And, we geeks need to not make painfully ignorant posts about the White House’s “robots.txt” file. Two examples follow :

The country’s new robots.txt file :

Here’s a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today. Here’s the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday:

Obama’s New Robots.txt

Change is afoot…

Within a few moments of President Obama being sworn in, a new whitehouse.gov was revealed. The new site looks great, and promises greater transparency about the actions of our President and government.

Both are followed by a comparison of the old White House’s 2400+ line robots.txt file and the new two-line one.

Let me explain this file before explaining why it doesn’t matter.

Search engines do their magic by “crawling” the web with programs often called “spiders.” These simply pull down webpages and then whatever those pages link to and so on. After that, the pages are indexed in various fashions for use by the search engine itself. In informal standard exists to prevent spiders from downloading information from certain parts of a website; some site admins may not want certain directories indexed, and some will prevent a spider from pulling down certain kinds of dynamic content. These rules are kept at the root of a website; if you’d like to see it yourself, simply visit a favorite site and manually add “robots.txt” to the URL of the base site.

It’s an informal standard, but a pretty helpful one at times. For more information, see wikipedia’s article on the subject.

So, yes, Bush’s whitehouse.gov had a massive robots.txt file, preventing indexing of a lot of parts of the website. And yes, Obama’s whitehouse.gov has just two lines, preventing the indexing of a directory called “includes”.

This is not a surprise or a big deal; for all intents and purposes, the January 20th whitehouse.gov is an entirely new website with new administrators. Also; there’s very little there as of yet beyond the basic policy things that you would expect from a new president. You cannot reasonably compare these two files at all; one represents eight yearsof work and the other was just put in place recently. It is also entirely possible that there’s a massive difference in terms of technical competence between the two administrations which could lead to a needlessly bulky exclusion file.

Compare these after eight years, then we’ll talk. Until then, stop turning molehills into mountains, people.

For the last couple years, I’ve lived in an apartment in spitting distance of the highway that runs through the city. As you might guess, this means I hear a lot of sirens at any hour. I’m just about desensitized to this now.

The thing that still doesn’t register with me is that some pretty bad shit happens really close to me. At one point, I walked into work and the guy I was reliving asked if I had heard about the shooting. At the fast food joint. The one across the fucking street from me. I had slept through the whole thing, and the party had already ended. More recently, when my sister was visiting, there was a large commotion involving police and ambulances just down the street. I don’t know what actually happened, but it stands to reason that it was pretty bad with that kind of disco-light action coming from the arrangement of cars out there.

Last night? I was outside, strolling around the work site when I saw a few police cars speeding by with their sirens blaring. I thought it was a little odd to see them dash down the road like that, but not totally unheard of. Without further notice, I finished my rounds and got ready to leave about six hours later.

The lead story on a local news website was pretty impressive: there was a car chase and a mobile meth lab. Neat! The arrests were just down the road, and they were busted at 2:30am… roughly ten minutes after I saw the cars speeding down the road. Wow.

Maybe I should take this “crime rate” stuff a little more seriously?

For the last year plus, I’ve been consuming audiobooks from emusic.com. So far as I can tell, they’re the only legit company offering audiobook downloads right now, and their selection is only okay at present. However, since my subscription allows for two downloads a month (at $20/month) it’s been quite sufficient. My one significant gripe is that a number of their older selections are rips from books-on-CD and thus have two odd artifacts.

First, they will remind you every hour and ten minutes that you’re listening to (for example) “Very Bad Deaths, by Spider Robinson. Continued; disc six.” I don’t know why the original source material had the disc numbers as part of the audio; I presume that they’re written on the physical media itself. It makes even less sense to keep this when you convert to mp3s. However, fixing this would take a bit of extra work and would probably be a legal problem for them (blah, blah, derivative work.)

Second, the original discs are cut into many smaller tracks, roughly two minutes each. This makes some sense in the original format; there isn’t a way to place a bookmark in a CD very easily, making it convenient to pick out tracks for later. This isn’t quite as useful on an mp3 player in my experience (though, if you lack a bookmark feature on your mp3 player, that’s a different matter.) With most books, this is a non issue – you’re running through in a linear fashion anyhow, so it doesn’t matter. But, when the book is a collection of short stories, it’s sometimes nice to be able to switch to the story you’re looking for instead of guessing and poking about the place.

With a pair of simple(…ish) tools, both of these problems are solvable without any mucking about in audio editors or losing quality by converting to WAV and back again.

First up, Mp3splt. Fairly easy to use; you specify where your cut starts and ends and it pulls the relevant data out of the file you tell it to. For example, if you’ve found a lone song in a music podcast that you’d like, you can use his to cut it out for later. Or, as mentioned before, trim the “Disc n” announcements from an audiobook. Also, you can have it attempt to split tracks based on silence detection or even through use of a cue sheet. This is an excellent tool to have around. It is available for any operating system that you might reasonably have installed.

On the other side of the coin is Mp3wrap which takes a bundle of mp3s and turns them into one. Like I mentioned, this is useful for short stories and such, but it could also be useful as a way to transfer a bunch of songs as a single file without fiddling with tarballs, rar files, and so forth. If one were so motivated, wrapped up mp3s could be treated kind of like a mix tape from the days of old; you could send someone a pile of related music that you liked and maybe they’d find something of interest. Interestingly enough, mp3splt can recognize mp3wrapped files and cut them as appropriate. It is available for Linux and Windows, though it probably builds on BSD and related systems without too many issues.

Anyway, enough of that for now. I’ve got to get to class fairly soon.

At issue are things like my recent inability to post comments on my own damn site and frequent + weird bugs with rendering entries.  I think that I’ve simply outgrown the site, so I’ll try this instead and see what happens.  For a while, I’ll simply cross-post entries on both sites to see how things go.

I must say that I like the idea of being able to schedule automatic posts; I could sit down and write a week’s worth of entries to let things run on autopilot for a bit, which I couldn’t do on either Livejournal or Blogger.  Having a simple “jump” option right in my editor is fairly nice, too.  Something tells me that there’s a lot of features lurking beneath the surface.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens.  More to come.