Paul Bissex @pbx@fosstodon.org

Remember referrer spam? Spammers would put their URLs in the HTTP_REFERER header when hitting blogs and other websites that had dynamically generated lists of “top referrers”, then the spammers’ sites would show up in those lists.

Gonna make some cool DAGs of our Jira backlog with this. Or so I hope. https://github.com/pawelrychlik/jira-dependency-graph

I'm told that at one time IBM's name for the IBM PC group was "IBM Entry Systems Division."

Talk about things not going as planned.

I converted my blog to Hugo and am very satisfied. The biggest time sink was dealing with comments (which were stored in the database in my old bespoke blog app).

I updated my conversion script to render the old comments as Markdown appended to the blog post itself.

Then, to support _new_ comments, just yesterday I finally got Disqus working (the first "shortname" I set was my domain, but that does not seem to be a viable choice).

http://e-scribe.com

I got a Microsoft Sculpt keyboard (the one with the wacky gap in the middle). It seems cool, I've used it a bit and will get used to and probably enjoy the form factor.

But the thing I missed in the Wirecutter recommendation was that this wireless keyboard does _not_ use Bluetooth. It comes with its own proprietary little 2.4GHz USB receiver! USB A, even. It functions. But why, Microsoft?

There's probably no direct lineage, but I just remembered a blog generator called Blosxom that I was using 15 years ago, and realized it is quite like #hugo in some respects -- e.g. no database. http://web.archive.org/web/20080106163256/http://www.blosxom.com:80/

Back in the 2000s I started a motorcycle-technology site (http://web.archive.org/web/20051218121140/http://neobike.net/bikes/electric) in part because I was sure that great electric motorcycles were coming soon. It's been a while but it seems to be happening: https://www.wsj.com/articles/zero-sr-s-this-whisper-quiet-electric-motorcycle-wont-spook-the-deer-11598608847

Though I'm saddened by the recent layoffs at #Mozilla, it's good to see the latest mobile #Firefox (seems excellent) and a steady pace of #Thunderbird releases.

"The Intranet Redirect Detector, which makes spurious queries for random domains statistically unlikely to exist, is responsible for roughly half of the total traffic the world's root DNS servers receive." https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/a-chrome-feature-is-creating-enormous-load-on-global-root-dns-servers/

Among Python standard library modules I've always liked 'functools' and 'itertools' a lot -- but this Counter class I just learned about reminds me that 'collections' goes far beyond 'defaultdict'... https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.html#collections.Counter

Typography snob question: Is it true that text on a Kindle can't be flowed rag-right, that it always is force justified? And if so, what were they thinking?

I migrated my blog to Hugo, and have been looking at stuff I forgot about from 10 or 15 years ago. Happy that some things I linked to are still online, like this hilarious yet earnest manifesto: http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2005/11/blue-sky-in-games-campaign-launched.html

I'm curious how this job-offer-from-a-well-known-company scam proceeds. They ask you to wire them an application fee perhaps? "The team and I have been impressed with your CV-background and approach, and would love to formally offer you a position in our company here at Splunk, Inc."

I migrated 15 years of blog posts from my custom blog engine to Hugo. It wasn't hard. http://e-scribe.com/post/new-blog/

It took creating a Hugo version of my blog for me to realize, hey, I really don't need the ability to do arbitrary relational queries against my blog content.