A post? They have those on blogs?

I load the front page of my blog nearly every day. I just can’t seem to create a post that has enough value that it’s worth posting at all. However, now I will.

That aside, I have been looking at CloudFlare, and I’ve implemented it in some areas. WordPress is locked to a domain, so this blog isn’t behind CloudFlare. Most sections of theoks.net can be viewed behind CloudFlare by replacing theoks.net with theoks.tk.

What CloudFlare does for you is that it caches static resources like CSS, Javascript, and images, closer to you, resulting in faster load of images and styles. Especially on the image board, and the zoomable Minecraft map render this can be advantageous.

I have also added Google’s +1 button to post pages, as well as the home page, and moved the Tweet button with it to below the post content.

In related news I got into Google+, which is pretty exciting. You may ask me for an invite, but I cannot guarantee that you will be allowed to join.

Google Authenticator and a finished robot

Last Tuesday, we got our robot shipped, or rather, put in a big clear plastic bag with big red zip tie on it. Although we shipped overweight, and missing a few components, this is better than last year on completeness at ship. I have a few pictures in my “Robots” Facebook album, showing off Ursa Major (our robot).

Last night, I upgraded my Debian VM to Squeeze, and set up Google Authenticator on it. The Makefile is kinda terrible, but it works as of now. I just scanned the barcode that loaded the secret key into the authenticator app on my phone, and now I can authenticate with time-based one-time passwords. I got it to compile on Mac OS X (some things are hacked up), but I don’t think it exactly works. I’ll have to dig in further to figure it out though.

Google Authenticator works rather well, although one thing I want is a timeout indicator so I know when my password is going to expire, so I don’t get half-way through typing it and it times out.

That is all.

Spamming Tactic: Exploiting Search Engines

It’s nothing new, but I see it happening right now. Spammers are searching for “leave a comment” on Google, and using those results to feed into spam bots that go and do the work. Google, please stop letting spammers search for “leave a comment”. Just block that string from being searched, as it won’t ever affect an actual user. Nobody would just be searching for “leave a comment” and not have  malicious intentions.

Software doesn’t have insight like this, and that’s why programmers must remain in the business. To help the software learn.

Should I use Google Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds?

I don’t use RSS like I should. Why? Standard techniques don’t work for me. Firstly, my screensaver only will activate on my command. Secondly, Mail refused to subscribe to either the Slashdot feed or my blog’s. Third, Firefox & Safari don’t have a big enough of an indicator for new entries. So now with Google Reader, which is on Springboard on my iPod, I hope to read RSS feeds more often.

Funny Video, Google Chrome (first impression)

This is one of the funniest videos ever. Most of the other videos from collegehumor are funny too.

Now, on to the Chrome part.

Google Chrome, Google’s new open source browser, only for Windows (as of this writing) looks cool.

I’m just writing about Chrome right now because I’m now actually on a Windows machine. You most likely know that I stick with OS X Leopard or Linux. But, Google hasn’t gotten those done yet. So I have to deal with *shudder* Windows to use Chrome.

Chrome is fairly fast, and has a fair amount of animation (like closing, opening and switching tabs). Also, it was fast to setup.

I plan to use Chrome on Mac anad Linux as soon as they come out.

One annoying thing is that there’s no adblocking. Google, I know you make money off those ads, but please incorporate adblocking into  Chrome for the next release.

So, that’s it for this post. You have fun browsing the Internet (or crawling for those bots) but stay safe. (Use a REAL browser to look at that pr0n)

Winblows Live Search

I have been looking in my logs for my web server and I was  doing a WHOIS on some of the IPs. A particular block  of IPs, that belong to m$ load my website. Turns out Winblows Live  indexes my website. Google does not though.

Proof: I searched for ‘site:oks.verymad.net onekopakaspace’ on Live Search and Google. Here are the results pages:

Live Search

Google

UPDATE: The reason Google doesn’t crawl my site is because they don’t have FreeDNS DNS entries. Unfortunately, I only have FreeDNS subdomains.

So, add a comment if you want Google to retrieve FreeDNS DNS entries! (If you don’t, explain in a lengthy 2 paragraph comment that has no grammar or spelling errors)