Damsnlivebotmn Is Important To Test

This is not a normal post, it's for an experiment!

Damsnlivebotmn is a word (no such English word) for testing if Dead Search really do the thing automatically below.

The source in the picture above is from Damsnmn company.

Obviously, if that is real visitors and this site will not get a visitors with search keyword like Damsnlivebotmn. But if it does, I can almost 100% sure that Dead Search really do dirty thing¹. That's why I try to emphasize Damsnlivbotmn and Dead Search. I hope they look so important in this testing post, and they surely are.

What if I don't get death or damsnlivbotmn as keyword? That may say that an employee of Damsnmn company does search and get result to this site. But I highly doubt that kind of possibility.

This experiment needs about at least about a month. Hope I can hear Dead Search soon!

Please note that I don't try to being mean by using damsnlivebotmn and Dead Search. Okay, maybe da...mn is for purpose. I must not use those real words.

CategoryUndone CategoryBlog

Amazon Stores

This post is written for international shopper.

After I ordered my first five German albums, I then realized that Amazon.com is actually quite expensive in shipping fee charging. Furthermore, Amazon.com could be the most expensive among all Amazon stores, but rather happen. Yeap! There are Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr and the other two.

I also noticed that JPC.de (not Amazon store), Amazon.de has different method to charge shipping, only Per Shipment fee, no Per Item fee! I made a table for the rates. Note that the price in the following is for shipping in the slowest method to Taiwan that each store provides and only for buying CD/DVD.

Note 1

I don't know if the price already includes tax or not, as far as I know, if ship to any state of USA, there will certainly be adding tax. Anyway, the final item price is unchanged for sending to Taiwan.

Note 2

I have seen some item have reduced price (about 15% off) while checking out, but that is not all cases and I don't know what certain case will give your reduced price.

Note 3

All item prices have about 16% off.

Again, note that all the information above are for shipping to Taiwan. Besides, I only have real buying experiences on Amazon.com and JPC.de. Others are just testing.

Test case

As of 2008-08-19, the top sellers #1 in music is Mamma Mia! on Amazon.com.

At first glance of price, Amazon.com and Amazon.ca seem to be the cheapest, but that wasn't true because of delivery time. If you choose same class, the grand total is NTD$940, more expensive than Amazon.co.uk, but still cheaper than Amazon.de. However, Amazon.de could be cheaper than Amazon.com if

1. Item prices are the same after currency conversion.
2. At least 4 items in order.

Say N_i is how many items you buy, then $4.99/N_i + $3.99 = €14/N_i. Each side are the total shipping fees evenly distributes on items on Amazon.com and Amazon.de, respectively. The N_i is about 3.35 (based on TWD), which means you need to buy at least 4 items, then shipping from Amazon.de will be cheaper than from Amazon.com. Therefore if item price is the same, then Amazon.de will cost less. For a normal shopper, buying 4 items is piece of cake. It only depends on the item price. Note that if you use Expedited Shipping, then you only need 2 items.

The Amazon.co.uk shipping fee (airmail) is already cheaper than Amazon.com (Standard) based on TWD. Item price dominates.

Conclusion

If you want to buy English (American) stuff, you must also check price on Amazon.co.uk as well as on Amazon.de if you buy many and you are lucky.

If you want to buy German stuff, Amazon.de definitely is the cheapest store among Amazon stores. The buttons are at same position, only texts are different, just click on same place. JPC.de is also a good place to buy.

CategoryUndone CategoryBlog TagAmazon

Buying Five German CDs on JPC.de

For a long long time, buying foreign stuff always frustrates my attempt to satisfy my desire. Of course, you can buy on Amazon, but not everything is available on it and it's not cheap to deal with shipping fee and custom tax (if you buy too much). Today (as of writing), I ordered 5 German albums for only €62,69, including shipping fee. Don't you think this is a great deal?

Wait! Do I know German? Not at all. I know nothing about German, not even Germany. Buy why!? It's really strange that German songs to me. I feel like even the singing is part of music or rhythm. German sounds very attractive to me. The first German song I heard probably is Perfekte Welle by Juli, someone introduced this to me on Internet. This song was prohibited airing on German radio in 2004 or 2005, because of the Tsunami.

Few days ago, I checked out Julishop. If I ordered on it, that costs about €49.98 for just one album. Later I searched and got information about JPC.de (It has English interface). Firstly, I know it only charge €13,99 per shipment to Taiwan, and that's all! No per item charge. Hooray! The rest problem is the importing custom tax. The custom only charge tax for shipment's value above NT$3000. It's not a high value, just few CDs can easily reach that amount on Amazon. NT$3000 is about €65, still can't buy much. But I have to control how much I bought, or there will be a 5% tax¹ charging onto my purchase.

At first I picked up 4 albums for about €58.95 (including shipping), but then I noticed that all prices are listed after VAT. Moreover, if the shipment sends outside German, I don't need to pay the VAT, so the final price of each item will not include the VAT. It's like a bonus to me, a gift. almost same price can buy one more album. Buy 4 for 1 free! It's about 16% off.

So here is my final order list:

I placed my order on last Saturday and JPC.de charged on Monday. My bank asked for confirmation, I confirmed on Tuesday. Later in the same day, JPC informed me that package is on the way. Hope I can get them soon. I will keep updating here.

What Songs Made Me Bought Them

Juli - Es ist Juli

• Perfekte Welle - MV

Juli - Ein neuer Tag

• I guess none, but I still bought this.

Christina Stürmer - Lebe lauter

• #6 Ohne Dich - Live 1, Live 2 and MV

Christina Stürmer - Laut-Los

• #7 Fieber - MV

• #11 Ich Lebe - MV

Silbermond - Laut gedacht

• #7 Das Beste - Live 1, MV and Live 2

  • This is the last one I picked up. Actually, it wasn't on my list. But this song made it on my list.

CategoryUndone CategoryBlog TagGerman TagGermany TagAustrian TagMusic TagJuli TagChristinaStürmer TagSilbermond

Learning German

I am trying to learn German in a very lazy way. I am not sure how far I can do it. Nowadays, learning something is really cheaper except learning some really high advanced technology and knowledges from experiences as long as you have Internet. Success or failure only depends on how hard you do.

I am planning to learn in the following order:

• Alphabets - I don't exactly know how many alphabets that German has.

• Phonology - try to pronounce alphabets
• Simple words
• Grammar

Although I only know English as foreign language (my mother language is Chinese), but I believe that I know how to learn a language correctly. The only problem is laziness, I am too easy to give up learning new things. Compare to English, I guess that English is easier than German since English actually a branch of Germanic, so is German. I always want to learn German for some unknowing reasons. But there is something stopping me, which is history. The history of World War I & II, those you see in the films. Actually, I never tried to understand Germany and history in Germany, or European history (It's really complicated to me). You can say that all I know of about Germany is Hitler, who made me fear of Germany. However, in the modern world, Germany is not what we see in history, and I think Germans are still sort of thinking that they are superior¹ than people in rest of world.

But what made me wanting to learn German? I think those are the German technology and the pronunciations of German. German, somehow, is very attractive to me; maybe I should say that German sounds sexy? Anyway, I am at very beginning of learning German. I probably will give up in any minute.

CategoryBlog TagGerman TagLearning

Vimperator

Vimperator is a nice Firefox addon for Vim users. Normally, I only put my hands on my keyboard, barely touch my mouse when I use Vimperator. But there are few exceptions, like in using Gmail.

As you can see options in Select: All, None, Read, Unread, Starred, Unstarred are not able to use in Quick-Hint way. I have to use my mouse to click on All sometimes. This only happens on those websites have heavy JavaScript usage.

Few tips I have learnt:

• f + number to click on link or enter text boxes.

• f + search text [+ number], for example finbox to click on Inbox as in above screenshot.

• F means open in new tab.

• r means reload

• d means close the tab

• :set guioptions=mTb to bring your default Firefox GUI interface back. m for menu, T for navigator toolbar, and b for bookmark toolbar. To turn them off by :set guioptions=.

• o search text<TAB> to search, e.g. I have a bookmark call Gmail, then I can type o gmail<TAB>. That will bring up a list of results, then I press <TAB> to choose right one. If want to open in new table just replace o with t.

• bmarks[!] only search in bookmarks. Exclamation mark means open in new tab.

• Press <Ctrl>[qv] is necessary sometimes.

• :help is helpful.

Few things different than in Vim:

• / is only for plain text.

• . can't repeat last command.

Vimperator doesn't change the user-agent, I hope it does. Just append its name and version.

Note that I had funny experience when I tried to post my posting with typing :wq, but that behaviour had been corrected long time ago. Now, I just did that again. Need to remind myself: This is not Vim!

CategoryBlog TagFirefox TagVimperator TagVim

Blocks Sogou

I decided to block Sogou's spider, its behavior is kind of rude. The following is the table of statistics of bots/spiders from AWStats, today is just 6th day of August.

You should know how I feel about it. Besides, it also changes its user-agent:

220.181.61.209 - - [06/Aug/2008:22:13:51 +0800] "GET /quickref.html HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Sogou web spider/4.0(+http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07)" (-) - -
220.181.61.209 - - [06/Aug/2008:22:17:40 +0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 406 - "-" "-" (-) SSLv3 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
220.181.61.209 - - [06/Aug/2008:22:17:43 +0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 406 - "-" "-" (-) - -
220.181.61.209 - - [06/Aug/2008:22:17:50 +0800] "GET /TagAwesome HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Sogou web spider/4.0(+http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07)" (-) SSLv3 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
220.181.61.209 - - [06/Aug/2008:22:17:53 +0800] "GET /HelpOnParsers/ref/rst/directives.html HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Sogou web spider/4.0(+http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07)" (-) - -
220.181.61.209 - - [06/Aug/2008:22:19:23 +0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 406 - "-" "-" (-) SSLv3 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
220.181.61.209 - - [06/Aug/2008:22:19:24 +0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 406 - "-" "-" (-) - -
220.181.61.209 - - [06/Aug/2008:22:19:34 +0800] "GET /TagsuEXEC HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Sogou web spider/4.0(+http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07)" (-) SSLv3 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
220.181.61.209 - - [06/Aug/2008:22:19:35 +0800] "GET /HelpOnParsers/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Sogou web spider/4.0(+http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07)" (-) - -
220.181.61.209 - - [06/Aug/2008:22:20:37 +0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 406 - "-" "-" (-) SSLv3 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
220.181.61.209 - - [06/Aug/2008:22:20:47 +0800] "GET /TagFastCGI HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Sogou web spider/4.0(+http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07)" (-) SSLv3 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA

It sends no user-agent quite often. Note that I already block those request having no user-agent on this website.

Firstly, I will try to block using robots.txt, but I am not thinking that will work. If you search for Sogou, you will see it really has very bad fame. Moreover, I don't know what's the correct user-agent for using in robots.txt. The FAQ doesn't mention its user-agent. Anyway, I block use

User-agent: sogou
Disallow: /

I give it a week, if this doesn't work. I will drop all packets from Sogou by using iptables. There is something I noticed from its IP:

> whois 220.181.61.209
% [whois.apnic.net node-2]
% Whois data copyright terms    http://www.apnic.net/db/dbcopyright.html

inetnum:      220.181.0.0 - 220.181.255.255
netname:      CHINANET-IDC-BJ
country:      CN
descr:        CHINANET Beijing province network
descr:        China Telecom
descr:        No.31,jingrong street
descr:        Beijing 100032
admin-c:      CH93-AP
tech-c:       HC55-AP
remarks:      hostmaster is not for spam complaint,
remarks:      please send spam complaint to anti-spam@ns.chinanet.cn.net
mnt-by:       MAINT-CHINANET
mnt-lower:    MAINT-CHINATELECOM-BJ
status:       ALLOCATED NON-PORTABLE
changed:      hostmaster@ns.chinanet.cn.net 20030620
changed:      hm-changed@apnic.net 20050715
source:       APNIC

Its IP belongs to 220.181.0.0/16 net block, Baidu also uses the same net block:

220.181.32.22 - - [06/Aug/2008:21:05:25 +0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 355 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu<DOT>com/search/spider.htm)" (-) - -
61.135.168.39 - - [06/Aug/2008:21:08:33 +0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 355 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu<DOT>com/search/spider.htm)" (-) - -
119.63.193.55 - - [06/Aug/2008:22:04:30 +0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 355 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu<DOT>com/search/spider_jp.html)" (-) - -

Does this mean Baidu also a bad spider?

CategoryUndone CategoryBlog TagSearchEngine

Cuil Visits

38.99.44.105 United States, CA, Oakland Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)
 | 02/Aug/2008 00:51:02 - - "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 92 "-" (-) - -

It is a bot from Cuil, a new style of search engine. The search results present in 3-column layout with related image aside the entry if available. That looks more friendlier but might not be easier for reading to me. It's been about two days from my first notice of this new search. This website wasn't included in their database at that time and still not now. I wrote an email for a request of inclusion, and it seems to respond to my request, or that already was planned? Although the crawler only requested the robots.txt for the first visit, I believe that it will come back for more files.

Cuil claims they are the biggest search engine in this world by ranking the amount of pages in database, They have 121,617,892,992 pages. If you search a lot a day, you should very hate duplications already. For example, if you search a programming issue, you probably see many mailing list archives. They have same content, the same posts, threads from a mailing list. There are way too many websites archive same mailing lists. If there are five websites, then you will have five pages with same content at the same time, and currently Google shows them all together. It's quite easy to see lots of duplications, it's a huge frustration when you are rush to solve a problem.

Page count isn't the point of being a good search engine.

CategoryBlog TagCuil TagSearchEngine TagCrawler

Yahoo Fakes User Agent, Too

67.195.37.116 - - [27/Jul/2008:16:52:02 +0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 105 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)" (94) - -
67.195.37.116 - - [27/Jul/2008:16:52:03 +0800] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 302 355 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20080721 BonEcho/2.0.0.4" (-) - -
67.195.37.116 - - [27/Jul/2008:16:52:22 +0800] "GET /Home HTTP/1.0" 200 3798 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20080721 BonEcho/2.0.0.4" (22) - -
67.195.37.116 - - [27/Jul/2008:16:52:23 +0800] "GET /static/modern_ttb/css/common.css HTTP/1.0" 200 3122 "http://thetinybit.com/Home" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20080721 BonEcho/2.0.0.4" (28) - -
67.195.37.116 - - [27/Jul/2008:16:52:23 +0800] "GET /static/modern_ttb/css/screen.css HTTP/1.0" 200 2296 "http://thetinybit.com/Home" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20080721 BonEcho/2.0.0.4" (28) - -
67.195.37.116 - - [27/Jul/2008:16:52:24 +0800] "GET /static/modern_ttb/css/print.css HTTP/1.0" 200 452 "http://thetinybit.com/Home" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20080721 BonEcho/2.0.0.4" (56) - -
67.195.37.116 - - [27/Jul/2008:16:52:24 +0800] "GET /static/modern_ttb/css/projection.css HTTP/1.0" 200 327 "http://thetinybit.com/Home" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20080721 BonEcho/2.0.0.4" (52) - -
67.195.37.116 - - [27/Jul/2008:16:52:25 +0800] "GET /static/pygments.css HTTP/1.0" 200 887 "http://thetinybit.com/Home" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20080721 BonEcho/2.0.0.4" (24) - -

The first line shows user agent Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp), which is the standard Yahoo crawler's user agent. Second line is the BonEcho web browser. If that is real BonEcho(Firefox), then that shouldn't have 19 seconds delay in between line 2 and line 3 since those style sheets were requested so smoothly after all. Line 2 is a redirection response, it asked the client to access /Home.

Is there someone still telling the truth? Everything is a lie everywhere. What happened to us? Why being honest becomes a hard job?

CategoryBlog TagYahoo TagThought

First Blogscraper Arrives

As using WordPress, they will come for your content eventually, even I am not using a blogging software. It makes you feel very bad, then you notice that. I saw someone getting my blog post via that scraper's website in access log. They use my Feedburner feed to scrape my content. Although all of my contents are licensed under the Creative Commons, but the scraper's website isn't. I believe that this is still an incident of copyright infringement. They not only have just one scraping blog, but a dozen of blogs at least. Bad people everywhere.

CategoryBlog TagBlogging TagScraper TagCopyright TagLicense

Live Spaces Is Awful

I searched for a keyword and got a result on Microsoft's Live Space. When I click on that link, I always am asked to log in. But I find out Google Translate can load it, although the content has to be translated into another language. I then used one of Anonymous Proxy to load that link and got the content. I finally realized that it's Microsoft. Yes, it's Microsoft! Still don't get it? It is the Microsoft! You know Firefox is not a product of Microsoft and neither is Linux. When I tried wget to retrieve the same page, it received the correct content. So, it is obvious, Microsoft do something is dirty. I am sure it is about Firefox or Linux, but not sure which one, maybe both.

If I recall correctly, Google does not allow this kind of websites to be indexed in its result. Microsoft's Live Search seems to check this kind of thing with fake user agent, but their website, spaces.live.com, awfully does the same thing that they want to prevent.

All I can say "It is the Microsoft" and please don't use any services like that.

CategoryBlog TagMicrosoft TagThought

Mozilla Weave on Linux Firefox x86_64

I finally can run Weave 0.2.5 in Firefox x86_64 on Linux and sync successfully.

I haven't installed Weave on other computers, I will test it soon! By the way, I am not using official build of Weave, but this one.

Today (2008-07-21), I installed Weave on Windows XP and tried to sync with data from my Firefox on Linux. I kept getting message about invalid passphrase from the first-time use wizard. I even tried resetting, but still got the same message. The activity log shows the problem: Weave could not download the private key.

The solution is:

• Change extensions.weave.username in about:config from nobody to your username.

• Click on Weave icon on status bar and choose Sign In...

• You should be able to sign in and sync.

CategoryBlog TagFirefox TagMozilla TagWeave TagLinux

Add Sphere Widget to MoinMoin

I want a Related Post section in MoinMoin as if same purpose plugin in WordPress, but I don't think there would be one. Because wiki is different than a blog, its pages are not chronological usually, therefore close topics already are written in same page usually. In another words, having Related Page is kind of redundant for a wiki. But it's still good to see it. I didn't try to find a native one for MoinMoin, I tried the Sphere. Although its widget designates for blogs, but I didn't read that as requirement in Sphere's TOS. Besides I have blogs, and with wiki, of course.

Obviously, I have to modify theme file again. Here is a modified theme file for example:

import urllib
from MoinMoin.theme import modern
class Theme(modern.Theme):
    name = "modern_ttb"
    def editbar(self, d):
        html = modern.Theme.editbar(self, d)
        if self.request.action == 'show':
            html = html.replace(u'</ul>\n', u'<li><a class="iconsphere" title="Related Blogs &amp; Articles" onclick="return Sphere.Widget.search()" href="http://www.sphere.com/search?q=sphereit:%s">Sphere: Related Content</a></li></ul>\n' % urllib.quote(self.request.getBaseURL() + self.request.request_uri))
        return html
    def send_title(self, text, **keywords):
        request = self.request
        html_head = []
        # Sphere
        if self.request.action == 'show':
            html_head.append('<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.sphere.com/widgets/sphereit/js?t=classic&amp;p=thetinybit.com"></script>')
        if html_head:
            old_html_head = request.cfg.html_head
            request.cfg.html_head = old_html_head + '\n'.join(html_head)
        modern.Theme.send_title(self, text, **keywords)
        if html_head:
            request.cfg.html_head = old_html_head
    def startPage(self):
        if self.request.action == 'show':
            return u"<!-- sphereit start -->\n\n" + modern.Theme.startPage(self)
        else:
            return modern.Theme.startPage(self)
    def endPage(self):
        if self.request.action == 'show':
            return modern.Theme.endPage(self) + u"\n<!-- sphereit end -->\n"
        else:
            return modern.Theme.endPage(self)
def execute(request):
    return Theme(request)

Basically, we need to add two things from Sphere, a JavaScript and Widget. I override send_title to add this script in <head> section of HTML and override editbar for the widget. The widget is added at the end of MoinMoin's edit bar. Overrides of startPage and endPage are for marking the correct starting and end of a page content, which makes Sphere has better idea of what to analysis for related content. Only when action is show, then Sphere widget shows up. Otherwise, such as Info or Attachments, widget doesn't show up.

This is first time of using Sphere. I may take it down, if the related content is not so related.

CategoryBlog TagSphere TagWidget TagMoinMoin

What the Hell?

This is part of a daily logs, it just a little over than usual. Their performance of success is exactly 0 in this server, because I don't have any PHP scripts running on this server. They really need to learn more, not just do burst-force attacks, that's wasting all of our time and speeding up the process of ice berg melting in north pole. They are killing our Earth!

CategoryBlog TagAttempt TagPHP

AWStats Re-Analyzes Logs

I decided to exclude myself from AWStats analysis, actually, just add a new AWStats configuration file. But that will only have result since the oldest record of current /var/log/httpd/access_log. It won't include those archives made by logrotate, therefore I have to make AWStats process all from beginning¹. I extracted all archived logs to ~/tmp/awstats and run with the script as follows:

#!/bin/bash
# 2008-07-19T23:00:09+0800
for log in ~/tmp/awstats/access*; do
    echo "Processing $log..."
    /usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -update -config=myconfname_excluded -configdir=/etc/awstats -LogFile=$log
done

-LogFile tells AWStats uses that assigned one, not the log filename in configuration file. Only a few seconds and run the normal updating script again, I have the analysis without me.

CategoryBlog TagAWStats