I’m quite happy about it. We are finally making that great change in our lives that we’ve been waiting for over a year now. On the other hand I’m a bit terrified. I’ve been in London a couple of times and I more or less like the city, but it does seem a chaotic place and it’s expensive too. The first thing to do will be to look for a house. I hate moving. We’ve moved 4 times in the last 2 years. Oh well. I’ll try to take it with some humour and philosophy.

It would be great if someone reads this from London to get a couple of tips on housing: where to start looking, neighbourhoods, … Anything that can put us on track.

The positive side is that I’ll probably be posting more in English and that I might make it to the Future of Web Apps Expo (or at least to the diggnation live recording…).

has been selected to be part of the 3rd edition of the Schmap Barcelona guide. If you haven’t already, go check the guide and get to know a little bit more of Barcelona (and to check my photo!).

I’ve now decided to integrate the English blog in my primary site, and though I don’t think it’s the optimal setup, at least I can dedicate some more time to it.

In the next couple of weeks I’m going to do a deep clean up of the old posts and comments and maybe I’ll polish some styles and templates while I’m at it. If you do actually read this, bear with me.

One of the best articles on how to prevent hotlinking was published by “A list apart” (Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention). It’s a really professional, complete and accessible solution based on a little php coding and some htaccess hacking. I really recommend this approach. But I wanted something meaner, because we want to fight it but we also want to get this idea trough: “Hey! Stop doing that!”. And besides, we want to have fun This can alos be done with htacess rules, but we are not *that* bad, so we are going to tolerate a little bit of hotlinking if it’s a fair use (i.e. the person mentions our site or links back to us).

So here’s my approach: we’ll write a script that checks our logs for hotlinks, we’ll set a cron job to run that script just before our logs are rotated and then mails us the results. After we check the hotlinks we’ll decide if it’s fair use and if it isn’t we’ll give the thief a little surprise (“goatse” is the keyword here). Let’s go.

This is the dirty perl script I use. It’s not clean and it’s not nice. There is plenty of space for improvement:

#!/usr/bin/perl
######################################################################
#      Hotlink Reporter 0.1       $LastChangedRevision: 0.1 $        #
#                 (C) 2005 Reven Sanchez                             #
#         Released under a Creative Commons sa-by-nc license         #
######################################################################

use strict;
use diagnostics; # just for debuging. Should not be in final
use Getopt::Std;
use Time::HiRes qw( gettimeofday tv_interval );

# define some vars most for future use
my (%option,$t0,$elapsed,$archive,@matches,@buffer);
getopts("H", %option);

# we're going to time this script
$t0 = [gettimeofday];

# kernel
print "Hotlink Finder v0.1\n";

# open log file
open (LOGFILE,"/var/log/httpd/access.log")
    or die "Error opening log file: $!"; # adjust to your path
while(<LOGFILE>){
    my $line = $_ ;
    # this mad regex gets all the vars we need and even some we don't
    # nasty line breaks! Should go on one line
    if (/(.*)\[\d{2}\/\D{3}\/\d{4}:\d{1,2}:\d{1,2}:\d{1,2}\s.\d
        {4}\]\s\"\S*\s(\S*)\s\S*\"\s\d{1,3}\s\S*\s\"(.*)\"\s\"(.*)\"/i){
        my $host = $1;
        my $get = $2;
        my $referer = $3;
        my $agent = $4;
        # if $get contains an image extension or any other extension
        # we want to track, we catch it here
        if (($get =~/png/i) or ($get =~/gif/i) or ($get =~/jpg/i) or
            ($get =~/zip/i)or ($get =~/tar\.gz/i)){
            # so it does so we check the referrer
            unless (($referer =~ /^http:\/\/www\.theorangeduck\.com/i)
                or $referer eq "-"){
                # unless the referrer is our site or is blank (direct
                # access or some proxies that block referrers)
                    print "hotlink caught\n";
                    print "$host\n$get\n$referer\n$agent\n\n";
             }
        }
    }else{
        print "Uncaught Regex $line";
        # Some weird error here. More error handling yet to be done
    }
}
close LOGFILE;

# some functions we'll use
if ($option{H}) { print "\n\nHotlink reporter help goes here\n\n"; }

# the time elapsed
$elapsed = tv_interval ($t0, [gettimeofday]);
print ("report generated in $elapsed seconds\n");

Ok. Now we have a script that does the dirty work, but we need a cron job to ease it. So copy this to a file and drop it in /etc/cron.d/ (on debian, other systems may vary):

# /etc/cron.d/hotlink: crontab fragment for hotlink reporter
# By reven

# every day at 3 check for hotlinks. Adjust this time to about
# 30 minutes before your logs are rotated

0 3  * * *   root /path/to/your/script/hotlinkfind.pl

In a normal debian setup all cron output is mailed to the user. In this case root (I’m root on this box; you may have to adjust something if you’re not).

If all goes well we’ll get something like this in our mail:

Hotlink Finder v0.1

hotlink caught
192.168.0.126 - -
/images/my_stolen_image.jpg

http://www.example.com/some_nasty_bandwidth_leeching_page.html

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4

report generated in 0.534186 seconds

So now we have a presumable nasty page. We go visit it and see if the author has linked back to our site or has mentioned the source of the image. If he hasn’t, we look for his contact info and we send him a friendly and polite mail asking him to please not hotlink our images and we explain why hotlinking isn’t a good thing.

If we get a friendly reply and the author changes the image or links to our site, then all is good that ends good. We have contributed to make the web a better place. Feel good about it. Write about it on your blog. Give yourself some treat.

If we get a nasty reply or no reply at all, then we have to go to the wikipedia Goatse definition page and look for an incredibly shocking image (Explore and experimet. Goatse is only a starting point; you can use other sources, like your favourite zoophilic porn site, but my experience says there is nothing so shocking and horrible as goatse) and download it to your server (Don’t hotlink it! Haven’t you heard a word I said?).

Then we change it’s name to the the name the hotlinked file had. Remember to backup your image with another name and change references to that image in your site (I didn’t say we didn’t have to do any work at all, but it’s worth it).

Then the fun begins.

You don’t even have to mail him again. Just check his site. The link to your image will be changed pretty fast.

Just imagine his face.

[Mood: evil ]

Really cool effect. It just amuses me how Google can tell so much about our culture.

read more | digg story

I got linked from Make for my POV post! That was a great start. I’ve had a lot of visits and even some mails!

I have absolutely no time at all to post or even to continue work on my projects. I’ve just got a whole too much of work on my to-do list.

Promise to post back as soon as possible. Maybe one or two weeks.

BTW, does anyone know where to get USB-A female plugs? Maybe sampling some electronics provider? Molex just doesn’t answer.

See you soon.

Yesterday I received my minipov kit from adafruit industries (MiniPOV 2 kit). I just love it.

It is very easy to make. Clear instructions on the web with lots of great photos (I definitively need a tripod). It’s easy to program too and all the source code files have a lot of useful comments. Overall it’s a great gadget and the price is quite good. I did have to pay $6.60 for postage, though. At least adafruit does post overseas.

I did some tricks in front of a mirror. Almost had more fun taking photos than building. I’ve even set up a flickr POV set. For your pleasure.

No, I’m not going to sell it on ebay. I was… eh… quite… hungry. Yes I was. Don’t look at me like that! I do have a strange aura since then, so for a symbolic price you can come to my house and wash the Jesus-related dishes… Donations are welcome and will be used to fund future Jesus related sandwich affairs. Thanks.

You’ve got to admit it has been a long time without sandwich appearances.

I’ve been quite busy these days and I haven’t had any time to continue style and lay-out editing. I’ve got plenty of things to do in my real world job, so I won’t do anything with the web at least until next week (expect major changes for then…).

Today I’ve just created a few categories, and this is a sort of a preview of them (see them on the side bar), so that you can get an idea of the things I’ll be talking about.

I’ll also add some kind of how-to section. I already have a few how-to’s in mind, like for example: how to make an RCA-iPod dock adaptor, how to get started with Ajax (that buzzy thing!)… Who knows? Hey, I even accept suggestions…

I’d also like to comment on the English pages/blogs I read: why I think they are great/stink, what just doesn’t seem real of the things American blogs publish from this side of the pond or what things make us so so close… I thing this could be an interesting exchange.

Well, we are going to have a lot of fun.