Category: Revelation

Ok, that’s one thing

I discovered why OpenID comments went from working some of the time to working never: last time I upgraded my blog I’d inadvertently made it so none of the directories within my blog site were writable by the web server, and the OpenId plugin makes temporary files. That lead to the discovery that as well as OpenID comments, the directory used by the Gravatar cache wasn’t writable, which lead to the discovery that the Gravatars weren’t updating at all, even after I fixed the permissions, which lead to the discovery that when the Gravatar plugin discovers it can’t write to the Gravatar cache directory it just silently turns the “Enable caching” option to off, which lead to the discovery that even when I turned it back on, it still wasn’t updating, which lead to the discovery that there is an option in the plugin to “Use REST protocol” which evidently Gravatar doesn’t support any more so I had to turn that off. Phew. Now Gravatars seem to be working again.

Knees still hurt like hell, though.

All the fun of aircraft ownership…

As I wrote a week and a half ago the last time I flew the Lance the engine died on the taxiway and I flooded it and drained the battery trying to restart it. Nobody has flown it since and I wasn’t even sure if the engine would start.

Since I’m the club’s maintenance coordinator for that plane, the problem is really mine to deal with. So today I went out to the airport in the cold rain and hooked the battery up to a battery charger for 3 hours or so. Afterwards I verified that the engine started just fine, ran smoothly at full rich and leaned, and there was plenty of crank left in the battery.

There’s nothing that makes you feel more like an aircraft owner than standing in the pouring rain undoing screws with freezing fingers.

Painless upgrade

Not to jinx myself or anything, but so far the upgrade of my domU from Debian Sarge to Debian Etch has been very painless. It upgraded over 200 packages, and I only had to manually resolve about 10 config files, most of which involved taking what the new package provided. After moving /lib/tls to /lib/tls.disabled and rebooting, everything seems to be working right.

Fingers crossed that it continues to work.