praseodymium's blog

MozillaZine Folding@Home Team Completes 10 Million Points

praseodymium — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 23:25:27 +0100

MozillaZine Folding@Home Team Completes 10 Million Points - [mozillaZine]
We only have 7.7 million points... and the number of users keeps decreasing. But congrats to MozillaZine!

cron cron cron

praseodymium — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 20:54:44 +0000

Drupal/CivicSpace, which powers this site, needs cron to execute some scheduled tasks. Since we don't have cron on the server, I made a script that looped with a sleep and executed the tasks regularly. Problem: this script got killed regularly, which resulted in no cron for weeks (until I remembered to restart the script, that is). I've now put crontask on another dedicated server with real cron, so it should always run now, which'll mean notifications are in time again.

PS.: Yes, I'm still active :). And I can give anyone admin rights if he or she wants (just so you can promote posts to the frontpage, etc.).

Another IE bug

praseodymium — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 22:40:26 +0100

Today I created a testcase on an IE bug I discovered this weekend (see the attachment). Fortunately there is also a fix available, which works OK and isn't really messy to other browsers when putting it in an IE conditional comment (it involves adding a form element).

Installation-Free Mozilla Firefox CD

praseodymium — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 18:52:29 +0100

Installation-Free Mozilla Firefox CD - [mozillaZine]

Haven't tried it yet but it seems promising. I might actually get it for using at school, where there's no Firefox. There are some cons about this though, for example that your bookmarks aren't saved. And you need a CD Player, and at our school 90% of them don't work (people took out the elastic bands around the wheels that are used to open the tray).

Anyway, here are some Dijjer links to the LiveCD:

Dijjer

praseodymium — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 22:26:19 +0100

Today I've checked out the Dijjer project. It's another P2P application, but different from all others: it is easy to use for sharers as there are no torrent-like files you need to create (a prefix to a link is enough), and no 24/7 seeders needed - your website is used as the first source. It's also and easy to use for clients: clicking a Dijjerized link will automatically redirect you to a page containing instructions, and no ports need to be opened because of the NAT2NAT technology.

Wordpress Banned by Google for Spamming

praseodymium — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 20:56:46 +0100

I found this quite shocking news - an open source application with such sneaking techniques. To summarize: Wordpress has been hosting 168.000 (168 thousand) articles on their website specifically designed to game the Google Adwords program, using high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes and mortgages.

Wordpress Banned by Google for Spamming - The Real Nick W writes "Wordpress, an incredibly popular Open Source Blogging system was found to be spamming google by inserting hidden links to junk content on high paying Adsense keywords such as mesothelioma and debt consolidation. Following Threadwatch picking up the story an anonymous Google rep appeared in the original thread admonishing bloggers not to use sneaky tactics to rank highly for "duplicate content" such as the 100,000 hidden articles on the Wordpress site. The articles have now dissapeared from Google and it remains to be seen whether Google will ban Wordpress outright as they tend to do when SEO's and web dev's pull these kinds of stunts." [Slashdot]

Google's AdLinks

praseodymium — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 23:23:33 +0000

Since a few days, Google has AdLinks: a new form of AdWords advertisment. If you're curious what it is, just scroll down to the bottom of the sidebar. They should be under the "Thanks to" header (except if you are on member-only pages - Google's bot can't index them) - feel free to check them out!

So, what do you think of them? Time for another poll (or post comments)!

Back from London!

praseodymium — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 19:38:12 +0000

And it was fun! I was really tired but after lots of sleep today fortunately not anymore.

So what's coming up next on the site? Probably the installer. It still needs some working on, and probably also some testers, but I'm sure it'll be fine. I still doubt if I have to do windows 98 support - win9x doesn't support services and would require some messing around to get working. I wonder if anyone still uses windows 9x - time for a poll!

Google 302 Exploit Knocks Sites Out

praseodymium — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 18:03:21 +0000

Google 302 Exploit Knocks Sites Out - clsc writes "The exploit: Redirect via 302 to another page of your choice, then watch as the URL of your your redirect script replaces the URL of that carefully selected page in Google's search results. Once this happens, feel free to redirect any visitor that is not Googlebot to any other page of your choice. Also applies to other search engines as well (not Yahoo! though)." [Slashdot]

I already noticed this thing when moving the site to spreadthefox.net (but didn't see any way of exploiting this): Google showed up results with firefoxfah.sf.net (the old domain) but with content from the new site. firefoxfah.sf.net has a 301 (Moved Permanently) redirect.

London!

praseodymium — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 17:31:52 +0000

I'm going to London tomorrow - won't be for long though, at Friday I'll be back already. I'll have to get up at 4 am...