Category: Site

Everyone can still read the wiki, but you now need a password in order to edit it. *sigh*. How sad is that. I have sent the password out to a random selection of people, but if I miss you and you want access, just send me a note and I’ll give it to you.

For the last few days, some moronic cretin from Russia has started spamming my wiki with pages of random drug sites. Although it is trivial to revert the pages back to their uncorrupted states, getting up and doing this every morning has become sufficiently frustrating that I have decided to enable authorization. Once I have done this, I will send out an email to all obvious candidates to grant them access.

My frustration with this whole situation has prompted me to post this to the main page of the wiki:

Spammers really are the single greatest threat to the future of our society. Religious terrorists are a distant second place. I formally curse all spammers as follows:

Your children will die of a disease that would have been curable, except that you put such a drain on the internet that the communication needed to discover the cure did not happen.

So the problem occurred again. When I went down to look at the machine this morning, I saw the following things:

• Backup open with the “I’m about to back something up” dialog visible and the auto-start count at 0 (i.e. ready to go), but not running
• Backup, Adium and iChat all flagged as “Not Responding” in the Force Quit dialog

When I’m in this state, if I force quite all three apps, then attempt to shutdown, the Mac shuts down to the “grey screen with progress spinner” stage, then stays there forever. I actually have to power it off and on to continue.

The thing is, there are several possible sources of the problem:

1. the 10.4.3 upgrade
2. switching to use the UA-5 USB sound module
3. Backup itself
4. network issues related to backing up to my slug.

It seems like there must be *something* network related, since all 3 apps would have been using the net stack at the point the backup was going to happen. However, even though those apps have locked up, everything seems fine if I browse the web or crawl around on the remote backup volume.

I got the combo 10.4.3 update, and I’m going to re-apply that tonight. I’ve also got the latest version of Disk Warrior and I’m going to feed it the main volume as well. Then it’s flush all the caches and maybe the preferences files and then just hope. If it happens again after that, I’ll have to start disconnecting pieces (likely the UA-5 first) and see if that helps.

sigh.

Twice now, I’ve come downstairs in the morning, and found Backup open on the desktop, in a state where it looked like it was almost going to start backing up the website, but was just sitting there (not responding). This morning, I noticed that my IM client, Adium, was also not responding. I have not seen anything like this, prior to upgrading to 10.4.3, so I wonder if there may be a correlation.

Maybe I should get the combo updater and re-run it.

As you’ve probably noticed, there is now a picture in the side bar. I’m using the WPG2 plugin to do this, but I don’t have many publicly visible pictures up yet, so if you aren’t a registered user on this blog, you’re likely to see a lot of puppies for a while. 🙂

As a test, here is the puppy photo embedded in this entry:
public/File0255.jpg
The way this works is, if you are logged into this blog, you get admin rights into the gallery2 site, but if you’re not logged in here, you have the same rights as a guest at the gallery2 site. This rule is strict, and you can’t get around it by including direct links to things that a guest normally couldn’t see so, for example, unless you are logged into this blog, you won’t see a picture of Lucky and Sunshine here:
otherweb/l12.jpg

My gallery2 site is currently failing with a scary looking database error:

Error (ERROR_STORAGE_FAILURE) :
… [Edited to remove the noise. McQ]

If anybody can suggest why this is happening, let me know. (I’m also posting this to make sure that I can talk to MySQL from WordPress.)

I almost hate automatically blocking some of the blogspam I get [well, no, not really], because it can be quite poetic in its attempts to get past the filter. Here are a couple of examples (with the lame-ass website they were attempting to flog removed, of course). This one…

This dustcloud, however, applies only to the quay : in its indigo-sheets, Dieppe is discoverable among Crisp-headed towns for the oniscus of its buildings. system is musik-saal with that of Telesikra

and this one…

Among them was a half-starve nurse-maid moss-oak and his sun-glow, who had often scooped the abolitionists might as well tesselated to his persequar and stigmatize his horse or wheat as to keep slave-holders out of their semi-publicity property.

Of course, all spammers should just go commit suicide for the sin of destroying one of the few good things mankind has built this generation, but other than that… 😉

Ok. I’m now running two blogs (one of them is this one), a genealogy site, and a wiki, in addition to a traditional web site on the G5. All seems to be going well, but I wonder if I really need that much capability for the little net presence that I actually have. Maybe I should get rid of the main site, and just hang a few more pages off of this one.

One of the things I would need is some photo display capability. I have heard that Gallery 2 works well with both iPhoto and WordPress, so maybe I’ll try setting that up. Realistically, photos are the only thing left of interest on the main site.

Apologies to all if you have tried to comment lately and didn’t see your posts show up. I got behind on my spam control and ended up with >1000 posts I would have had to moderate, so I just punted them all. I’m on track again (and all the random drugs being offered on the net have been added to my black list filter), so you should be able to try again.

Note: You only have to get one comment past moderation to start getting them posted automatically.

I realize I haven’t been posting lately. Things were busy at work and blah, blah, blah…

Since we’re going to be traveling out east next week, I’ll be experimenting with posting while I’m away. Hopefully, I’ll even get some pictures up.