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Paul's Time Sink

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duckdriver referrer

Paul Westbrook | 07 August, 2005 23:17

I noticed some strange referrers in my http logs.  I saw some entries like:

80.175.64.69 - - [08/Aug/2005:01:30:59 -0700] "GET /imgs/rss20_logo.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 989 "http://lisa.duckdriver.com:3420/cache.px?id=22823" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.1; Linux)"

It looks like there is a web site called DuckDriver which states it is a Personal Internet Manager.  It looks like it is caching my site.  But that is not the bad part, it looks like it is stripping part of my html.  One of the things that it is stripping is my Google Adsense javascript.

I have blocked access from clients with this referrer, and from the host that is doing the caching itself (80.175.64.72).

Update:  It looks like the site that had a cache of my content has been made inaccessible from the outside, and access are redirected to this page.  I found something interesting on that page:

Because the bots do not 'spider' your website (ie. they do not recursively grab pages) they do not check robots.txt before scanning. The ability to regularly scan the submitted page is essential for the upkeep of the Blogwise database and we require this action to avoid delisting blogs unnecessarily.

So if I wanted to prevent the indexing from their spider, I wouldn't be able to use the standard robots.txt mechanism.  This seems wrong.

Update #2:  Sven from Blogwise added a comment describing that this is the Blogwise cache.  It is not intended to be a public cache.  I will be removing the blocks that I added before.

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"Today's Destinations" on Navi

Paul Westbrook | 07 August, 2005 23:00

This weekend, I noticed something interesting while we drove to Squaw Valley and back.  I wanted to enter all of the places that we were going into the navigation unit, so we wouldn't need to add them again later.  Also this would allow the navigation unit to calculate the best route between all of the destinations.

After I entered five destinations, I was not able to add amy more.  It looks like this limit is in the software itself.  Maybe it is too expensive to calculate the best route between more destinations, but this limit seems pretty arbitrary.

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Poor implementation of a web terminal

Paul Westbrook | 07 August, 2005 22:11

This weekend, I received a page that one of my servers was down.  I was on the way to the wedding, so I thought that I would deal with it after getting back to the condo from the wedding.

When we got to high camp at Squaw Valley, I noticed that there was a web terminal in the building where the cable car drops you off.  Even though the directions on the terminal said you had it enter money, I decided to see what happened if I didn't.

When I entered the url, the web page for the site fully loaded, and then after it finished, it went to their home page.  It appears that the web proxy might be modifying the http response headers to include a redirect to their web page.

It seems like this would be better if the proxy redirected the dns traffic. Or it could have just redirected traffic on certain ports.

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Condo in Squaw Valley

Paul Westbrook | 07 August, 2005 21:03

This weekend we went to Squaw Valley for a wedding.  We decided to stay in a condo a couple of miles away, instead of in the complex itself.  The condo was very nice.  It was in a building that appeared to be 20 years old, but the unit itself was newly renovated.

If you are interested in a place to stay in Squaw Valley, I would recommend this place.  You can find rental information here.

The only problem that we had with this place was that it wasn't "child-proofed".  I think that next time we go, we would bring outlet covers, and a child lock for the front door.

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Culligan installed

Paul Westbrook | 07 August, 2005 19:54

A few weeks ago, we noticed that our clothes weren't getting clean.  We thought that this could be cause because of hard water. So we called Culligan.

When they came out they stated the the water quality varies in Santa Clara County, depending on how much water they get from ground water vs. surface water.  He also tested our water and said it was a 13.5, while normal is 8.  (He could be making up these number, and we would have no way to verify these numbers)
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Upgraded to Tiger

Paul Westbrook | 07 August, 2005 05:45

I finally upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4.  I bought the box from Other World Computing, which had it for $99.  Here are the steps that I following for the installation:

  1. I booted my laptop with the 10.4 DVD
  2. Plugged in an external firewire drive
  3. From the Utilities menu, selected Disk Utitiles
  4. Restored the internal drive to the external firewire drive
  5. Erased the internal drive
  6. Installed the software on the internal drive
  7. When it finished, and rebooted, restored the data from the external drive

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