The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Monday, May 19, 2003

“And now, news from our sponsor … ”

In two places the ad featured statements highly critical of now-former Secretary White. In her statement Fitts criticized White for his inability to balance the Army's books at a time when the Department of Defense has admittedly “misplaced” more that $3 trillion of taxpayer money. Ruppert observed, “White's claim that residual damage from the attacks of September 11th was the cause for unbalanced books in the Army was ludicrous. The attack of 9/11 hit the Navy Wing of the Pentagon. How could that affect the Army?”

In the text of the ad itself White was also criticized for his role as an Enron executive which provided him with millions of dollars in income while stockholders were being defrauded. White was subsequently investigated for insider trading of Enron stock.

Via Robot Wisdom, Subscriber Buys FTW Full Page Ad in The Washington Post—Leaked Copy May Have Forced Resignation of Army Secretary

I wonder if we'll start seeing more and more of this? Certainly the major media outlets won't write articles like this so it seems to the only way to get news like this out is to slap it into advertising.


Bad robot! Bad! Bad!

The load on tower shot up, making it quite unresponsive. A few minutes later it settled down enough for me to check the system out.

I would think that programmers who know enough to check for robots.txt would be smart enough to limit the number of concurrent connections to any one website. But not for something called “QuepasaCreep” which slammed this site pulling down the entire archive in about a five minute span (typically, about two or three hits per second).

It seems to have passed; I can only hope they realized just how poorly their robot was behaving.

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You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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