I Am Completely Serious

In Wordpress? Never use the automatic upgrader for plugins. It broke my whole installation today, and I spent two hours today putting it back together.

(Edit several hours later: Actually, the LiveJournal crossposter’s still broken. Additionally I hate everything, including you.)

* Definitely still in beta.

* The scroll-bar thingie on my touchpad scrolls down, but not up. (I assume this is at least partly because of some problem with my computer itself, since I’ve had similar issues on a few other applications, but those were all either kinda-crappy-open-source-projects or Second Life.)

* YouTube videos crash sometimes. What? Why? Don’t you guys, I mean, own YouTube? Some of Chrome’s documentation is hosted on YouTube.

* Sometimes there are artifacts left on screen after I select and then deselect something.

* The search-within-a-page-thing is apparently only accessible through a menu in the upper right. It doesn’t look like you can set it up to start searching whenever you start typing, a technique I use constantly in Firefox.

* Wordpress interface looks a little weird - there’s something resembling a “resize-here” point stuck into the bottom left of my text box.

* It’s pretty; the import from Firefox was smooth; address bar recommendations are thus far rarely confusing/irritating; I haven’t managed to make it crash yet; and double-clicking within a paragraph selects the whole thing, which is good (though sometimes the selection areas are shaped funny). And I like that the status bar only pops up when you mouseover a link, since checking URLs is all I do with it. This might cause problems for those 90’s-awesome websites that use Javascript to put Sylvia Plath poetry and stuff down there (though I haven’t yet searched one out to check).

* Not about Chrome specifically, but seriously, people - what is this thing with browser spellcheckers not recognizing stuff like “spellchecker,” “touchpad,” “Javascript,” “href” and “deselect?” Are these terms’ applications for “real” status still pending? It’s not like there’s some federal word review board that’ll get on you for including common non-OED words and HTML tags in the damn spellchecker.

* Edit: Ha! I made it crash immediately after posting this! I tried to disable the SnapShots mouseover boxes on LiveJournal, and it crashed so hard Vista wouldn’t let it use its recovery thing.

In short:

It’s not possible to either transfer or cancel a domain registered this way without making your personal information public. Yahoo’s description of the service is dishonest about this.

At length:

Continue reading “Why Yahoo Private Domain Registration Is Not Private”

WordPress doesn’t delete comments you mark as spam - they remain in the database to help train the spam catcher. If you accidentally mark a real comment as spam (or, perchance, a whole page of them), and you have access to phpMyAdmin, you can get it back pretty easily.

Standard disclaimers: This is for WordPress 2.5.1 - I don’t know if the database is organized in exactly this way in all previous versions, or whether they’re going to change it in later versions. Don’t do anything big with this without backing up your database, and don’t do it at all if the idea of messing around with MySQL by yourself scares you. I suspect there are plugins that’ll help you with comment recovery out there - go look for one if you’re worried you’ll mess something up. (But back up your database anyway. No, seriously. There’s a plugin for that.)

Continue reading “How to Retrieve WordPress Comments Accidentally Marked As Spam”

I took someone else’s perfectly respectable-looking theme and covered it with pictures of Sechs. I think I’m now incapable of identifying my website as my own if it doesn’t have a grumpy Sechs picture on it. Oliver Sacks will write a case study on this phenomenon.

NearlyFreeSpeech.net does not get along well with a brand-new Wordpress installation. The Wordpress installation will do stuff like this:

Continue reading “How to Get Wordpress Working Under PHP safe_mode on NearlyFreeSpeech.net”

I believe it indicates some sort of vital flaw in my character that, when my technical problem disappeared immediately after I finally emailed my host asking what was going on, I was annoyed rather than relieved.

This is what I do with a four-day weekend.

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World of Warcraft Registration Error 202

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Apparently, when you try to upgrade World of Warcraft from a trial to a normal registration using the “Upgrade Online Now” button (possibly also when entering an authentication key), while,

1) using an IP that maps to somewhere far away from the billing address you’re using (say, if your IP says you’re in Japan and your billing address is in Kentucky)

or

2) not on one of the continents supported by the version of WoW you’re trying to set up (say, if you’re in Japan and trying to set up the North American version, or in the US and trying to set up the Taiwanese version)

you’ll get an error message saying “Error 202: We were unable to process your request with the information provided. Please contact our Billing and Account Services team for assistance - (800-592-5499).”

I post this here because if you contact Blizzard about it, you will get an unhelpful form email that doesn’t explain the problem, because their system got creaky and ended up giving this error to lots of non geographically-unconventional people when Burning Crusade came out and their servers couldn’t handle it.

You could theoretically get around this by using a proxy located in the appropriate country. However, there is a problem with this proposition.

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Free Proxies: They Are Probably Not Really Safe

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When someone wants to access something through a proxy, they generally google something like “free proxy” or “web-based proxy,” go to a list like this one, and pick a proxy at random.

This is a short guide written by a middle- or high-schooler explaining how he set up a web-based proxy to steal his classmate’s passwords*, using a piece of free GNU software called PHProxy and a shared hosting account.

I’m pretty sure the kid’s not the only person, or the most technically advanced one, who’s thought to do something like this. Nor do I see any reason to believe that the people running those big proxy directory pages run background checks on the maintainers of every single proxy they list.

(When you’re talking secure connections - the kind over which one generally sends credit card information - I’m not sure at what point the encryption goes into effect (ie, whether or not it’s encrypted before it hits the proxy and only unencrypted after it comes out the other side), but the proposition seems iffy enough that I don’t really feel comfortable attempting it myself.)

If you want a web-based proxy to use at school/work/etc., probably the absolute safest thing to do here is to set up PHProxy or CGI Proxy on your own webspace. Making one of these do SSL right is my new project.

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* How this works: The kid’s school, like many, uses filtering software to keep the kids from playing on MySpace or whatever. One can bypass these filters by using a proxy. The kids will generally find these proxies using one of those huge lists I mentioned above. However, the companies that run the filtering services also look at these lists, and go around blocking the proxies on them as quickly as they find them.

The way out of this arms race is a private proxy not listed on any of these sites and only used by a few people, so that the filtering company never knows to block it. So, Villainous Kid gives all his friends/enemies the address to his private proxy, and off they go.

(Villainous Kid is my new evil hero. This is such a perfect con. It works by taking advantage of its victims’ desire to Do Something Bad! If the victims catch on, they’ll be unlikely to report it because of their guilt over the Something Bad! It subverts the larger authority (y’know, the school) by taking advantage of a policy said authority implemented to make the kids more safe to make them less safe! If the authority catches on, they’ll feel horrible because of course their policy was going to lead to this, and they’re just lucky it wasn’t worse! Blame splatters everywhere and makes everyone all sticky! It’s perfect.)

If I were a school staffer/parent/employer using filtering software, I’d be considering whether it’s really worth the risk, given what people seem to be doing to get around it. If the point of the filters is to make your network/users more secure, I’d say a policy that encourages the use of proxies is counterproductive.

If the purpose is merely to keep them from fooling around on the internet, however, I think you would probably be happiest with a filter in place, for in my childish mind a person opposed to fooling-around-on-the-internet is just the kind of heartless bastard who would be pleased to see a kid lose her savings to a PayPal hacker as punishment for using Facebook at school.

And I didn’t even understand what it was this morning.

Continue reading “No human person ever hated PHP safe mode as much as I do.”

Man, pirating software is hard work. I have like a whole new respect for message board assholes.

I made Mom play the first chapter of Phoenix Wright the other day. She yelled inscrutable legal stuff at it the whole time and refuses to touch it again.

I also totally broke the blog the other day trying to do a test-run of copying it to a new server. I’m all grumpy at WordPress now. What is this forwarding bullshit you do? This is massively inappropriate, and the solution is fucking non-intuitive and for some reason broke all my Unicode characters. I’m not upgrading to this fucking 2.5 of yours until it’s been out at least three months and I know I can recreate all this work I’ve done messing around with PHP and hacking these fucking plugins to make them fucking work like I fucking want. Fucking.

The Mexican restaurant in town always has Star Trek playing. It’s really depressing to me I can hear a random line of dialog from Voyager and go, “Hold it, that totally contradicts that stupid episode where the Doctor’s fucking registry got corrupted or whatever!” I need rewrite privileges for my brain. That is space I could be using for kanji.

You’d think the people who localized Professor Layton would be paying attention to what the people who localized Phoenix Wright were doing. But I guess not. Evil women with mysterious doubles should clearly always be named Dahlia, and the double’s name should be that of a purple flower.

Anyway, this game is really cute, but I have to have scratch paper around when I’m playing it.

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For writing class today, we made posters describing where we’re from, because language school is sort of like pre-school, but with more emphasis on vocabulary relating to intoxication. A scene from today’s class:

*I am dubiously considering the way I wrote “marijuana,” because I think it might be wrong.*

Great Artist-san: What is the kanji for “kami”?

Dragon-san: What? “Kami” for paper?

Great Artist-san: No, no, “kami-sama” - “kami” for God. I have to write “Brazil: God’s Country!”

Me: What?! No! America is God’s country! Don’t you people have TVs?!

Fuzzy-san: Hungary is obviously God’s country.

Great Artist-san: Is Taiwan God’s country?

Dragon-san, disgustedly: No.

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I just upgraded WordPress in hopes that it will make comment notification start working. Thus far it seems to have broken my ability to preview in-progress posts and use the Open-ID thingie. Fuck you, WordPress.

The iPod problem appears to be the battery. I am pondering my options.

Continue reading “And then everyone dies of consumption.”

This morning, while walking to class listening to my freshly-downloaded sea shanty playlist, I randomly thought: “You know. It would be really annoying if my iPod died.”

This afternoon, my iPod died.

Anyone using Vista having problems with certain domains refusing to show up? I’ve only had this computer for a week or two, and the past few days I’ve been getting “server not found” errors for a bunch of pages pretty much all the time, and I’ve heard vaguely unpleasant things about Vista’s firewall and wonder if that might have something to do with it. It obviously isn’t actually a problem with the servers, because some of them are just people’s LiveJournal subdomains - for instance, snarp.livejournal.com has only been loading about half the time the past couple of days, while www.livejournal.com and some other people’s pages are working normally.

(To show how random this is, some of the other stuff that’s had issues includes Achewood, Scary Go Round, Diesel Sweeties, Vampirates, The Comics Journal homepage, and The Angry Black Woman. (This list probably gives a fairly good idea of how I spend my time…))

Of course, it could be the school’s firewall, not mine. Or just a network administrator grumpy at me because of all the downloads I’ve been making, though that only amounts to about 1.5 gigs over the past week, and I’ve been spacing them out. Is bandwidth way more restricted in Japan?

Testing LJXP WordPress plugin…

Continue reading “Test”

(This text was originally posted on LiveJournal. It has been reformatted (awkwardly) for use on WordPress.)

For the last few months, when I type a new kanji into the RTF files I’m doing my translation projects in, 90% of the time it comes out pointing left. My kanji do not know which way is up.

I thought at first that the problem was only with @SimSun, which is apparently intended mostly for Chinese, not Japanese, but switching to MS PGothic, which actually has “Japanese” as a language option, doesn’t fix it. Anyway, they both used to work. And I’ve saved and restarted and reopened trying to right them, but nothing changes. This isn’t disabling, since I’m lazy and I either romanize or kana-ize everything before I start the actual translation (the kana work properly), but it’s really irritating.

Since I haven’t installed any new Japan\China\Korea\etc.-related software or fonts during this time, I’m going to assume this is something one of the Windows updates did.

( Image behind cut )

(Edit: And if anyone reading this can tell me what the spine of the book in this image says, and what that title would probably be in English, I would be extremely happy. From the context it’s obviously a children’s book involving talking animals, and Charles Perrault’s name is on the cover, and there’s the phrase “boy(s) and girl(s)” in there.

Edit again: Okay, yeah, the book is “Puss in Boots,” so the spine is probably a series name. (This is important, okay?!)

)

Continue reading “Microsoft!”

Last week, I decided to mirror copies of my LiveJournal posts over onto my website for paranoia reasons. I think I’m pretty much done now. I don’t know if I’m going to bother making the mirror keep up with the LiveJournal perfectly unless I can find a way to do it automatically.

Anyway. Notes on exporting stuff from LiveJournal to WordPress:

* Make sure the WordPress content directories have their permissions set up all nice before you start. It might not work right anyway, though.

* Set the correct time zone in WordPress before you start. WordPress and LiveJournal don’t communicate well about this - all your imported posts will end up with the wrong time stamp if you’re not in the time zone WordPress thinks you are.

* * And apparently Daylight Savings doesn’t sync up right no matter what you do. What the hell.

* It’s the XML export option, not the default CSV one.

* LiveJournal-specific code - lj-cuts and user- and community-names - won’t go through right. It just gets erased. (Not the stuff under lj-cut tags, just the tags themselves.) For user- and community-names, I just uploaded the little graphics to my server and manually put in fake tags. This will be over-labor-intensive for people who write more than I do.

There’s no WordPress equivalent to an LJ-cut; I eventually ended up manually setting up fake cuts that led back to the LiveJournal. This won’t work for people who write more than I do, or are planning to erase the LiveJournal. (I also made invisible posts containing all the cut text, to keep all my data nice and safe.)

* Apropos of the invisible double-posts - you can *have* two posts for exactly the same time, but only one will show up at a time on a list-page that should show both. My solution was to set the double-posts’ times one second back.

* Tags (”categories”) won’t transfer over, either.

* The “Uncategorized” category doesn’t disappear automatically once you’ve, you know, categorized a post - you have to actually remove it. And WordPress has no mass-edit options.

* In WordPress, “publish” means “make visible to all” - if you’ve set a post to “private,” hitting “publish” will undo it. Hit “save” instead.

* When viewing the blog while logged in as an administrator, there’s nothing to differentiate private posts from public ones. There doesn’t seem to be a way to view only the private posts, either. This is annoying.

* If you’re changing the permalink style and WordPress says, “You should update your .htaccess now” at the very top of the page, scroll down to the very bottom. There’s a box down there that explains what it wants.

* It’s kind of messed-up how the LiveJournal spellchecker doesn’t recognize “LiveJournal,” “LJ,” “blog,” “permalink,” and “href.”

Today it’s been pretty cold and overcast, though it’s never rained for more than a few minutes at a time, and that always just as I was getting back to the dorm; and I never went to the dining hall, and when I walked through town there wasn’t much traffic, and walking around campus there weren’t many people; and the house is quiet, and I’ve got brownies and tea; and basically every single day could be like this and I’d be happy.

(Though my domain’s DNS servers could be working. That would actually be good.)

In celebration, I give you the Triforce of Power.

(What happened was, the lens froze stuck out and the camera wouldn’t stay on for more than a couple seconds. It flashed “E18″ at the corner of the screen during those seconds, so I googled “canon s400 e18,” and found about eight million people on various websites suggesting twisting the lens (plus a class-action suit).

Seeing as the thing is long out-of-warranty anyway, I went ahead and twisted the lens. And it snapped menacingly and I nearly had a heart attack, but it’s okay again now. So, yay.)

MY CAMERA CANNOT BE DEAD.

AAAAAAGH!