Privacy Statement -- Charlie Harvey

Online privacy is extremely important to me and I do my level best to maintain your privacy when you use this site. However, I do collect some data to help me run the site better and to figure out what bits are good and what bits are crap. I never share any information that I collect with anyone, especially with capitalist advertising companies like Google, Yahoo et al.

Updates

2011-12-19 Added references to stopforumspam antispam service
2011-08-25 Added references to botscout antispam service.
2011-04-26 Added sections for comments and updates. Minor edit of intro.

Cookies

This site uses a cookie to store information for my analytics package, piwik (see below) on your computer. You can chose to disable or selectively turn off cookies in your browser settings.

Analytics

I use Piwik analytics to keep an eye what people look at on this site. Mostly I’m just interested — having some analytics helps me figure out how people use my site (and maybe improve it, no promises though). The data is hosted at OX4.org. I anonymize the last byte of your IP address with the piwik AnonymizeIP plugin. That means that rather than your IP showing as 74.125.230.116, I would see 74.125.230.0 . In general, the stuff that gets logged is the stuff your browser reveals. You should use a firefox plugin like ghostery if you would rather not reveal such data.

Log Files

As with most other providers, my ISP, domainsrush collects data from its web server log files. The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider, such as Virgin media, Be Broadband, BT or Shaw Cable), the browser you used to visit my site (eg. Chrome, Firefox or Epiphany), the time you visited my site and which pages you visited. A public record of aggregated logs is published elsewhere on the interwebs. I don't control that. But I do link to it.

Contact Form

If you use the contact Charlie Harvey form, it will pass on your IP address, your browser string and the page that referred you. That's because people often contact me when I break something and its helpful to me in debugging my code to know those things. Your message goes into my personal email account. It is not encrypted. You may wish to use my gpg key to encrypt any sensitive information which you are sending me (I can't imagine why you would be doing that, though).

Comments

If you post a comment, I forward your IP address, user agent and referrer to the Akismet, StopForumSpam and Botscout spam filtering services. Akismet is run by Automattic Inc. You can read their privacy policy on their site. You can read Botscout.com's privacy policy and StopForumSpam's privacy policy on their respective sites. I don't retain this information but I do retain the email address, comment title, comment body, url and user name that you provide. You can post anonymously, but I do require that you provide an email address (its for antispam, and will be used later as a proxy indicator of user uniqueness) and body text. If you don't want to give your email real address you could use a service like mailinator. It'd work better for me if you used the same email address each time, so I had a clearer idea of how many commentors I had, but that may reveal more information about you than you wish to share. I have to ask for a comment body because it would be weird although possibly quite zen to have empty comments!

Charlie,

I am D.N.Abhishek, a undergraduate student in computer science, 8/8th semester, from a rural part of INDIA. I got to know you as you followed me on twitter recently. I appreciate your efforts in writing a fantastic blog,this is helpful for all cs students. hope and request you continue your invaluable efforts towards CS.

Coming to the fact,I developed an unknown interest towards CS.I am hailing from a rural area, i was ignorant and was not exposed to my core field for the last 3 and a half years. Apart from my academics, there are many things that excited me trhoughout the last 3 years but i dint know who to to approache and stayed calm, that frustrated me and it effected my academics as well. I literally wasted my 3 years of engineering which i value it as the most precious time now. Even my grades are not that great. But im spending lot much time on what i need and no people to guide me, althoug it should be a process of self learning, i feel depressed all the time about it.

I am ready to do anything for enhancing my computing skills. Im not up to the mark or for that matter not eligible to think about Masters rite now. It needs a lot of knowledge, time and perseverance to do masters. Rite now im in my 8Th semester. To be frank, Im a not good-when it comes to engineering(cs) except for the fact that im OK with programming. As i already have mentioned, I'm ready to do anything that will make me better and create intuition of only computers in me and nothing else.

The thing that makes me so excited abt cs that i haven't recognized it 3 years before is that computer science for the matter of fact, programming is the only field where one can apply right away what one has learned, But cs is not about programming only.coding excites me very much, its not a same old way of writing the code written for years and years now. I feel coding gives new challenges from time to time and makes us feel to strive one step ahead when failed. It needs a lot of background and fundamental knowledge,strong at core CS, hard work and time taking. The sense that if i sit before my pc and start exploring, i tend to know how data packets travel, how data is stored, how instructions are carried out by the processor throws me off my feet. As of now, all of the cs makes me excited, there's nothing in particular. I have made up my mind that i