rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: July 2005 (page 1 of 7)

Signalling your status

The New York Times has an article today about the psychology behind those white oval bumper stickers with obscure acronyms that seem to be popping up everywhere. Here in North Carolina, the preponderance of them seem to advertise an affinity for various North and South Carolina beaches. We have OBX for the Outer Banks, TI for Topsail Island, and OINC for Ocracoke Island, NC. It took me forever to figure some of those out, probably because I’m not in the in crowd.

CafePress.com has a big selection of these stickers. My personal favorite is LKW for Lake Wheeler, a 650 acre manmade lake featuring picnic areas and a regulation volleyball court. Here in Raleigh our status symbols just don’t measure up very well to New York’s.

Changing hosting providers

I’m making a change to a new hosting provider. I’ve been testing TextDrive for the past couple of days, and have found that things that were not working at all at Pair.com work just fine at TextDrive. I think a lot of the problem is that Pair.com’s software is, for the most part, old. Especially on my server, being that I was a customer for more than 8 years and things hardly changed in that time.

Naturally there’s going to be some domain name messiness for a little while until things get sorted out. Hopefully you’ll stick with me through it. If you run into any problems, please send me email at [email protected], or just leave a comment on this entry.

Until the DNS is switched over, requests to rc3.org will be redirected to rafe.textdriven.com. If you go to rc3.org and stay there, you’re getting the fresh DNS info.

Full disclosure

News of security researcher Michael Lynn’s presentation on vulnerabilities in Cisco routers at the BlackHat security conference is being reported everywhere. Both Cisco and ISS (Lynn’s former employer) did everything they could to prevent the researcher from giving his presentation. In the end, Lynn quit his job at ISS so that he could go on with the presentation unencumbered. Bruce Schneier has a good summary of events and an explanation of why protecting full disclosure is so important if we’re serious about security.

Dynamic Main Indexes with Movable Type

So I posted a question on the Movable Type community forum and thought I’d link to it here. The question is, how do you map the server root URL to the Main Index in Movable Type if you’re using dynamic publishing for that page?

If you publish a static file for the Main Index under the name recognized by the Web server as a directory index, then there’s no problem if someone goes to a URL like http://rc3.org/. However, if you are dynamically publishing that page, then no directory index is found and mtview.php tries to load the template associated with /. Since no such template exists, it returns an error.

The options to deal with this are:

  • Hacking mtview.php to map the URL / to the Main Index.
  • Creating a Movable Type template that maps to /. (I’m not sure whether this will work given that / is not a valid file name.)
  • Add a redirect to .htaccess to redirect people from / to the index.

Is there a preferred solution to this problem in the Movable Type community?

Subverting the constitution

Jason Levine describes how supporters of the Boy Scouts are trying to subvert the Constitution in order to maintain federal support for the group even though its discrimination based on religion makes it ineligible for such benefits. Here’s how it works:

Now you see why I find this so fascinating? It’s clear that the Constitution forbids our government from supporting organizations that mandate religious faith (like the Boy Scouts), and it’s also pretty clear that there’s no way the Senate would get the country to amend that ban out of the Constitution. So in order to get around it, the Senate is trying to pass laws that aim to prevent ordinary taxpayers from having sufficient standing to bring suit — “what we do might be unconstitutional, but you don’t have the right to file a court case to demonstrate that, so we can do it anyway.” And as the final straw, they did all of it by declaring that the Boy Scout Jamboree is vital for national security.

These are the same people who constantly go around claiming that they’re for strict interpretation of the Constitution. Spare me.

Kids and video games

Steven Johnson’s op-ed in response to Hillary Clinton’s call for a $90 million study on the effects of video games on children is a must read.

Password problem fixed

I fixed the password problem that I mentioned yesterday. It actually turned out to require some detective work. To test my Movable Type installation on a new server, I backed up my database and loaded it on the new MySQL server, installed Movable Type, and then tried to log in. At that point, Movable Type told me my login was invalid.

After trying a number of things, I had to start hacking on some Perl. I’ll spare you a lengthy narrative of the diagnostics and tell you that it turns out that the crypt() function on the old host returned something different than the crypt() function on the new host.

Because Movable Type stores an encrypted password in the database, the comparison wasn’t turning out the same. What I wound up doing was copying the original password encrypting code out of the Movable Type application and running it on my password on the new server. I took the resulting encrypted string and set my password to that in the database, and then I could log in again.

Moving Movable Type

I’m trying to get Movable Type up and running on a different server to test out some things (like the new beta), but I am running into another problem. I dumped my SQL database to disk and then loaded it into a new database, and now I can’t seem to log into the new installation. Any idea what’s up with that? Is the password encryption somehow tied to the host where Movable Type is installed?

IP addresses

Let’s say you have a choice between two hosting providers. One gives you your own IP address for every domain name, on another, you share your IP address with other users. Is there any practical reason why you wouldn’t want to share that IP address?

Stylesheet updated

I’ve updated the style sheet for the site, with an assist from Anil Dash, who fixed the font and colors so that this site more closely resembles the old one.

One of the next big things on the list is updating the comments template so that what is allowed is clearly explained. Right now, basically nothing is allowed, but I’m going to ease up on that since everything is moderated anyway.

By the way, how annoying is it that when you’re using the QuickPost form, if you navigate through the fields with the tab key, you get to the “Cancel” key before you get to the “Save” key? I just had an unpleasant experience with that.

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