Category: Life

While I was waiting a prescription to be filled out at a pharmacy the other day, I heard the full conversation of a woman berating a worker for what was entirely the woman’s fault. She was insulting the employee, raising her voice, and generally failing at being an adult.

She walked past me after her tantrum was over. I let her know what I thought of her behaviour. She wasn’t pleased, and continued walking on.

A minute later I hear her high heels walking through the store. She was looking for me. She was quite angry, and asked if I worked at the store. I told her I didn’t. When she failed to succeed in belittling me in a manner she deemed satisfying, she stormed off.

I realize this wasn’t any of my business. However, it’s not right for people to insult others like that, and those workers in the interest of self-preservation are prohibited from standing up for themselves. Someone had to.

In this final segment about Websense, I’m going to show you how, as a web developer, you can prevent your site from being blocked. It all comes down to this PHP code which you can insert in the top of your web page:

<?php
  if (ereg("208.80..*..*", getenv('REMOTE_ADDR')))
     header("HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden");
?>

In the first line, we compare the IP address of the person visiting with the block used by Websense. If it matches, the second line stops the page from loading and issues an error to the client. Websense doesn’t see what’s on your site, and consequently, has no grounds on which to block it.

As far as user agent strings go, Websense spoofes its bots to appear like regular web traffic. Blocking on a basis of IP is the only way to go.

I’ve completed the first draft of the film script for Rice Tea. In this initial process, I concentrated on streamlining the story and shortened the dialog. Next up is revising it to make sure that it maintains audience interest and that its reverence for accurately depicting technology doesn’t get too anal.

Other Developments:

• “Rice Tea” won’t be the title of the film. It’ll be called something that sounds more related to the subject matter.
• Shooting is set for mid-July.
• The film will be free as in beer and as in speech. One key benefit of going this route is that it enables me to utilize an excellent variety of Copyleft and Creative Commons music.
• A community will be set up to enable third-party contributions to development. More on this later.

Last time, I showed how to bypass Websense if you were in an environment which used it. However, this last method required you to be able to install an application onto your computer. What if you have no such rights?

With that in mind, here are a few more tricks to get around Websense filtering so that you can do the work you’re paid to do.

Use Translation Services:

1. Go to http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
2. In where it says “Translate a web page”, insert the address of the blocked page you want to access.
3. Choose to translate from Chinese to English.

The translator will attempt to find Chinese words and translating them to English. Failing to do so, it will leave the original text (in English) intact, providing you with a mirror of the page hosted on the translator’s servers. If the translator isn’t blocked, neither will be the page you want to load.

Switch up the subdomains:

Websense filters by subdomains. So if you want to access, say, “http://www.somesite.com/”, try putting in “http://somesite.com/”. It may just work.

I have a Samsung Gravity 2 phone from Wind Mobile with an unlimited data plan. I’ve figured out how to tether it to my netbook so that I can have the laptop surf from anywhere.

Originally, I followed the directions provided on Wind Mobile’s site. They want you to install software from Samsung and use that to connect to the Internet. Unfortunately, in my case, the Samsung software crashes on startup. I can’t get it to work at all. So I figured out another way to tether the phone, which I share with you here. (more…)