I really hate bad robots. When a web crawler, spider, bot — or whatever you want to call it — behaves in a way that is contrary to expected and/or accepted protocols, we say that the bot is acting suspiciously, behaving badly, or just acting stupid in general. Unfortunately, there are thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of nefarious bots violating our websites every minute of the day.

For the most part, there are effective methods available enabling us to protect our sites against the endless hordes of irrelevant and mischievous bots. Such evil is easily blocked with virtually zero side-effects because their presence is simply irrelevant.

But what about bad bots that aren’t exactly irrelevant, such as Yahoo’s mindless Slurp crawler? By disobeying the robots.txt protocol as promised, Yahoo’s Slurp clearly falls into the “bad-bot” category. Unlike typical “nonsense” bots, Slurp is not exactly irrelevant (yet), so simply blocking them is not a reasonable solution.

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Priceless..

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One of the original purposes of Perishable Press involved serving as a “virtual dumpster” for all of my miscellaneous code snippets. Over time, I continued elaborating to greater degrees on the various code recipes that I was posting, until eventually those brief snippet posts evolved into complete, richly detailed articles (at least from my point of view). Now that I enjoy the luxury of writing for an incredible audience, I try to avoid posting anything that doesn’t include an accompanying explanation. “If it’s worth posting, it’s worth explaining,” I always say. When you have people reading your stuff, there is little room for superfluous nonsense, unexplained code snippets, and long-winded introductions. ;)

Even so, every now and then you need to break the rules, shake up the routine, rock the boat, drop some acid, that kind of thing. Lately, I have been doing some deep archiving and have amassed a considerable collection of completely miscellaneous and unrelated chunks of code. There are too many random snippets to spend time sewing together similar functionality, and I really hate deleting perfectly good code. I also hate keeping misfit code chunks lying around in my otherwise pristine digital archive (joking). Fortunately, this dilemma is easily resolved by loosening up and simply dumping the information right here on the site. After all, that’s what it was originally designed for — in fact, the further you dig back into the archives, the more apparently pointless code snippets you will find. So without further ado, I now present a completely random, unexplained, miscellaneous collection of potentially useful code snippets!

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Kicking things off for this month’s official Speed Linkin’ post is a site designed to help with all of your graphical background needs. Then, we move on to a lightweight forum plugin for WordPress. Ever feel lost when it comes to choosing the best lightbox script? Well it’s Ozh to the rescue with the excellent Lightbox Clones Matrix. Also handy is this incredible list of social media sites. As a big fan of ASCII art, I can spend hours playing with the enchanting ASCII-O-Matic. Here is another excellent tool for checking your site’s gzip compression. For a little SEO fun, you may benefit from learning about your site’s anchor index search results. If you are a heavy Tumblr user, you may want to backup your Tumblr posts. There is also a nice backup tool for your Twitter posts as well. Saving the best for last, check out the site redesign I recently threw down for graphics guru Thane Champie, aka 88teeth. Btw, huge thanks to Thane for providing the sweet “Speed Linkin’” graphic! :)

“Oh no, not again!” It looks like another one of my non-existent bank accounts has been blocked at Bank of America. But that’s cool, because I like, totally graduated from third grade. Knowing best for all grammar and words in email. Let’s examine yet another idiotic phishing attempt, shall we? First, let’s have a look at the full-meal deal (sans bank logos, links, and other forged minutia):

From    : abuse@bankofamerica.com
Date    : Wednesday, November 07, 2007 6:19 AM
To      : none
Subject : Online Banking Alert

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Your Online Banking is Blocked

Because of unusual number of invalid login attempts on you account, 
we had to believe that, their might be some security problem on you 
account. So we have decided to put an extra verification process to 
ensure your identity and your account security. Please click on 
sign in to Online Banking to continue to the verification process 
and ensure your account security. It is all about your security. 
Thank you, and visit the customer service section.

------------------------------

Yes indeed, another amazingly pathetic phishing attempt. To quote an old intergalactic smuggler:

“What an incredible smell you’ve discovered..”

First of all, it needs to be said that, especially in our modern, “phishing-aware” world, it is absolutely critical for would-be phishers to comprehend thoroughly the language in which their bait will be delivered. This is especially true when it comes to the emulation of formal communication from legitimate business establishments such as banks, online shops, and governmental offices.

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Insanity reigns in the blogosphere! Check out this sweet little spam comment that found its way to my moderation queue..

Cloth
Hello to all, its my new pages about cloth
cloth diaper
You can buy here 24\7.

Yes indeed, “Cloth diaper”!! Come on now, is the competition really that fierce in the cloth diaper industry that companies must turn to the slimy spam cartel for scummy comment links?

“its my new pages about cloth” — WTF?!!! Dude! I can’t wait to check out your sweet-ass pages about cloth diapers. Can I check out some killer cloth-diaper photos while I’m there?

May I just take a moment to thank anyone and everyone who was in any way involved with this absolutely priceless spam turd — keep up the great work, scumbags! Way to push those cloth diapers, “24\7”!

Front-page story attacks city

Central Washington — The Columbia Basin Herald continues to describe Quincy as “stampeded by gang members, teeming with teenage pregnancies, constant shootings, stabbings, drugs and excessive consumption of booze.”

They printed the story — believe it or not — on the front page.

“Quincy is also known as ‘Q-town,’” the Columbia Basin Herald, a regional newspaper, claims. “It is overpopulated by gang members and individuals of hispanic decent who often believe they are of african background. Smoking marijuana is very popular and is often practiced by all age groups in the area.”

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Happy Fourth of July, 2007!

Of all the bizarre, nonsensical, and pointless spam we have received so far this year, this one takes the cake. It was delivered to our designated spam account earlier this month as a plain-text email, which opens with an explanation. Apparently, "Bob Diamond" is "an Hiring Manager" looking to advertise a couple of important items. The first ad seems remotely realistic, but the second ad.. it’s like, "teddy bear features" out of nowhere — you can’t be serious. Also worth mentioning, the triple signature effect — Bob signs his name not once or twice, but three times. Check it out..

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“Perhaps it’s time for a bizarre diversion…” — Wild Bill recommends these bizarre Flash websites for your personal entertainment, education, and enjoyment:

monoface For a few delightful moments of splendid online fun, prance on over to the hilariously interactive Flash interface currently on display at monoface. Once there, click the "shuffle face" link a few times to get the general idea, and then graduate to plastic surgeon by clicking on the various facial components themselves. Each click mixes androgynous Flash flesh further and further into bizarro land, where smooth blending manifests disturbed visions of hermaphroditic unrest..

heiwa-alpha.co.jp Flexing some incredible Flash muscle, the good citizens over at heiwa-alpha (update 12/2008: site seems to be down..) have produced a Flash site of monolithic proportions. The sheer magnificence of the animated imagery and truly remarkable attention to detail make this surrealistic visual feast one of Wild Bill’s personal favorites. Indeed, for a delightful romp through the collective mind of some truly gifted Flash engineers, crank up the broadband, dust off the Japanese translator, and drop in for a wonderfully bizarre Flash diversion..

i heard today that caos is better to live and create in than in a world of pure even, balanced, organized utopia.

“Generative artifacts, graffiti archaeology, and interactive chaos, anyone?” — Wild Bill recommends these highly addictive, interactive websites for your personal entertainment, enjoyment, and enrichment:

Gallery of Computation

This site peeled my hat back. I am completely enamoured and will most likely spend vast amounts of time exploring the endless creative potential opened up through this remarkable online experience. The Gallery of Computation takes computer-generated graphical artifacts and algorithmic image processing to a distant universe. Infinite thanks to Jared Tarbell for sharing his inspiring world with us.

Graffiti Archaeology

Here is another fascinating website at which one could spend countless hours surfing and learning. As avid graffiti enthusiasts, we were immediately hooked on this remarkably interactive presentation of society’s most unappreciated art form. Chronologically organized, Graffiti Archaeology is an insightful online documentation revealing localized patterns of urban expression within various graffiti subcultures. As the site says, "Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a time-lapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. Most of the photos are from San Francisco, over a timespan from the late 1990’s to the present."

Splatter

Splatter is a fun interactive Flash application enabling users to splatter virtually vectorized viscous globs of sloppy, splattering lines. Or something. The program follows the user’s cursor coordinates around the screen, leaving a continuous flow of digital "paint", which flows at a rate determined by that of the cursor. Splatter is extreme fun for the common surfer, and perhaps esoterically useful for graphic designers and web developers. Also check out the offline version of Splatter, available for download here.

CanvasPaint

Finally, check out this online emulation of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Paint program. Firefox 2 and Opera 9 users enjoy the option of saving created images to a local hard drive. Other users may create images but not save them. Besides demonstrating some elite programming skills, CanvasPaint is also a very handy tool to have available online. Indeed, online apps such as this are rapidly changing the landscape of software development and deployment. As described by the CanvasPaint site: "[Canvas is] a near pixel-perfect copy of Microsoft Paint in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, using the <canvas> tag as specified by WHATWG and supported by Safari 1.3, Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9."

Happy Halloween

ertdfgcvb.ch Check out the intriguing Shockwave site at ertdfgcvb.ch.

Star Burst Check out the slick online digital flower maker at zefrank.com.

When all else fails..

Interesting… then the problem is likely to be in the HeNe signal chain somewhere. Look at TP1 and TP2 for analog versions of the HeNe laser clock, and TP6 (or TP8?) for the digital version of that clock. It should look like a variable but mostly steady clocking sine wave or square wave.