GoComics.com changed their Web page format and broke my screen scraper again last night. I’ve updated my comics aggregator to support the new page format as of this morning.
Archive for the ‘Web’ Category
GoComics.com changed their Web page format again
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011![[Digg]](http://blog.kamens.us/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
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comics.com has merged into gocomics.com
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011For those who use my comics aggregator, note that as of yesterday, the comics.com web site has merged into gocomics.com. I’ve just updated the aggregator to reflect this. The comic strip “That’s Life” appears to have been lost in the shuffle; I’ll check again at some point in the future to see if it resurfaces so I can put it back. All other comics are intact.
I’ve also fixed Mother Goose & Grimm, which stopped working at some point in the past and I just noticed today.
As always, please let me know if you want me to add a comic to the line-up.
Enjoy!
Google AdWords is still staffed by poorly trained monkeys
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011Last month, I wrote about Google’s surreal attempts to collect from me a debt I don’t actually owe, and my unsuccessful attempts to make it stop.
Things have gotten much worse since then.
I sent a letter (appended below) to the office of Google’s CEO over a month ago. There has been no response.
Today, I received notice that Google has turned the bogus debt over to a collection agency.
It’s looking like I’m going to have to hire a lawyer to sue Google for defamation of credit to make this stop.
I just can’t believe this is going on. It’s totally absurd. (more…)
Google AdWords is staffed by poorly trained monkeys
Monday, April 4th, 2011Back when I was doing my week-long Shave a Redhead for Israel fundraiser, Google’s search index was taking an unusually long time to index the fundraiser page. This was a problem because I was publicizing the fundraiser and telling people they could find it easily by searching for “Shave a Redhead for Israel”, but they actually couldn’t.
The fundraiser was only a week long, and four days in, Google still hadn’t indexed it. Luckily, Google had recently sent me an offer for $100 in free AdWords advertising to get me to try AdWords. I decided to take advantage of that $100 offer and set up an AdWords campaign to match searches for “Shave a Redhead for Israel”.
I called Google’s AdWords department and worked with the sales representative there to set up the campaign. I told him, several times and in several different ways, that my only goal was to direct people who Googled for “Shave a Redhead for Israel” to my campaign page. I told him I didn’t wants ads to be placed on other pages — I just wanted sponsored links on Google’s search page — and I told him specifically that I just wanted that one phrase, “Shave a Redhead for Israel”.
Despite my repeated instructions, he set up a campaign which matched all sorts of keywords and ran ads all over the Internet, not just sponsored links. By the time I discovered this the next morning and fixed the campaign, it had racked up almost $60 in charges for ads I didn’t want and didn’t need.
But that’s not the worst of it. In addition to screwing up the campaign, he failed to apply the $100 promotional credit to my account. As a result, a few weeks later Google charged my credit card for almost $60 in advertising that was supposed to be free, and, to be clear, was for a non-profit fundraiser from which I didn’t make a cent of profit.
Astroturf for (or against?) Obama
Thursday, March 24th, 2011An interesting comment showed up a few hours ago on an earlier blog posting of mine about Barack Obama: “Just wanted to say that I am eployed at a large Pharmaceutical company in Clayton NC and I support Barack Obama with all my heart. I would love for all my friends and colleagues to re-elect Obama in 2012!! I LOVE YOU OBAMA.”
The commenter gave the name “Diane Pearce Votes for Obama Again” and linked to my.barackobama.com. I thought it was slightly weird, but not weird enough to merit further investigation.
Then, three hours later, another comment came in on a different blog posting, this time from “Diane Pearce Loves Barack Obama”: “All I know is that I work at a large Pharmaceutical corporation in Clayton NC and I endroce Barack Obama with all my being. I would love for all my friends and colleagues to re-elect Obama in 2012!! I LOVE YOU OBAMA.”
That exceeded my weirdness threshold, so I looked into it a bit further.
The two comments gave two different email addresses, Reitter@gmail.com and Lipovsky@gmail.com, both of which appear to be based on people’s names and neither of which is related to the full name given by the commenter.
One of the comments was posted from an IP address in the United Arab Emirates. The other was posted from Indonesia.
I Googled for pages matching “Diane Pearce” and Obama, and there were 264 matches, many of which were similar comments. I did the same Google search a half hour later, and the count was up to 270.
Someone is clearly astroturfing here. The motives for this, and whether the people doing it are in reality trying to help or hurt Obama, are left as an exercise to the reader.
 Diane Pearce Votes for Obama Againmy.barackobama.com Reitter@gmail.com 86.96.226.22 |
9 chickweed Lane, Brewster Rockit, Frazz added to comics aggregator
Monday, December 20th, 2010For those of you who use my comics aggregator, please note that in response to user requests, I’ve added 9 Chickweed Lane, Brewster Rockit, and Frazz to it. As always, please email me if there are any comics you’d like me to add.
Devious domain typo hijacking
Friday, December 17th, 2010I just tried to visit Facebook but typed the URL wrong and typed “faceobook.com” (note the extra ‘o’). Here’s where I ended up:
(click for full-size image)
Devious, eh?
Needless to say, I did not participate in the “anonymous survey.”
Comics aggregator now supports short links
Wednesday, December 15th, 2010For those of you who use my comics aggregator, there’s now a “get short link” button at the bottom you can use to get a Bitly link for the comics page you’re currently viewing. So you can build up exactly the configuration you want in terms of which comics you want to see, and then generate a short link for it for bookmarking etc. Enjoy!
The wrong way to be a good samaritan
Monday, December 13th, 2010You’ve probably heard by now (the party line from Gawker, an a much more comprehensive analysis from Forbes) that a huge database of Gawker Media usernames and (poorly) encrypted passwords was recently stolen, and that the thieves published the stolen data for anyone in the world to download, and that the thieves managed to crack hundreds of thousands of the passwords using a brute-force attack. As far as I know, the thieves, who are in it for glory rather than money, haven’t released the decrypted passwords, but since they released the usernames and encrypted passwords, anyone on the Internet is free to download and do their own brute-force cracking.
Fortunately, this security breach had almost no effect on me, because I’ve already learned the hard way about the perils of using the same password on multiple sites, and because I don’t really care if my email address is leaked to yet another group of spammers since it’s been widely disseminated all over the Internet for over two decades and my spam filtering is just fine.
However, this morning, I received an email message from “teamhint@hint.io” which read as follows:
National Grid gets 66.666% confused with 99.999%
Monday, December 6th, 2010You’ve probably heard the expression “five nine reliability,” which is shorthand for saying that a product, Web site, service, application, or whatever is fully functional 99.999% of the time, the equivalent of less than six minutes of downtime per year.
Most Web sites don’t need to achieve that level of reliability. However, when you’re in the business of critical infrastructure, e.g., the natural gas that people use to cook their food and heat their houses in the winter, you had better be aiming for a pretty serious uptime target.
National Grid apparently thinks otherwise. When I contacted them to find out why there have been several incidents recently when I was unable to view or pay my bill online, here’s how they responded:
Our system goes down every night between 10:30 PM and 6:30 AM for processing. During this time you cannot view bills or take care of other processes for your account like payments or paperless billing. Please try going online during the daytime to view the bill.
In other words, their Web site has planned downtime, let alone unplanned downtime, for a third of every day, so their maximum possible uptime, assuming no other outages ever occur (which, alas, is not the case), is 66.666%. That’s an awful uptime ratio. Really, really awful.
National Grid ought to fire whoever thought it was reasonable for their Web site to be down for eight hours out of every day, not to mention whoever thought it was necessary for their Web site to be down for eight hours out of every day.
