Peter Maxwell - Personal Blog » Uncategorized

Photos: Holyrood Park & Meadows; Friday 13th March 2009

Peter — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:31:08 +0000

It has been my intention to upload some photos for a while but couldn’t find some decent gallery code. So finally, I’ve found a half decent plugin… here’s the first lot. If there is delay in loading, it just means it hasn’t been cached yet.

There was an old woman who swallowed a fly.

Peter — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:47:51 +0000

It seems as a species we still have not learnt our lesson: it is a bad idea to interfeer with other species. I was reading this article from the BBC about the Harlequin Ladybird; unlike native numerous British species of Ladybird, this one seems to have been introduced from Asia to Europe as a means of controling pests like Aphids. Being particularly invasive, significant concern has been raised about its spread. Scientists are putatively considering introducing a mite which will disrupt the invader’s reproductive cycle. Did these people never hear the rhyme when they were young… “she swallowed the spider to catch the fly”. This kind of behaviour will only end up with us swallowing the environmental equivalent of a horse. And the public is expected to accept the release of genetically modified species into the wild.

Who shot the sheriff (in the foot)?

Peter — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:11:03 +0000

Earlier today, I noticed this article. It seems that there has been a ruling in the High Court to say that bloggers have no legal protection to assure their anonymity. Seemingly arising out of a case where a Police officer was – rightly or wrongly – posting what I can only assume was sensitive material, it has ended up with the officer in question having to remove the blog and be subject to a written warning.

Naturally, I wanted to read what the officer – a detective named Richard Horton – had written. It seems that it was originally hosted at the URL http://nightjack.wordpress.com/, although not suprisingly the content has been deleted. Right, Google Cache then… erm, nope no cache entries. How about olde’ reliable Internet Archive – aka “The Way Back Machine” – surely that must have a copy? Nada again, it seems that there had been a robots.txt to block crawling by the Internet Archive. Bollocks.

Ironically, if the officer had not stuck in such a restrictive robots.txt then the content which he thought important enough to risk his job over in the first place would still be accessible and serving it’s original purpose – and to boot he would of had a valid excuse for it still being there!

Another lesson perhaps in why the ease of web publishing nowadays can act against the uninitated. One has to wonder if he knew how things would pan out when excluding crawls from Internet Archive. Interestingly, most of the standard copy-and-paste robots.txt examples you see floating about also have Internet Archive excluded; I wonder how many people have actually considered if that is truely what they want.

When it comes to the Internet, caveat emptor still applies – or should that be publisher beware.

Government’s new financial rescue strategy unvieled.

Peter — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 03:31:13 +0000

… while out walking recently, I’d seen this notice in front of what I presume was an Episcopal Church; if anything represents the summa of our current government’s policies, this message has to be it.