East of the Sun, West of the Moon

2005/4/26

My Inner European

Filed under: Humo(u)r,Meme — Erwin @ 12:16 pm

Your Inner European is Dutch!

[Dutch]

Open minded and tolerant.

You’re up for just about anything.
Who’s Your Inner European?

How… unexpected! ;-)

Update: At least they didn’t ask for my last name and just go straight for Irish, like the marketing departments and genealogy websites do 99% of the time. I’m a bit tired of getting green lucky clover Discovery offers so I can be more in touch with my heritage, or something! Ok, so I’m really just tired of the CC offers in general, but that’s an old rant and this just seemed to fit with the topic. :-)

2005/4/25

Argh!

Filed under: Software — Erwin @ 8:33 pm

This evening I noticed that my cable internet provider appears to have decided to block outgoing SMTP (TCP port 25) connections, except to its own mail-server.

So far, so good, I can understand that in their desire to fight spam and viruses they want to route it all through a central point where there is some sort of accountability of where certain traffic is coming from.

However, it appears that their mailservers are set up too restrictive and I can’t send some messages that I used to be able to send, like MAILER-DAEMON bounces for email that couldn’t be delivered on my servers, for instance, or when a forward couldn’t be delivered for the past 4 hours? *growl*

Time to start looking more seriously into an SSH tunnel for these things.

Yahoo! 360º

Filed under: Software — Erwin @ 7:55 pm

So far, so… bored.

After the initial fun of seeing what Yahoo! had cooked up for us with their 360º beta (it is invite-only, let me know if you want to look around as well), I’m already losing interest in what’s there. I can see what they’re trying to do, building a community and linking everything (blogs, groups, social networking, instant messaging, photo collections, etc) together, but everything except the social networking website part I do elsewhere anyway, as far as I do that social networking anyway.

After having seen Friendster (which suffered from chronic performance problems when I was there) and Orkut (which was fun but suffered from forums that were below par in that they lacked threading and they didn’t keep track of what you had or had not read) this 360º is just more of the same and while there definitely were some elements that I hadn’t seen in the other two, that could only keep my attention for so long.

Maybe I’ll come back when they announce some new feature, assuming they’ll announce that in their blog.

Too popular?

Filed under: Software — Erwin @ 7:40 pm

It looks like Leo Laporte is too popular for his own good.

Let me explain: Mr Laporte has a podcast along with his blog, and for the (mp3) enclosures that are the podcasts he uses the Coral Content Distribution Network which uses a collection of hosts spread all over the world to make content more easily accessible when the original source is being overrun by the Slashdot or Fark effect.

You may have seen these CCDN URLs before, you can recognise them by the .nyud.net:8090/ in the URL.

This evening I noticed that, while NetNewsWire claimed to have downloaded the latest enclosure (Revenge Of The Scr**n S*v*ers, part 2), the download window indicated that it was a 0 byte download, ditto for his regular podcast. Going to the URL for the enclosure manually I find myself admiring a 403 error, because he’s gone over his hourly quota. Oops.

Some research seems to indicate that the CCDN node should have redirected me to the original source instead of giving me that 403, but perhaps this node was running an old software version? No idea. I’ll try the enclosures again later this evening, hopefully with more luck then. :-)

Update: It’s still not working and I just noticed this blog entry which indicates something unusual happened and it wasn’t (just) his popularity. ;)

2005/4/23

Double trouble

Filed under: Site,Software — Erwin @ 11:05 am

This post has a double function.

  1. I’m wondering if Zzot! uses NetNewsWire basically as his main browser, if he has that many tabs going all the time.
  2. A test to see if track/ping-backs work (again) now that the WP software has been informed more properly of where the proxy is that this internal webserver needs to reach out to the world.

*crosses fingers*

2005/4/21

A bad day for PCs

Filed under: News,Technology — Erwin @ 10:39 pm

This evening two things happened, which at first seemed like they might be related but turned out not to be.

First of all the mail/file/web/shell-server in the back-room stopped working for no immediately noticable reason. I booted it back up (needed to powercycle b/c the attached monitor & keyboard were unresponsive) and within a minute it locked back up, not even fully booting into the OS.

I was about to investigate further (while juggling the kids around, who were supposed to get ready for the school-(roller)skate this evening), when the tornado sirens started. I knew we were expecting a thunderstorm but had missed the briefing on the tornadic one. Bother.

So… with my parents (who, as I mentioned before, are here for the entire month of April) and the two boys — but without M who was still at work — we made our way to the basement, into my office, grabbing a radio and some reading material on the way. I walked back upstairs a few more times to get a flashlight, the pet-rat, and some other bits.

Me being the only adult in the room that had an idea of what to expect and the youngest being rather panicky (entirely in-character, unfortunately), this made for a fun two hours, the last half of which gave us unreliable power which then finally gave up entirely.

The 3 UPSen held the fort for a while, but 2 of them finally ran out of juice while the third (which only had a Mac Mini and a monitor in powersave mode to worry about) made it through the entire outage.

When power finally came back on I had some fun getting my workstation and the gateway/firewall PC to get started again, but that wasn’t too much trouble, compared to events in the past. What was much more fun was opening up the file/mail/web/shell server and finding that the reason the computer was shutting itself down was because the fan of one of the CPUs had broken off at the spot where it hooks to the CPU base and was hanging inside the case, instead of cooling the CPU! Well, that explained the odd behaviour, at least.

The temporary fix was to put the case sideways and place the fan on top of the CPU it was supposed to cool instead of its usual vertical position. Tomorrow I’ll walk into the local Radio Shack and see if I can pick up a replacement. If not, I guess I’ll need to order a new one online *crosses fingers*.

Tomorrow we’ll probably go for a drive to see if there’s anything interesting damage to show my parents. How out-of-character of us! But hey, hopefully this will be one of the (very) few opportunities in their life to see tornado damage from up-close, might as well get a glance at it. ;-)

And now, with everything working mostly as intended again, I say goodnight.

2005/4/16

Cool toy

Filed under: Technology — Erwin @ 9:12 am

I’ve changed my mind. Forget about public transport, forget about cars, let’s all get one of these AirScooters!

On second thought, I don’t see any room for additional seats on which to place passengers, which makes this a fairly inefficient way of transporting your family for instance. Also, while the article talks about not needing a license, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if this thing really takes off (ahem), some sort of regulation would probably become a necessity.

Oh well, back to dreaming…

2005/4/15

My English

Filed under: Humo(u)r,Meme — Erwin @ 1:21 pm
What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Your Linguistic Profile:
55% General American English
25% Yankee
10% Dixie
5% Midwestern
5% Upper Midwestern

This helpful information brought to you thanks to Printemps and Froya

Static

Filed under: Site,Software — Erwin @ 11:44 am

I’ve been fiddling with the static pages, giving them a slightly different layout than regular blog entries, which meant figuring out how the WordPress templates work (not too difficult). The only minor obstacle was that the regular template elements the_date() and the_time() show the creation date instead of referring to the last update, so I ended up hacking in something like:

  <?php echo mysql2date(get_settings('time_format'), $post->post_modified); ?>,
  <?php echo mysql2date(get_settings('date_format'), $post->post_modified); ?>

Not the prettiest approach, but it’ll do and it does look like it might survive a future upgrade to a newer WP version… hopefully. :)

2005/4/13

Here, have some coffee

Filed under: Humo(u)r — Erwin @ 11:51 am

Because it sounds like you need it:

Asian woman: Excuse me, what time is the 7:17 train?

–Penn Station

Overheard by: Adman

Certainly not all of the overheard snippets on that site are treasures, but browsing through the new ones (use the RSS feed) is sure to give me a few chuckles, every now and then.

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