Category Archives: Administrative

Administrative

Off To The Land Of The Midnight Sun

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Well, OK, not that far — I’m unlikely to get further north than Poker Flats, but I am off to Anchorage. I’ll take a computer, but don’t know what connectivity will be like.

[Evening update from Anchorage]

OK, had a good flight. Flew right over Yosemite and the fire, but unfortunately, things got socked in north of the Oregon border, and only cleared up briefly around Graham Island. It’s kind of dreary here, weather wise, but beautiful. I had dinner (fresh-caught halibut) on the top floor of the Captain Cook Hotel, with a gorgeous view of the Inlet and mountains. More anon.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Light Posting

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I’ve been busy doing final editing on the book (it’s amazing the problems you see when you actually print a proof copy), and getting ready for a combination business/pleasure trip to Alaska (I leave tomorrow morning, and won’t be back until the evening of September 4th). But I’ve also had problems logging in to WordPress (it times out). It’s not a server problem — I can ssh into it, and the blog itself seems to load properly and people seem to be able to comment. I’ve heard that there are some brute-force password attacks occurring to WordPress logins, so that may be the problem. Anyway, I’ll put up a couple posts right now, because I seem to be able to (at least momentarily) get in.

Administrative, Technology and Society

The Share Buttons Problem

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I’ve disabled the plugin that puts the share buttons on the posts, so let’s see if that helps page loading. But I’ve also noticed that there’s an update to it, so it might be that if I install the new version, it will fix it as well.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I”ve installed the new version. Let me know if you’re still having problems with page loads.

[Update a while later]

OK, new version didn’t fix it, so I’ve deactivated again. It does seem to be Google that was slowing things down.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Linux Twitter Clients

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I’ve been having pretty bad luck finding one that works for multiple accounts. I installed Choqok a few days ago, and was pretty happy with it until it broke today. When I launch it, it immediately sucks up about half the CPU, but doesn’t actually start, and leaves a pretty picture in the middle of the screen, independent of what application I’m using. I have to kill it to shut it down. Googling around, I’ve found this to be an issue if you have a lot of unread tweets, but since I can’t functionally start it, there’s no way to read them and fix it.

So then I tried Qwit, which installed fine, and went to Twitter to authenticate my three accounts, and said they’d been approved. The only problem with it is that it doesn’t either display or send tweets for any of them. Other than that, it’s awesome.

I’ve also tried Gwibber, which runs fine, except when I go to the Edit/Accounts menu, it does nothing.

So I’m back to using two different browsers (Firefox and Midori) for two of my accounts, and not doing anything with the third one (which is my book account). I’d like to solve this before the book is available, though, which is likely to be next week.

[Thursday-morning update]

OK, the solution I’ve found that seems to be working pretty well is the Tweetdeck app for Google Chrome. There may be one for Firefox, too, but I’ll stick with Chrome as long as it doesn’t act up.

[Bumped]

Administrative, Popular Culture, Technology and Society

Light And Scattered Posting

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I have a niece and nephew visiting from Michigan. We went out whale watching today from Dana Point (saw at least two blue whales and a mother and calf fin whale, and hundreds of common long-nose dolphin). Then Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. Tomorrow, it’s California Adventure in Anaheim (where I’ve never been).

[Tuesday-morning update]

It was a long day, but we had a good time. Advice in the comments about getting there early for the Cars Racers is right — they were sold out of Fast Pass, and the wait was in the two-hour range for the bulk of the day. But we saw everything else (that we wanted to Bugs — the insects, not the Bunny, which is a different cartoon franchise– World was worth a miss unless you had little kids), and toward the end of the day, we went in the singles line, and only waited twenty-five minutes. Since the car seating is three and three, it’s not that big a deal to split up the party anyway, and it actually gave the kids an opportunity to race each other instead of being in the same car.

My overall verdict: like an alternate-universe Disneyland, with more California flavor (the restaurant we ate at had vineyards leading up to it), and with more modern, as opposed to classic characters. Disneyland has Cinderella’s Castle, CA has the Mermaid. Disneyland has Thunder Mountain, CA has Grizzly Rapids. Disneyland has Frontierland and Tom Sawyer’s Island, CA has the Redwood hiking/rope trail. I’m not a roller coaster connoisseur, but California Screamin’ seemed to pull some good gees, particularly backward at the launch. And I have to say that the World of Color light/water/flaming-gas-jets show was pretty spectacular. I was impressed by the power of the pumps that could generate eighty feet of head, and the precision and control over the valves. I’d never seen lasers painting on mist before. No one, including Disney, could have done this twenty years ago, I think, without modern computer technology. And we got a bonus of watching the early fireworks display across the way at Disneyland. So definitely worth a do once.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Data Disaster

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OK, it’s not a total data disaster, but basically, it potentially means the loss of almost all my outgoing email for the past three years or so.

When I migrated to Fedora 19 over the weekend, I did it on a new disk, retaining the old installation on the old one. After I did so, I copied my old files over to the new disk from it. Unfortunately, rather than doing it from the shell with a ‘cp -r *’ I just used the GUI tool to drag’n’drop. Which means that I didn’t get the hidden files. Which contain all of my Thunderbird folders. I still have all incoming mail, because I’m using IMAP, but the outgoing was in those folders.

It shouldn’t have been a problem, but when I went back to grab the rest, I’m getting an error message that the drive can’t be mounted, and warnings that the drive is failing. Is the data still recoverable? And if so, by me, or do I have to take it to a specialist?