The majority of deadprogrammer.com traffic these days consists of myspace.com users hotlinking images. I really don’t mind hotlinking, in fact, I encourage it, but the thing is myspacecadets never ever link back to me. It’s common courtesy – if you use somebody’s image as well as server resources, provide a link back.

Well, now I use this little snippet of code that in my .htaccess file to replace any hotlinked image from myspace.com with a tasteful ad for deadprogrammer.com:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.*\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ photos/hotlinked.jpg [L]

All of a sudden, hundreds of popular myspacers are promoting me:

Classy. If you have a better idea for a replacement image, let me know.

What is it with the naming of websites these days? The harder to type it in – the better? http://del.icio.us and http://flickr.com are just as hard to remember as dastardly regedt32.exe

The photo is Hotel Pierre at night from Central Park. Everybody’s favorite billionaire tyrant recently bought himself a humble apartment there.

ruperts_house
Originally uploaded by deadprogrammer

You see, ordinarily I have the most horrible memory for faces and names. Just terrible. It’s because my brain is a bit lazy. So I decided to work on that. I bought a book about remembering faces and names and started paying attention.

Something slightly surreal happened to me today. Rupert Murdoch said hello to me in an elevator. You see, I was reading Murdoch’s biography a while back and studied the pictures well enough to recognize him. So I guess he noticed the look of dumb recognition on my face and said “Hello”. I said “Hi”. Probably I’ve seen him many times before in the elevator – his office is a few floors above.

This is approximately how it went down:

Here’s the soundtrack.