Just discovered that the GNOME weather applet has been integrated into the clock in the GNOME Panel. The scary thing is that I don’t know how it knows where I am to display the right temperature.
Not teh evil?
29 February 2008Andrew Pollock wrote a response to my previous blog post, and I now see what he’s getting at, and that I was probably wrong to be calling that particular instance of UA sniffing “evil”.
You see, in my previous blog post, I noted that if you used wget to download from Facebook, you would be blocked. However, I found out that if you changed the User-Agent, it would let wget through.
I see that what Facebook is doing is a blacklist, not a whitelist. They have found that most wget requests are abusive, and so they block it. After a bit more thinking, it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It would be a different story if they’d, say, only whitelisted the browsers IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, locking out, say, iCab, OmniWeb, Dillo, Telnet, and Lynx users.
User-Agent Sniffing is teh evil
22 February 2008I registered at Facebook a few days ago, mainly because I wanted to try out the Mugshot and Wordbook applications. They have a “badge” feature, where you can post a minature preview of your profile around the web.
However, the HTML code they give you for embedding this contains an img tag, where it’s pointing to a hotlinked image directly to Facebook. I’d personally rather host the image myself, so I thought I’d set up a cronjob to download the image onto my own server every 15 minutes. However, the following command:
$ wget http://badge.facebook.com/badge/633559111.252.224229917.png
…results in a 302 Found response, and redirects to http://www.facebook.com/common/browser.php. So, apparently, Facebook is “not cool enough” to support my browser wget.
So, let’s try this instead:
$ wget --user-agent=Gecko http://badge.facebook.com/badge/633559111.252.224229917.png
Voilà . Downloaded fine. So, changing the User-Agent from wget‘s default, to “Gecko”, made all the difference in the world.
Well, as the post title states, User-Agent sniffing is teh evil. Oh, and this isn’t the first time I’ve talked about this.
Lunar Eclipse
21 February 2008I’m currently watching the Lunar Eclipse. How can I be doing that if I’m in Australia? Easy, just use Flickr, and press the F5 key every minute or so.
cPanel File Manager v3
19 February 2008I just need to vent for a few seconds. Please bear with me.
WHY THE HECK when, in the cPanel File Manager (v3 — ooh, shiny), I select a few files to delete, hit the Delete button, click OK on the confirm dialog, then I select a few more files, THEY GET DELETED TOO? I did not ask for those files to be deleted — I just selected them afterwards.
Uh, cPanel, It might be a good idea to create a JavaScript array of the selection BEFORE you give the user an opportunity to interact further with the application and change the selection. What you’re doing now is just plain unsociable.
