Busman's Holiday

Ahhhh... vacation time!

I have the next five days off to do whatever I damn well please. I started off this morning at 4:30AM by hacking around with the Proxy Page.

We are almost there, boys and girls!

I have hacked it around to make it a multi-page list. Looks sweet. Right now I'm working on the master update loop, which checks all the known good proxies to make sure they're still online. Since they can disappear pretty quickly it's imperative to make sure the list is up to date.

I have also finagled a speed rating this time around, so look forward to that. Anything with a 30 second or greater response time is going to be thrown into the bit bucket. I'm considering listing them from fastest to slowest to make sure you don't have to look too hard to find the proxy that's right for you.

I have also included another proxy type, "Undefined".

A lot of these placed I steal proxies from don't bother to do a thorough check. Not every proxy in a list is necessarily a proxy server. Sometimes it's just a Web server. Sometimes it used to be a proxy, but today it's not. Any proxy that responds but can't be identified as CoDeeN, Transparent, Anonymous, or High Anonymous will be classified "Undefined".

We'll see how that goes. I'll be re-re-checking those manually and if a significant number are junk, they'll just be excluded from the list.

So far, from what I've seen (and I'm getting fewer than I expected) it looks like the "Undefined" sites, for the most part, redirect you to a cheesy search page for a click-thru or two. Dirty rat bastards!

For now I'm going to freeze the page and let the updates catch up. Plus I'm going to suspend "harvesting" activities until that happens, since it really whacks the VM this stuff is running on. The next time the page is updated you should get all the new goodies.

Hacking all this crap together with bash scripts and ftp uploads is definitely an exercise in Bad Web Development, but I go with what I know. I suppose I could learn ASP or LAMP or .Net development, but I'm old, I'm stuck in may ways, and it works. After a fashion.

In other news, I never heard back from those dilrods at GoDaddy. I guess they're still scratching their tiny little pinheads on their server problem. Perhaps their plan is "Ignore it and it'll go away".

If so, they don't know me very well.