I Am Completely Serious

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.)

MY CAMERA CANNOT BE DEAD.

AAAAAAGH!

Public Service Announcement

Never, ever, ever attempt to uninstall Norton. It will mess you up. Hire a man to take care of it for you.

I’m trying to make it sound like hitmen are a logical response to Norton software, but I’m slightly too irritated to make that totally obvious. I apologize for this.

System Restore is a blank box and fucking *Windows Help is broken*. And it gave me a weird error message telling me I should uninstall McAfee, and then broke all the McAfee icons. This seems like kind of a dishonest business practice, what’s going on here.

I can still open most programs, but some of them are acting weird – one of the textboxes on the LiveJournal site has changed sizes, for instance, and in IE the buttons have disappeared. Since I can still get into Wordpad and Adobe, fixing this is going to have to wait until after essay-mageddon.

I decided a while ago that the tablet’s name was Cordelia. It’s just occurred to me that I should make a sticker out of the Vorkosigan seal and stick it on there, so I can pretend like it wasn’t Fujitsu that made it, it was some company Mark owns or something.

…wait, do the Foglios sell Heterodyne seal stickers? Wulfenbach?

I’ve just spent twenty minutes trying to download a copy of Arial Unicode for my Japanese dictionary on my brand new (really old) tablet.

Microsoft is afraid you’ll like, pirate Arial and do nasty things to it. Like rape the letters that have holes in them or whatever it is you stinkin’ pirates do. Pirating all the time.

So Arial Unicode is only available with Works, and can’t be downloaded from their website.

The tablet has some ancient, bizarre version of Works installed, but it somehow apparently didn’t come with the font. I have a newer copy of Works sitting here, and the library has the very newest one, if I wanted to walk over there – but the tablet doesn’t have a CD-ROM drive, so I can’t install either of them.

So in short, I have, theoretically, legal access to three separate copies of the damn font, but I can’t use them. I feel justified looking for other places to download it – actually, it doesn’t even occur to me yet that I need any justification, I mean, this is *Arial* we’re talking about.

But Microsoft has apparently sent C&D’s to every website that was offering the download. I just checked a couple of BitTorrent search engines. Didn’t find anything, of couse.

And so then it kind of hit me – I was just reduced to trying to download an illicit copy of FUCKING ARIAL off of BitTorrent. And I FAILED. And I wasted TWENTY MINUTES of my time TRYING and FAILING to acquire ARIAL.

Which Microsoft is afraid that PEOPLE ARE GOING TO STEAL FROM THEM WITHOUT *PAYING* OH THEIR POOR BAAAAABY.

ARIAL.

If I ever meet Bill Gates, I am going to kick that stupid little wuss-face so *hard*.

Because I am inefficient, I have set up both a Livejournal and Journalfen, which I plan to update with the same stuff until I decide which one I like better. I only decided this like, twenty minutes ago, so all that stuff before this is backdated, and this here is technically my first Livejournal post.

Just so you know.

Journalfen is here.