ill with bulimia and went to end-of-term dances and stuff like that.

The rest of the weekend consisted of beer and such, the usual. Did some DIY at my parents. Managed to not buy books and more or less took things easy. Went running in the rain today.

Apparently The Revs are playing in Dolan’s on thursday, if anyone wants to go.