inessential.com: User Agents All Time
obidos-bot (just looking for books.)
someone occasionally surfs by looking to see if I have any books listed: judging by the name, it’s looking for links to Amazon.com, since obidos appears in all their URLs.
The most recent one I saw was being used by a PacBell ADSL subscriber so it may just be someone’s unusual hobby.
I think this is interesting that the tools — programming/scripting languages — are powerful and accessible enough that someone can create their own tools like this.
A friend writes:
I’ve really realized, especially at [the startup I just left] that lower-level development
(anything involving pointer math 🙂 ) doesn’t make a lot of sense in a
world with dual 1.6-ghz servers selling for less than $3000. Since you’re
typically spending so much more on developer hours than on processor cycles,
it should make economic sense to focus on minimizing developer hours. The
“scripting” languages can do so many things now, and there are so many
libraries available, that starting from scratch is really expensive.
Looking at the languages/toolkits I can use on my FreeBSD/NetBSD machines, I think he’s onto something. For a really performance intensive application, you’ll probably need to get down and dirty with C or C++, but if you can throw enough iron at the problem to keep your hands out of that tarpit, python, perl, java, and friends become serious contenders.