This is the first post I’ve put up in a while, because I’ve basically been unable to post. Our theory is that I was running out of memory (the server for this blog, and all my other sites, only had four gig). So I’ve upgraded to one with sixteen. You won’t see this immediately, until the DNS servers pick up the new IP, but hopefully I’m back on the air.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Commenting Problem
A regular commenter writes:
I’ve been blocked from commenting on your site for weeks now. I’ve tried both IE and Chrome, and I get the same error message:
Your comment has been blocked because the blog owner has set their spam filter to not allow comments from users behind proxies.
If you are a regular commenter or you feel that your comment should not have been blocked, please contact the blog owner and ask them to modify this setting.
As far as I know I’m not behind a proxy, whatever that is. I use the same email addy and computer I’ve always used. If I’ve offended you somehow and you’ve blocked me, I would like the opportunity to apologize for the offense. If there’s a technical issue, I haven’t changed anything, but Win7 updates so many times, I wouldn’t know if it messed up my settings somehow.
As I told him, I have no idea why WordPress thinks that he’s behind a proxie, but I’m afraid that if I don’t block proxies I’ll be inundated with comment spam. I’m not sure how to allow his IP, because while I have a blacklist, I don’t think I have a white one. Any suggestions?
Linux On Gateway
OK, so I purchased a new laptop, a Gateway NE522 series. It came with Windows 8 installed. After doing a full Windows update, and making a recovery disk, I tried to install Federa 19 on it from a USB drive (it doesn’t have an optical drive). It wouldn’t boot, instead barfing out the following (after the jump) I’ll probably submit it to the Fedora Project for a bug report, but I’d be interested in opinions:
[Update late evening]
OK, I tried with Ubuntu as well. Same result. Dumped into a shell. I’m guessing that it’s the problem described in comments, but not sure I’ll do that experiment until tomorrow.
The Media’s Guide To Firearms
Captain Video
Lileks has a review:
Now. Let’s think. The escape portion is the rear. It has no controls or power, according to Captain Video. Yet that’s where the engine was. So the escape pod is powerless and rudderless even though it has the engine, and that’s what you get into to escape. From onrushing asteroids. How? By disengaging from the front half, which cuts off the engines, which makes the escape capsule fall.
Captain Video and the Ranger landed on the planet when the gravity of Atoma took their escape capsule and laid it down gently about 14 feet from the front door of the evil bad guy’s lair. What a stroke of luck! They dress up as natives. Aliens always dress like 19th century Arabs with big futuristic guns.
It was amazingly bad, almost Plan-9-like.
Drop Box
Here’s an interesting article about it at Wired, but as Paul Hsieh notes, the best thing about it is the hilarious correction at the end.
Life On The ISS
Joel Achenbach has an interesting article about the station.
Blog Appearance
I’ve switched themes in an attempt to solve my ongoing difficulties in logging in to the site. It’s TwentyTwelve, the same theme I use for SafeIsNotAnOption. If it fixes the technical issues, I’ll start to pretty it up.
Site Problems
As you may have noticed, the site’s been down since yesterday. Apparently, mysql had crashed on the server. It should be fixed now, though I still have issues with logging in as administrator (one reason that posting has been sparse lately, in addition to the fact that I’ve been busy).
My Five-Year-Old Laptop
…has finally given up the ghost. It won’t boot, or even bring up a POST screen. It just lights up for a couple seconds and dies. I’ve been planning to replace it for a while, but now it’s urgent. I only use it to travel, and not for entertainment, so I don’t need a high-end machine. I’ve been toying with the idea of tablet/keyboard, but don’t know if it will meet my needs.
[Friday-afternoon update]
This look like a pretty good deal to me. Basically, a new version of what I had.