Monday, July 20, 2009

Naracoorte Fossil Expedition

Geared up for caving - Sorting bones in the Lab - Luxurious accommodation

I spent a few days fossil hunting with a team of Palaeontologists from Flinders University. The fossils being down the bottom of deep holes in the ground meant a crash course in caving - my perspective on the size of gap I can fit through has been completely revised.
Then some time was also spent in the Laboratory sorting 12,000 year old bones.
Sleep deprived, repeatedly frozen, battered, bruised and carnivorous plants - haven't had this much fun in a long time - my idea of a holiday!



Box of fossils - Team of intrepid cavers

Friday, July 10, 2009

Build Your Own Proxy Server in 5 Minutes

Need to get vital information at work but the website has been blocked by nannyware because some nong wrote a rude word in the comments section.
Why not build your own Proxy Server to give you the access you need?

You'll need some webspace that does php - google for free stuff if you don't already have it.

Open notepad and paste in the following five lines.

<html><body>
<form action="p.php" method="post">
<input type="text" name="t" value="http://www.">
<input type=submit name=submit value=submit >
</form></body></html>

Now save this file as "myproxy.html"

Open another notepad and paste in the following five lines.

<?php
$thefile = $_POST['t'];
$thepage = file_get_contents($thefile);
echo $thepage;
?>

Save this file as "p.php"

Next, upload these two new files to your webspace.

That's it - type "http://www.your_webspace.com/myproxy.html" into your
browser,then type the address of the page you want to visit in the box
that appears on the page and hit the 'submit' button.

DELETE THE FILES WHEN YOU HAVE FINISHED
- this is the most basic, quick & dirty method I could come up with that mostly works most of the time. The more technically gifted amongst my readers will have noticed there are one or two security issues approximately the size of Greenland that could SERIOUSLY compromise the server if they are left lying around on there. So really, I mean it -
DELETE THE FILES WHEN YOU HAVE FINISHED.