JaBbA's Hut

I was watching a talking head show on TV the other day and the one commentator said that someone was "hectored" into doing something.

I'd heard the word, but wasn't 100% sure it was being used correctly. Did he mean "heckled" ?

Nope. Hectored is right:

v. hec·tored, hec·tor·ing, hec·tors
v. tr.

To intimidate or dominate in a blustering way.

[Latin Hectr, Hektor, from Greek Hektr.]

This Saturday is the first, and only, Time Traveler's Convention. Why only one?

Well, why have more than one. All time travelers can simply make sure they arrive at MIT at 10:00PM EDT. They can even arrive mutiple times (assuming that doesn't cause an explosion, or something).

The important thing is to get it into the search engines as much as possible so future time travelers will know about it. So link to it, pass it on.

A few months ago, I split my blog into political and non-political content, since I was spending a lot of time on the political stuff and some people wanted to see just my other stuff.

Well, I'm posting less often now, and I definitely am not going to be posting on the political blog at the rate I was last year. So I decided to focus just on JaBbA's Hut. But I didn't want to completely stop the other stuff, and I wanted to maintain all the data.

So I wrote a script that takes the contents of one S9y-based blog and pours it into another. I haven't run in on my production blog quite yet (I'm running it through more tests) but I think it's all set.

The script is here, you're welcome to do with it as you see fit.

UPDATE The bug I thought I had turned out to be in my old 0.7-version template. So I've run it through and all postings from both blogs are now here.

Cleveland Hts has this nice new utility for doing your city taxes. Use the PIN number sent on your tax forms, log into the city website, click the link (which goes to a service bureau of some kind - 'citytaxtools.com'. you didn't think they'd actually do this on their own, did you?), fill out some info, and presto! A completely filled out city tax form to send in.

Pretty nice, really.

Except they made an amateur mistake. Used floating numbers internally, displayed decimals to the hundredths, and ended up telling me that $.79 minus $.45 = $.35.

That's pretty basic coding practices that are being forgotten here. Always check the rounding error.

Just ran into a problem which took me a little while to figure out.

I reinstalled/upgraded a server to Fedora core 3. I use pam_ldap (against an OpenLDAP server right now, eventually Active Directory) to authenticate interactive users.

My service account cron jobs ran fine, but since reinstall my own cron jobs just wouldn't run. Finally found the answer at RedHat's Bugzilla.

When using crond and atd with an external authentication service, nscd has to be running. nscd was disabled by default. This is a good thing - services should be installed disabled by default for security.


sudo /sbin/chkconfig --level 35 nscd on
sudo /etc/init.d/crond stop
sudo /etc/init.d/atd stop
sudo /etc/init.d/nscd start
sudo /etc/init.d/crond stop
sudo /etc/init.d/atd stop


And now all is well.

Just thought I'd put this up so anyone else can find it easier.

Keywords for searches:
cron crond at atd pam_ldap ORPHAN userid not found

After soliciting feedback, I got K a Mac Mini.

I got over my Anti-Apple ideas a while ago, and everything I'd heard about OSX made sense to me. But actually working with it...

yeah.

I've always been a command-line / text-file / vi kind of guy. But the experience with the Mac Mini has been 100% good. An inexpensive flat-screen monitor worked great out of the box (someday we'll get her the really really nice Apple monitor). Believe it or not, the Microsoft Wireless Keyboard and Mouse seemed to be the best choice, and they work great. And the Home Power Networking Ethernet adapter from SMC just worked, no muss, no fuss.

Firefox/Thunderbird? Done. Once I figured out how to use a .dmg file.

Attaching a HP USB Photo Printer? Done.

Connecting to a Windows Network printer for document printing? Done.

It's fast, quiet, compatible, and very small.

Now I want one

Greg Beaver has made the switch to Serendipity.

The Trackback SPAMmers are still trying. After their blast didn't work, they tried a trickle this morning - just one attempt every few minutes. Still didn't work, trackback moderation is on.

So just a couple minutes ago, I get the following moderation message:


I dunno - were they thinking that if they hid the poker reference in a random sentence I'd allow the trackback?

Serendipity is wonderful.

This morning I woke up to more than 100 messages from my blog that trackbacks had been created. And the developers list confirmed - all the blogs had been hit by the same spammer.

A Spammer had figured out the Trackback API, and an online casino had paid to be advertised.

The good news? We use Serendipity. And the spammer is going to have to refund the casino's money.

Not a single trackback actually appeared on my blog. It took me about 4 minutes to go through and delete all the trackbacks using the backend administration, and another minute to delete all the emails.

There's a lot of talk about how to solve this. My feeling, though, is that they didn't get any advertisement. It took just a couple minutes - and I have some idea for some small interface tweaks that could make cleaning up after this even faster. So right now, I'm happy with the solution in place.

Kristian, Christian, Sebastian and Tom also blogged about this, and Kristian implemented a patch that would stop at least the most common of these.

People sometimes ask why anyone would spend their time coding for an Open Source project. With very little chance at making any money, where's the incentive?

It's the Glory.

I switched over to PHPWebSite for the Eastside Kickers website, partially because of an existing module called Leaguesite. It had some nice features, but there were some pieces that didn't meet my needs.

So I changed it. The beauty of Open Source - I had an idea, I implemented it, and then I submitted the patch back to the author...

Who liked it, and gave me my moment of glory.

Super Villians for Linux

Thanks to Billford for the laugh.

You scored as Neutral Good. A Neutral Good person tries to do the 'goodest' thing possible. These people are willing to work with the law to accomplish their goal, but if the law is corrupt they are just as willing to tear it down. To these people, doing what's right is the most important thing, regardless of rules, customs, or laws.

What is your Alignment?
created with QuizFarm.com

LAS VEGAS - Despite suffering through an embarrassing computer crash that prompted jokes and guffaws, Bill Gates promised that Microsoft Corp. would help consumers stay plugged into technology, during a keynote speech Wednesday.

-- AP, via Canada.com

Schadenfreude

In my previous life as a Psychology student, I was really interested in psychological pathology. So when Weezer caught this link, I had to take a look.

The electronic British Medical Journal has published a paper discussing a ICD diagnosis for Smeagol.

My favorite part? The disclosures:

Competing interests: We are all of short stature and have very large, hairy feet.

BTW, Gollum is apparently not Schizophrenic, since his delusions are based in a Middle-earth reality, or even a multiple personality, since Gollum and Smeagol are aware of each other, and converse.

he has, instead, a schizoid personality disorder (ICD F60.1)

Movable Type's non-solution to Comment Spam is causing problems at many web hosting companies.

Comment spam attacks on Movable Type weblogs are straining servers at web hosting companies, leading some providers to disable comments on the popular blogging tool. The issues are caused by bugs in MT, forcing publisher Six Apart to recommend configuration changes while it prepares fixes.

Try Serendipity. Comment Spam is no longer a problem with our Anti-Spam configuration.