I'm having some problems with a new access control module, to replace the previous one that was randomly failing to protect entries. I should have it sorted out shortly; please forgive the disruption.

Update: I have managed to successfully remove the offending module. This means that users have lost the ability to restrict access to nodes again, but at least the site is stable, and no longer vulnerable to attack.

Despite having patched Drupal to run its anti-spam module on trackbacks, too much trackback spam is getting through, even of the form of stuff that it's been theoretically trained on and should know for certain is spam, and the attacks are coming ever more frequently. Thus, I have no alternative but to disable trackbacks until enough of the Drupal modules for 4.6.0 are working well enough for me to attempt a major upgrade and test the systems again.

Days like this make me think the Chinese had the right idea when they started executing spammers.

I've been mulling over for a while now the analysis by John Rogers over at Kung Fu Monkey of what Republicans have been doing right and what Democrats have been doing wrong in politics. There are thousands of these, of course, but I think this one is one of the best, because it's not coming from the perspective of a political analyst, but a stand-up comic.

As one might expect a stand-up comic to say, the problems basically resolve down to Democratic candidates not being enough like stand-up comics. He goes into great detail, however, and whether or not you agree with the conclusions, they provide a fascinating starting point for thinking about how people react to politicians, and how thinkers tend to react to those people. He also followed up on some of the more common responses to his essay.

Well, the center RAM slot on my motherboard is definitely flaky, so my planned upgrade from 1GB to 2GB has turned into an upgrade to only 1.5GB, since I had to pull one of the old modules to put the new one in. Damnit.

It's still enough to keep Photoshop from grinding to a halt, though, which is good.

A new gallery for my photographs of birds is up, with both old and new images there. I'm still working on the Ensenada pictures.

Over the last couple weeks, half of my main entries have been announcements of one technical problem or another, and the trend continues tonight. It appears that port 80 is now being blocked by my provider (Cox) on SOME connections (but not all), despite the fact that I'm on a business account that is not supposed to have any blocking whatsoever.

Those who are seeing this anyway should take note that port 443 is NOT being blocked, so you can still access the site by:

https://www.resonant.org/

(Note the https rather than the http.)

I was putting the finishing touches on the blog entry that was supposed to go here when I finally opened up one link too many and the system froze, taking down not only the web browser I was using to post, but the copy buffer containing the full copy of the text as well.

It's my own fault; I had been doing some game-playing before I started writing, so I was still in Microsoft Windows, and I chose to start writing from there rather than rebooting to do it. I know better.

Still, I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate Microsoft. You'd think that just killing an application wouldn't kill the copy buffer for the OS. I had a full copy in memory from a few minutes prior, and could have recovered if I had been allowed to paste into Notepad or anything else. Anything I tried to paste into froze as well. So much for my simple attempt to safeguard myself against exactly this. Lesson for the day: if it's not completely flushed to disk, it might as well not exist.

Sony for the longest time was pushing its own proprietary data interface and memory card very hard. The NX80V has a CompactFlash slot only grudgingly, and only because customers loudly demanded it. The downside to this is that the CF card can only be used by default for storage, and even that only in a limited fashion.

A number of enterprising people have come up with various ways around this, the most well known probably being the Athena CF Enabler driver. This allows the CF slot to be used for storage even with the default Clie applications that normally want to use only the MemoryStick slot. Unfortunately, it handles only storage.

... of mice and men gang aft a-gley.

I was supposed to get on a plane this afternoon for a visit home, but an unexpected storm got in my way. In a way, this shows the limitations of the electronic age, because for this particular trip everything was handled electronically and I still spent quite some time at the airport getting everything straightened out. I had checked the flights and printed my boarding pass from home only a couple hours before departure, and the system gave no warning that there was a problem.

By the time I reached the airport, there was definitely a problem. By the time I reached the front desk (walking around a long line) with an LED sign above it marked "Baggage" to ask where do do the electronic luggage checkin, my flight had been cancelled. I was shaken a bit by the fact that the woman didn't even acknowledge my presence, but instead called the next person down from the check-in line, so I stepped up hesitantly and asked if that long line was for both just baggage checkin and ticketing, or just ticketing. That's when I got told my flight was cancelled, and I'd have to get in line to work something out. All flights were marked as delayed on a board behind the counter -- not electronically, just with a large sheet of paper taped over the list of departures. The LEDs above each counter were noting a variety of things, from Checkin to Closed to Baggage, but all counters were being used to get the mess sorted out. I took my bag and got back in line.