The Junkyard

Destionation Unreal now hosts a new Coop server besides it's array of MH servers. The server is set up by iDeFiX and currently hosts the Operation NaPali Campaign.

Coop is a gametype derived from the original unreal series. You (and some friends) explore a strange and often hostile world on a story based quest. Compared to other gametypes the speed of these games is much lower, the maps look much better and fights are sparce but well thought of.

If you like the old unreal, coop or just want to check out some new environments you can check out the server on 85.14.203.180:5555

Currently I'm developing my own webspider, the primary use is to index sites I want to follow but that don't offer RSS feeds. It's currently in a simple state where it downloads a page and extract the links. Yet for retrieving the page in a nice way and parsing the contexts I use a few modules I'd like to share.

To retrieve the pages I use LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Request. I aim the webspider to be nice so I check the robots.txt with WWW::RobotRules and the robot meta tags with HTML::TokeParser.

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I think almost everybody is aware these days that major companies or websites like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are creating profiles of their costumers in order to show targeted adds. I don't know if that's a bad thing, for example if someone sends you a wish list you can just pick up the item from the advertisements next to the list.

Another way of advertisement is sending/posting plain spam, and since I removed the recaptcha and changed to commitcontrol on my weblog I get to see all spam messages that are posted, besides that I also check my filtered emails so I know what I'm spammed about. The email, and now the spam comments made me wonder, is there something like targeted spam?

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As development on my own webspider continues and now reached a stage where the basics seem to be working well and it's ready for a larger implementation it is time to put up some basic information about it. I will write about the technology later, this article is intended for administrators who find the user-agent in their logs and are wondering about it.

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I just released NP_LatestComments v1.85 which is a modification of the mod previously build or modified by anand, moraes, admun, e-Musty, PiyoPiyoNaku. This plugin for Nucleus CMS shows the latest comments for all or just one blog.

I added support for the NP_BBCode plugin, different odd/even comments and fixed a bug in breaking comments by word.

For more information about using the plugin and downloads see the wiki page.

I hope people will find these changes useful, comments can be left below (if I fixed that) or in the forum thread.

In februari's "Best Waves" I shortly wrote about the search engine DuckDuckGo. I've been using it on and off since and the search engine has been developed and improved ever since. Some improvements are really welcome for my normal (programming) searches.

The way it handles searches and prints information is quite different from the way Google (tries) to do it. Not only does it claim not to track your searches, it also tries to answer your question itself rather then linking to a page. There are a couple of really interesting additions that I'd like to write about.

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Lately I've been working with PHP primarily, I'd almost forgotten how much fun it actually is to do a small perl script for practical extraction and reporting that is not entirely useless. The other day I was expecting a package from Germany which had a Track & Trace code. I regularly checked the page to see when the package could be expected but then I thought of another approach. Instead of checking the page I wrote a small script that checks the pages and uses the KDE notification system to keep me up to date.

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It's time to pick up the boards again and explore some new and unknown beaches. This months waves contain a couple of beaches I think are worth exploring but also a couple of new boards to explore them. Search engines, linux and web development are all featured this month but let's start with something different.

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The first series I wrote on this weblog was about Web spiders covering their control and my views on how a site should be indexed. After installation I set up the robots.txt, however due to the way urls are made this has some limitations. Meta tags would be an excellent addition to this but I never got to implementing them into the CMS until now.

I expected that adding the metatags would mean changing the Nucleus CMS core or writing a plugin but it was much easier. There are conditional statements which can be used in the skins which allows to add different code for different skins among other things.

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In earlier posts I wrote about how to load Unreal Tournament maps and servers from the commandline and url's. However it's even easier to load maps directly from the file browser.

As I'm using KDE as a desktop and I'm going to show how to setup Unreal Tournament to load maps straight from Dolphin. I'm still a server admin and have to compress ut packages every now and then so I'll also add a shortcut for this but this will be added to the rightclick compress menu. The first can be done trough a graphical user interface, the seconds requires a file being written. I'm using KDE 4.4.6 for this tutorial.

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