Category Archives: Administrative

Administrative

Off To Vallejo

16 Comments

Heading up north in an hour or so for the weekend. But there will be computers and bandwidth there.

[Thursday-morning update]

Got in late last night. It was a three-hour drive to get thirty miles, from Redondo Beach to Valencia. Smooth sailing after that, though. Don’t think we’ll do that again. And definitely not coming back Sunday night.

It’s a good reminder of what a mess it would be if there were some event that required evacuating the LA metro area. I think we need to keep a boat in the garage.

Administrative, Mathematics, Technology and Society

Computer Problems

4 Comments

I just put a new install of Fedora 20 (yes, I know it’s still beta) on a brand-new Western Digital 2T drive, and it boots into emergency mode. Here’s the final output of journalctl -xb:

[Update in the afternoon]

For anyone who’s interested, here is the output of of ‘journalctl -xb’ and here is dmesg.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Whoa! Now that I look through that enire output of journalctl, I see a lot of file system errors on the /home partition. Guess I’ll run e2fsck and see if that fixes it.

[Update a while later]

Welp, that was the problem. I ended up just doing a reinstall, and let Fedora decide how to partition. I’m not real happy with it, because I’m not sure that fifty gig is ultimately big enough for root and I don’t want to have to resize later, but at least it’s working now.

Continue reading Computer Problems →

Administrative, Technology and Society

New Server

2 Comments

This is the first post I’ve put up in a while, because I’ve basically been unable to post. Our theory is that I was running out of memory (the server for this blog, and all my other sites, only had four gig). So I’ve upgraded to one with sixteen. You won’t see this immediately, until the DNS servers pick up the new IP, but hopefully I’m back on the air.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Commenting Problem

7 Comments

A regular commenter writes:

I’ve been blocked from commenting on your site for weeks now. I’ve tried both IE and Chrome, and I get the same error message:

Your comment has been blocked because the blog owner has set their spam filter to not allow comments from users behind proxies.

If you are a regular commenter or you feel that your comment should not have been blocked, please contact the blog owner and ask them to modify this setting.

As far as I know I’m not behind a proxy, whatever that is. I use the same email addy and computer I’ve always used. If I’ve offended you somehow and you’ve blocked me, I would like the opportunity to apologize for the offense. If there’s a technical issue, I haven’t changed anything, but Win7 updates so many times, I wouldn’t know if it messed up my settings somehow.

As I told him, I have no idea why WordPress thinks that he’s behind a proxie, but I’m afraid that if I don’t block proxies I’ll be inundated with comment spam. I’m not sure how to allow his IP, because while I have a blacklist, I don’t think I have a white one. Any suggestions?

Administrative, Technology and Society

My Five-Year-Old Laptop

43 Comments

…has finally given up the ghost. It won’t boot, or even bring up a POST screen. It just lights up for a couple seconds and dies. I’ve been planning to replace it for a while, but now it’s urgent. I only use it to travel, and not for entertainment, so I don’t need a high-end machine. I’ve been toying with the idea of tablet/keyboard, but don’t know if it will meet my needs.

[Friday-afternoon update]

This look like a pretty good deal to me. Basically, a new version of what I had.