zhasper2.0

Right, so we all know that Optus decided to charge international call rates for some local numbers, to try to claw back some of the money they’re losing as customers choose cheaper options to call home. A more sensible option would be to provide reasonable rates to existing customers - or set up such a VOIP service yourself, and let customers choose between the cheaper lower-quality VOIP service, or paying more for a “premium” connection[1] - and maybe even snagging some customers from other carriers. That woud be hard though - so instead, lets just slug prepaid customers with additional fees to access the VOIP services, and pray that not too many of them port their service to a different provider.

But that’s just stupidity. This is outright theft:

The most recent legal case, decided on November 27, also forced Optus to concede it had stolen 100 numbers from a tiny telecommunications carrier in Vanuatu and then allowed a pair of its pornographer partners, Global Internet Billing in Britain and MDC in Europe, to use the stolen numbers for their business.

Optus then kept the proceeds of these calls, money which would have normally been payable to the Vanuatu carrier.

[1] Of course, the difference would probably be entirely in the marketing and not in the implementation of the service, but that’s nothing new.

Remember when Cityrail decided that trying to get trains to run on time was too hard, so they just redefined “on time” to make things easier?

Remeber how shortly afterwards Cityrail had posters all over the stations with graphs showing the huge increase in on-time running compared to the same time last year - and didn’t mention that the two sets of numbers used different definitions of “on time”?

They’re doing it again. Cityrail has a target of no more than 5% of services running at more than 135% passenger capacity - but over the last two years, the actual figure has been 16%. Rather than trying to fix the problem, they’re redefining the target to be 17%.

Keep in mind that this is not 16% of services at full capacity: this is 16% of services at least 35% *over* the rated capacity of the carriage.

Well done Shittyfail!

From My New Year’s Resolution: Be A Proud Creationist:

The second message was even more bizarre. After the excitement of the first message and the realisation that there was only Australian beer left and the sun hadn’t yet set, we were rapt to see the skywriter trace out the word ‘THE’. We gazed on as he added, ‘CREATOR’. Intrigued, we cooed as the pilot scrawled ‘IS’… and waited for the payoff…

‘JESUS‘.

Fuck. I mean, that’s not even biblically accurate, surely! Jesus doesn’t come in until after the Triwizard Tournament! According to Genesis, Yahwehdidit. He was so clever, he managed to create the world twice in two different orders!

See, I lost interest in this even earlier: when I last saw this bit of drivel it had just turned into “The”, and I got bored and went back inside. For a few moments before that, the sky had proudly been advertising “THC”…

(Side note: I found this past via a pingback on Stilgherrian’s post “Telstra, you goddam bloody idiots!” - you’ll have to read both posts to figure out the connection)

People have been telling me to read STR for ages, but I’ve never got around to it. Pascal just went to the site while I was shoulder surfing - and thus I discovered this review of Ubuntu:

One of the great things about Windows is the ease of obtaining powerful utilities and applications. In addition to hundreds of great titles available on CD-ROM you can download awesome shareware applications: simply click on Setup.exe and most installers will instantly deploy your chosen software, sometimes with cool bonus productivity apps that enhance your browsing experience. In comparison with Microsoft’s common-sense approach, pandemonium reigns on the Linux platform.

The only way to install software is via a tool called the ‘package manager’ which is confusingly also called ‘Synaptic’. This works according to a similar principle as a communist super-market: You have a limited range of software which has been chosen on a purely ideological basis rather than functionality. If you want to ‘think different’, it’s tough-luck again: Another obvious fail for the ‘contender’.

To make matters worse, in order to install an application you must be ‘root’ which entails memorizing a series of confusing passwords. By contrast Windows allows any user to install the applications they need to do their work - a wise productivity gain that endears the flexible NT platform to IT departments the world over.

The rest is good reading too. Very informative! I’m switching away from Ubuntu forthwith.

Firemen here to put out the oven fire http://skitch.com/jdumay/97em/kitchenonfire. about 1 hour ago from twitterrific

Okay, so I lied. Some of these are from two days ago..

	stilgherrian “Christmas ruined as Sarah Palin shoots Rudolph” http://is.gd/cYaU about 12 hours ago from TweetDeck
	stilgherrian Just discovered NewsBuiscuit! “Children ‘getting over-excited’ about going to church on Christmas morning”: http://is.gd/d6pz about 12 hours ago from TweetDeck
	harleyd I just had to explain who ABC radio host Julie McCrossin was to an ABC reporter who rang seeking gay christian sources. Yay ABC cuts. 12:52 PM Dec 24th from web
	mcannonbrookes RT @barconati Awesome post. Dan talks about the benefits of deploying Confluence enterprise wiki at the Powerhouse Museum http://tr.im/2l9b 9:44 AM Dec 24th from web

One of the downsides of having spent years messing with my old Drupal blog is that I’ve ended up with a bunch of different permalink styles: to pick three posts at random, http://zhasper.com/zhasper/harry_potter_done, http://zhasper.com/2007/09/linkbloggery, http://zhasper.com/?p=631. Fortunately, I’m only running this blog to give myself a place to vent, so I don’t care about lost traffic. If I did care, this would be a problem.

I’m using the “Platinum SEO pack” plugin, which does a good job of handling URLs that don’t quite match the same schema that Wordpress is using - for instance, if you visit http://zhasper.com/linkbloggery, it’ll figure out that you meant the second URL in the list above. Unfortunately, it’s not perfect - and my old blog had way too many variations for anything to cope with.

So, I’m going through and doing what I can to fix the low-hanging fruit. URLs in the second form, /YYYY/MM/title, already work fine. URLs in the first form need to have the /zhasper/ removed, and need all the _s turned into -s. I accomplish both of these through a bit of RewriteRule magic:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule zhasper/(.*) /$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)_(.*) $1-$2 [R=301,L]

This is quite definitely not the neatest way to achieve this. In the example above, it requires three excess round-trips between the server and the browser:

• Browser requests /zhasper/harry_potter_done
• Server sends a redirect to /harry_potter_done
• Browser requests /harry_potter_done
• Server sends a redirect to /harry_potter-done
• Browser requests /harry_potter-done
• Server sends a redirect to /harry-potter-done
• Browser requests /harry-potter-done
• Server sends a redirect to /2007/07/harry-potter-done/
• Browser requests /2007/07/harry-potter-done/
• Server sends actual content

The 301 in the RewriteRule means that the server tells the client that this is a permanent redirect - the content will never be at the old address, please update your bookmarks. This doesn’t make much difference to your browser - but crawlers such as Google should use this as a signal to update their index, and send any link-love directed at the old link to the new link.

If you didn’t have the redirect at all, Google wouldn’t know that /zhasper/harry_potter_done and /2007/07/harry-potter-done were the same page - it would think that the latter was just a more-recently-seen page which mysteriously had similar content to the old page.

If you go with a temporary redirect (by just using R on its own, or by stipulating [R=302], Google won’t know to update its index: it will still come back later and check the old URL, just in case the page has moved back there.

There are definitely better ways to achieve this - suggested enhancements are welcome

I’ve seen a few hits on my site to http://zhasper.com/user/, or pages underneath. This seems to be because there used to be content there, and Google’s cache hasn’t (or hadn’t at the time anyway - it seems to have mostly caught up now).

I don’t want this, so I went to the “Remove URLs” tool, under Tools in the Webmaster Console.

The page says:

Before you begin, you must make sure that Google and other search engines will not crawl the content you want to remove from our search results.

To do this, ensure that each page returns an HTTP status code of either 404 or 410, or use a robots.txt file or meta noindex tag to block crawlers from accessing your content.

Okay, so it needs to return a 404. Easy - there’s no content there anyway, it’s already returning a 404. Double-check:

zhasper@bridgitte:~$ wget http://zhasper.com/user/
--2008-12-25 17:03:31--  http://zhasper.com/user/
Resolving zhasper.com... 88.198.1.123
Connecting to zhasper.com|88.198.1.123|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2008-12-25 17:03:31 ERROR 404: Not Found.

Excellent. So, I request the whole directory to be removed from the index.

Some days later, I come back and check, and my request for removal has been denied. There’s a little question mark beside the word denied, obviously further details, so I click on it:

Your request has been denied because the webmaster of the site hasn’t applied the appropriate robots.txt file or meta tags to block us from indexing or archiving this page.

No shit - I didn’t put anything in robots.txt because it’s returning a 404, and your instructions say that’s all that’s needed.

Grrr.

I *think* that everything under /user/ has been removed (there’s certainly nothing in the index any more), it’s just /user that’s not been removed. I don’t understand this - /user gives a 404 also, and the content shown in the snippet is the old Drupal content.

(obdisc: this is a private blog, all opinions are my own and not those of my employer, who happens to be Google. There’s probably something obvious that I’m overlooking - hopefully I’ll have another blog post soon with an update on what that is)

Udpate, 5 minutes later: Duh. Read the next paragraph, idiot:

If you’re requesting removal of a full site or directory, you must use a robots.txt file to block crawlers from accessing this content.

I’m requesting removal of a full directory. So….

From the normally staid ABC news website comes this gem:

Paranoia is much more common in modern society than previously thought, says a British doctor, who warns it could lead to major problems in society.

Oh noes! Rampant paranoia! Is this what’s been making me think crazy thoughts lately? Our society is in danger! Quick people: we must be vigilant! Examine your own thoughts for any hint of paranoia, NOW!

Dr Daniel Freeman from the psychiatry institute of King’s College London says almost a quarter of the population experience regular paranoid thoughts,

One in four? Then it’s almost certain that I’m paranoid. Woe is me! Whatever could be causing this epidemic of paranoia?

driven by an avalanche of sensational stories in the media.

Oh. Right. Good to see that you’re helping there, doc!

Re censorship of flight details: Tim Bennet at Electron Soup was faster than me and got screengrabs before the details were censored. Go satisfy your curiousity at his blog.