GridStat

Are you looking for the Gridstat grid.org statistics graphics generator?

It is offline at the moment while I resolve hosting for it. If this is something you value, please leave a message here, and I will expedite it.

Firefox Proxy – Yahoo.com

I have firefox configured to use my proxy server. I do this using Foxyproxy.

I have just discovered that if my proxy server is out of commisssion, Firefox attempts to make a connection to yahoo.com on port 65535.

Now why would this be?

Technocrati

Technorati Profile

Zencore Takedown II

An interesting sequence of events – and the moral of the story (always best up front) is: If you use a DNS host, do not use one of the domains they host for you for the email address you register with.

I use 123-reg.co.uk, who are based in the UK. I am in Australia. My website is hosted in Florida I think. So cogent in Florida got their routing mixed up and the IP address my sites are on went dark. Cogent apparently were going to take their time fixing the problem, so my web hosts gave the servers a new address.

So all I need to do is repoint my dns at the new address and viola. So I go to log into 123-reg, and hmmm… what is the password?

No problem, I forget every time, and all that needs to happen is I go through the lost password routine and they reset it and email it to me. I probably had the old one in an old email somewhere, but it was on another machine.

I realised my blunder as I clicked submit. Because now they have changed the password from something I had recorded somewhere, to a new random password and they have emailed it to my domain. The one that is broken.

Damn. Ok, so now I have to leave them a support call. The half a quid a minute phone line is out, as it cannot be called internationally. So I use the webform.

Days pass. Nothing happens.

Damn… try the fax number! Nope. Nothing happens.

Email has been down for several days now. So time to get creative. First I try skyping the 0900 number – perhaps skype can break out to pstn locally, so it isn’t an international call. But no – barred.

So 123reg is a part of pipex, so I call one of the other pipex companies. Lots of hold music later, I get a guy who cannot help, but gives me the number for “123reg” that can be dialled internationally.

Of course it isn’t really, it is another pipex company that still isn’t 123reg. Their tech people tell me the only support provided to international customers is via email. I explain that I have already sent an email and got no response, so actually, there isn’t any email support to speak of. And then I point out I sent a fax too.

He repeatedly tells me there is nothing he can do – even though when asked said he had a number for 123reg, but couldn’t give it to me.

He said try customer support. Fine. Whatever.

With customer support things got better. The woman tried to divert me a couple of times, but I stood my ground, and finally she capitulated and put an email together to 123reg. She took all my details, and I had the new password minutes later.

I am finding it amusing in hindsight that the best way to get responsive support from 123-reg is to actually phone a different company entirely.

Screen Screen

Continuing my enthusism for screen, the terminal multiplexer (on most linux dists), I found the

following post in response to another post about the wonders of screen.

Basically, some tips for using screen within screen – which comes in handy when you want to kick something off but still have a terminal session attached to it – and you already have a screen session in play.

The deal is that the “outermost” screen hears the Ctrl-a sequence and responds to it.. so detaching from inside the second screen sessions detaches the first (you’ll understand when you start using it)…

For anyone that dislikes C-a as the command key (e.g. emacss or bash users) one of the two following keys may be convenient. Put one of these lines in a file called ~/.screenrc:

#to use C-] as the command key
escape ^]\
or

#to use C-\ as the command key
escape ^\\
it’s useful to use different escape sequences on different machines so that ssh’ing from one to the other and running screen within screen doesn’t cause an aneurism.

another useful customization is to show the current screens at the bottom of the page:

hardstatus alwayslastline ” ] H]{= Bw} %w %=”

notice that that has a ] as the first character; this helps me remember which escape key I’m using at the moment. On a machine with C-\ as the escape key, it should be:

hardstatus alwayslastline ” \ H]{= Bw} %w %=”

Blacklander at Dilbert.blog

Scott Adam’s blog is good reading at any time. But this post wasn’t even by him. Scott recently caused a new wave of commenting in response to his recent post and follow-up where he considers the effort required to fear all the things that we are required to these days.

Some serious discussion came out of this, along with the usual Bush-banging and Bush-loving nonsense. But out of it all came a comment that Scott thought so well of that he promoted to a post.

Blacklander offers incisive thoughts about the reality of the “us” and “them” rhetoric we hear every day, from the perspective of “them”.

Cliffskis Mumblings…: Kudos Video Trailer

Oooh, excellent, Cliffski has posted a google video of his latest masterpiece, and it is looking good:

Cliffskis Mumblings…: Kudos Video Trailer

Check out other Positech titles here: Positech Games

Cliffskis Mumblings…: Kudos Video Trailer

Oooh, excellent, Cliffski has posted a google video of his latest masterpiece, and it is looking good:

Cliffskis Mumblings…: Kudos Video Trailer

Check out other Positech titles here: Positech Games

Dark Ages

With Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Inflation, I can’t help but think that in 50 years or so that cosmologists and physicists are going to snigger a bit about the lengths we would go to to protect a deep belief in relativity.

Perhaps a few years more than fifty, as doctrine often takes a long old while to shake off.

So you start with the axim that relativity is right – and absolute. Then find a bunch of observations that say that it doesn’t seem to fit the whole picture… then rather than look for ways to refine it, start inventing undetectable stuff that makes it all hang together just like Einstein says.

Inflation – the universe looks the same in all directions. So what? Well the universe is too big for light to have traversed it in the time available considering how old it is. So there hasn’t been time for all the everything to even out like that.

Dark energy and matter were invented to cater for the fact that there isn’t enough gravity to hold galaxies together.

Of course there is no conceivable explanation for inflation, or for what dark energy and matter might be.

So if it was me, I would be saying “yes I know that relativity is excellent and all, but it doesn’t work at small scales or high energies so should we seriously be focusing so much time and effort trying to make the universe fit to it (when quite frankly, it doesn’t give a damn), instead of trying to find a theory that better matches observation? A theory being something testable remember?”

Making the command line more commanding

Nircmd is a great little utility for making the Windows command line just that little bit more useful.

nircmd will let you manipulate many aspects of what is going on in your windows session, such as closing, minimising and restoring windows (even by class), stop/starting services, turning off the monitor, shutting down, even making windows varying levels of transparent.

This greatly enhances what you can accomplish with batch files without having to resort to vb or other scripting languages.