Rants and Revelations

As we were leaving Rochester air space, I heard N2259Q on the frequency. That’s the second time I’ve heard good old 59Q in recent weeks. If you look back at my previous post where I said how many hours I have in which planes, you’ll see I have nearly 25 hours in 59Q. It was the second or third PA28-181 Archer I checked out in, but at one time it was my favourite club plane because it wasn’t so heavy on the controls as N2902S. I wrote the “for sale” page for when the club sold it. Although nobody believed that anything other than an ad in Trade-a-Plane would sell it, the eventual buyer did see he saw the web page I made first. I also flew it out to Dunkirk or Hamburg for its pre-purchase inspection, and took the prospective buyer on a turn around the pattern in it.

I wonder if it still has that faded old red and white paint job? I wonder if it’s still missing the end-caps on the landing gear struts? I hope the buyer is enjoying it. He was joking on the frequency with the controller because he was heading out to a fly-in breakfast and there was somebody else from the same airport in another plane going to the same breakfast, so they were asking about each other’s ground speeds. So it sounds like she found a good home.

Vicki and I flew our airplane (well, the flying club’s, but it feels like ours) down to New Jersey to pick out the soapstone slabs that they’ll use to make our custom counters in our kitchen remodel in our beautiful 1922 Arts and Crafts house. How yuppie is that?
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I just dropped my 60Gb Photo iPod in the toilet. Fortunately, after I’d flushed. But now it’s acting funny. I’m hoping that if I leave it alone for a while, it will dry out and be ok. Otherwise, I might be getting that video iPod sooner than I wanted.

Back in 1998 I did some work to use some experimental sendmail rule sets to block spam, and wrote up a page on how to use them and how to test that they worked. I even gave a talk about it to the local Linux and Sun user groups. It’s all terribly obsolete these days, because sendmail has changed, spam has changed, and the tools available have changed. A few years ago I found a better page, and put a header on my page to tell people they should read this other page instead. But people still kept finding this page, and it was getting more and more obsolete. Last year I wrote another header briefly mentioning what I use now (postfix, rbls, spamassassin, bogofilter). But the page is totally worthless and if it didn’t get dozens of hits a day I’d just take it down.

Today I got an email from somebody who wants to pay me $35 to put an ad on that page. No, he didn’t tell me what the ad would say, no mention of a time scale, just $35 to put an ad for “a site that provides businesses with email hosting”. I have no idea if this person is advertising a spam-friendly or spam-unfriendly email hosting site, and frankly I don’t care. I find the whole idea of putting an ad on a page that shouldn’t even be there just too creepy to consider.

Very strange.

Fascinating Facts My Coworkers Don’t Appear to Know:

1. Cubicle walls are not infinitely rigid membranes, but are in fact quite flexible.
2. As well as transmitting motion, cubicle walls also don’t do much to stop sound.
3. The other side of the cubicle wall that bounds a hallway frequently bounds a cubicle that contains a human being. Sometimes that human being is actually trying to work, or at least feign it convincingly. Flexing his or her cubicle wall by leaning against it, punching it or grabbing the top and shaking it or having loud hallway meetings just on the other side of that cubicle wall may be distracting to him or her and make it hard for him or her to accomplish their goal of working or feigning work.
4. If you are unable to stand on your own two feet for the duration of your loud and distracting hallway meeting, our employer helpfully provides chairs that you can sit down on. You will find those chairs back at your cubicle, or at the cubicle of the person you are talking to, or in our many meeting rooms, or in the break room. They are not provided in hallways, for reasons that might become apparent if you carefully read the previous points.

Just thought you’d like to know.

After restoring my backup using
ssh ptomblin@192.168.1.1 "cat /media/usbdisk/albook/home.cpio.0" | ditto -xv - .
I’ve had a “fun” afternoon re-downloading and installing applications. Fortunately, the two I was most worried about, Quicken and TurboTax, I had left the .dmg disk image files on my Desktop for just this reason. I only have three gaps left in my Dock - one (Photoshop Elements 2.0) because the sticker with the serial number is mangled so I can’t read it, and the others because they weren’t 100% legal copies and I have no install media. Oh well. There’s a couple of things I decided not to reinstall, like iWork 2005 because that version of Pages sucked rocks. I understand the new version of Pages is better. And they’re up to 4.0 on Elements for Mac (but 5.0 for Windows) so maybe it was time to buy a new version anyway. I’m still debating whether to install fink.

I think when this is over, I’ll have a better system with fewer crap programs left over from days gone by, but it’s still no fun getting there.

(I should probably stop using this as a title - Firefox actually filled it in after the first couple of letters)

I took my Powerbook into Apple to fix the problem with the DVD drive not ejecting. This is the second time I’ve brought it back - the first time they replaced the drive itself, but told me the frame of the laptop was twisted and they may have to replace some of the case if it happens again. And it happened again.

They gave me the usual spiel about how they can’t guarantee that they won’t wipe your hard drive, so make sure you’ve got a back up. I said “yeah, yeah, yeah” since I have a nightly cron job that backs up my home directory to my Linux server, and besides they worked on it before without killing my hard drive, so why should they wipe it this time?

And of course, they did wipe it. My restore restored the files, but of course now I have to find and re-download all my apps. Hope my iTunes Music Store purchases still work.

Getting ready for my upcoming BFR, I was entering some flights from my PDA’s AvLogbook program to my paper logbook when I suddenly ran out of pages, and had to run out and buy a new logbook.

Looking at that old beat up logbook and the shiny new one, it’s not hard to feel the pride of all that aviation history. I maybe haven’t flown as much or gotten as many ratings as some aviation bloggers, but I feel proud of what I’ve done and the fun and hard work that old logbook represents.

First flight: 27 June 1995
Last flight: 24 Feb 2007
Total hours: 445.6
Ratings and endorsements: Private Pilot, Airplane Single Engine Land, Instrument Airplane, High Performance, Complex.
Airplanes Flown (in the approximate order I checked out in them):

In spite of the fact that yesterday Dunn tire told me my tires were fine, today Browncroft Garage refused to pass my state inspection unless I replaced them. Dammit. They’re also replacing the front brake calipers, which I’m not 100% surprised about.

Why is that nothing with cars can be easy or cheap?

This happens so infrequently to me, I had to blog about it.

My front tires are quite worn. I need to take my care in tomorrow to get a state inspection, and I wasn’t 100% sure they’d pass. So I was planning to take the care to Dunn Tire, where I bought them, to get them to have a look. But this morning as I was getting in my car I realized that the rear tires were bought at the same time, and they look fine.

I went into Dunn and asked them to look at the tires and see if they needed replacing or just rotating front to back. They put it up on the rack and said “they’re fine, but they do need to be rotated, and possibly balanced”. And rotation is free because I bought them there, so I just had to pay for the balancing. I was so stunned I agreed to pay for them to put nitrogen in the tires, even though that’s a bunch of hooey. $33 when I was expecting hundreds.

I got a notice that Gallery 2.2 is out, and they recommend upgrading. So I thought I’d try. And it seemed straightforward enough. I did all the steps, and when it got to the part in the automated upgrade about updating plugins, it start spewing hundreds of errors, both database and file system. And any attempt to continue the upgrade without updating the plugins got me to a page saying the theme I’m using wasn’t present, and when I attempted to change the theme it booted me back into the upgrade process.

I deleted the entire php directory and restored it from backup, and deleted the database and restored it from backup. But it told me that I was using a newer version of the Gallery core module than the rest of the program, and said I couldn’t do that. I have no idea where this “core module” is if it’s not in the gallery2 directory. So I’ve blown away the entire gallery, including the g2data directory, and am restoring it from backup. That includes all the picture files, so it’s probably going to take hours. Let’s hope it works.

Last night I took my Powerbook into the Apple Store to get them to look at why my CD/DVD drive won’t eject. It’s been like this for months, but I waited until yesterday because I’d finally gotten my taxes sent off and so I wouldn’t be needing it for a few days. Except as soon as we got home, Vicki was comparing notes with her sister on their joint inheritance from her mom’s estate, and discovered that I’d entered the wrong value in some schedule or other and so missed a significant deduction. Which means that when I get the Powerbook back I have to figure out how I can file an amended return using TurboTax.

Plus it’s a real pain having to use Vicki’s spare iBook for normal web surfing and stuff - I don’t remember the passwords for web sites, Firefox remembers them for me!

I thought I had it figured out - people using OpenID LiveJournal ids were being flagged by SpamKarma2 because their comments were missing the two SpamKarma2 “payloads”, which are hidden input fields in the comment field that are used by SK2 to make sure the commenter really did look at the post before posting the comment.

Investigation showed that the script “openid-comments-post.php” validates your id by passing the fields in the form off to the OpenID server which then calls the script back. It appeared to me that it was only passing the fields to the plugins that it knew about, and so it was missing these SK2 payloads. So I was planning to try adding those missing fields to the script. But first I did some further experiments. And that’s where it all fell apart. I’m not using my Powerbook, because it’s in the shop to get the DVD drive fixed. And I can’t use my Linux box either, because the X configuration on it is hosed. So I find myself using the old G4 which I’ve hardly used at all. And for some reason, every test I’ve tried on both Safari and Firefox has worked - SK2 is not complaining about missing fields.

So I’m left with a few possibilities:

• It’s not the script, it’s Livejournal that sometimes swallows the SK2 fields.
• The plugin architecture of Wordpress doesn’t specify the order that the plugins run, and under some instances the SK2 plugin runs before the OpenID plugin and othertimes after, and that makes the difference.
• It depends on a cookie on my other computers that isn’t on this one.

I’m baffled.

Update: It’s still complaining about the missing fields when I attempt to use OpenID commenting from work. Which means it might be the cookie thing, or it might be a Mac versus Linux thing.

For some strange reason, when some people post comments to my blog using their livejournal OpenID (jenniferm and ptomblin_lj, for instance), SpamKarma2 complains that their posts are missing the “payload”, which is a hidden input field with a cryptographic hash of some of the other values in the form. But others can post without this problem. I look at the page source before I post, and I can see the payload is there, so something is stripping it. I have no idea if this is some sort of interaction with Akismet or a bug in OpenID or what.

So far I’m not impressed with Akismet. Ever since I’ve installed it I’ve seen an increase in false positives. I’m going to try to disable it and see if the OpenID commenting problem goes away.

Update: Disabling Aksimet didn’t help. Must be the OpenID plugin.

I have a PCI USB 2 card, which I use to plug in external USB 2 hard disks for backup. I have one external disk that I’ve been using for months now, and it’s been working fine. Some months ago I bought a second drive, with the intention of swapping between the two, and keeping one in my desk at work as an off-site backup. It worked for a while, but then started failing during backups. I’d lost the reciept, so I ended up selling it locally to somebody under the understanding that it may fail, and if they don’t like it they can return it.

The day before yesterday, I bought a new drive to try again. I stuck it in and backed up about 200Gb to it. Then I simulated 7 nightly backups all without incident. Last night, our power glitched for about 3 seconds, which was long enough to knock both the external drives off, because they’re not on the UPS. This morning I power cycled them and mounted them both, and did another nightly backup. But in the middle of backing up to the second drive, it started failing in a very similar way to the old drive. It started with:

Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: sd 18:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to device being removed
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats last message repeated 47 times
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: sd 18:0:0:0: rejed 18:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to device be
ing removed
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: sd 18:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to device being removed
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats last message repeated 1154 times
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: __journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_frozen_data
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sdb1): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable
to read inode block - inode=7897505, block=15794191
Mar 15 07:51:30 allhats kernel: journal commit I/O error


Two external hard drives, both of which caused these sorts of problems under load. Hmmm. I’m starting to wonder if it’s not the disks. Maybe it’s something about the USB controller. I need to test this somehow. I wonder if my work computer has USB 2?