Posts

Al Gore’s television project, Current, launched today. Of course I, like pretty much everyone else, can’t watch it because it’s not carried by my cable provider. Current has segments rather than shows, which means that it will be difficult to Tivo things. There’s no broadcast schedule on the Web site beyond what’s coming up for the next hour or so. There’s no way to watch any of it on the Web, making it nearly impossible to know what the channel will even be like unless you’re one of the households that receives it. At least Current doesn’t seem to be centered around professional blatherers “discussing” the issues of the day. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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.

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. ...

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? ...

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?

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. ...