Category: Activities

I have three blogs on this site. One of them is this one, my personal blog, which I set up first just to experiement with this whole blogging phenomenom, but I got hooked and continued to update it nearly daily. And when my friend Maddy got acute lymphatic lymphoma, I set up a blog for her to record her thoughts and feelings as a form of release and catharsis for her. When she got too sick to post, we added a couple of other authors to her blog so that the people who were visiting her in the hospital and talking to her on the phone could keep the rest of her friends updated. And when she died, I set up memorial blog site with an author userid and password that anybody could use to post memories of Maddy, and also to post announcements of things like the memorial service in Philadelphia last winter and the interment ceremony in Quebec this summer.

So while it’s my site, and non-commercial, I have multiple blogs and multiple authors. Well, SixAhead, the people who maintain the MovableType software that this blog runs on have decided that people like me need to be hit up for vast quantities on money. I could probably afford the money they want, but by the same token I don’t want to pay it. So now I’m looking for new blog software. I’ve heard good things about Textpattern and WordPress, but neither of them allows multiple blogs, so I’d have to set up instances. Not sure how that works. Also, one or both of them only supports MySQL, and I much prefer PostgresSQL.

This morning my network access was sucking rocks. Pinging upstream showed up to 80% packet loss. Resetting the router and the cable modem didn’t help. I called RoadRunner, and they had a recorded message saying that they were doing work and service might be intermittent until 8:00am. So I waited.
Continue reading “Working, after a fashion”

I’m watching my web server logs scroll by, and every minute, I see the following:

216.239.69.45 - - [10/May/2004:10:04:18 -0400] "GET /getlatest.glh?PV=6.0.5.27&OS=WIN&L=en-US, en, *&LID=1033&ch=120+90+0+0+0&ch=72+53+0+0+0&ch=52+739+0+0+0&ch=33+923+0+0+0&ch=73+166+0+0+0&ch=97+108+0+0+0&ch=118+14+0+0+0 HTTP/1.0" 404 1063 "-" "RMA/1.0 (compatible; RealMedia)"


Now, if Google can be trusted, and believe me, it can, it appears that this bozo somehow has his DNS screwed up so that it thinks I’m channels.real.com.

If only I had some suitably BOFHly way of handling this – like causing his RealPlayer to suddenly scream at him to shut the fucking thing off.

I have a bunch of mailing lists that I maintain, and which operate using Mailman software.

I also have a person on a bunch of my lists whose ISP routinely will stop accepting email for several hours a day. The ISP that this ISP gets its email from sends these “your mail hasn’t been delivered for four hours, I’ll keep trying for 5 days” messages which were common back in the days of UUCP email, but pretty stupid now a days. Unfortunately Mailman treats these messages as bounces, even though they’re not. And if Mailman sees enough bounces, you get bounced off the mailing list.

The person in question doesn’t want to change to an ISP that is more reliable, for reasons that are really none of my business. The ISP that sends the warning adamantly refuses to stop sending them, saying they’re important. And I don’t want this person to drop off the lists – she’s a very positive contributor. So thus my dillemma.
Continue reading “Just Answer the Question, Dammit!”