Category Archives: General

Administrative, General, Technology and Society

Is There A .htaccess Doctor In The House?

11 Comments

I just tried logging into one of my sites that I’ve password protected, and I stupidly used the wrong password multiple times. Now when I go to the site, I don’t get a username/password box. Instead, I just get a 403 error. Does the server somehow keep track of failed logins from a given IP and block it? If so, how do I fix it?

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, more clues. When I attempt to log in from my laptop, I get a username/password box, but when I correctly type in username/password, I get the same 403 error. This tells me there’s something going on with the server. Right?

One other bit of info. I can log in to other sites that use the same username/password, just not this one. Is it an Apache issue? If so, I’ll have to talk to support at my host. I don’t understand that, though, because it’s just for this one directory. It seems like a .htaccess problem, but I didn’t know that it would block an IP after a failed attempt, and I can’t find any info about how to unblock it.

[Wednesday morning update]

Well, it let me in this morning, so it must have had a time limit on the lock.

General

Finally

9 Comments

It’s raining.

This is the first serious rain we’ve had in months. If you only looked at the freeway medians in south Florida, you’d think you were in Arizona. I have brown patches on my lawn where the irrigation is inadequate, even though we water on the days prescribed by the local fluid commissars. I think we’ve gotten an inch so far, with more forecast for the next day or so.

I hear about people who move to the Pacific northwest and get depressed at days of endless clouds and rain. I’m the opposite. In California, near the beach, it would often be cool and foggy all day (with sunshine just a mile or so to the east) and I loved it. Down here in the sunshine state, I tend to go into a funk at the prospect of yet another depressing day of Sol unhindered. Even though it’s not particularly cold, I think I’ll make a pot of soup and revel.

[Update a while later]

Wow, it’s really coming down. This is where the expression comes from, “when it rains, it pours.” Unfortunately, it will quickly saturate and then run off into the canals and ocean. And looking at the radar, the bulk of the activity is offshore, giving water to the fish, who probably don’t notice much. It would be better if this was happening over the lake.

General, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

“There’s Nothing Special About Britain”

32 Comments

I guess this is the kind of smarter diplomacy, and “reengaging with the world” that we were promised in the campaign. Of course, we were promised a lot of things in the campaign.

[Update Sunday night]

More smart diplomacy, with Russia.

[Monday morning update]

Gee, just what we want in an American Secretary of State:

Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering was effusive in his praise, saying that with the new administration, the United States and Europe once again “share the same values.”

“What you said mostly could have been said by a European,” he told Clinton after she fielded questions ranging from climate change to energy security and aid to Africa and one on gay rights from a participant wearing an “I love Hillary” t-shirt.

I suspect that, even more than is usually the case, she’s going to represent the world to America, rather than the other way around.

[Bumped]

[Monday afternoon update]

Gift-giving advice from Barack Obama:

With my busy schedule of entertaining foreign dignitaries and celebrities at the White House, I know how important a well chosen gift can be. Two weeks ago, for example, we received a visit from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister brought a few housewarming gag gifts including a pen set made from a boat, a framed paper thing from another boat, and some old books by Churchill (not Ward, but that English guy). Obviously we wanted to return the nice gesture so I sent my interns out on a scavenger hunt for an appropriate present. They couldn’t find anything in the West Wing, but luckily Costco was open and was running a 25-for-the-price-of-10 clearance sale in the DVD department. You should have seen Mr. Brown light up when he opened that sack of classic titles like “Wizard of Oz” and “Baby Geniuses 2.” I like to think those DVDs helped cement our Anglo-American “special relationship” even if, as he mentioned to me, they probably wouldn’t work in his European player. Thinking quickly, I told the PM I would send him an American DVD player as soon as I earned enough cash-back points on my Costco card. Crisis averted, but that episode taught me a valuable lesson: always keep a stock of gifts handy in case some foreign poobah or supreme religious figure or failing industry pops by for coffee. As a result, I make sure the Oval Office closet is filled with pre-wrapped Sham-Wows and Snuggle blankets and trillion dollar bailout packages for whatever emergency might arise.

Why not? It makes as much sense as taking market advice from someone who doesn’t know what a P/E ratio is.

[Update late afternoon]

Here’s a completely plausible thesis on why the Obama administration dissed the UK:

The alliance that Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt crafted to win World War Two was more than just good strategy. They forged it in order to assert and defend an ideal which had fallen on hard times in the dark days of 1941, that of individual human liberty.

Originally born in Britain, this common ideal holds that human beings have a God-given natural right to arrange their lives as they see fit without interference from any authority, whether pope or king or government bureaucrat. The belief has always been America’s most precious historical legacy, and the rock on which our friendship with Great Britain is built.

It was that ideal which the Founding Fathers inherited from Britain, expressed as the rights of freeborn Englishmen. Our founders fought and nearly lost a war of independence against the British crown, and devised their own Constitution, to preserve the same ideal.

… Perhaps the president simply believes some other nation should replace Britain as our closest friend. (For a while, the Clinton administration meant to put Germany ahead of the UK.) Or perhaps Obama has a different view of the special relationship – one held by the likes of his onetime mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

These critics don’t see a legacy of freedom going back to Magna Carta. They see a historical procession of self-serving white males. And Churchill is not the man who singlehandedly stood up against Hitler and who warned us all about the Soviet Union’s iron curtain, but a white supremacist.

In this view (which also sees an America steeped in racism, colonialism and greed, rather than a nation dedicated to the proposition of liberty under law), there is no need to preserve any precious British-born legacy.

Including that fuddy-duddy English common law, and particularly contract law. After all, dead white guys came up with it. And that Churchill guy was on the wrong side in Kenya.

I wonder if Barack and Michelle Obama know who it was who freed the slaves? And who it was who originally sold them into slavery? I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of actual historical knowledge from either of them.

General, Mathematics

OK, Now An Open Office Problem

8 Comments

So, I’m trying to import my Perl-generated file as a CSV into Open Office. Apparently, if the data coming into a cell is of the form “D.D.D” where “Ds” are digits, it obviously and absolutely must be a date, and it converts the incoming cell to that format.

Well, no. I wanted it to be (for example) literally “1.3.5.” Really. No kidding. It’s not 01/03/05. But it won’t let me do it.

I don’t want to have to manually go in and change the format for each cell where this happens, and even if I did, there’s no obvious way to do it and retain the original info without manually retyping the number with a single quote in front. Is there an Open Office guru out there?

BTW, I really appreciate the help with the Perl problem. It was invaluable (which means, it was very useful, but I don’t know how to pay for it, or what it was worth to those providing it).

General, Mathematics

Perl Problem

28 Comments

I’m going crazy with a script. Here’s the code:

$parent = @line_elements[8];
$lower_req = @line_elements[1];
print DEBUG “BEGIN \$lower_req is $lower_req, \$parent is $parent, \$req_num is $req_num.\n”;
if ($req_num eq $parent) {
print DEBUG “\$req_num is $req_num, \$parent is $parent, got a match!\n”;
}

And here’s the output:

BEGIN $lower_req is “2.1.1”, $parent is “1.1”
, $req_num is “1.1”.
BEGIN $lower_req is “2.1.2”, $parent is “1.1”
, $req_num is “1.1”.
BEGIN $lower_req is “2.1.3”, $parent is “1.1”
, $req_num is “1.1”.
BEGIN $lower_req is “2.1.4”, $parent is “1.1”
, $req_num is “1.1”.
BEGIN $lower_req is “2.1.5”, $parent is “1.1”
, $req_num is “1.1”.

Note that in each case, that $req_num is equal to $parent, and the line should be repeated with the statement that a match was found. Can another pair of eyes tell me why it’s not?