February 2004 Archives
How wonderful!!! In these times of stress we receive an extra day for free!
Let's enjoy it... :-D
Today it is raining in Lleida. So what? Well, the problem is that the people over here are not used to rain. When it is raining, the people simply stay inside until the rain is over.
When I drove this morning past the market square, I could see all merchants waiting inside their cars, still packed. They were waiting for the rain to stop, because their clients won't show up when it is raining. I was imagining that Dutch merchants would have the same mentality; they would only be able to sell during some weeks in summer! But that is mainly because the Dutch clients are used to the rain; they simply have to.
Of course there are situations in which even the Dutch people stay at home, and the amount of snow today created such a situation. The Dutch only stay at home when it is impossible to get out. Unfortunately, my parents have to catch a flight to Barcelona in a few hours, so at this moment they are desperately trying to get to the airport. I just checked the news, but there are no trains going to Amsterdam and there are huge traffic jams on all highways. I really hope they are able to make it in time!!! :-o
[Update 2004.02.26]: They managed to get to Schiphol airport by train, and I assume they have arrived safely in Barcelona. Just a few hours more, and I will meet them. :-)
Today I received the following message in my mailbox:
an improper scan has caused a ban on your site
date: Tue Feb 24 18:30:20 2004
ip: 66.77.73.32
host: shop-gw.sac.overture.com
agent: Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler
I regulary receive this kind of messages, usually created because bad robots or script kiddies access my spam trap. But Yahoo and Overture are well respected companies, and I would assume that they would have respected my robots.txt file, in which I explicitly deny access to the /private folder:
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /dummy/dummy.html
Disallow: /errors
Disallow: /fimcap
Disallow: /js
Disallow: /mailtemplates
Disallow: /mt-static
Disallow: /private
Disallow: /spam
So I looked in my access log and found that they indeed violated my robots file!!
66.77.73.32 - - [24/Feb/2004:17:20:24 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 758 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler"
66.77.73.32 - - [24/Feb/2004:17:57:22 -0500] "GET /private/ HTTP/1.0" 200 4815 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler"
66.77.73.32 - - [24/Feb/2004:18:30:20 -0500] "GET /private/welcome.html HTTP/1.0" 200 351 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler"
Notice that the page mentioned in the User Agent string states that Yahoo-Overture does support the robots exclusion protocol!
That is an awfully big gray area!!! I guess I still have some traveling to do :-D
Notice that a holiday in a small part of the US of A made a big difference, since the whole country is marked red after visiting only 2 states:
The fastest way to fill my map would be to make some strategical visits to Canada, Russia, Greenland, Brazil or China.
The other way would be to go for the biggest number of countries, and in that case traveling through Europe is the way to go:
(Hat tip: hightext)
[Update 2004.02.23]: Added USA and Europe maps.
[Update 2004.09.27]: Added Cyprus and Thailand.
It has been very silent on this site lately.
This was not because I did not have time to write; it only takes about five minutes to write some lines.
This was not because I did not have anything to write about; I could have written about using Zempt for posting on this site, about the political situation in Spain, about my parents coming to visit me this week, about the fimcap.org server migration...
The only reason for my silence is that I did not feel like writing. But now I'm back again! I promise
That the pixies are going to tour again is old news. The problem is finding the tour schedule, it simply does not exist. So I googled a little bit, and made the following scheme. Surely it is still incomplete, so if you have any additions or corrections, please let me know.
Sometimes people ask me why this site is called 'Brain Tags'. Well, the origin comes from a nice song of Bettie Serveert called Brain Tag. Of course the word Tag links nicely to my interest in web development, while people knowing me only a little bit realise that the word Brain has no link to me at all...
How does this rhyme, cause every time I see you
well, I could swear, must've met you somewhereDown under lock and key,
there's a brain-tag to every secret
If I could keep my mind shut,
there's a chance that I might even keep it
You feel familiar and I wanna feel some more
Have I ever laid my hands on you beforeThis must sound weird, it's like you peered inside me
cause every time, you recognise my state of mindDown under lock and key,
we put a brain-tag to every secret
Now comes the time to figure out
whether we should keep it
You feel familiar and I wanna feel some more
Have I ever laid my hands on you beforeTotal freedom beneath the waves
Floating through the arcane waves
Synchronised in space and time
Leaving all desire behind
