Internet

After doing some readings on the semantic web and RDF, I came accross an emerging standard called FOAF.

What is FOAF? Actually, it is an acronym for Friend Of A Friend. What is its purpose? It let you describe yourself inside an RDF document with such infos as: your name, your email, your school and workplace.

But the juicy stuff comes right after. You can list your friends inside your FOAF description and link their FOAF to yours. As a result, you could build a giant tree of people knowing each others. Hypothetically, an RDF crawler could then parse the tree and permit queries such as: "Does Bob know Alice?" or "Show me Charlie's friends".

So go ahead, crawl my FOAF description and create yours today!

Posted by Olivier Hill in Internet at 23:48 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Looking at Webalizer's reports, I have just noticed that webpages returning a 302 do not get into the Total URLs listing.

I do not know if this is a bug or not, but a 302 is a Moved Temporarly status code. I do want to count those since it reflects how many people I am bouncing elsewhere. This simple patch does the trick:

--- webalizer.c 2002-04-16 18:11:31.000000000 -0400
+++ webalizer.c.new     2005-08-11 11:02:52.000000000 -0400
@@ -1080,7 +1080,7 @@
          
      /* URL/ident hash table (only if valid response code) */
      if ((log_rec.resp_code==RC_OK)||(log_rec.resp_code==RC_NOMOD)||
-         (log_rec.resp_code==RC_PARTIALCONTENT))
+         (log_rec.resp_code==RC_PARTIALCONTENT)||
+         (log_rec.resp_code==RC_MOVEDTEMP))
      {
         /* URL hash table */
         if (put_unode(log_rec.url,OBJ_REG,(u_long)1,

What would I become without having access to source code...

Posted by Olivier Hill in Internet at 12:25 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Have you ever received spam that was coming from yourself or someone else from the same domain name? Well, I did. It seems to be a new trend that spam or viruses are coming from someone with almost the same email address you use.

But why is that? The answer is simple: whitelisting. When you filter spam coming to your inbox, it can be a common practice to whitelist your email address or the domain of your organisation so that it is never non-intentionally considered spam. This is good while working with Bayesian filters and the like.

So what is the solution to this common problem? Well, it is quite simple and it is called SPF, or Sender Policy Framework. Basically, what a sysadmin does is publishing a SPF record about which server should send mail for his domain.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Internet at 22:11 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)