I gave a talk entitled ``Building Better Tools'' at NYCBug. This talk is an extended version of a presentation I gave at work in March, on how system engineers and administrators, the people who maintain the infrastructure of the internet and who write a lot of code without (usually) having any training in software engineering practices, can improve their tools.

Slides are here.

Audio of the talk is here.

Reminiscent of my previous nightmare with DSL, the reason why I'm ditching Speakeasy DSL service after 9 years can be found summarized in this ticket.

Having outsourced my hosting to Panix, I'm ready to become a consumer.

Apparently some time today, relays.ordb.org was changed to return positive results for any and all queries. This caused my mail server to reject all incoming mail.

I understand that it's an efficient way to make people not use relays.ordb.org anymore, but willingly and intentionally cause people to lose mail is really not very nice.

See also: http://www.nabble.com/relays.ordb.org-r ... 86049.html

Date: 2008-01-19
Where: Pacifica/Linda Mar
Time: 13:30 - 15:00
Weather: Sunny
Wind: None.
Crowds: Emptyish (for Pacifica)
Tide: Low, low tide.
Waves: 3-4', mostly. Some 5. Fairly clean, but few.

First time surfing in 2008. Very, very out of shape. Good thing it was mellow. Warmer than anticipated.

If you're trying to write a tool that retrieves information from Google, you want to make sure to explicitly set the UserAgent string to something like what a regular browser would set.

For example, perl's LWP::UserAgent sets the agent string per default to "libwww-perl/#.#". Google apparently doesn't like that and will not return results to you. Setting it to something like "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; NetBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3)" would work.

Interestingly, they appear to whitelist agents, rather than blacklisting them. That is, a random string as a user agent will not work. This means that they are effectively saying "we will only serve content to agents that we know (and approve) of", banning any client they simply might not know of.

One would assume that they did put this whitelist into place to prevent certain abuses, but then again, it would be trivial for anybody developing tools that lend themselves to abuse to simply reset the agent string to something they would accept, so the win seems negligible to me, while the cost of banning unknown agents seems high.