jacauc's blog

Well, even though dieInter.net hasn't been very active in the past few months, I am still keeping an eye here, and maintaining the site, until the Facebook craze has dispersed a little.

What I noticed recently, is a lot of very smart little spam comments appearing on my site. Here's what they do nowadays..
Instead of just leaving a comment, saying "visit so-and-so site right now to increase your chances of getting lucky....etc etc"

They (the spammers) now has a very unique new technique of leaving comments which is vaguely tied to the topic. It really doesn't look like blatant spam right away... you have to read it twice to notice that this spammer left this comment, but what he is actually doing is just linking to his own website.

You see, it works like this: if Google sees a lot of big and well-known sites linking to your site, inevitably your site must be good/valuable in the eyes of those of the maintainers of those sites. Therefore Google increases your "pagerank".

Think for instance... if CNN.com's homepage had a link directly to dieInter.net in large bold letters... Google already knows CNN.com being a valuable site with good and valid content, and CNN is a highly rated site. So if CNN links to dieInter.net, that means they like dieInter.net, and this website's "pagerank" would improve.

On the other hand... If CNN wants to mention my website, but they don't want to be connected or affiliated with me at all, they can always put a small piece of code right next to the link. This is called the rel="nofollow attribute.

This tells Google not to follow the link from CNN to my website.
...and that's exactly what I have done now... I have added the nofollow tag to all new, and existing comments. Maybe this will discourage the spammers a little...

It essentially means they are spamming, but there would be no potential gain for them. What's the point....  read more »

Yes, I finally arrived in Thailand after a grueling 48 Hours in Airports and aboard planes. ...Only to find out that somewhere between Luanda, Johannesburg, Hong Kong and Phuket, my luggage went missing.
Eish!

I actually suspect that it is still going around on the carousel at OR Thambo Airport.
See the thing is: When Boarding a plane from Luanda airport, while in transit, you never have the opportunity to "check" your luggage to wherever you are heading.
The standard operating procedure seems to be, as you are about to board the plane, just before you leave the runway, someone will spot that you have a "bigger than handluggage" bag, and stop you there. They will offer to take it from you, and in return you will get a little sticker with a barcode.
This, amazingly, works quite well when only traveling to Johannesburg. i.e One hop. Where it gets tricky, is when you have connecting flights out of JNB, as they cannot issue a barcoded tag to check the bag through to JNB, Hong Kong and finally, Phuket. (or wherever else you might be connecting to.)

In other words, what they want is: Once I arrive in JNB, I must go to Passport Control, enter South Africa, go to the carousel and pick up my bag, go to passport control again, and leave South Africa. All in All a 10 minute stay in the country. - And...I cannot do this as I have to be out of South Africa for 63 consecutive days.

Eish again!

The guy on the runway assured me that, once I get to JNB, I can just give the ground staff my barcoded ticket, and they can get my bag for me. So that's exactly what I did.
Went to the ground control staff, and the guy told me that I must speak to the Passport Control/Immigration officials. Arriving there, these guys told me that I must speak to SAA to get this done... At which point, the future of my bag is becoming less and less clear.
and the story goes on... blablabla..
Needless to say, when I got to SAA, they told me that I should speak to Cathay Pacific staff to ensure that my bag comes out of the "cage" (as they call it), and that it is loaded on my next flight.

So, it wasn't such a big surprise when I got to the Airport in Phuket, to NOT see my bag on the carousel. Filled out all the forms, and all I can do now is hope.

Now for the good part
Arriving in Phuket, and walking around in the Market, I realized that losing my luggage almost a blessing in disguise, as clothes here are Really cheap. Bought myself 2 (nice) Boardshorts and 4 (nice) Shirts for around R250. (Had some scuba gear in my luggage though, which would not be such a blessing if I lost it)

Weather today wasn't as great, so the beach was nice, but not Paradise-like!
It's extremely humid here, and the temperature never drops below, I'd say 25 Deg C.
Lekker!

On another note, I have been looking at the Sony α (alpha) DSLR-A100K camera for the past year, and today I decided that now is the time to buy this camera. After all, I am in the East and electronics are significantly cheaper here. Only had a short while to play with it as I need to get the battery charged, but it's GREAT! ...Like the Ferrari of DSLR cameras.

Anyways, it's 12:20 at night now, and I'm getting ready for bed, as I am starting my open water scuba course tomorrow morning at 9am. REALLY looking forward to that!
Spent almost my entire day watching the required pre-course DVD training material.

I will (try to) post more blog entries as I continue my travels, but for now, this is it.
La Gon!

It actually exists!

As I am currently sitting in Angola, locked on an onshore oil base for 28 days at a time, not allowed to leave camp while I'm here, working 12 hours a day, practically 7 days a week, ...I'm sure you can see why we sometimes refer to this place as the "Angola Prison".

(The upside of that, though, is that we do get 28 days parole from time to time)

Rather ironic to see that "Angola Prison" actually exists on Wikipedia.

Here's a slightly modified quote out of the article:

Angola is ^*snip* estimated to be one of the largest prisons, ^*snip* with 5,000 inmates and over 1,000 staff. Located on an 18,000 acre (73 km²) plantation...

They almost have it better off there... they don't have to be up at 5am every morning!
Look at this article for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Angola_Prison

I don't write technical blog posts very often, but I thought I'd share this handy and very basic utility I wrote. Someone out there might find this useful. (I hope..... Well, as a matter of fact, I actually couldn't care less... hehehe)

Some background first:
I often write little batch programs for various tasks, which sends it's output to a log file.
When I initially implement a batch file which will be used in a production environment, I usually want to monitor the results for a while, to make sure it is robust enough. i.e. I keep an eye on the log file for a period of time and look at the results.

How I do this currently, is to have a Windows Explorer window open at the folder where the log file will be created, and then periodically check the window to see if the file is there. This can be rather difficult to keep track of, and messy if there's a bunch of other files cluttering the same folder.

For these reasons, every time I wanted to "continually check if a file exists" (If you are familiar with ping in TCP/IP, you'll understand why I called it a File Ping), I would briefly search Google for a utility that does this, not find anything, forget about it and deal with the "Monitor an Explorer window" method instead.

Anyways... to get back to the point...

This morning, when I had the same situation again, I actually thought about the logic behind this for the first time, and realized that this is Very easy to do. (It was never a big enough problem that I had to really think about it a lot)

You can use the fileping utility attached to this post with the following syntax:

fileping

where is the full path to the file you want to monitor. (for paths with spaces, you can enclose the "path in quotes")

an example:

fileping c:\pagefile.sys

It is recommended to save the "Fileping.bat" batch file into your "C:\Windows\System32" location on your PC, as this will ensure it is included in your entire environment path. (...Thus you will be able to execute it from anywhere.)

Here is an example of pinging a file called ~temp.pid on a network location (UNC path)

Download the fileping utility here (Right click the link and select "Save Target as..". Save to your c:\windows\system32 folder.)

The source code to the program is:


@echo off
REM Fileping utility by Jacques Aucamp.
Echo ** Now Pinging %1. Press CTRL-C to exit.**

:TEST
IF EXIST %1 GOTO REPLY
IF NOT EXIST %1 GOTO TIMEOUT

:REPLY
echo Reply from %1 - File exists
Sleep 1
GOTO TEST

:TIMEOUT
echo Request timed out.
Sleep 1
GOTO TEST


(as you can probably see, this is not exactly the most intricate application ever written, but it works like a charm! Very handy!)

The script can also be used to check for the existence of a drive (like trying to detect when a flash-drive is plugged into the system)
For example:

Hope someone out there can make use of this. Suggestions Welcome!