Saturday, December 29, 2007
Cows, part 2
In Grade 9, I wrote a program to download comics and newspapers from the web[1] and display them in a whiz-bang DHTML page (that's right, back in my day we called it DHTML, you young whippersnappers, none of this new-age AJAX crap.)
Anyway, to drive this, I realized I could write a bunch of painstaking code to generate the URLs to download the images, or I could write some sort of text-based configuration file that would drive the program.
That worked well for simple cases. Over time, distributors got tricky: the URL for their image had some custom string in it that you could only get if you loaded a specific page on the given day. And you had to have a specific Referer, too! This required a complex pattern matching system. I realized I could write a bunch of painstaking code to match the patterns I needed... or I could look into this thing called regular expressions that I had kept seeing people use on the MOO.
As always, I didn't have a deep understanding of what they were, but seeing what they could do pretty much blew my 14-year-old mind away.
And thus, I committed my first act of (unintentional!) intellectual property theft by including the regexpr package from the LambdaMOO server into my program wholesale. "Attribution? What's that?" Consider this a mea culpa and a fix after the fact.
[1] I now understand how older folks feel when they say "it was the 70s," as if the date somehow excuses their pastel leisure suits. It was the 90s: back then, if you were on the web and didn't have enough popups and banner ads to induce seizures in rates competitive with modern Japanese anime, you were a nobody.
Anyway, to drive this, I realized I could write a bunch of painstaking code to generate the URLs to download the images, or I could write some sort of text-based configuration file that would drive the program.
That worked well for simple cases. Over time, distributors got tricky: the URL for their image had some custom string in it that you could only get if you loaded a specific page on the given day. And you had to have a specific Referer, too! This required a complex pattern matching system. I realized I could write a bunch of painstaking code to match the patterns I needed... or I could look into this thing called regular expressions that I had kept seeing people use on the MOO.
As always, I didn't have a deep understanding of what they were, but seeing what they could do pretty much blew my 14-year-old mind away.
And thus, I committed my first act of (unintentional!) intellectual property theft by including the regexpr package from the LambdaMOO server into my program wholesale. "Attribution? What's that?" Consider this a mea culpa and a fix after the fact.
[1] I now understand how older folks feel when they say "it was the 70s," as if the date somehow excuses their pastel leisure suits. It was the 90s: back then, if you were on the web and didn't have enough popups and banner ads to induce seizures in rates competitive with modern Japanese anime, you were a nobody.
Labels: bsd, comics, intellectual property, moo, regex, theft
Comments:
<< Home
As the owner of the highest trafficked familly internet site, I offer you this advice: you've gotta cut out the boring. And, help me figure out how to crack these new NHL play by play files, which consist of billions of tables, instead of just one, like in the good old days.
Go Oilers!
Go Oilers!
# posted by 
: 5:19 PM
: 5:19 PM
Hmmm, and I was worried about infringement of copyright in the comic strips themselves. I always felt like a Grinch after freaking out about that issue. And now I learn that it was MOOs that I should not have been concerned about.
Dad
Dad
# posted by : 12:25 AM
: 12:25 AM
Hmn, Tripod gets upset that you're hosting an exe; can't download it. The list indicates no penny arcade, PBF, or xkcd! I trust these 3 are part of the "sixty unlisted ones."
Post a Comment
<< Home
