Archive 3. February 2005

First Fallout of rel="nofollow"

Rogers Cadenhead made some comments about Wikipedia marking all external links with rel="nofollow". I find it particularly unfortunate that Wikipedia typically only links to external sources that actually have subject matter quality - or at least are considered to have such quality by the Wikipedia author. Precisely a link monster like Wikipedia has improved the positioning of other pages through its links - which surely would have been particularly helpful for information websites about obscure topics. After all, who else would link to them?

fallback-reboot is a small daemon that locks itself into memory (so it cannot be swapped out) and then waits for a password on a port. When the password arrives, the machine is rebooted without any security precautions or disk sync. Interesting as a last resort when the machine still responds to pings and similar, but you can't get a shell prompt anymore.

Gigablast is a search engine that offers some interesting features. And most importantly, the search results are available as an RSS feed.

Suddenly and unexpectedly: 25 minutes with Bush - Hawks among themselves.

Software Patent Directive: EU Parliament calls for restart of proceedings - whether that will particularly impress the Commission now? Last time they simply ignored the opinion of Parliament anyway.

Pledge association names?

BVB pledges rights to club name - and I wonder who's more stupid: the football club that pledges its name, or the insurer who's dumb enough to accept something so pointless as collateral...

Completely crazy: the sherry enema

Woman Kills Husband with Sherry Enema. Yep, that means exactly what it says: an enema with sherry. On an alcoholic — because he couldn't swallow.

When you read something like this, you understand why Americans need all these nice warning labels on products. A clear case for Wonko.

Zope.org - FileStorageBackup is a description of many useful tips on how to handle ZODB database files. Specifically replication, backup, repair - basically everything that will bite you in the ass sooner or later when running larger Zope systems.