June « 2008 « Jim's Random Notes

Odds ‘n Ends

By Jim, on June 23rd, 2008%

A few notes after a day of knocking things off the “to do” list.

I’ve used QUIKRETE before, but never for setting a post. Just pour the dry concrete mix into the hole (after placing the post), and add one gallon of water for every 50 lbs of mix. The stuff sets in about 45 . . . → Read More: Odds ‘n Ends

Major search engines support robots.txt standard

By Jim, on June 19th, 2008%

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Live Search recently announced standard support for the major robots.txt directives. This means that you can use the same syntax for robots.txt to control the activities of those three major search engine crawlers. The common directives are: Disallow, Allow, and Sitemaps. In addition, all three support the use of wildcards (* . . . → Read More: Major search engines support robots.txt standard

One more time: the Internet is public

By Jim, on June 16th, 2008%

[Note: As Michael Covington pointed out, there's plenty of privacy on the Internet--just not on the World Wide Web.]

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I keep running across people who don’t understand that there is no privacy on the Internet. If you’ve uploaded something to your Web site, it’s highly likely that Google, . . . → Read More: One more time: the Internet is public

Can’t Configure Windows DNS Resolver Cache

By Jim, on June 11th, 2008%

In experimenting with the program I described yesterday, I got to fiddling with the DNS resolver cache, called dnscache. Briefly, dnscache saves the results from recent DNS queries so that it doesn’t have to keep querying the DNS server. Considering that a DNS query can take 100 milliseconds or more to resolve, this can save . . . → Read More: Can’t Configure Windows DNS Resolver Cache

Is this really asynchronous?

By Jim, on June 10th, 2008%

I’ve been working on a relatively simple program whose purpose is to see just how fast I can issue Web requests. The idea is to get one machine hooked directly to an Internet connection and see how many concurrent connections it can maintain and how much bandwidth it can consume. A straight bandwidth test is . . . → Read More: Is this really asynchronous?

The perfect ground cover?

By Jim, on June 9th, 2008%

A few years back, Debra and I started adding large mulch areas around the trees in the yard. This was an effort to make things look a little better, as well as to reduce lawn maintenance. More mulch means less grass to mow. And mulch around the trees means that I don’t have to run . . . → Read More: The perfect ground cover?

Internet Explorer clipboard protection is broken

By Jim, on June 6th, 2008%

This morning I copied a URL from the browser to the clipboard and then tried to paste it into the email message I was writing in another browser window. Internet Explorer popped up this confirmation box:

I wouldn’t mind so much if it showed this box one time. But it shows the box for . . . → Read More: Internet Explorer clipboard protection is broken

Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers

By Jim, on June 5th, 2008%

Considering what I’m doing for work, you can imagine that when I ran across Michael Schrenk‘s Webbots Spiders, and Screen Scrapers recently, I ordered a copy. The book is a tutorial on writing small Web bots that automate the collection of data from the Web.

Most of the book focuses on screen scrapers that download . . . → Read More: Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers

.NET regular expressions are slow?

By Jim, on June 4th, 2008%

One of the benefits–or curses, depending on my mood and how urgently I need a solution–of programming computers is that I often start working on one thing and end up getting sidetracked by a piece of the problem.

Take today’s distraction, for example. I’m writing a program to experiment with some text classification using the . . . → Read More: .NET regular expressions are slow?

Jim's Random Notes