Monthly Archives: June 2008

Odds ‘n Ends

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Odds 'n Ends | Comments Off

Major search engines support robots.txt standard

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Web Crawling | Comments Off

One more time: the Internet is public

[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 … Continue reading

Posted in Internet, Web Crawling | 2 Comments

Can’t Configure Windows DNS Resolver Cache

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Computers, Programming | Comments Off

Is this really asynchronous?

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Programming | 1 Comment

The perfect ground cover?

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Odds 'n Ends | Comments Off

Internet Explorer clipboard protection is broken

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Idiocy, User Interface | Comments Off

Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Book Reviews, Programming, Web Crawling | Comments Off

.NET regular expressions are slow?

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Programming | Comments Off