2006 Nov 10 - Fri
Apache Rewrite
After taking a look at Google's
Webmaster Tools over a few days, I have come to the conclusion that Google doesn't crawl
cgi-bin type things. So David
Wheeler's rewrite page that I had come across a while back finally
makes sense. The page url's need to be modifed to turn things into a seemingly standard
directory structure.
Here is my version of a section of the Apache configuration file to handle the rewrites
found anywhere within my /blog subdirectory:
RewriteLogLevel 0
RewriteLog /var/log/httpd/rewrite.log
<Directory "/var/www/html/blog">
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
Options +ExecCGI
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/$1 [L,QSA]
</Directory>
The first two lines helped figure out why the rewrites weren't working. By setting
RewritelogLevel to a non-zero value, of which I used a value of 4, log statements are
written to the directory indicated by RewriteLog. It turned out that my rewrite rule
becomes '^(.*)$' rather than Wheeler's '^/(.*)$'.
This only required one configuration change in the blosxom.cgi file:
$url = "http://www.oneunified.net/blog/";
[/OpenSource]
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Turing Test for Comment Submissions
People have designed various ways to prevent bots from successfully submitting web forms.
Perhaps the most common method is by using CAPTCHAs: common ones being those funny images
with characters
hidden in a disconcerting background. CAPTCHA is an acronym for 'Completely Automated
Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'.
There appear to be a number of ways to defeat CAPTCHAs. But why bother implementing such
a scheme?
For the casual bot scanning the web, they may be tuned for bypassing CAPTCHAs. But what
if a site was to do something completely different? For example, David Wheeler's Comments & TrackBacks uses a simple arithmetic expression
to break an auto submission bot. So if every site out there did a variation on the theme,
auto-submissions could be prevented. On the other hand, if everyone did a little
arithmetic turing test, then we've come full circle with the bot being tuned to look for
such a simple test.
One side comment, Wheeler made his site, through a simple javascript, some how
better viewable with Firefox but less so with IE.
[/OpenSource/blosxom]
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Career Planning
In talking to a friend today, they were considering a career change. I remember way back
when, I was doing career changing, ie, finding myself. I think there were two books that
helped me the most. Both are by Richard Nelson Bolles: 'What Color is Your Parachute' and
'Three Boxes of Life'. The first one is re-written yearly. The second is a bit harder to
come by. Both helped me figure out where I was, where I wanted to go, and helped plan how
to get there. I recommend them both.
[/Personal]
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