Monthly Archive for January, 2006

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Prince Charles and the Pope

Published on January 18, 2006 in media. 4 Comments

Prince Charles and the pope

Headlines from 1981:

  1. Prince Charles got married
  2. Liverpool crowned soccer Champions of Europe
  3. Australia lost the Ashes tournament
  4. Pope died

Headlines from 2005:

  1. Prince Charles got married
  2. Liverpool crowned soccer Champions of Europe
  3. Australia lost the Ashes tournament
  4. Pope died

In the future, if Prince Charles decides to remarry, somebody should warn the pope.
(via haveadaydotcom)

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My iPod is a girl

Published on January 17, 2006 in Apple, hardware and music. 2 Comments
  • the first time I saw her, I thought she looked absolutely stunning and I wanted to have her
  • there are others that are thinner, bigger or last longer, but I don’t want any other
  • I did not have to read any manual, handling her was very intuitive
  • every now and then I learn a new trick that I can apply to her and I feel very happy
  • sometimes when I push her buttons, she does not do what I expect, but I find that a proof of character
  • she has really improved my quality of life
  • I have learned a whole lot since we first met
  • she makes me dance when I walk
  • other guys can look at her but I don’t like it when they touch her
  • some days she’s very touchy, and it is impossible to let her do what I want. I don’t get mad, I just leave her alone and a day later she’s better.
  • I dread the day that she is no longer around

Q.E.D.

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Apple creates RSS the Microsoft way

Published on January 15, 2006 in Apple and podcast. 5 Comments

When Apple reinvented the photofeed, they actually were a bit sloppy. Instead of building upon standard RSS and the Media RSS extensions backed by Yahoo!, Feedburner et al., they decided to do what Microsoft has always been accused of: they made a different, non-compatible RSS format.

cf http://static2.podcatch.com/blogs/gems/snedit/rss.xml
It’s pretty bad. There are lots of errors, the date formats are wrong, there are elements that are not in RSS that aren’t in a namespace.
via scripting.wordpress.com (Dave Winer)

Apple photocast RSS
from static2.podcatch.com/blogs/gems/snedit/rss.xml

  • First of all, it looks like they made a ‘wallpaper-cast’ instead of photocast. The RSS extensions are called www.apple.com/ilife/wallpapers.
  • The RSS feeds are only accessible with a specific UserAgent, i.e. only with Apple Safari. Try to open it in any browser and you get an error message. (Update: actually, while I was writing this, the behaviour seems to have been changed to delivering the RSS with Content-Type: application/octet-stream. So this is more or less fixed – application/rss+xml would have been better)
  • The dates are not conform the RFC822 standard: “2006-01-11 16:43:22 -0800″ should be “Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:43:22 -0800″. Most RSS parsers will have no problem with this, but if there’s an official RSS specification, why not follow it.
  • They put the image URL in the link field, which does not allow extra attributes like type or size. Why not use enclosure?
  • For all the date related metadata (photoDate, cropdate), why not use Dublin Core dcterms?

Continue reading ‘Apple creates RSS the Microsoft way’

Blogspot splogs in Technorati

Published on January 13, 2006 in spam. 2 Comments

For some reason, if I search for “baeyens” on Technorati (sorry, John), all I get is a list of splogs (spam blogs). The first ‘real’ result is somewhere at #50, drowned between WEBCAM, CAMERA and PHONE CARD splogs.

Technorati splog results

They all have the same characteristics:

  • all on Blogger‘s blogspot.com
  • post title is up to three spam words in upper case
  • blog title is up to three spam words in lower case
  • blog post contents is a sequence of words without any meaning (apparently ‘baeyens’ has become part of a standard splog dictionary)
  • at the end of the blog post is an iframe part
  • the iframe inserts code from www.webs-search.com in the page that also redirects the browser to e.g. http://www.webs-search.com/search.php?key=guns (if the blog topic was ‘guns’)
  • that page is filled with ads that go through www.peakclick.com, an Austrian PPC site

What I mean is: Dave, you guys should be able to filter this scum out! And Matt, can’t you give the Blogger team a hand in attacking the splog problem from their side? We don’t want Technorati installing a if (domain ends in "blogspot.com") {/* treat as splog */ ... } rule, do we? Or do we?

webs-search.com

  • domain is registered by a “Anrev, Kovacz contact@mwayc.com – 1003 Star Street – Novambark, na 88737363 – CA”
  • the registration address for mwayc.com is “41 State Street – New York, NY 12345 – US”
  • domain is hosted on an EV1 server: ev1s-67-15-104-73.ev1servers.net [67.15.104.73]
  • the page title is ‘Licht und tonanlage’, which could mean that either the above Kovacz speaks German, or -more probable- that the site’s code was delivered by the Austrian PPC site.

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