Category Archives: Administrative

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

SoCal Verizon

10 Comments

Anyone else having slow connection problems? I’m dropping packets, and some sites (e.g., National Review) are timing out. I’ve also had to reboot my modem a couple times today (I’m on FIOS). There’s a half-hour wait time for help on chat.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here is the chat session so far:

Chat Subject:Slow Throughput
Your Question:Slow connection.
A Verizon Service Representative will be with you shortly. Thank you. (17:37:58)
Agent Kapil has joined. (17:38:13)
Kapil : Chat ID for this session is 08291149279. (17:38:13)
Me (17:38:24): Dropping packets, have to repeatedly reboot modem.
Kapil(17:38:29): Thank you for contacting Verizon HSI Technical Support. My name is Kapil and I am the technical support analyst assigned to help you. Please stay online for a few moments while I review the information generated by your trouble ticket.
Kapil(17:39:05): As you are having a FIOS account. Please stay online with me while I connect you to our FIOS department.
This session is being transferred. (17:39:15)
17:54:53 Estimated wait time is 5 mins 15 secs. We apologize for the delay. You are 22 nd in the queue.
Me (17:39:55): 36m wait time? That tells me I’m not the only one…
Me (17:46:33): OK, time is jumping around.
Me (17:51:39): OK, now what how much time?
Me (17:52:27): If there are still 21 ahead of me in the queue, it’s hard to see how it will only be three and a half minutes.
Me (17:54:19): Hello?
Me (17:54:24): I have a life.
Me (17:54:53): Now the time is back up to five minutes. No, six. This is ridiculous.
Me (17:57:01): OK, now it’s back to 21 minutes.
Me (17:57:37): If I were just working, I might keep an eye on this, but I have to make dinner.
Me (17:59:06): This is pointless. I have no idea how long it will be until I get help. Closing this effing chat window, so I can get back to life.

Administrative, Technology and Society

My Office Is Broken

52 Comments

Open Office, that is, on Fedora 14. I click on a document to open it, or try opening from the menu, and it says “starting open office,” spins an icon for a few seconds, and then nothing. I tried removing and reinstalling, and no change. I recently did an update on my Nvidia drivers, which included a new kernel. I of course had to reboot (something I am always loathe to do). I think that’s when the problem started. Any ideas out there? This is really an emergency. If I can’t get it fixed, I may have to do a lot of my writing on a different machine, maybe even a Microsoft one, and one not in my office.

Administrative, Technology and Society, Weird

Web Server Bleg

35 Comments

Geek Alert for this post.

I’m running a web server app on my computer, which I can address by http://localhost:8080/webapp, where “webapp” is the app.

It works fine, but in theory, I should be able to access it from another machine on the network via http://localhostIP:8080/webapp, where “localhostIP” is the IP address of my machine, but I can’t. It just times out.

I’ve even installed Apache on the machine, and I’ve set up a reverse proxy in the Apache config file per the following:


ProxyRequests On


Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 192.168

#Set up reverse proxy for Webapp server

ProxyPass /webapp/ http://localhost:8080/webapp/
ProxyPassReverse /webapp/ http://localhost:8080/webapp/
ProxyPreserveHost On

Again, where “webapp” is the actual webserver that I’m trying to access remotely.

When I try to access this from either a remote, or my local machine, by http://localhostIP/webapp, I get the message: “The requested URL /webapp was not found on this server.”

Any Apache gurus who can tell me what the problem might be? I’ve opened up firewall to both http and https.

[Update Friday morning]

Problem solved. As noted in comments, it was a combination of allowed ports and SELinux.

Administrative

Twit

8 Comments

I just noticed that I have almost thirty followers on Twitter, even though I have only tweeted once since joining a couple years ago. I was feeling a little guilty, so I’ve set up my RSS at the blog to feed it. I may or may not start actually manually tweeting in the future, but at least there’s some content there now.

Administrative

Light Posting

32 Comments

Conference is over, and Patricia and I are driving down the coast highway. We’ll be stopping in Cambria tonight, and then back to LA tomorrow. I might keep an eye on things with my phone, but I won’t be posting much, if at all. Be good in comments.

Administrative, Space

Off The Air

12 Comments

I’m heading off to drive up to the space conference in Mountain View, and will arrive some time this evening. Be good in the comments sections.

[Late evening update]

Had a good drive up, except for getting stuck in a traffic jam for an hour just east of Gilroy. Got a good whiff of garlic, though.

Back on line tomorrow morning from the conference. Lori Garver is the headliner.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Google+ Bleg

1 Comment

I’ve done some amount of searching, and I can’t figure out whether it’s possible to automatically feed the RSS from my blog to my stream, and if so, how to do it. I see lots of instructions as to how to follow streams in an RSS reader, but not the other direction. Anyone know? I currently do this on my FB wall (I never manually post anything on FB, other than comments to others’ posts), so if Google doesn’t offer the capability, they need to catch up.

[Update a few minutes later]

Someone asked a similar question in the forum on Tuesday, with no replies yet.