jamezpolley.com

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

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 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.…

Dear Stil­gher­rian Sir[1],

What is your take on Vodafone’s new pre­pay plans, with The Inter­webs Included? Start of a Jesus-phone-induced mobile inter­net rev­o­lu­tion, or just a mar­ket­ing ploy?

I’m going to call them tomor­row to clar­ify if when they say “Surf the real Inter­net on Your Mobile”, they mean the 12c/Mb “real Inter­net” or the 2.2c/kb “real Inter­net”, as it’s not clear. If the for­mer, this makes their caps sim­i­lar in value to Optus Turbo Cap plans — which, I note are expir­ing on 30^th Sep­tem­ber — although, that doesn’t mean they won’t be replaced with iden­ti­cal plans..

[1] I’m opti­mistic enough to believe you sub­scribe here already, real­is­tic enough to know that you don’t, and enough of a com­pany shill to be cer­tain that either way you’ll get a nice email from my employer noti­fy­ing you that some­one took your name in vain.

Bug­ger all.

Cab dri­vers got noth­ing except a slow week.

The Syd­ney Cham­ber of Com­merce and Indus­try claims 231m was injected into the Syd­ney econ­omy — but does not explain where, or who ben­e­fited — the same story has con­ve­nience store own­ers say­ing the week was “absolutely dead. As bad as Apec, even worse”, cafe own­ers say­ing the only peo­ple who came into their cafe “were kids who asked for their water bot­tles to be filled up”.

The arti­cle does men­tion that “cheap trin­ket” stores saw a sig­nif­i­cant boost, but I doubt that’s going to inject $231m into the economy.

The only other ben­e­fi­cia­ries I can think of:

- They had to have eaten some­thing, some­where. I saw a lot of them stand­ing out­side McDon­alds, but few going in. In the whole week, I didn’t see a sin­gle pil­grim eat­ing — you’d think that with 250k+ in town, a few would ran­domly hap­pen to be eat­ing some­where near me. I vaguely recall hear­ing that the State Gov­ern­ment was cough­ing up for cater­ing for at least some parts of the event — pos­si­bly just the final show at the race­track, so pre­sum­ably some caterer, some­where, got a bit of money.

- The horserac­ing indus­try. Tak­ing all the fluff out of the arti­cle, we’re left with a huge in jec­tion of cash turn­ing War­wick Farm into a train­ing facil­ity on par with Rand­wick, and with suf­fi­cient cash float­ing around that they start giv­ing free break­fast to employ­ees. Great use of tax­payer money!

It wasn’t shop own­ers in rand­wick who ben­e­fited — I was there last week and it was a ghost town. It cer­tainly wasn’t my doc­tor, who had to close on Fri­day — and it cer­tainly wasn’t his accoun­tant, whose office was on a street only reg­is­tered pil­grims were allowed to get onto, so he had to shut down for a few days too.

It wasn’t shop own­ers in the city. It wasn’t cafe own­ers, con­vie­nience store own­ers, or even fast food store owners.

Who the hell got this fabled $231m injec­tion of money? QANTAS and the other air­lines who fer­ried pil­grims in?

Dear Mr Palmer,

A) Either your blog’s com­ment fea­ture is bro­ken, or nav­i­ga­tion links to it have been mis­placed. Please fix, so that I don’t have to con­tinue com­ment­ing here.

B) You are a spam­mer. You admit that you mer­rily sent spam on its way into around five user’s inboxes — spam that you know appears to come from you, spam that you know is def­i­nitely unso­licited and unwanted. This makes you a spam­mer. The fact that you seem to think that send­ing this spam to users was some­how get­ting back at either the authors of the spam, or the writ­ers of the spam block­ing tools, only makes this worse.

C) You com­plain that “but the peo­ple whose job it is to write, main­tain, and run spam soft­ware don’t [know that source addresses are forged and there’s no point reply­ing to them]”. If you’d take two sec­onds to think instead of send­ing spam and then blog­ging while enraged, you’d realise that this is patently false. The authors of these tools are try­ing to ensure that, in the case they’ve blocked legit­i­mate email, it can be allowed through. This *requires* that they assume the From: address is not forged.

Please stop and think next time before you angry-blog.

Dear SMH,

Please, please stop employ­ing mon­keys and start employ­ing peo­ple who under­stand basic rules of Eng­lish grammar.

No. “Three year olds” is sim­ply plural, there’s no pos­s­e­sion being described here — there­fore no apostrophe.

I guess I shouldn’t be sur­prised — this is the same pub­li­ca­tion that talks about “cop cars” on the front page.

Actu­ally, a clus­ter thereof.

grum: won­der­ing if there is any way i can poop with­out leav­ing my desk

trib:@grum too much info, Chris

grum: @trib too much info? no way! this office chair toi­let combo could make me rich!

grum: I could sell it to @jasoncalacanis to increase pro­duc­tiv­ity at mahalo!

Dear Myer,

It’s great that you’ve got a web­site where I can track my points balance.

It’s great that you’re using open source.

It’s great that you’re pre­tend­ing to care about me, by per­son­al­is­ing the site based on my recent activity.

But do you really think that inspir­ing slo­gans like “This is the ALTERNATE mes­sage” are going to make me feel spe­cial? You really think that “OpenCMS resource /myerone/content/myprofile/my_summary” is going to per­suade me to spend more money with you?

Please, try again.

(dlsspy): Has any­one seen XKCD #404? 403’s there, and 405’s there, but I can’t find 404.

Oh Ran­dall Munroe, you wily sexy funny man. I want to have your babies.

Bloody hell, I’ve been tagged.

The Rules

1. Each player starts with eight ran­dom facts/habits about themselves.
2. Peo­ple who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight peo­ple to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t for­get to leave them a com­ment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Ran­dom Facts about Me

Well, thank good­ness this doesn’t have to be 8 ran­dom things you don’t already know.

1. I was raised in an Open Brethren church. Well, not raised so much, that mostly hap­pened at home, but my fam­ily attended the assem­bly reli­giously. My father was an elder (and I think his father was too).
2. Bob’s my uncle. Actu­ally, Bob is three of my uncles — my mother’s brother, my father’s sister’s hus­band, and my mother’s father’s brother.
3. I have a 2.5-greats grand­mother. Let’s call her Betsy, as I don’t remem­ber her real name. Betsy had a daugh­ter out of wed­lock, and later, another daugh­ter in wed­lock. The sec­ond daugh­ter had a son, who mar­ried the first daugh­ter. I’m descended from this union…
4. I’m hideously unsym­met­ri­cal. I have a Darwin’s Tuber­cle on one ear, but not the other. On one foot, my third toe is longer than my sec­ond toe, but on the other foot it’s the other way around.