Informatik – Book and Sword

Notice to Followers on RSS

Hi all! I am trying to track down the source of heavy traffic to my site this year. Part of it was a misconfigured Cron job, but another source is RSS feeders like http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html and https://wp.com; On suggestion of my web host I tweaked my WordPress settings so that the RSS feed only gets... Continue reading: Notice to Followers on RSS

Automattic is Creepy

This peaceful presenter is in a pickle! Leaving his usual home to be photographed by PA Media, he finds himself trapped in the triple web of an invasive content delivery network! Can he escape with his shiny toy? An example of Automattic’s CDN grabbing and serving an image from a random URL from i0.wp.com/, in this case Sir David Attenborough at https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/125EA/production/_125324257_hi076596136.jpg

On 7 June I learned that Automattic automatically copies images and other uploads to their own servers at the domain http://i2.wp.com/ It does so whether or not the uploads have been shared publicly. Not only that, but it keeps doing this once you move from their hosting with the Jetpack plugin to independent hosting without it. Their pretext is that if they host the same file in many physical places, they can generate your site quicker for people in distant parts of the world, but they keep doing this even if you are no longer using the Jetpack plugin which provides this service. I was completely unaware of this while I was hosting my site with Automattic (ie. WordPress-the-company, distinct from WordPress-the-open-source-software).

Substack Transmits User Email Addresses in Plain Text

At first I thought substack were just good self-promoters. They managed to convince people to lend them more than $80 million to launch a blog platform with 2010s aesthetics. Most blog platforms will deliver posts by RSS or email if you sign up, and paid and unpaid newsletters go back to the 19th century. Getting people with too much money to give you some is harmless, and convincing people to read and write blogs is good. But then @22@octodon.social suggested I should look at their source code and I saw something as beautiful as the tale of Emperor Norton of the United States.

Building a Website to Last in the 2020s

The site above was last updated in 1997. It still does everything it was designed to do. How many script-heavy, CMS-based websites from 2017 will still be readable in 2041?

My mental health has recovered to the point that I can work on moving the static part of my website onto its own domain name and server. That is good, because WordPress’ web interface has become even more intolerable. Automattic has other frustrating policies, like storing images on their domain not mine (so if I move the site links on other sites to the images break), and editing a customer’s site to stop them from using someone’s legal and most famous name. If you want to see how a computer scientist[1] thinks about this problem, read on!

[1] a scientist with a diploma that says CSC and a resume with “junior software developer” under work experience, at least

Comparing Lists of Works Cited with Regular Expressions

XKCD 208: a programmer swings in on a rope to save the day with regular expressions — Obligatory XKCD (#208, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License) The alt text was “Wait, forgot to escape a space. Wheeeeee[taptaptap]eeeeee.”

As part of a recent project, I had to compare my list and a co-author’s list of works cited in a chapter. Since we started five and a half years ago, one co-author dropped out and versions of the files got confused between different people in the project, some forthcoming publications had appeared or changed venues, and the first entries were written long before we had a style guide. It was very important to make sure that every work cited appeared in the bibliography, and to reduce the length of the chapter as much as possible by removing references to works which are not cited. Since the lists of works cited contained 150 and 180 entries, many of which fill several lines in print, comparing the two lists was going to be a tedious task. And so I turned to the powerful arts of a dead tongue which I had not invoked since I learned it from German and Indian adepts in a distant land: the language of shell scripting and regular expressions.