It Doth Boggle the Mind!

Note: This will make sense to no one other than a seriously geeky web developer.  And they probably know it but it is still pretty amazing.  Or at least it was to me.  Perhaps I need to get out more.  :-)

For a client project I needed to look at the user agent from different http requests so I took my largest log file and wrote a quick little perl script (Ok -- I did start with an O'Reilly template but that puked out quickly) to pull out only the User Agent strings.  I then sorted it with sort -u (i.e. only unique entries) and got much to my surprise ... (drum roll). 

5,371 UNIQUE user agents

Picture me rolling on the floor cradling my head in pain ... How can there be so damn many?  "How" I shriek. 

Well it turns out that a lot of copies of IE include identifiers as to where you installed it from Juno you might have:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; AOL 7.0; Windows 98; DigExt; JUNO)

And then there are the different versions of each bizarro search engine's spider like

Googlebot-Image/1.0 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
Googlebot/1.0 (googlebot@googlebot.com http://googlebot.com/)
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/3.0 (Slurp.so/Goo; slurp@inktomi.com; http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)
Mozilla/3.0 (Slurp/si; slurp@inktomi.com; http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)

Those just too stupid to configure things:

Indexer larbin2.6.2@unspecified.mail

Or there are our friends still in text mode (and that's not a negative thing, I'm still a lynx user at times):

Lynx/2.8.4rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14

And let me not forget about the aggregators:

AmphetaDesk/0.93 (MSWin32; http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/)

And if you are running Opera then I might know your processor and Kernel number:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Linux 2.4.17 i686) Opera 5.0  [en]

and spoken language:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98) Opera 6.05  [fr]

And then there the computer languages like the Microsoft programmers:

MFC Foundation Class Library 4.0

The Perl programmers

libwww-perl/5.65

The php programmers:

phpgetter

And since this I am an equal opportunity sneer'er in this essay, let us not forget the Java programmers:

Java1.4.0_01

The blogging tools:

MovableType/2.51

The either poor spellers or very funny folks:

 Moozilla

The Mac folk:

sherlock/1.3

And then there are very funny jokers out there in geek land:

Wouldn't you like to know! :-)

If you should want to see this monstrosity then go to http :// www fuzzygroup net / sjohnson / ua.sorted (I'm not making a link intentionally since it is 360K+ in size and would be a big, unnecessary bandwidth hit; but it might be useful to someone and if you're motivated ...).

It doth boggle the mind.

1:19:08 PM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Probably Not Very Much Today

Sorry.  Heads down in code. 

8:37:06 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This