Category: observations

mozdev.org – flashblock: index:

Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla and Firefox browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves a placeholder on the page that allows you to click to view the Flash content.

Thanks to a comment, I may try FlashBlock. I wasn’t aware of any correlation between my CPU spinouts and Flash-larded pages, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a factor.

Now playing:The Other Side Of Summer by Elvis Costello from the album “The Very Best Of Elvis Costello (Disc 1)” | Get it

I can see out, but dimly: traffic seems to be coming in OK.

white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping ebay.com
PING ebay.com (66.135.192.87): 56 data bytes
^C
--- ebay.com ping statistics ---
36 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping mail.apple.com
ping: unknown host mail.apple.com
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping smtp.apple.com
ping: unknown host smtp.apple.com
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping apple.com
PING apple.com (17.254.3.183): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 17.254.3.183: icmp_seq=0 ttl=49 time=30.023 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.3.183: icmp_seq=5 ttl=49 time=30.884 ms
^C
--- apple.com ping statistics ---
8 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 75% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 30.023/30.453/30.884 ms
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping apple.com
ping: unknown host apple.com
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping apple.com
PING apple.com (17.254.3.183): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 17.254.3.183: icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=33.125 ms
^C
--- apple.com ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 83% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 33.125/33.125/33.125 ms

Well, things are OK now. It seems I may have some (more) flaky hardware, being one of the NICs in this aging hulk.

The comcast support droid wasn’t very helpful: he did suggest it was a NIC problem, but not from any gift of insight. In the course of the conversation (mostly consisting of advice about deinstalling and reinstalling devices and rebooting), I learned that comcast is “only licensed” to support Windows and Mac OS (version not specified) and only IE and Outlook. If you use Firefox or Eudora (and Mail.app, I suppose), they won’t help you and will point to the unsupported components as part of the problem. I didn’t get into the unlikelihood of needing a license for free software: it wouldn’t have been on the script.

Something somewhere is different, I know, because the address I finally got to stick (via DHCP) was in a totally different range than what I had before (67.x.x.x vs 24.x.x.x). I switched cards (reconfigured them from WAN to LAN and vice versa) and perhaps the presence of different card prompted the DHCP server to actually serve up valid details. I suspect it was an expiration or something that didn’t work: the dhclient.leases file shows an expire time of 20:14 last night. Things worked after that, I know, but nothing from some midnight until 6:50 when I discovered things were not right. Only 6 more hours until service was restored 100% or close to it.

For some reason, local name service (cached) doesn’t work: I have to rely on comcast’s servers. Dunno what that’s about yet.

Time for my annual visit with Ebenezer Scrooge.

And if I get a chance, I’ll watch this version and see if I can get through it without a tissue or two.

Comment Spamalot:

But it’s not really anyone’s fault but the spammers. Yes, Six Apart could improve the load the scripts place on the servers, (and perhaps they are. Who knows? For a blogging company, their own blogs are very quiet. Sensibly, in my opinion, but that’s another story.) The targeting of MT, however, shows nothing more than its popularity. It’s certainly not a security issue on a par with Internet Explorer: the comment spam is only using a facility to the purpose to which it was built.

Eh? I’m not sure I am willing to concede this point: my own struggles with MovableType are still fresh in my mind.

The blithe statement that “[t]he targeting of MT, however, shows nothing more than its popularity” is disingenuous: why, after two years of this, has so little (anything?) been done about it? Why can’t admins reliably take evasive action?

There are two issues here for site hosting MT, both manifesting themselves in disproportionate system resource usage.

1. MT is slow and gets slower as its content database grows. North of a couple thousand entries, things bog down, the rebuilds take ages, comments get repeated as users run out of patience with sites, browsers time out (try Safari and it’s hardcoded 30 second timeout on a big site).
2. The system has not been designed or tested so much as built. Some of the simpler (and even recommended solutions) don’t work as documented (read: at all) and it makes me wonder what testing has been done with each new release.

The solutions to these are a. throw more resources at it, or b. tune the system with, say, mod_perl. Option a is not a realistic choice for hobbyists or hosting services who are unprepared for weblogs to become a regular item on the staff meeting agenda. Option b is sensible, on its face, until you realize that (for 2.x) some of the popular extensions/plugins (MT-Blacklist, for example) don’t work in a mod_perl environment. An even easier option — simply renaming the comment and trackback scripts — won’t work either in a mod_perl environment: there are some hardcoded references to those script names somewhere in the bowels of MT’s .pm files that preclude this working either.

I think Ben needs to re-examine this: does he really think MT’s problems are so trivial or at best, an artifact of their success?

I needed to add a DVD burner to my circa 1997 PowerMac G3 (the funky Blue & White) and after tracking down the disassembly instructions, I was successful. The internals of the machine both look and feel more solid and, well, designed, compared to commodity PCs. And the drive was recognized (though System Profiler claimed it wasn’t a burner, while Toast proved otherwise) right off. Now to find some more disk for it (I hate to dump money into such an old and obsolescent box, but the $1800 I would need for a G5 iMac isn’t forthcoming anytime soon: say, could you click on an ad on your way out? Every little helps . . . though Google’s T&C forbid my saying as much).

This old box may be around for years yet (I still have a 1995 vintage 9500, upgraded to a raging 233 MHz 604 processor). These boxes lack the sheer design appeal of a Cube, but they still run and reliably enough to keep them around. I have retired one Intel box that is newer than either of these Macs and the current host that runs this website may see the same fate before too long.

I had occasion to root out and replace all instances of my old identity (paulbeard.no-ip.org, where I found some cheesy placeholder page: thanks, no-ip.org) with my current domain (relative links would have made this unnecessary, but then I would never have learned this, would I?)

update crank_posts set post_content =( REPLACE (post_content, ‘paulbeard.no-ip.org’, ‘www.paulbeard.org’));

One quick Googling and hey, presto. T’would be nice to swoop through and pass all my old entries through some kind of html-sanitizer/tidier, but I’ll deal with that later.

I just published it to the iTunes Music Store: sadly the sequencing isn’t what I chose and not all the tracks I’ll be using are in the iMix since they’re not in the store (do you believe they don’t have “I want a hippopotamus for Christmas”?)

Here’s the whole thing:

Holiday 2004 iMix

I’m thinking I may burn CDs and print out these CD liners to include in any Christmas letter we send out this year.

I added 384 Mb RAM to this little gem tonight (replacing a 128 with a 512) and so far things are zippier.

I was really getting frustrated with the boggy slowdowns after a couple of days or a week or uptime as I opened more and more applications. Even logging out wouldn’t solve it, and rebooting was a temporary fix. For US$100, I was able to, I hope, solve the problem. Only time and a vigilant watch on my swap files will tell.

white:/var/vm paul$ ls -l /var/vm

total 131072

drwx–x–x 18 root wheel 612 26 Nov 09:09 app_profile

-rw——T 1 root wheel 67108864 1 Dec 20:22 swapfile0

An easy fix, too: pop off the keyboard and the instructions are right in front of you.