Technology
Posted: Thu 19 May, 2005 Filed under: Geeky 2 Comments »Today, Netscape released Netscape 8 for download – a new version of their browser, based on Firefox.
Interesting, thought I. I’ll download that and give it a thrash.
Within five minutes I’d managed to crash the fucking thing.
It’s now in my recycle bin, where it belongs.
Miniature
Posted: Mon 16 May, 2005 Filed under: Geeky, Thoughts Leave a comment »One of the activities over the weekend – and certainly not one that I’d normally be expected to go to – was that we went to the Kensington Dolls House exhibition. Not really my cup o’ tea, but Herself wanted to go, and I thought it might be interesting.
And I have to say, it was kind of fun. I’ve never been into this kind of stuff, and honestly can’t see that I ever would be – but even so, some of the stuff on display was pretty fantastic. The people who make a lot of the miniature stuff are definitely odd, to say the least. In fact, some of them are utterly crackers – in particular the ones who do tapestry carpets and wall-hangings. And for some reason doll-makers themselves are invariably creepy as fuck. I don’t know why, but they are.
Still, there is something about a lot of the stuff – working clocks at 1:12 or 1:24 scale. Replicas of designer furniture. Perfect 1:12 scale handmade glassware. It’s things like that where I can see the appeal in such a hobby, even though I don’t personally posess that obsessive trait for collection and perfection, regardless of what’s being collected.
All in all, it was certainly an interesting afternoon. And with luck I might even be able to drum up some website business out of it too…
Code – An Explanation
Posted: Sat 14 May, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky Leave a comment »OK, it’s not really all that difficult…
1 <?php
2 if (substr($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’],0,20) == “http://images.google”) {
3 header(‘Location: http://www.dummies-for-destruction.co.uk/404.htm’);
4 } else {
5
6 }
7 ?>
This entire lot just basically says “if the first 20 characters of the HTTP referrer are http://images.google then go to a non-existent page, otherwise do sod all” – and that’s all that’s needed.
The best thing is that this works for all Google’s Images searches, regardless of source country. Sounds good to me.
Code
Posted: Fri 13 May, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky 7 Comments »Gordon was right, I really should publish the code for blocking referrers from Google Images.
At the absolute top of the code, add this :
<?php
if (substr($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’],0,20) == “http://images.google”) {
header(‘Location: http://www.dummies-for-destruction.co.uk/404.htm’);
} else {}
?>
It really is that simple.
An explanation will be added when I’ve got time!
Blocking
Posted: Thu 12 May, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Thoughts 1 Comment »I know I’ve harped on about this for a while now, but I have to say that I’m still really chuffed with how well my little piece of script for blocking Google Images has worked.
Yes, I’ve got a lot less daily users now – but at least they’re valid readers now, not bloody Google. And my bandwidth useage has nose-dived since blocking the referrers from Images.google. In fact, it’s more than halved.
To me, that’s pretty successful, particularly considering it took a whole four lines of code – and two of those were just to make it a bit more expandable, should I find anyone else who’s using shitloads of my bandwidth. And in the meantime I can’t see it as being anything but good for d4d™