Welcome to Nowhere

Home ยป Page 38

  • Someone wants a how not to guide. Or: Hey looky what Google brung me.

    written by

    james

    I can be more than a tiny bit snarkastic. That’s a word, dammit. It can occasionally come off as, well, somewhat helpful. In a what the hell are you smoking kind of way. And sometimes, Google and its search engine friends/competetors/whatever they’re calling each other now helpfully provide folks with direct access to some of those pro tips. Good; it means I don’t necessarily have to. This one, though, somewhat amuses the everloving hell out of me.

    May 18 7:37am: when not to put your consumer first

    I could construct an entire how not to guide right here, right now. but why? It’s kind of already been written. Here’s version canada, and somewhat before that, version US. And that should about cover that particular how not to section. Now hopefully they weren’t actually looking for a when not to guide…

    Edit

    So you know those mistakes delaying posts was supposed to help me fix? Like, you know, HTML failures? Yeah. About that. I fail at HTML.

  • Conservatives don’t actually get the tech they’re regulating. But you knew this already, right?

    written by

    james

    I’ll be the first to say there’s a few things the conservatives have done that I openly agree with–immigration reform, anyone? But there’s an equal number, at least, that make me wanna scratch my head. Or beat someone else’s. The copyright bill up here has pretty much already been dealt with, but I still find it interesting that not very many people picked up on parliamentary secretary Dean Del Mastro’s complete and utter technostupidity. According to him, and presumedly most of the rest of the party (Tony Clement used to be against it, as did James Moore–probably why they suddenly don’t have a whole lot to do with this bill now), buying a CD with the intention of putting it on your iPod or other such technothinggy is the equivalent of buying socks and intending to steal shoes.

    It’s like going to a clothing store and buying a pair of socks, and going back and saying ‘By the way, it wasn’t socks I needed, what I really wanted was shoes, so I’m just going to take these — I’m going to ‘format shift’ from socks to shoes — and I’m not going to pay anything because it was all for my feet.’”

    I can’t even wrap my head around where a comparison like that even comes into play. That would be like going into a store, buying a Celine Dion CD (I know, I know, but bare with me), then going back and saying “I actually wanted the titanic movie, so excuse me. I’ll just walk off with it.”. Except, uh, no one’s saying that either. It’s like I’ve been saying for ever, and ever, and ever, and ever. You buy a thing once. It’s yours to do with as you please, or so the rule’s supposed to go. That can and should include backing it up on your computer. Or putting it on your iThing so you’re not hauling the CD with you to and from work. Or, hell, copying it to another CD for those people who still insist on hauling the CD back and forth to work–so you don’t, you know, go and lose the original. In dean del Mastroland, that’s exactly like walking out with the titanic movie for the price of a Celine CD. Which is exactly what no one, legally or otherwise, is trying to do here. Ah, but you don’t get to play spokesman for a bill like this if you can actually, you know, use your head.

    Related: I wonder how many songs dean Del Mastro’s iPod or equivalent has that maybe he aught not to, by his own logic. Just sayin’.

    , ,

  • More random ODSP searches.

    written by

    james

    I said I’d do more of these. Then I, uh, promptly fell off a cliff. So this one’s quite old. The searcher probably found what they were looking for already. But, you know. You’ll have that.

    May 17 11:55am: minimum wage vs odsp

    There’s not much of a comparison here. Minimum wage is way the hell up there ($10.25, last I’d heard). when I made the calculation in an open letter to Ontario’s government, what we receive on ODSP was well below that. It still is. And there’s been nearly as much activity on that file as there was in 2010–translation: not much. And that’s what we’re left with. I’m going to most likely need to needle the government again. But for right now, hopefully this answers someone else’s question who just so happens to be tossed over here by Google etc.

    ,

  • Review: Postie for WordPress

    written by

    james

    So I mentioned I started experimenting with posting by email, for not the first time, on this blog. The plugin I tested for that purpose, the only one that before didn’t really overly irritate me, was Postie. For the most part, it does what it’s supposed to. General usage takes some getting used to, but that can be lived with.

    What It Does

    Let’s say you get wicked uber popular and your site gets recognised enough that certain overactive filtering systems–I’m looking at you, most corporate firewalls–decide you’re just way too evil for people to read at work. Or in your case, your site’s way too evil for you to post to from work. But you still have mockery material. You could write the whole damn batch in MS Word or somesuch, or, you could play with this plugin. If you create an email address (can be Gmail, if you don’t want or don’t have access to create one on your own domain), then hand the login details to that address to the Postie plugin, anything you send to that address will, if the email address you use is authorised, become website material. the plugin lets you specify things like categories and whatnot in the actual email itself, or in the subject in some cases–part of what takes some getting used to. But if you’re used to how LiveJournal and maybe Blogger do email posting (Does Blogger even do email posting anymore?), it shouldn’t take too much getting used to.

    What’s Changed In the Update

    The plugin was last updated in August of this year. Before that, it hadn’t seen an update since mid-2011. there was at one point a security concern or two about the plugin, but that seems to have been addressed–more on that below. The biggest change with this update, that I’ve noticed, is it’s become a lot more sensitive to HTML emails. I sent a test email to the site using Outlook, and didn’t switch it to text format. Mostly because I want to see what happens. The plugin saw the email, scanned it, determined it was a possible XSS attack, and promptly deleted the email. Oops. Not exactly the intended result, but hey, easy fix. Switch to text format, send the same test email. It works, almost, as advertised–again, see below. I can probably fix that with one of their other built-in commands. The edited result of the test that actually succeeded is here. Again, easily worked around–took out the extra blank lines at the end, added my update.

    What It Won’t Do

    I had to test this on my own, though I can probably make it do what I want easily enough. Out of the box, the plugin doesn’t respect post scheduling settings. For instance, I run another modification that pretty much guarantees this post won’t show up 30 seconds after the last one I wrote. It also makes for easy editing if I decide, say, 6 hours later to delete that incriminating paragraph about my caffeine habbit–oh, uh, that’s half the blog. Nevermind. Postie, however, wants to publish things immediately, regardless to when it’s supposed to be published. Works for most people, doesn’t work for me. Or anyone who runs anything remotely like me. But hey, nothing’s perfect.

    Security Concerns

    In the early days of the plugin, and quite possibly as recent as the 2011 update, there were concerns that the plugin made liberal use of bypassing WordPress’s publishing routines and manipulating the database directly to insert posts. I didn’t get a look at the 2011 code, but in the latest update, the plugin appears to have fallen back to using WordPress’s publishing routines. At least, my 30 second look at the code says maybe. somebody with more time on their hands can feel free to provide me with a free education though.

    Conclusion

    For what most people will use it for, the plugin does what it should. I didn’t test things like images, or videos, but I also very rarely post videos, and even more rarely post images. But it does what I expected it to do, with the exception of respecting automatic scheduling modifications. Use this plugin if you want to be able to post from behind a corporate firewall. Don’t use this plugin if you expect to be able to do so in accordince with some other posting structure. At least, not without some slight modifications. Then, feel free to share those mods with yours truely.

    , ,

  • so I mentioned I quit caffeine.

    written by

    james

    Well, maybe not quit. But cut back. Somewhat. At least for the weekend. It’s a thing I very rarely actually do. Mostly, because–hey, it’s near the end of the month, I’m broke, and I haven’t yet found a reason–well, except for the fact Thursday involved steak–to bother with it. Have I gone twitchy? Well, uh, no. but I also haven’t broken anything supremely nifty since Thursday either–that, also, gets its very own entry. Could there be a patern? We’ll know if I end up finding something else to twist ’til it breaks. As for right now? I think I’ll go back to figuring out where the hell September went. Ottawa should not be staring at just above freezing this early in the damn season. That’s against some law or other, I’m sure.

    Update:

    I was informed in a comment to this post that I did, in fact, have caffeine on friday. Said caffeine was pepsi. I do not count that as caffeine. My statement still stands. At least until the author of that comment threatens my life.

    May Cheated. She ordered pizza. Do you have any idea how impossible it is not to have caffeine with pizza? Neither did I. I do now. Oh well. What to break tonight?

    , ,

  • And this is to see what I can break at half past insane.

    written by

    james

    A long long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I played with a plugin that would let me post without needing to actually be on the website. If I didn’t break things, an updated, more secure version of that plugin will allow me to do it again and not break what I’ve got going on with the site already. Of course if I’m wrong I may have just set the whole damn thing on fire, but hey you’ll have that. If this works, I’ll have something somewhat geeky to review–and it won’t require caffeine to do it! Now, then. Where’d I put the other half of this thing?

    Update

    It breaks quite nicely. Not quite the way I was hoping it would, though. Okay. So. Email posting is still out. Good to know. So who wants to buy me a keyboard for the iPhone?

  • In which I again fall off a cliff. And this time, I don’t have an excuse. Or a life.

    written by

    james

    Well okay, I have all kinds of excuses. But largely they can be disproven in about, oh we’ll say, 10 seconds. So there goes that. Back to basics. Which, in this case, means–uh, well, I’ll get back to you. I can say this, though. The new server? Yeah, that server? Rockin’ like nothing else. Had a couple scary-ish incidents at the beginning of the month–gotta love it when folks decide you really would appreciate them DOSing your ass just when you’re contemplating sleep, but a couple rooky firewalling mistakes later that’s been fixed. Also in the newness/what’s happening category, I’ve accidentally cut down on the amount of caffeine I live on. By that, I mean, uh, let’s see. There are 2 bottles of coke in the fridge. They are both unopened. The last time I had anything caffinated, I was out for dinner with May–who really needs her own entry up here. She’s already got her own category–think it’s time I make somewhat decent use of it. that was–now let me think. Thursday, if I remember right. working on 4 days without caffeine and I’m still breathing. Can I make it 5? depends on how long it ends up being before the afore mentioned May starts getting concerned for my health. Although, she may or may not need to wake up a little more first. Things in that department are going quite well, speaking of May–but that’s, I think, going to be its own entry. Just as soon as I go distract a dog. And maybe pretend like I actually want to do something productive with today.

  • Smacked by senderbase.org.

    written by

    james

    I love breaking in a new server. It’s kind of nifty cool. What’s not so nifty cool about it is breaking in a new server when you kind of need to move some of your production stuff over to it, like, 5 minutes ago. That’s where I spent the last week or so. Everything I maintain directly, for my own benefit–or, now, for May’s as well–has a new address. Unfortunately for everything I maintain, that new address apparently used to be owned by someone with a less than stellar performance record. So when it got handed to me, I got to find out just what *not* to do as a sysadmin. I mean I knew most of it already from dealing with previous sysadmins, but that’s a rant for when I’m less than sober.

    I’ve been used to the standard problems with email, especially with email coming from a new–or in some cases, previously used–IP. Hotmail doesn’t like recently asigned IP addresses, AOL tends to throw a bit of a hissy, and most smaller services tend to temporarily fail mail coming to them from new servers on the first pass–they call that greylisting. And then there’s the odd duck who decides “Oh, you’ve never had this IP before. I’m just going to pretend I don’t know you.”.

    I can deal with that. It’s called just keep queueing up the mail, and eventually, they’ll like you enough that a metric shit ton of it will hit them in the box. But this one’s new, at least for me. Apparently, senderbase.org is not actually a strict blacklisting service, a la SpamCop. It’s an IP reputation tracking service, whatever the hell that means. Which, again, is awesome. Until you start to factor in, uh, companies will permanently (as in, 5xx error) reject mail from your server if senderbase doesn’t like you. Which is all well and good and amazing, if you’re the lazy type. And here’s a fantastic little kick in the teeth to go along with the kick in the geek nads. They don’t actually give you a whole lot of info on how, exactly, you’re supposed to *improve* your server’s reputation, so companies who use them don’t permanently reject your face off–especially when the only way I know they track such things is when companies receive email and report such things to them. So you’re sitting there, trying to figure out exactly what in the 7 levels of hell you broke when you set up your server, and all you have to go on is, well, this.

    2012-08-14 11:41:59 1T1JFP-0006mG-18 ** wgrignon@wikiscribeit.com R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp: SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host smtp.secureserver.net [216.69.186.201]: 554-m1pismtp01-003.prod.mesa1.secureserver.netn554 Your access to this mail system has been rejected due to the sending MTA’s poor reputation. If you believe that this failure is in error, please contact the intended recipient via alternate means.

    Helpful. Really. Extremely Now, uh, kindly tell me how I’m supposed to get in touch with the moron who says so so I can point out to ’em that, hey senderbase guy? Yeah. IP’s a week old from where I’m sitting. Little help? Nah, I didn’t think so. And that’s where it sits. About 20 minutes on Google tells me, uh, not much. Apparently your IP reputation’s supposed to improve over time, but since everyone I know tracks that kind of thing has apparently blocked my face, I’m still curious how that happens. Unless senderbase just occasionally develops amnesia. Which, I suppose, is possible–they don’t say. So I’ve been smacked by senderbase.org, and the only counter is, uh, an unknown variable. God I’d love to be that lazy with this server. But I’m not paying to do it.

    ,

  • In which cPanel and CentOS actually, uh, kind of do what they should?

    written by

    james

    I’m still trying to figure out if it’s just because somebody decided to smack me in the head a little too hard, or I woke up in an alternate reality at some point, or what. But an interestingly weird thing happened over the course of the last couple days. I asked cPanel and CentOS very nicely to do something for little innocent old me, and the server didn’t actually catch fire.

    A little background, for those of you who may be almost as sadistic as me. Installing Icecast on a CPanel server, any version, any time, used to be a right royal bitch. Compile the thing from source, curse as it spits out 80 million missing dependencies, compile those dependencies from source, curse as it still can’t find them–by the way, /usr/local/lib64 being in root’s environment path apparently does not help when the configure script is freaking braindead, then spend the next 5-10 minutes tracking down all those dependencies, finding the exact shared object the configure script wants to reference, then symlink the whole damn batch to a directory wherein the damn script wouldn’t bitch. If I didn’t occasionally *use* Icecast, just setting up the dependency structure for the compile process would warrant hourly billing for the poor bastard who asked for it. But since I do, and hey, it was an excuse to flex muscles I haven’t needed to flex since the last time I smashed Gentoo, I figured oh what the hell. So Icecast existed, compiled from source, dependencies and all. and I kept 80 million notes for the next time, just in case. And then the wickedest weirdest awesomest thing happened.

    I’m not sure if it’s a CentOS 6 thing, or the version of CPanel I’m running, or hell, maybe the OS devs just finally decided let’s update a bunch of packages that we haven’t actually updated in at least a year and a half (Did I mention I hate binary OS’s for that?). But on a random thinggy, I thought hey, let’s run a theory. They’ve had time to fix their shit, and they’re not Debian, so maybe. So I skip the tracking down of my usual source dependency packages, and go straight to the configure process. It falls on the floor. Apparently, the server has ogg-vorbis support (hey, that’s an improvement right there), but it’s 0.6.x. Awesome. Wicked. Nifty. Cool. But Icecast wants 1.x. Well fuck me running. So I’m all ready to go tarball hunting. I’ve got links, I’ve got references to other links, I’ve got ice cold (no, literally ice cold) caffeine, bring it, bitch. I do the usual dance. make sure my links haven’t broken in a year and a half, make sure nothing was unexpectedly updated and I need to do something slightly different this time around, and I find something so new it still has that new geek smell. Where before, the CentOS package manager absolutely hated to do anything remotely involving Icecast and its dependencies, this time, I was fed exactly the command I needed, in exactly the format I expected, that I’m pretty sure I tried a year and a half ago that made just about everything fall down around my ears. But, hey. Maybe. I didn’t find this in Google last time I looked, so maybe. It would certainly make me less dependent on vodka, if nothing else. So I do the do, and suddenly, I’ve got updated libraries the configure script likes, and a couple packages I’m pretty sure the box I set this all up from via source last year is still missing. And because CentOS did whatever CentOS does with it, the configure script *should*, God willing, find the damn things without me needing to perform minor surgery. So I run it, kick back, and hope the booze store’s still open just in case this thing blows up–it wasn’t, by the way. And the thing not only compiles, but compiles like a dream. Thing threw less warnings on this box than it did last year.

    I nearly fainted. CPanel doing what I say is a rare occurance when it comes to actual, significant admin things. CentOS doing what I say is even more rare, for anything, administrative or not. Both of them cooperating on the same task, at the same time, and neither’s arm needing to be twisted? That alternate universe theory sounds better and better all the time. And then I go and install something like Logwatch (believe it or not, the server was not handed to me with that installed), and I run smack into CPanel’s damned yum.conf exclude line. Okay, right universe. CPanel just wanted to mess with my head. Did I mention I hate it when CPanel wants to mess with my head?

    , , ,

  • Old folks say the darnedest things.

    written by

    james

    So I’m sitting at Macdonalds having supper with May last week–of course, this would be before I start doing this regularly again, and this nice enough couple of old folks come in and grab the table next to us. Now, ordinarily I don’t really take much notice when old folks drop in–they usually just do what they do and either ignore your existence or, in rare circumstances, go absolutely bonkers over the fact that OMG you’re blind and you got here by yourself! The former’s perfectly fine with me, the latter’s somewhat amusing. What these two did, though? If I’d borrowed Shane’s recorder that day, I could have had interesting fun with that. From a couple of old people in a fast food joint, we learned:

    • Turtles don’t actually die of natural causes. Sure, they’re vulnerable to disease and whatnot and would make for easy prey, but if it wasn’t for that, they’d be immortal.
    • Water will become the new oil. Before too long, we’ll be facing the possibility of being invaded for our water. Which, of course, will drive the price up and all hell will break loose.
    • Everything’s being run by technology nowadays. Machines and the like are everywhere, doing just about everything. If we’re not careful, it’ll cause the US’s already high unemployment rate to smack into 28%, as opposed to the current 8%. They didn’t say a thing about Canada, but the inner geek just went all “Skynet exists” for about 15 seconds.
    • Dogs can apparently understand complex sentence structures. Or at least, they have a vocabulary of around a thousand words and can understand phrases such as, we’ll say, “would you like”. Gee. I wonder if May’s pup would like to demonstrate for us. I’d ask mine, but sadly she’s only motivated by food.
    • Related: cats only understand about 500 words. So much for that theory about cats being smarter?
    • There was something in there about life either being or having been or possibly could be present on Mars. We may or may not have actually landed there. We may or may not be wanting to start a colony up there. Uh. Maybe. depending on which 5-minute period of the conversation you’re listening to. But we know Mars exists, anyway.
    • And we somehow went from those toy lasers your kid brother probably habitually pointed in the general direction of the eyeballs of a passing pilot, to those same lasers being used for corrective eye surgery, to those exact same lasers being used as aircraft defense. Or, at least, to bring down an aircraft–they never actually mentioned defense or anything. Bright side: at least one of them was sane enough, ish, to point out that maybe his buddy was getting just a tiny bit whacky with his predictions. Okay, okay, so the word he used was “futuristic”. “Science fiction” could also apply. I’ll stick with “whacky”.

    And I didn’t even have to stir anything up with this conversation. Of course, May had to point out as they were leaving that it could have been rather amusing if they’d taken notice of the fact the two people seated at the table next to him were pretty much totally blind, and huge fans of the very technology they say will be the downfall of the US’s job market. I, personally, still cringe at that very thought. Although, to be fair, I don’t think they’d of paid much attention had we chosen on that trip to bring the guide pup. Their own little reality seemed much more comfortable to them. Thank christ, because it was a hell of a lot more amusing for us. Forget about kids. Old folks say the darnedest things.

    , ,

recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives