I have struggled the last few days to overcome challenges with our Internet access.

I noticed on Thursday that we had lost Internet connectivity.  After doing just a bit of problem determination, I realized that the problem was that the 2Wire HomePortal 1700HW gateway that AT&T had provided four years ago had died.

I called AT&T and began what ended up being a very frustrating experience.

The agent I talked with told me that I would have to purchase a new gateway for $70.  I said okay. Next thing I knew, she was telling me it would arrive "next week."  I told her that was unacceptable.  She told me the order had already been placed and she had no way to edit it.  I asked her to cancel it and told her I would purchase one locally.  She said she couldn't cancel it, and the group that could was gone for the day.  She offered to call me back the next day and connect me with the group that could cancel the order.  I said okay.  In the interim, I searched for a local AT&T store using my work laptop and the tethered cellular modem mode of my Sprint Blackberry.  There was one on the island, but when I called, they said they didn't stock the 2Wire gateways.  I searched more and found one in the River City Marketplace near the airport.  I called them, and they said they had them in stock.  So, Jeanie and I drove there, only to find out that they did NOT in fact have any in stock, and if they did, it would be $100 - not the $70 quoted by the telephone agent.  I decided to try Best Buy, and they did in fact have the 2Wire for $100.  They also had a number of other Combination 4 port switch/wireless access point/router/firewall/DSL modems, but I decided to go with the 2Wire, since I had been told by AT&T that was the only unit they supported.

We got it home, and the setup wizard worked well, and in no time, the gateway was working - sort of.  There were two primary problems: 1. the wireless kept "dropping," and I couldn't get to my web sites from the local area network.  Strangely, I could get to them from outside of the house (I knew this thanks to the Blackberry).

I did a bunch of Internet research, and found that both of these issues were widely known problems with the 2Wire.  By now it was late, so I decided to call it a night.

The next afternoon, I called AT&T technical support.  That turned out to be a joke.  The first person with whom I spoke was level 1, and all she could do was read the script to open up the ports in the firewall to allow access from the Internet to the web server - which of course I had already done.  I asked to speak to Level 2 and ended up on hold for a total of almost an hour, getting bounced to four different agents, none of whom could help me.  I decided to call back, and was basically told that if I wanted level 2 support, I would have to pay for it.  I told the agent "no thanks."  My Internet research indicated that at least one of the problems was related to the software version of the 2Wire, and apparently, there was no update available and no indication of when, or if, there would be one.  I decided I would return the 2Wire and purchase another brand of gateway.

The agent from Thursday did call back in the afternoon, only to tell me that there was no way for AT&T to cancel the order, and my only option was to reject the shipment when UPS delivered it.  I asked what if I wasn't home when they delivered it and she told me I would have to call UPS to come pick the package up and that I should write "rejected" on the box.  Arg!

On Saturday, we went to the local Staples and purchased a Netgear DG384G Wireless-G Router with built-in DSL Modem.  The installation using the wizard was very simple.  I did have to make some edits to the network configuration, as the Netgear used a different IP address and gateway address than the 2Wire, but it was fairly straight forward.

Unfortunately, I experienced the same problem of not being able to access the web sites on my web server from my local area network (LAN).  After doing some more research, I discovered that the problem was that the gateway was not running NAT loopback.  Turns out there were two possible fixes.  The first one I found was fairly simple: just edit the hosts files on my local machines (/etc/hosts file (*nix) or C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (Windows)) to include entries for each of the three web sites I host (www.blogdom.org, www.witsdom.com, www.dealdom.com) - found at http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-390461.html  The other was to update the firmware on the gateway to a version that supports NAT loopback - http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/11882.  There was actually a third option - http://www.nikrivers.com/2009/10/26/netgear-dg834g-and-nat-loopback/ - but it wasn't necessary given option 2 that added the NAT loopback support.

I chose to implement option 1 for now, as it was quick, and I didn't want to have to hassle with reconfiguring the gateway after the software update.  Maybe I'll do that in a few days.

Today, July 26, 2009, marks my 10th anniversary of blogging.  I use the blogs mostly as an online journal, as my memory for events is absolutely horrible.  Thus, my blog tends to be extremely self-centered.  Every now and then, I try to provide some greater value in my postings, mostly in the form of reference/solutions to problems I've encountered - typically computer or appliance related.  I started with http://www.witsdom.com and then created http://www.blogdom.org.  I now mostly post to Blogdom, although I do occasionally make an update to Witsdom, most recently to add an aviation links page.  Unfortunately, since I have not one iota of artistic ability, my blogs/sites are not pretty.  Blogdom used to support the ability for visitors to leave comments, but for every one legitimate comment, I'd receive a thousand spam comments, so I disabled the feature.  Newer web interaction environments such as Facebook or Blogger (or even the current version of MovableType) seem to have figured out how to effectively combat comment spam, but for the time being, I'll just stick with what I have.  Upgrading to the current version of MT, or moving to another environment is just too much trouble at this point.

Monday

I met the Fernandina Beach squadron commander at the airport at 0630 for a transport mission.  I flew us to Craig (KCRG) and dropped him off so he could fly the Craig squadron's aircraft down to Daytona for service.  I followed him down to Daytona, and then flew the both of us back to Fernandina Beach and was still in the home office working by 1300.

Tuesday

Worked.

Wednesday

Worked.

Thursday

I worked in the morning.  Mid-afternoon, I went on my first real CAP SAR (REDCAP) mission - a report of a missing aircraft.  I got the call at 2:00 PM, we were wheels up just after 3:00, and back at base just after 5:00.  I served as Mission Observer.  We had been given coordinates of the last known position of the missing aircraft, so we flew directly to that location.  After arriving at the location, we began a point search (expanding square).  We found the wreckage on the third leg of the expanding square.  As was reported in the local media later that day, unfortunately, there were no survivors.  If we hadn't known we were looking for a crashed airplane, I never would have recognized it as such.  Even knowing that's what we were looking for, it didn't look anything like an airplane.  It was sad to know that an aviator had perished, but there was some comfort in knowing that we might have in some small way helped in at least providing confirmation to the family, as not knowing is sometimes worse than knowing.  It was also gratifying to see that the time we spend training can result in performing an actual mission effectively.

Tweaked Witsdom.

Friday

I took the day off from work, and Jeanie and I spent the bulk of the day cleaning out the garage to create a walk way so the fridge could be delivered on Saturday, and moving a shelving unit that was packed with food from one location in the garage to another so that there would be room for the refrigerator near an electrical outlet and near the door from the laundry room into the garage.

Saturday

I flew the aircraft currently assigned to our CAP squadron down to Craig (KCRG) so that the Craig squadron (which is still without their aircraft (see Monday) could do some Mission Scanner and Mission Observer training.  The weather was a little marginal at KFHB, so I had to wait a bit to launch, and even with that, ended up flying through some rain and ended up arriving about 30 minutes behind schedule.  I ended up spending the first part of the day providing Mission Observer ground training to two senior members, and then flew two training missions as Mission Pilot (my first two) so that another senior member could get his two Mission Scanner missions and earn his Mission Scanner qualification.  I didn't end up getting home until around 1700.  All together this week, I logged 4.6 hours of flying and 6.6 hours of total time in a small aircraft.

While I was away, Sears had delivered our refrigerator for the garage, and Jeanie had spent much of the day transferring items from the kitchen fridge to the garage fridge.

Also while I was away, I realized I have allowed my priorities in life to get disordered and have generally allowed things around and involving me to get out of balance.  I am renewing my resolve and focus to rectify that.

Sunday

I did the normal Sunday morning coffee thing at the airport, then attended the monthly flying club meeting.  Jeanie and I drove to Jacksonville and took my mother out to lunch at Maggiano's.  We spent about three hours with my mother, plus another hour each way in travel.  Lunch was yummy and we had a pleasant visit with my mother.

I spent a couple of hours in the evening deal with various Blackberry issues as noted in this post.

Jeanie spent the time I was working on the Blackberry feeding her new Facebook addiction.

Once upon a time, when you hovered over a link in the top navigator on Witsdom, the link would show with a yellow background...

Somewhere along the line, I lost this functionality.

Now I realize that I am probably the only person who ever visits Witsdom anymore, and no one else would know or care, but it started bugging me.

So, I fixed it.

I don't know how it used to work, but the way it works now is to use the onmouseover and onmouseout constructs as in the following example:

<A href="/main.shtml" style="text-decoration:none; color:#000000" onmouseover="window.status='Main'; this.style.backgroundColor='yellow';return true;" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to David\'s Home Page'; this.style.backgroundColor='#689EC5';return true;">Main</A>

There was probably a more elegant approach, but this accomplished what I wanted with a minimum of effort.

The example above is also supposed to display a message in the status bar at the bottom of the page when one hovers, but this functionality isn't working, and I'm not going to worry about fixing it.

This past weekend was relatively quiet...

On Saturday, I worked in the morning and Jeanie had her weekly call with her mom.  In the afternoon, Jeanie and I took a walk through downtown and browsed the local bookstores.  We at lunch at a new Italian/Pizza restaurant on island OPS Pizza.  Jeanie had cheese ravioli which she thoroughly enjoyed and I had a slice of cheese pizza which was not bad, but not as good as Tony's.  So, we will go to OPS when we want Italian other than pizza, and Tony's when we want pizza or calzone.  I worked a little more in the evening and that was about it.

On Sunday, I was supposed to fly twice; once in the late morning just to knock the rust off me, and then at night to renew my night currency.  Unfortunately, it appears that a seal failed on the nose strut during another member's trip to Savannah on Friday, so the aircraft was grounded awaiting repair.  The airplane assigned to our CAP squadron was moved to another squadron over a month ago, and we still haven't been assigned a replacement.  The rental aircraft that the FBO used to rent reached its time for overhaul on its engine over a year ago, and because of the ongoing legal battle between them and the city, they elected to not overhaul the engine, so there is no rental aircraft available from the FBO.  So, I went to the coffee and whined about the fact that even though I live five miles from an airport with three open runways and an FBO, am a member of the Civil Air Patrol, and a member of the flying club, there still wasn't an airplane available to fly.  As a result of the whining, I did learn that the aircraft that had previously been limited to rental only by student pilots was now available for rental by licensed pilots, but it was too late for me to make arrangements to get checked out, and I really didn't want to pay $25 per hour more than the club plane, plus have to pay for the aircraft and an instructor for the checkout.  I guess if I get desperate, its good to know that there is an alternative other than having to drive to Jacksonville.

After I returned home (a little later than usual - around noon) Jeanie and I ate lunch, then we bathed Diego and clipped Cali's nails.  I then jury rigged a repair on one of Jeanie's rain gauges.  The original gauge had a plastic tube that had cracked from old age.  Jeanie found a replacement tube made of glass, but it was narrower than the original tube.  So, I cut off the old plastic tube flush with the base (a ceramic frog) and then used a piece of large heat shrink tubing as a shim between the glass tube and the old plastic tube.  The solution is close enough...  Speaking of heat shrink tubing, I finally got around to affixing Diego and Cali's new rabies and county license tags to their collars and then shrink wrapping the now four tags each (the others being their name tags and microchip tags) so that they don't jingle jangle as they walk.  Speaking of Cali, she appears to be feeling better.  She's still not quite 100%, but she's at least 80%.  She went back to not eating on Saturday morning, but Kimberly suggested we give her four fingers of Pepto-Bismol (i.e. dip your finger into a spoon of the pink liquid and then wipe your finger on the dog's tongue - four times) and that seems to have worked to settle Cali's stomach as she started eating again in the afternoon.

Later in the afternoon, we puttered around the yard a bit.  Before the last few weeks when it rained so much, the fig tree had started experiencing browning of new buds and yellowing of its leaves and the grapefruit had been dropping leaves and fruit.  I thought that the problem was a lack of iron in the soil or improper PH.  But, with all the rain, both trees really perked up and started growing beautiful new leaves.  So, it appears that the trees just weren't getting enough water during the county mandated limit of lawn watering only twice a week.  As such, it appears that we will have to supplement the water needs of the new fruit trees with at least one hand watering per week.

Jeanie made a lovely meal of boiled shrimp and lobster tail, along with corn-on-the-cob, broccoli and salad.  I added some links to the aviation page on Witsdom as well as updating some of the meta tags on the four different files that serve as the "index" page.  I watched the CAP ground handling video for the third time - this time so I could take the now mandated test.  I also accepted four friends invitations on Facebook that I had been sitting on the fence about.  Previously, I had been only accepting invitations from people I knew really well, or at least remembered really well.  I decided that I'd widen my circle a little bit, even if that means I will be a bit more selective (read less open) about what I post as updates.  We ended our nice, quiet weekend by watching a bit of TV.

Friday
The day started out with us taking Cali back to the Vet as she still wasn't doing well.  We started her back on Cetrine in the afternoon and she was better on Sat, Sun and Mon (good appetite, but no poop on Sun/Mon) By Tuesday, she was back to not doing so well.  Fortunately, eventually, she did get back to feeling well.

I Spent a good part of the day dealing with insurance - homeowner, umbrella, automobile, etc.  In general, I'm not really happy with our current independent insurance agency.  I guess I just got spoiled by our agent of twenty years in North Carolina, Jerry Teague.  The existing agency just doesn't provide a good level of service.  Forget being proactive, they don't even do a good job of following up on what we ask them to do.  As an example, when our address street number changed due to 911 changes in the county, we notified the agency of the change.  Apparently, they never properly processed the notification, since the new bills still had the old address on them.  Another issue was the lack of credit for wind mitigation last year - even after we sent them the report, then called to follow up to make sure they received it and acted on it.  It was only luck that we figured it out after getting a new quote from another company (Olympus) and overhearing another agent's comment about St. John's being cheaper than Olympus.  Had that not happened, we would have ended up overpaying over $800 for our homeowners insurance.

We had dinner at Pepper's on-island.   Jeanie had fish taco's - I didn't like the sauce.  I had seafood fajitas - they were delicious, although I would have preferred more peppers and onions.  The serving was enough for four people and included a fillet of fish, shrimp, scallops and fake crab in addition to the tortillas, guacamole, source cream, cheese, lettuce and pico-de-gallo.

Saturday
I gave blood to The Blood Alliance at a Fernandina Pirates Club blood drive at Murray's Grille.  While I do appreciate the fact that The Blood Alliance is quite convenient due to their frequent blood drives close to home, I do miss the way the American Red Cross made a point of recognizing each gallon milestone.  It turned out that this was my 9th donation, yet I would not have known had I not bothered to look it up on their web site.  While collecting gallon pins was never the primary motivation for donating, it was a nice gesture on the part of the ARC.  On the other hand, the BA has a Donor Awards program that appears to be quite cool.  You get points for each donation that you can then use to select various BA logo items from an online catalog.  The primary motivation is still to help others, and the secondary motivation is that I believe there are health benefits to draining a pint every few months, but getting a little pat on the back is nice too.

Speaking of the Pirates Club, why is it that pirates are so celebrated in our culture?  Think about it... pirates were murdering thieves who raped and pillaged.  No one would think of celebrating the current crop of Somali pirates.  Why so then the pirates of yore, who in many ways were much worse than those of today?

In the afternoon, we watched a bunch of "Rescue Me" episodes.  I found them to be  funnier and not as mean as last year.  Jeanie baked banana nut bread and muffins which were yummy.  One of my coworkers with whom I had spent the better part of last year working with on my last deal called to tell me about his first flying lesson.  I was really excited to hear how excited he was, and I hope that he continues on through obtaining his certificate.  We ate the fajita leftovers for lunch.  For dinner, we had a real oven baked potato (not wrapped in foil) for dinner.  Baking the potato in an oven (as opposed to a microwave) without foil results in such a nice fluffy potato, with just the right amount of bite to the skin.

Sunday
I did the usual morning coffee thing at the airport.  I then returned home, picked up Jeanie, and headed back on-island so we could have Calzone at Tony's.  We spent the bulk of the afternoon driving around and looked at houses and neighborhoods.  On the way home, we went to Lowes to get three pyramid shaped trellises for the back yard.

Monday
We spent most of the day working in the flower bed in the back yard.  The primary focus was getting the trellises installed and pulling some of the dollar weed out of the primary bed.  The reason we installed three trellises is that we have three Carolina Jasmine bushes that we had severely cut back because they had gotten out of control.  Each jasmine will now have a trellis that it can climb on, but that will allow us to keep the bushes under control.  As an aside, the fig and grapefruit trees we planted at the end of March are doing really well.  A few weeks earlier, I had noticed that the leaves were yellowing and buds were browning.  I had thought that the problem was either poor soil, improper PH or a lack of iron, but it now appears that the problem must have been insufficient water since the only thing that has changed in the last few weeks is that it has rained every day.

In the late afternoon, we watched WALL-E which we both thought was really cute.

After dinner, I burned the new live ColdPlay CD for Jeanie.  The CD is available as a free download (zip file with MP3's) as "a thank you to our fans" at this link.  I also created the new Aviation / Flying page on Witsdom.

I've been meaning to add a page to Witsdom for aviation / flying related stuff for quite a while...

Well, I couldn't sleep last night, so I finally got a start on it.

It isn't anything to brag about, but at least it's a start.

The one issue with it is that since I built it on Witsdom, it's not particularly easy to update.

Oh well, as I said, at least it's there.  Here's the link: Aviation Links Page on Witsdom.

After all these years, I still can't resist the occasional urge to tweak the basic setup every now and then...

The latest tweaks were to move the tools section in the right hand column towards the top of the page.  This was done primarily to facilitate access to the search function.

The other tweak was to reinstate the display of the category(ies) for each post.  I hadn't realized that they were no longer displaying until I happened to look at an old post and I somehow noticed that the category showed on the old post, but that it didn't show on new posts.

As best I can tell, the change occurred when I removed comments.  The fix was fairly easy: I just had to move the display category code snippet around on the Individual Entry Archive and entrybody templates.

There have always been many reasons why I don't post as often as I'd like to, but...

Now there's a new one: Facebook.

The problem Blogdom has compared with Facebook is that a Facebook post takes about 30 seconds.

The very fact that it is limited to about six lines limits the amount of time I can spend crafting an entry.  And, the nature of a Facebook entry is a quick status update, so, it is by definition, quick.

My Blogdom entries can take 20-30 minutes each, or even more.

The interface for making a Facebook entry is simple - whether I'm on my laptop or the Blackberry.  And the post is instantaneous.  With Blogdom, I must wait for the entry to not only post to the main page, but also to update all of the associated indexes on the blog.  And even though I can use the web interface to make an entry (either on the laptop or the Blackberry) I really prefer to make them using Windows Live Writer so I have an independent database of entries on my PC in addition to the HTML and proprietary database both of which reside on the server.

Oh well, I guess those that are really interested in more frequent updates will have to add me as a Facebook friend.

As I was working on the recap of my recent trip to The Netherlands, I discovered that the text of our 2001 trip to St. Thomas and Puerto Rico had vanished from Witsdom.  The index page was still there, as were the photographs, video and music; just the text page was missing.  I looked everywhere I could think of to recover it, but it was nowhere to be found.  This was a bit surprising since I actually had an archived backup of the entire web content of the server from 2003.

Fortunately, I still had the hard copy notes I had written while we were on the trip, so I re-typed them and recreated the page.

Not being one to be able to leave well enough alone, the fact that the audio controls on the page weren't working was more than I could bear.  The fact that I spent quite a bit of time reworking them so they would operate correctly on Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari is silly since probably no one will ever view the page, but, at least I know it is right now.

Even though I kludged / brute forced the solution, I am pretty proud of it, as I wasn't able to find another reference that provided a solution for playing a randomly selected music file on a web page, in the background, that provided functioning controls in multiple browsers.

In case you're interested, here's the code:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
   1:  
   2: <!------------HIDING
   3:  
   4: /*Script by Scott R Harrod  
   5:                 7/18/1997
   6:  http://members.aol.com/kirrak9/cyberbase.html
   7:  modified by David Sanders 11/21/1999 and 12/27/2007 with snippets from F. Permandi
   8:  http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/flashVars/
   9: */
  10:  
  11:    Play=new Array                                                                               
  12:    Play[0]="music/feelhi2.mid"         
  13:    Play[1]="music/hothothot.mid"
  14:    Play[2]="music/jama2.mid"
  15:    Play[3]="music/redredSD.mid"
  16:    var now=new Date()
  17:    var music=now.getSeconds()%4                                                
  18: // DONE HIDING-------->
  19:  
  20: document.write(
  21: '<OBJECT ID=Crescendo CLASSID="clsid:0FC6BF2B-E16A-11CF-AB2E-0080AD08A326" WIDTH="200" HEIGHT="55">\n'+
  22: '    <PARAM name="src"        VALUE="' + Play[music] + '">\n'+
  23: '    <PARAM name="autoplay"   VALUE="true">\n'+
  24: '    <PARAM name="controller" VALUE="true">\n'+
  25: '    <PARAM NAME="volume"     VALUE="100">\n'+
  26: '    <PARAM NAME="type"       VALUE="audio/x-mid">\n'+
  27: '<EMBED SRC="' + Play[music] + '"\n'+
  28: '    TYPE="audio/x-mid"\n'+
  29: '    WIDTH="200"\n'+
  30: '    HEIGHT="55"\n'+
  31: '    VOLUME="100"\n'+
  32: '    AUTOPLAY="true"\n'+ 
  33: '    CONTROLLER="true"\n'+
  34: '    ></EMBED>\n'+
  35: '</OBJECT>\n');
  36:  
</SCRIPT>

The first section (above the DONE HIDING) creates the array of possible selections, then chooses one.  The second section creates the code to generate an HTML object and an Embed statement using the selected file from above to activate the player, play the selected song, and display a small control console.  Both the Object and Embed are needed to provide cross-browser functionality.  Since a variable is being used in the Object and Embed statements, both statements must be generated using the javascript document.write function.

A couple of times, I have encountered an issue with Windows Live Writer related to the handling of special characters like in Crème Brûlée.

The issue was that in WLW everything appears fine, but when posted to the blog, it displayed as Crème Brûlée.

The only way I could get the text to display properly was to enter the special characters as HTML entities like this:

Crème Brûlée

I should note that in the above initial example, I did not enter the characters directly into WLW, but instead copied them from a web page then pasted them into the WLW editor.

I posted an item on the Windows Live Writer MSN Group and got a very quick response.

The net of the solution was:

Ah, here's the problem. The encoding is simply declared incorrectly in your blog template. If you change this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

to this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

everything will work fine. You can confirm this by forcing your browser to display your homepage in UTF-8 (in IE7, right-click on the page and select Encoding | UTF-8; in Firefox, it's on the View menu).

Here is a sample of Crème Brûlée that was copied from another page and pasted into WLW so you can see the difference between the display with iso-8859-1 and UTF-8 encodings (you'll have to force the display as noted in the solution above).

So, one option is to edit each of the master templates in Movable Type to use the charset-utf-8 directive and then rebuild the site.  Since I don't use special characters that often, I am going to hold off on doing that since I am concerned that the change might break something else.

The other option is just to convert the special characters manually to HTML entities.  Of course, to do this, one would need a list of the characters and their corresponding Entity Names.  Fortunately, there are many pages out there with this information concisely captured and nicely formatted including:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp

and

http://www.cookwood.com/html/extras/entities.html

just for starters.  For a longer list, Google HTML Entities.

Unfortunately, there is what I consider to be a bug in WLW.  If I enter the HTML entities into WLW in the HTML Code View, then switch to any of the other views, when I switch back to the HTML Code View, the HTML entities are converted into their character equivalents, effectively overriding the HTML code that was entered.  The only way I have identified to work around this is to not switch back to a WYSIWYG view prior to publishing. Of course, if you have want to edit the entry at a later date, you will have to remember to switch to the HTML Code View prior to opening the entry, or the HTML will get munged.

One of the great values that Blogdom provides to me is that it serves as a repository for helpful tips and tricks that I have discovered along the way.  Unfortunately, my mind usually isn't sharp enough to remember the tip or trick, but fortunately, at least sometimes, it is sharp enough to remember that I had encountered the challenge previously, came up with a solution, and maybe even recorded the solution for posterity in a post.

Such was the case today.  I had received a Lotus Notes email at work with an animated GIF as an inline (or embedded) image.  To my knowledge, there is no easy way to save such an image from Notes as a GIF file - even saving it as a BMP is a bit of a challenge.  But, I figured I could forward the email to my personal email account, then extract the image from Outlook.  Ultimately, it turned out I was right, but I needed the trick captured in this post from 2004 to accomplish it.

For quite some time, I had noticed that the calendar didn't display "quite right."

The problem was with the shaded background on the right hand side - it wasn't even.

I finally got around to playing with the CSS template, and now have it looking "right," at least in Firefox and IE6.

It still doesn't display correctly in Safari or IE7.

I believe that the problem is related to the fact that both Safari and IE7 use a slightly larger font as the default, and the size of the shaded background is fixed.  At least in Safari, if I go to View, Make Text Smaller, the calendar displays properly.  My guess is that if I were to increase the size of the area just a bit more, I'd get closer to a solution - although it would be a brute force solution rather than an elegant solution, and then I'd be wasting space when displaying in Firefox for IE6.  Since my main browsers are Firefox and IE6, and no one else has complained, I think I'll consider this fix "good enough."

For those interested, the details of the CSS section in question are:

The main change was to adjust the width: from 120 to 180.  I also changed the right: from 5 to 1.

While I was at it, I made one other tweak. I modified the display when you hover the cursor over a date that has an entry in the calendar so that the reverse display unreverses.  This makes it more obvious than the old behavior that just changed the color of the underlying text from blue to greenish.

Here's the code:

PS. notice the sleazy way I am presenting the code snippets?  They are screen shots, rather than text.  Why?  Saves me from having to edit a bunch of characters to keep the browser from interpreting the code rather than just displaying it.

I just can't help myself...

It had always bugged me that when I am leafing through the monthly archives,  I had to scroll back to the top of the page to get to the navigator to be able to go to the next month.

Notice the operative word had in the sentence above.

One quick change to the "Date-Based Archive" template - which involved simply copying the navigation code at the top of the page and pasting it in at the bottom - and now I don't have to scroll back to the top to navigate.

When the Linux server was revived, one of the things that I didn't get working was the UPS signaling.  I kept getting a message that the getty was respawning too rapidly and I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so I just disabled the entry in /etc/inittab.

I decided to play with it a bit today, and I partially fixed it - at least it's back to functioning the way it used to, which wasn't quite right, but close enough.  The not quite right part is that if I call powstatd as part of the boot process (i.e. from /etc/rc.d/rc3.d) as soon as I log in, the sytem shuts down as if the UPS were sending a low battery signal.  However, if I run powstatd manually after logging in, it runs fine.  My guess is that this is a bug in powstatd, but I don't have the interest to install the latest version right now, and it really doesn't matter, since once the system shuts down if the battery goes low, I have to manually power it back on, so I just restart the UPS daemon after I do so.

As to the specifics of the problem, the initial symptom was that the console would generate the following message:

INIT: Id "S0" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

This appeared to be a problem with how the serial port was configured, so I tried a whole bunch of different settings for S0 in /etc/inittab with no luck.  I searched through /etc/gettydefs and tried calling different stanzas in /etc/inittab with no luck.

I thought maybe there was a problem with the physical port not reporting its UART correctly, so I tried running the setserial command with various parameters with no luck.

Somehow, it finally occurred to me to see if maybe the problem was that even though there is only one serial port on the back of the system, that it was configured as Com1 rather than Com0, and maybe I should change the line in /etc/inittab from:

S0:2345:respawn:/sbin/uugetty ttyS0 F38400

to

S1:2345:respawn:/sbin/uugetty ttyS1 F38400

That fixed the respawning message, but still didn't get the powstatd running correctly.

I did some more digging, and discovered that I also had to modify /etc/powstatd.conf from:

# Watch /dev/ttyS0
watch ttyS0

to

# Watch /dev/ttyS1
watch ttyS1

I still haven't fixed the locale error message when httpd starts, nor have I fixed Xwindows, but I am happy now that the UPS signaling is working again.

This makes the 1006th entry for Blogdom...

I flew right past 1000 while posting all of those pent up entries.

Whoda thunk?

So, I changed my mind...

I posted one old post (Dead Sleep) as a recent entry, then decided it made more sense to keep the chronological integrity of the entries, so I posted them using their original creation dates.

So, on the one hand, scrolling back through the archives will (mostly) correctly reflect the order that the entries were created in.  On the other hand, the fact that Blogdom was off-line for six months will not be quite as readily apparent.

I just installed Beta 2 of WLW...

I have a number of entries that I created in Windows Live Writer that never got posted since the server was dead and thus there was no where to post them to.

I had debated whether to post them using their original creation dates to keep the blog chronologically correct, but I've decided to just post them using the current date as I get around to it.

Maybe I'll get around to it this weekend.

It's been almost six months, but we're finally back up!

That title could (should?) also be viewed as advice...

I ended up purchasing a replacement motherboard on eBay.  It seemed a bit silly to purchase a six year old motherboard with a 400Mhz AMD K6-2 processor, but I didn't want to take a chance that there would be a problem with the OS loading.

I didn't count on one of the drives dying in the interim.

The good news was that I had a backup.  The bad news was that it was two years old.

Fortunately, the server had two drives - one for the system directories, and one for the two primary user directories.  The drive that died was the system drive.

So, I was able to get the system back up with the Mondo Rescue bootable backup CDs, then install the old "data" drive.

It took some tinkering to get things working - subtle things that drive you crazy like the fact that the backup's network configuration had a different default gateway than the router I now use.

One of these days I'll need to break down and buy a new server and build a new software environment from scratch, but, for the time being, we're back online!

Amazing what a change disabling the comments and trackbacks have made...

Since I made the change:

• There has not been one new comment or trackback spam posted to the blog.
• No nusiance emails in my inbox alterting me to comment or trackback spam
• Average utilization on the server is down to below 3%

And, unsurprisingly, not even one email asking me to post a comment that the reader couldn't enter directly.

They've totally won.

I've had all I can stands, and I can't stands no more!

Well over 99% of the comments and trackback pings posted are spam, and I'm tired of having to clean up the garbage every day, so I've removed the ability to create comments or trackbacks.  My guess is that the maybe three people who actually intentionally read this blog don't really care.  Even they didn't regularly leave comments,  and they need to email me more often to let me know how they're doing anyway.

To disable the features, I modified the comment and individual entry templates to remove the comment entry form.

I tried renaming the mt-comments.cgi and mt-tb.cgi files in the cgi directory on the server, but this caused all sorts of errors in the blog, so, since I don't have the time right now to figure out how to do it "right" I just changed the blacklist in MT-Blacklist to have an entry for each individual letter of the alphabet.  Since the blacklist is now MUCH shorter, I am hoping it reduces the load on the server.

If you desperately want to leave a comment, you can send an email to:

comments at blogdom dot org

replacing the at above with @ and the dot above with .

The bad guys continue to do bad things.

"They" have now started using my witsdom.com domain to forge the "from" address on spam e-mails they are sending.  This results in two major hassles:

1. My in-box gets filled with non-delivery notices because many of the addresses the spammers send to are invalid.  Even though the "from" address is not a valid user in my domain, because I am the administrator, I see them all.
2. As more and more spam goes out and gets caught by automated anti-spam agents or gets reported by users, the entire domain gets blocked by more and more mail servers.  Eventually, I'll no longer be able to receive valid email sent from valid senders because the servers will block the mail due to the domain being viewed as a spam initiator.

I have searched the Internet trying to find a way to overcome this challenge, but so far, I have come up with nothing.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Suggestions along the lines of: just give up and shut down your sites and domains and servers will also be seriously considered.

Sometimes, I really don't quite understand why I keep changing the structural elements of the blog.

Sometimes, I really don't quite understand why I keep writing new entries, but that's a different issue for another day.

Anyway, this idea of social bookmarking has me intrigued. So, I decided to add a couple of easy links for a couple of popular sites, digg and del.icio.us

It wasn't as hard as I had anticipated.  I created a new MT Template Module that contains the actual code to generate the links.  The key was to use the <$MTEntryPermalink$> and <$MTEntryTitle$> tags to construct the references.  I got put on the right track from an entry which gives specific examples for Movable Type on Dave Taylor's great site Ask Dave Taylor.

As an example, my code for digg is:

<!-- Start Digg -->
<img src="http://www.blogdom.org/images/digg.png" alt="Digg It!" /><a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>&title=<$MTEntryTitle$>" title="Digg It!" target="_blank">&nbsp; Digg It! &nbsp;</a>
<!-- end Digg-->

I then simply had to add calls to the new module in the entrybody module and the Individual Entry Archive module and then rebuild the site.

I'm still not super happy with the asthetics, but, it'll do for now.

I doubt I'll add any more, as I doubt I'll ever have an entry actually submitted to either, but, it was an interesting academic exercise.

The last two entries were old entries I had started, but never finished, much less posted.

I have four more waiting in the wings.

What I sometimes do when I don't have a lot of time is start an entry and outline it, with the intention of fleshing it out in the near future, and then getting it posted.

Of course, we know what they say about (g00d) intentions...

So, I learned a few new things today.

You know those challenge dialogs which ask you to look at a distored picture of numbers/letters, decipher them, and type them into a box, something that a human can do fairly easily, but is extremely difficult for a computer to do; typically as a method to prevent automated computer entries into a web page?

Well, those things are called a CAPTCHA, which is based on something called a Turing Test.

Well, doing a Google using CAPTCHA as the search phrase yields lots of hits.  While the top rated ones seem to be related to CAPTCHAs written for .asp or .net, if you hunt, you can find ones for perl or php.  Here is a link to a php script.

Doing a search using: captcha movable yields lots of hits including a nice implementation specifically for Movable Type written by James Seng called MT-Scode.  Its installation is a bit more involved, and requires the installation of a couple of additional modules on the web server.

MT-Scode Quick Links:
- Download latest mt-scode
- You need GD for this plugin to work
- You also need GD.pm

I also found the very interesting Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam which frowns on CAPTCHAs because of their negative effect on accessibility, but offers lots of good suggestions to managing/mitigating comment/trackback spam.

The big question is my mind is...

Do I implement a CAPTCHA, which would take quite a bit of time up front but which should allow me to re-enable the subscriptions and significantly reduce the time I spend removing spam, or do I just spend the few minutes a day with MT-Blacklist to delete the spam and rebuild the blog?

Considering that I've yet to have someone complain about the removal of the subscriptions - or the fact that they didn't work for so long, at least for the moment, I think I'll stick with the latter, but at least I've now documented an alternative, should I get inspired...

I continue to be vexed by spammers exploiting the Subscribe To Comments hack by ScriptyGoddess.  Apparently, someone has designed a robot which opens a specific entry, enters an email address, selects the "subscribe" radio button, then "clicks" the submit button, adding the email address to the subscription list.  Unfortunately, the existing Subscription hack does not integrate with MT-Blacklist, so even if the actual comment gets blocked, the subscription gets through.

As a bandaid, I have blocked an entire Class B IP address range from which the vast majority of the attacks have originated.

The ultimate solution would require upgrading to the current release of Movable Type or going back and unfixing sendmail on the server for the email spam doesn't get sent.

While I was poking around yesterday trying to solve the sendmail / spam issues, I realized that one of the other blogs I host had never had MT-Blacklist installed.  Turns out that part of my server utilization problem was the massive number of comment spams going through a separate instance of MT-Comments for that blog.  Since the primary author of that blog hasn't posted in almost two years, I just disabled MT-Comment as a bandaid.  Unfortunately, there are over 20,000 comment spams, and MT-Blacklist chokes when asked to perform a mass delete on anything much over 25 comments at a time.  It really bugs me to have that many comment spams feeding search engine rankings, but, I'm not willing to spend the time it would take to clear them out 25 at a pop.

SPAMMERS SUCK!

So, the good news was I got mail working on the server again.

The bad news?

Apparently, someone has come up with a new exploit which generates copious amounts of spam email.  I'm afraid quite a bit of spam went out before I figured out what was going on.

The exploit targets the Subscribe To Comments hack by ScriptyGoddess.

Apparently, some clever person figured out that they could directly access the emailtolist.php file which generates the email notification.  Somehow, they can use this even for posts which have comments turned off.

After I figured out what was happening, I changed the name of the file, and the references to it in the comment templates.  I believe the exploit is based on the specific file name, so I am hopeful that I can retain the functionality, without having it exploited again.

Arrg!

So, another vexing problem solved!...

For whatever reason, I've been more interested in working on the mechanics of the blog lately...

Today, I fixed a bug in my blog which has perplexed me for, literally, years...

I have continued to play with Windows Live Writer, and I must say, the more I use it, the more impressed I am.

The major new "feature" I discovered?

When you modify an entry which has already been saved and published, and then (re)publish it, WLW updates the entry in Movable Type.  With SharpMT, editing an entry and posting it results in a second entry being added to the blog.

I did also notice that the last entry did not have a Trackback link.  I don't know if that is because I reconfigured the default in MT to turn Trackback off - no one ever used the feature for anything other than spam - or if because it is another MT unique feature and therefore not supported by WLW.  I am going to set the Trackback in the Properties tab to "Allow" to see what happens with this post...

I am not putting SharpMT down - it still has a lot going for it, especially the full support of all of the unique features of Movable Type, but, I am impressed with WLW.  If only it supported Extended Entry...

I now have eleven lines in my .htaccess file...

I've decided to try a more brute force approach to stopping the worst of the spammers...

I accidently deleted two comments while clearing comment spam today...

It still tickles me when I get a new (legitimate) comment...

That last entry was number 900! I guess what I lack in frequency, I make up for in duration. I've always had a goal of 1000 entries in the back of my mind. At this rate, that goal will only take maybe five more years to get realized...

So, after my whining last night, I decided to take a break from work for a few hours today and play with the blog...

As if comment spam and trackback spam arent' enough, now they've hijacked (via spoofing) my domain...

I am so tired of removing comment and trackback spam...

I replaced one of the random Pearl of Wisdom section quotes with a new one...

So, now that I switched to BellSouth, my outgoing email on my server stopped working...

I just installed my new BellSouth FastAccess DSL with the 2WIRE Home Gateway...

This is my 800th entry in this blog...

I finally got around to upgrading MT-Blacklist...

You may have noticed that the blog has been down for a few days...

You may have noticed that Blogdom has been inaccessible for a few days...

You may have noticed that Blogdom has been inaccessible for a few days...

I had implemented this a while ago, but noticed it had stopped working...

While I was working on the Blogrolling challenge, I noticed another opportunity...

I ran across this tool at work today, and thought I'd give it a try.

It seems to have lots of nice features - especially related to formatting the text of the entry. Since it stores the entries locally, it might also be helpful for when I travel.

So far, the only thing I don't see is how I can make entries using the "read the rest..." format that I favor.

Definitely worth playing with a bit more...

Hmm... I just finished upgrading to MT 2.661 and everything still seems to work...

I added a recent comments section to the right side bar.

I was doing some e-mail cleanup directly on the Linux server, and realized that none of the comments that were being entered in Blogdom were getting automatically sent to me as they should have been...

The good news is that I got two new comments.

Woohoo! This is the 500th entry.

Wow! That last entry was number 600. I wouldn't even have noticed if Dennis hadn't have trackbacked to it (thanks Dennis). Funny, ieSpell doesn't think that "trackbacked" is a valid word - sheesh!

I added a photo gallery today...

Cool! Someone added a link to Blogdom from their blog. Check out http://www.serialpurrs.org/blog/. Thanks for the link Sara.

Jennifer gets the honor of having written the 100th comment. Cool!

I'd love to know the demographics of the people who rate my blog. I'd also love if they could leave a comment along with their rating.

Wow, I just noticed I've surpassed the 300 entry mark.

Well, I got MT 2.51 installed...

Okay, one more tweak. I modified the templates to include the no_spam MT directive. Now my e-mail address isn't quite so easy for spiders to snare from the entries.

Since commenter's e-mail addresses aren't displayed on the site, you're safe...

Ooh, a tweak to make the snippet more elegant. I just learned a new javascript tidbit - escape(variable). No more need for %20 instead of spaces!

I thought this article had some good tips...

I added WeatherPixie. Why? BTFOOM.

Wow. That was too easy.

It was bugging me that I kept having to use the mouse to select the first field of the form. A little Googling, and I had my answer.

I transplanted the wisdom code from Witsdom to here. Every refresh gets you a new pearl.

I made a little tweak to the listens modules this morning.

I rewrote the 'listens' functionality.

As a general rule, whenever possible, I try to set my off-site links to open in a new browser window.

I created another web ring this morning, and I really struggled with the question of if I should or not.

I have created a new WebRing called "Bloggers Over Forty." I searched all over, and I found a ring for just about every other niche, but none for this particular group, so I felt compelled to fix this oversight.

Should you care to join, there's a link in the WebRings section in the right column.

I decided that the color used to denote links on the site was a little too subtle - it was a little too difficult to distinguish between link text and normal text.

I decided to change the verbiage from "comments" to "tickles." Actually, I changed the code to display "tickle me" if there are no comments, "(1) tickle" if there is one and only one comment, and "(n) tickles" if there are > 1 comments where n equals the number of comments.

If you are interested in the php code, let me know and I'll post it.

Yes, I really am trying to focus on blogging for the sake of blogging, and feeling self-worth internally, rather than from external recognition. But...

Why two different site rating memberships?

I just wrote my first M-T hack! - sorta...

No, I haven't started my work yet...

But, I did add ScriptyGoddess' Subscribe to Comments script.

I didn't sleep well last night, and awakened very early this morning. Even after I completed my morning routine, the sun still had not arisen.

Really.

The little Rate Me on BlogHop.com! thingie on the bottom right...

I can log in and see how the site has been rated. Can't tell who, or what they had to say, but I can see the brutal numeric ratings.

When will the madness end?

Moved the entry body to a template, modified the main index and archive templates to include the body template, added the the javascript to the archive templates, and changed the config to use a php extension rather than an html extension for the archives so that all three now have a consistent look and feel.

I have got to stop reading the M-T support forums!

It was becoming too much of a pain to right column content because the index template had grown so large.

So, I created six new templates for the six major right column sections, moved each section's code to the appropriate template, and replaced the code in the index template with an MTinclude.

While I was at it, I created some new sections, moved some content around, and added a bunch of comments to the HTML.

Much better!

Blogdom has been unavailable most of the day because RoadRunner has been dead most of the day.

The good news is that although RoadRunner has brief outages from time to time, this is the first time I've endured an extended outage.

I added a count of all of the entries in each category in the categories archive links listing.

Yesterday, I added the category related stuff.

There was one little problem.

I guess I just can't leave well enough alone.

I added the category display for each entry, along with a category archive and links to the category archives.

It would have gone a lot faster if I would have completely read the documentation before starting the project.

What's that you say? RTFM? But that takes all of the fun out of it!

It really doesn't take much to brighten my spirits - a comment here, a guestmap entry there...

Thanks SandyP for brightening my spirits.

I would be most grateful if another MT user would post a trackback entry in her/his blog against this entry just so I can make sure that I set up the trackback function correctly.

Thanks in advance (I hope).

Well, I finally screwed up the courage to ask a question on the support forums. I did a couple of different searches (guess it would have been dumb to have done a couple of the same searches) and couldn't find an answer. Hopefully, it isn't a dumb repost, and hopefully, someone will have a quick and easy solution.

After I (hopefully) get an answer, I'll leave it as a comment for SandyP since she actually sparked the question.

I couldn't sleep.

So, I made some more changes.

Implemented the script fragment to only display the "show comments here" link if there are actually comments for the entry.

Of course this required me to change the extension on the index page from html to php.

I've spent most of the evening playing with the structure of the blog.

Thanks to PromoGuy and Scriptygoddess, and the MT User Manual, I've added the in-line show more / show less, the show comments here, permalink, and trackback. I also added PromoGuy's enhanced comment-email subject line hack.

Thanks again PromoGuy and Scriptygoddess.

That last gem was my 100th entry. Woohoo.

It takes so little to make my day...

Someone signed my guest map.

Thank you so much Dennis. You made my day.

Maybe I'm strange, well actually I know I am, but I actually do like to make a financial contribution when I find an application that I like that is written by a single author or "small shop."

I especially like to do this when the author gently asks, rather than demands...

I contributed to the author of ieSpell, and to the authors of M-T.

Aside from the good feeling it gave me, the M-T authors provide a "thank you" in addition to the nice e-mail they send - they provide a registration code that "pings" their site whenever you update your blog.

This then causes your blog to be listed on their "recently updated sites" list.

I've re-done Dealdom with Movable Type. I know that M-T is for personal not-commercial use, but I figure that since I have yet to make a penny from Dealdom, it's not really commercial...

It turned out to be quite an interesting project. I was able to find a base three column template on the B-T forums, but it didn't quite do everything I wanted. With some other tips from the forums, I was able to construct the templates just the way I wanted.

Since you're already reading this, why not take a moment to stick a pin in my guest map? <------ Just click the link. You could also click the box in the links section.

Woohoo! Dealdom finally got Googled. Not that I think it will drive any more visitors to the site, much less any more visitors that will use the links to make purchases, or to click on the CPM links. But, a small victory nonetheless.

I just love when I get comments. They are so appreciated.

This is actually my second try with Moveable Type. I had installed it, along with a number of other blogging applications week before last, but had aborted the project.

I had trouble getting Moveable Type to work, and I didn't really like the interface for Grey Matter. I tried a few other apps, but nothing really got my juices going.

One of the big issues with MT was that it didn't seem to want to work with IE 6. Every time I logged in, I would get dumped back to the login screen. I was working on something else yesterday, and ended up having a problem because the page wouldn't set a cookie. I took a look at the IE 6 security configuration, and discovered that MS had changed the default security settings, and that's why the page couldn't set the cookie. Well, that got me to thinking about the problems that I was having with MT, and sure enough, it was also a security/cookie issue.

I had a few other challenges getting MT installed - the program is great - but the installation documentation leaves a little to be desired. Anyway, I managed to finally get everything working, so, we'll see...