Category Archives: Administrative

Administrative, Technology and Society

Computer Problems

23 Comments

I’m running Fedora 11 on my primary desktop. The mobo is a couple years old. Lately, it’s started randomly freezing, or occasionally shutting itself down without warning. I was going to run memtest on it, but I can’t even get into the BIOS to change the boot sequence. I hit “del” repeatedly during boot, but it ignores me and always goes to the hard drive. Does anyone have any suggestions (other than just upgrading the board, processor and memory, which I’m considering…)?

[Wednesday morning update]

For those asking, no, it is not a wireless keyboard.

And so far, I’ve had no problems since swapping the memory sticks.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Greased Lightning

17 Comments

I’ve been suffering with a crummy DSL connection for months, since the move back to CA (I’ve had to reboot the modem often, because it seems to slow down and start dropping packets periodically, with multi-second delays on pings). But yesterday, Verizon fiber finally came to the house.

This is real broadband, for the first time at home. It’s like night and day, in terms of page loads and video.

[Update a few minutes later]

No, I don’t know why the date is wrong. I did the test today. Maybe I should try a different site.

[A couple minutes later]

Bandwidthplace says that it’s about 4 Mbps up and 15 down.

Administrative, Space

Hitting The Road

I’m driving over to Phoenix for the conference, and unfortunately, it’s bad timing, because there’s going to be a 2 PM EDT teleconference with high-level NASA officials to flesh out the new plans. I guess I’ll find out what they are when I arrive this afternoon.

[Update a couple minutes later]

“Major Tom” comments over there that the purpose of the announcement is to define the roles and missions of the centers in the new direction.

[Evening update]

I arrived a few hours ago, but this is the first time I’ve gotten on line. Alan Ladwig of NASA is describing the new plans. Not in the mood to live blog, though, and I have to think about what I’ll say on my panel in an hour or so. The topic is technology requirements for transportation beyond low earth orbit.

[Bumped]

Administrative

Comment Blockage Issue

17 Comments

Several people have had problems commenting recently. I’m guessing that the issue is that I recently added the word “Successful” to my blacklist, because I was getting so much spam from malicious morons using that as a user name. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t distinguish between strings from user names and content, so that was probably the problem that commenters were having. I’ve removed it, and we’ll see if that solves the problem. Unfortunately, it will recreate the problem with my moron spammers.

As an aside, I have to say that I’m very unhappy with WordPress’ inherent comment-spam-blocking system. It seems to me that multiple comments to multiple posts from the same IP in a few minutes should be automatically blocked, or at least held, but it doesn’t seem smart enough to do even that. MT, for all its flaws, could do that years ago. I have to look into a better solution.

I hate to go to a captcha system, but that may be the only solution. I’ve always wanted to make commenting here relatively painless, but apparently the spammers are going to ruin it for the rest of us, as they have with email.

[Monday morning update]

OK, per advice in comments, I’ve added the WP-Spamfree plugin. We’ll see how it goes.

Administrative, General

Yeah, We Felt It

18 Comments

We were at Lowes, buying some casing for a new front entryway that I installed last weekend, and you could feel the entire concrete slab that the store was on start to gently roll. It went on for many seconds, and equipment hanging overhead was gently swaying. I told Patricia, “That’s a big quake, somewhere, many miles away.” When we got to the car, and turned on the radio, we heard that it was down in Baja, probably about 180 miles or so southeast of us. They got a lot bigger jolt down in San Diego and the other border towns, I’m sure. I haven’t exinspected the house here for damage, but I’d be surprised if there was any.

[Update a while later]

For those interested, it was at the Lowes in Hawthorne, at the end of the runway of the airport. And SpaceX is right across the street (Crenshaw) from it.