NE wonders if error logs of Web sites could become the next target for spammers. Webmaster already suffer from comment spam, unrouted E-mail spam, and referrer spam.

Fortunately, error log spam appears to in its diapers. I believe it is only a matter of time before it becomes a serious plague. Below are some thoughts, all of which were sparked in recent discussions in nntp://alt.www.webmaster after we had observed odd yet identical errors in our logs.

Many requests appear to come from Seoul, seeking a file called robotsxx.txt, a variation of the usual robots.txt, which is fully-standardised. Upon closer inspection, it looked like this was related to ‘adult’ material. The IP address seems to have been associated with pornographic content.

To stress the danger of such requests becoming commonplace, our error logs could soon be accommodated with requests like:

GET /enlarge_YOUR_log_www.bigbeef.com HTTP/1.1
      (funny example from Alan)

It is worryingly easy to automate such requests and spam the entire World Wide Web en masse, leaving such invalid requests for tens of millions of Webmasters to see. Will there soon be filters for site referrers and error logs too? Let us hope we need not go down that route.

The new looks of Slashdot?

LASHDOT will become standards-compliant XHTML/CSS rather soon as new code is currently being tested. If these changes were to be confirmed, one wonders how the vast audience would react. Perhaps the new layout would have slow penetration as it gets exposed to the community already. Looking at the Web Archive and making a comparsion with the new layout, long tradition definitely gets broken. I, for one, welcome the change reluctantly.

Always store your mail in (at least) two isolated places

nfortunately for most of us, there is rarely an option in mail clients which caters for one-click backup and restoration of E-mail. We still lack an embedment in a GUI, which makes backup trivial to all, as well as quick to invoke.

An alternative to explicit backup is duplication of data files. Owing to the use of Open Source applications, my mail gets backed up on the SAN every night and on another computer twice a week (in an open and raw MBOX format). I advise everyone to install a reliable mail client and set up a repeating job that can handle backups without any user intervention (see links below).

Microsoft applications (speaking of computer crashes when backups are truly needed) rarely seem to mind portability and safety of data. Outlook and Outlook Express would lock your mail in proprietary formats, which is the reason why I ceased to be their user (having started with Netscape Mail). Anything that served Microsoft’s purpose, namely my immobility, appeared to be the grand goal. Thunderbird will save your mail in a form that is extremely painless to back up. Furtherfore, it can also easily import mail from Outlook or Outlook Express, in a way that preserves all the data and even mail settings.

Another backup option is by converting mail to HTML, which is open and standard-compliant. There exists a Ruby script called eml2mbox which bridges a gap and helps towards the generation of Web pages from individual mail messages.

Older notes about mail management:

• Local or Web-based E-mail
• Public Mail Accounts and Filtering
• Urgent Mail Account
• E-mail Address Disclosure
• Managing Large E-mail Quantities
• Autoresponder Trick
• Solution to Junk Mail
• Managing E-mail on a Personal Domain

Thunderbird-related items:

• Outlook Versus Thunderbird
• Thunderbird Aqua – an attractive theme for Thunderbird

As well as links that are related to mail, lots of resources and tips on backup reside on this Web log.

SN joins the on-line advertisement club. They will soon enable pay-per-click ads to be embedded in Web pages. According to ZDNet, MSN has already launched an advertising application, which upon closer inspection, leads to an appalling invasion of privacy. The Seattle Times (free registration needed for reading) reports that:

AdCenter uses information from customers who registered for services such as Hotmail or who tailored the MSN home page to their interests. It supplements that with data purchased from the Experian credit bureau.

This was predicted long ago in one of Joel’s most popular essays. Joel Spolsky used to work in Microsoft and he foresaw the exploitation of cookies and information swap:

…One day, Expedia could start offering higher fares to customers who have more than a million dollars in their Investor stock portfolio. There’s not really anything technically impossible about this, and it’s probably legal, too…

A shrunk-down screenshot of CrossOver-themed Thunderbird

OZILLA Thunderbird has been my primary mail client for several months, having made it the permanent replacement for KMail. I thought I ought to share a recommendation for a theme. I personally find Apple’s Aqua theme and brushed metal elements in Jaguar/Tiger highly appealing. I even went as far as tailoring my own in Firefox (see below). I have also come to discover that CrossOver, the Aqua-inspired theme for Thunderbird, is by far the most popular theme at the moment with approximately 18,000 downloads in the past week alone.

Related items:

• Firefox Mac OS X Theme – my personal Firefox theme (see picture below)
• My Firefox Theme

Mac OS X theme for Firefox

Before and after Hurricane Katrina hit

HE devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina have been caught by Google Earth’s eye. Constant footage of the ground is made possible owing to many recently-acquired overlays. The devastation is very clear as reflected by before/after snapshots, which can be viewed interactively in Google Earth.

Internet Explorer remains aside for the time being

or quite some time I have been kind to Internet Explorer (IE) despite its obnoxious limitations. Those who follow this blog may have noticed that its layout is IE-friendly. It comes with a cost though, in terms of flexibility in particular.

One of the prominent IE deficiencies, which constantly puts me aback, is its lack of support for high-depth colour blending — something for which I have great affinity. Earlier this week I decided to give up on Internet Explorer visual compatibility as far as my Ph.D. progress reports are concerned. I did likewise when assembling the talk that I prepare for an audience of surgeons at the Royal Eye Hospital. I went along with what should work in any modern browser like Mozilla, Opera, Firefox and Safari, to name just the major ones. I incorporated 32-bit PNG transparencies in Web pages — or put differently — I have included 32-bit alpha blending effects in my reports. I used to reluctantly stick to JPEG‘s, but I wanted some nicer effects that resemble shadows.

If you are curious, the result is in my latest progress report ¹. See the slides which contain figures to get an example of blending with the background ². I am assuming that they will appear with white background in Internet Explorer, which is not aesthetic and seems like a complete misfit. All I can say is that Internet Explorer 7 will render this properly, having surveyed some and reviews on the topic. Either way, my supervisor and I use Firefox. I even urge him to use it more often and sometimes set it as his default browser (it will be our little secret).

To those anticipating the arrival of Internet Explorer 7, it is worth mentioning that, on the face of it, it will still be adverse to Web standards. As an intersting statistical side note, Firefox and IE usage is more or less in state of equality on this domain as a whole.

¹ The report is yet to be delivered at 11 this morning

² There is a nice story behind the background image. It depicts the Maths Tower which is being demolished the moment. The reports might commemorate its existence.