kysol

I'm only 10 minutes away from Brisbane CBD, and my closest bus/train stations have no staff. I remember 15 years ago the train station did having staff there for ticketing, but not anymore.

I used to see full length empty trains going out to the coast during peak hour as a "limited stop" service, yet regular commuters would have to pack onto 3 car all stop services. That there caused me to stop taking the train. The bus system also has it's faults but is generally ok. Worst I've seen are the ghost buses that just don't turn up but are still on the status boards.

Airport train fares were a exploited for a while until they did a crackdown on the passes. It'd cost you $10~ to go from the CBD to the airport, but the passes would only cost you $5. You could tap on to get on the train, and never tap off (which incurred a $5 fee, but you didn't care) then bin the pass afterwards because you weren't going to pay that fee.

It's these sorts of things are why our transport system will never progress, we are always looking to screw over something that we don't hold value in. If we needed it, we'd pay for it in fear of not having it.

If someone was working on privileged information (financials etc) then yeah it's probably not great to look at the screen, but if everyone is working on the same projects, then there shouldn't be any restrictions.

Personally, I'm the only one I work with to have my screens facing out to the public eye. Hiding behind screens just invites distractions. There's nothing that could be on my screens that is sensitive enough to hide. Even if other developers saw what was there, the worst that could happen would be 5 minutes trying to explain what a specific core function did, and an hour wasted trying to get out of a trivial one sided conversation about conspiracies all stemming from how their component doesn't handle multibyte characters and how they have to strip them out (yeah don't ask, just don't... best not to).

Every time I've returned from Japan, I've always felt compelled to do my best where every I could. Sounds cheesy, but there is something about how well everything runs and has a place that makes you feel energised.

がんばって ^^

Just throwing this out there, buy JR Passes if you are going to be traveling a lot via Shinkansen (especially if you did what we did, Osaka->Kagashima->Kumamoto->Beppu->Nagasaki->Hiroshima->Kyoto->Osaka), it's worth it.

I've mentioned this to a friend a few times, the biggest differences between the Japanese and Australian public transport systems is that we (Au) take ours for granted. We don't care about our trains and buses until they are not there (strikes), or late (traffic/human delays), and then we complain rather than attempt to fix the problem.

If our everyday work life depended on our transport system, and I mean really depended on it, we'd see a dramatic shift between what we have now and what we would have.

We do, not 100% of the time, but damn close (usually non-locals and jerks that will push in past those coming off).

As for Japan, I was amazed when taking the trams down in the south where, from what I remember, you got on via the back doors (taking a ticket, which was optional some times depending on the trip), then you would slowly move forward to the front to pay on departure via a coin collector near the driver. Change machines were also on the trams. The ride and transaction was seamless as everyone always had correct change, the collection of money took little to no time (we're talking nobody really stopped, drop money in, keep walking) and because everyone was entering and leaving the assigned doors, everything just worked.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

And that's based on phones that don't take 3 minutes to boot up.. Oh hi old phone :)

From what I was reading, the removal of the favicon in Safari was more just a UI redesign decision to remove "clutter". Personally I don't find a 16x16 icon too intrusive, but hey, what ever floats their boat. I was hoping that it was as you said, and was to prevent maliciously designed favicons from tricking users on plaintext sites (where the protocol had been stripped by the UI) into thinking they were on a secure site.

I don't use Safari, so I don't know how they render their address bar.

..and people complain about transparency :)

I wasn't calling it a social engineering trick, more that it just felt like one. To the average person they wouldn't second guess the icon. To those who believe in HTTPSAllTheThings, we question anything out of the ordinary.. and that little padlock shouldn't appear in the tab.

As I said, it just felt weird, sort of the same feeling you get when you go to Apple or YouTube and there's a warning on the lock icon. You just want to hit the back button almost instantly fearing something dodgy is happening.

There's something about their favicon being the default green lock ( https://https.cio.gov/assets/favicon.ico ) that unsettles me. It feels like a social engineering trick.

You sir are correct, and on that note: http://flangipanis.bandcamp.com/ (local punk band), for your safety (and sanity) I recommend not watching the "My Period is Late" video. Really fun live show though.

Not for/against the code formatting, just giving you a target (just hope you know who you're going after) :D

https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/8e2737dab409c46d688c...

That or more hardware to overcome bottlenecks caused by bad code. "It's running slow, we need more memory!". After some investigation, really... you've got 8 joins without using keys, and you're getting paid more than us how?

I've been tailing logs for "()" as I've seen a fair amount of () { :fake; } - () picks up some other lines, but I'd rather see everything rather than 90%

One thing they didn't mention about the base64 of example.comShellShockSalt is that as per use with Spammers finding emails that get reported on anti-spam boards, those initiating the probes can watch for reports and extract the identifier to see who said what. Why they would be interested in this sort of information, I have no clue, but it would be of use.

I thought I was just one of the lucky ones to get such an obscene message for a capture... way to spoil my excitement :P

People were bat shit crazy in the middle of that Cold War. If someone randomly decided to turn off machines without notice, even if they said "whoops accident, my bad", their actions would have instantly thought of as sabotage.

I'm not agreeing with the outcome.

For security reasons I think that it might have been justified, considering the events that had just taken place. Still a crappy way to go out though.

My thoughts exactly. With that sort of "global" function, you would expect some sort of countdown timer prompt on each terminal that could be cancelled.

The first bit of advice I give to people when they ask where to start is exactly what you did. Take working code and play with it, modify it, make it do what you want. You will learn faster by breaking things and figuring out what went wrong.

- Self taught, my school's idea of "Computer Studies" was to teach you how to use WordPerfect, and a few other DOS based office apps.

- Everything I did before my first coding job was done purely for myself.

- 1997 to 2000 if I want to only count "Web development" as my core skill. I've been playing around with code since 1990, trying to mix art with code on Amiga.

- First gig was in the adult industry designing and maintaining sites.

Brief Timeline for those interested:

1997 - Playing around with Netscape Navigator Gold and GeoCities. Purely HTML based sites with some use of 3rd party CGI tools (Matt's Script Archive... I think).

1999 - Touched on ASP but I didn't like the taste.

2000 - Since everything didn't burn to the ground, I started to develop using Perl and flat-file databases.

2001 - Upgraded to PHP/MySQL. Expanded further into JS/CSS as well. Also started using Rackspace as my main host with a FreeBSD machine.

2003 - Career change to advertising, regretted it every day. The lies and screwing of customers. Was primarily splash pages with some functionality.

2006 - Went back to the Adult side of the tracks. Learned more about server management. Dabbled in C at the same time as I was making modifications to Kannel.

2009 - Left the Adult industry for a more retail position. Switched from FreeBSD to Ubuntu as my primary deploy OS. Expanded into scaling architecture as well as picking up a few extra languages along the way (Obj-C, Python etc).

The scary thing is that I started writing an article about this on the 28th, all due to a comment I was sent by an advertising agency stating that "HTTPS is only really for checkout pages". I nicely pointed out why they were wrong.

It was mentioned somewhere that if Google started giving priority to full HTTPS sites, there would be a mass scramble to convert web sites to support HTTPS. Isn't this what we want?

You can warn people all you like, but until it starts to hurt them, they won't listen.

phpStorm and some of the other JetBrains tools are nice, clunky (on lower end machines) but nice.

The canned responses are hurting me to read. Pretty sure comments will be turned off shortly when this blows up.

Been there, had that response. I got the same rejection last year and basically stopped fine tuning my app as I refused to add stuff that it didn't need.

Even bigger would be for Paypal to add BTC as a payment method . Stores wouldn't have to "accept BTC", Paypal would do the dirty work and send on the amount in fiat to the store.

What would be better (from a branding point of view), Paypal to use PPC as "Paypal Coin". The masses wouldn't have a clue that it was actually named something else.

Time to switch login prompt to "Logging in with username and password" and have a dummy account that can delete files upon login. Provide the fairly clueless customs official with the loaded login credentials and damage done before they realise.

Not that I have anything to hide... that being said they will probably just back door into my laptop next time I'm on and deactivate any form of tripwire.

Curse you NSA, always streets ahead!

(Note: If I wasn't on their radar, I am now... /sigh, it was a joke)

Sorry if it sounded empty, there is a reason why I didn't include examples. I'm not really saying "don't use libraries", more just that you should understand the problem first before looking for an easy solution. To be honest, I've done all my scraping in PHP/Perl over the years. Only recently have I started to look into other options such as Python and NodeJS (hence looking at this thread).

I don't claim that my scrapers are better off because they are written from scratch, but they do the job that I want them to do. If I find a target that has a "quirk" I write that into my classes to be used then and in later instances. The real point of doing it this way is more about knowing what the scrapper is doing, rather than what it might do. When you're scraping, you're walking a fine line. Targets may be fine with you doing it to them, but as soon as your scraper freaks out then starts hammering the site, you're in trouble (even worse if you end up doing damage to the target).

I'm not saying that 3rd party libraries are prone to doing this, more so if you forget to set an option or handle an exception, you might screw yourself. If you wrote the scraper it's your own fault for not handling the issue properly. If you used a 3rd party library and the library bugged out causing the issue, you can't really go after the writers, right?

This all comes back to understanding your target, and to understand them, you need some form of knowledge on how it all works.

In response to your questions - I do a lot of things manually when setting up the scrapers. I don't import the data into any sort of DOM (due to watching memory), and in doing that I'm not really concerned about Encoding (for the record I'm generally dealing with UTF-8 and Shift_JIS only) or Broken HTML (I do a general check over the source to see if the layout has changed. If it has, it exits gracefully sending me update notifications on what changed, then puts itself out of action until I reset it. If it's a mission critical scraper, lets just say that I have a myriad of alerts that are sent to me). It's probably not the best way of doing things but it works for me.

Sorry if I was vague, I probably should have put some sort of rant-detection on my mouth. If I didn't answer something specifically, it's not that I was ignoring it, it probably just fell into the "I don't trust it so I don't use it" category. Again, not advocating that people shouldn't use 3rd party libraries, just that you should at least know what you are doing before you do.

Not to rain on the parade of this post (I'm in support of more people learning to scrape, and more services out there giving us easier to access data). I'm someone who loves web scraping, but I'm also someone who believes that if you don't know what the library is doing, you shouldn't be using it.

You can give a brief overview of how to use it and what to look for in the page to extract from, but you're giving a very simple cheat sheet to people that may not understand HTML (trust me they exist... unfortunately). As soon as your example breaks, or they reach a limitation with the library, they are going to throw their arms in the air and deem the library broken, or the task impossible to do because the example said it would work. The only reason I'm writing this is that I know of these sorts of people, I deal with them on a regular basis, and I have to explain to them every time to look at what they are doing on a lower level to get a better understanding of their problem to find the solution.

These sorts of people will stumble across this article after their bosses told them "We need to pull Company X's product information into our sales screens so that we can compare the competitions prices while making our price adjustments". Knowing that they don't even have a clue on how to do that, they will Google for it and retrieve this article. With no experience, and an boss behind them, they will just blindly use it and pray that it works, but due to their inexperience with the subject at hand they will fail.

Sorry to be so negative, I just had to say that. It's the same as any other tutorial out there, just Scraping is something that I feel you need to know what you're doing before you do it.

Personally, I write my own scrapers from scratch (or using libraries I have written over time to make certain aspects less painful) for years. I know, I know, there is a myriad of ready-to-go libraries out there that will do the same thing and probably better for me, but where's the challenge. Sure if you're time restricted, then go forth and grab a library and start scraping, but please at least try to understand what you are doing at a lower level.

> This seems to be a massive PR blunder for the LV guys. They could have put up a blog post enumerating how many of their (and others') designs were ripped off (which is not the same thing as copyright infringement) and probably garnered some internet sympathy. Now, by misusing the much-hated DMCA takedown notice they've positioned themselves in the same camp with all the DMCA bullies we have grown to loathe.

Maybe I've had my head in the sand for far too long, but I had never heard of LayerVault until today, and I know them now for all the wrong reasons.

I find it somewhat silly that no matter what trend you follow, someone will always be there, waiting to pounce.

This isn't the mid 2000's, "First" posts were childish back then, and "First" claims are the same now.

...and seriously at the colour schemes. The flat colour trend is basically the same as a new art movement (it's only pastel colours made more vibrant). I predict that with the current trend being Real -> Flat, the next phase will be a new form of Pointillism.

If we really wanted to be picky, you could draw comparisons between the way that LV do human faces (see bottom of the Tour page) and the old Mac OS logo.