Month: March 2007

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?