Category Archives: Administrative

Firefox Question

I like the new version 1.5 overall (particularly the feature that opens a new window when I click on a URL in Eudora, instead of changing the last window viewed, which was what it did before, and the ability to move tabs), but one thing drives me crazy about it (as it did in previous versions).

When I download a file from a site, it automatically puts it on my desktop. It doesn’t offer any other options. I think I can go in and change the default to some other location, but I don’t want a single default location–I want to specify at the time of download where I want it to go. Does anyone know if this is possible, and that there’s something I’m missing?

Out Of Town

We spent the night down in Coconut Grove to go to her office Christmas party, then had a late breakfast on Key Biscayne, and took a leisurely drive back up to Boca Raton on A1A, all the way from South Beach, and just got back. Work things are heating up as well, so blogging might be light.

Trouble Commenting?

Me, too.

For some reason, the blacklist was not allowing anyone to comment, because it thought that they were commenting too many times in too short a period of time, even if it was only one comment.

I’ve bypassed that section of the code for now–I don’t have time to figure out why it was screwing up.

Blogspot Problem Update

In my previous post, someone pointed out that I should flag the offending blogs. I hadn’t previously been aware of this feature. But here’s the interesting thing.

The blogs that are doing this (at least the few I’ve looked at) have no flag. Somehow, they’ve come up with a way to disable it. And it seems to me that that could be their undoing. Now all that Blogspot has to do is autosearches of all their blogs and see which ones’ flags are disabled, and zap them.

Am I missing something here?

I may reenable blogspot comments later today, just to see if they’ve given up on me yet, but I hope that the folks are Blogspot are working this problem. I’m dismayed that I’ve not received a single response to several emails to their abuse address.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, what I’m missing here is that there’s no requirement to have a flag, and only the blogs that are using some variant on the out-of-the-box template seem to have them. For example, Arcturus doesn’t have one. So I guess that won’t work. I knew it was too easy to be true.

But that answers the question about flagging them…

I also note that when one goes to www.blogspot.com, there’s no obvious place to report abuse, so if they don’t respond to emails to abuse@blogspot.com, I’ve no idea how to report these things.

Once again, I recommend that serious bloggers get off of Blogspot.

[Update about 10:15 AM EST]

I’ve reenabled blogspot to comment and ping, and so far, so good. It may be that after I shut them down yesterday, they’ve gone off to greener pastures.

Network Problems

Ever since the hurricane, my phone and DSL lines have been flaky.

Surprisingly, the DSL has been more reliable than voice (as I type this, I have no dial tone (whooops…) take that back, I have dial tone with static, but I’m confident that based on tonight’s experience, I will soon, once again, have no dial tone.

The internet comes on and off as well, sometimes with a bright red traffic signal on the DSL modem, and other times simply not working. Sometimes it comes back with no prompting, others I have to log into the router and manually reconnect.

This is all a long way of saying that life is frustrating as hell right now, and that if I’m not posting, you’ll know why. Bellsouth guaranfrickingtees me that they’ll have it fixed next Tuesday…

Under Attack

Sorry, Blogspotters, but for now I’m going to have to ban any URL from blogspot.com, until they can get the spam situation under control. I’ve gotten dozens of comment spams today from various blogspot sites advertising poker, car rentals, golf equipment, etc. I’ve notified blogspot, and forwarded them the spam for each suspect subdomain, but have received no response from them. I don’t have time to fend off these attacks, which come from different IPs each time.

If I were a Blogspot user, I’d be pressuring them to do something about these spam sites, because it’s only going to punish the legitimate users as more of us are forced to take the same drastic action that I have today.

[Update at 3:30 PM EST]

This is going to be a tough problem for them to solve. The deal is that these scumbags are going in, setting up a blogspot blog with a bunch of nonsense text full of keywords, and the link to the real spammer site. I looked at a couple of the ones that hit me today, and they’d been set up today, with a single blog post. Once set up, they obviously go out and start spamming blogs like mine.

I don’t know how it would be possible for blogspot to do anything about these cretins preemptively, except to institute more stringent registration procedures.

Windows Update Problems

And please, no advice to get a Mac. It’s not helpful, and some of my clients require that I have a Windows machine.

I don’t seem to be able to update. When I look through my update history, in fact, I can see a large number of failed updates, going back a year or two. There are no instructions as to what to do about this at the Windows update site. Also, I’m getting a message that I have ActiveX disabled, so that the Windows Update site can’t “display” properly. How did I do this, and how do I undo it? Or should I? Is that causing my problems?

[Update a few minutes later]

I should note that in my IE Security Options, the only thing disabled for ActiveX is downloading unsigned objects. Surely that can’t be the problem on a Microsoft website? I should also add that the specific thing that it’s trying and failing to install (at least for now) is Microsoft Installer 3.1 (something that another web site told me that I had to uninstall in order to avoid a different error message).

[Update about 6 PM EST]

FWIW, I just downloaded and ran Microsoft’s beta version of their new anti-spyware software, and it found no problems…

[Saturday morning update]

Oops, spoke too soon. Overnight it did discover MyDoom and Netsky on the machine. I’ve removed them, but I still can’t do the update.

[Saturday afternoon update]

Well, I never really figured out why it won’t do updates, but I spent a couple hours doing manual updates for about a year’s worth of security upgrades, and all seemed to go well, except for one, called “.NET Framework 1.1” for which it wants to install a service pack. Unfortunately, it’s a catch-22ish sort of thing, because whenever I try to install the thing, it tells me that I have to have .NET Framework 1.1 installed. When I try to install that, it bombs out.

So I don’t know if this is a problem or not, but it’s the only thing that Microsoft wants to upgrade that can’t be now.