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OK Euroweenies... I have no idea what Google's cookie policy is. This is legal notice that you're on your own.

Still not dead yet

This blog is still a blog.

Humor break

The scary thing is that they vote...

More MSM lies

From the same organization that installed detonators on pick-up trucks to make their "crash test" work the way they needed it to comes this: MSNBC Caught Doctoring Clip From Romney/Ryan Rally . MoreShitNBC doctored the audio on their own footage to make it look like the crowd at a Romney/Ryan rally were supporting Ryan over Romney...

I'm not what you'd call a Romney supporter. He was my last choice in the primaries. But this crap makes me want to go out and donate to the guy.

Burritobortion

Actually, I thought that Sarah Silverman's abortion tweet was pretty funny; though I'm laughing at a joke she probably didn't intend to make.

What makes the joke funny is the fact that there probably are liberal women out there who would get pregnant just to have an abortion for political reasons. That kind of crazy is really there on the left.

Well that's disturbing

I just checked the spam box on a fairly new Gmail account. There're more messages in the spam box than the inbox!

Spell check is not your friend

I guess you have to leave Tim behind with a shotgun when you're not adequately prepared for a disaster.

Have I mentioned that AT&T sucks?

Nekkid Pichurs

Seriously? You mean there are still celebrities around who are stupid enough to keep naked pictures of themselves on their phones? I thought they had all learned by now that anything on a phone might a well be posted on a web server.

And let's be honest: If you take nekkid pictures of yourself, or allow someone else to take nekkid pictures of you, they're gonna wind up on the internet. I don't care what you intended or what that other person promised, your nekkid butt is going online. You want your naughty bits to stay private? Then keep the camera away from 'em.

Kindle on a Linux box

I'm not sure what Jim Lynch is talking about in How to read Kindle books on Linux. I've been reading Kindle books just fine on my Linux box using Wine. If there are any compatibility issues with Kindle for Windows and Wine, I haven't run into them yet.

Somehow, I thought there'd be more

A few weeks back, Verizon announced that they were ending their unlimited data packages. It doesn't affect me since I'm grandfathered in with an old plan. The new plan caps you at 2GB per month then they start to charge you out the wing wang for any overages.

Now when they announced this, I thought I was getting away with something with my old plan. I thought "Ha! You fools! I'll chew up data by the terabyte and there's nothing you can do to stop me! Muuwhaahaaaahaaaahaaaaahaaaa!" Well, I just checked my data usage for the month and found that I'm on track to use a whole gigabyte for this billing cycle.

...which makes me wonder: Just how much time must one spend on a smartphone to rack up 2GB?!?

Tweeter-bots?

It didn't take me long to figure out that some people on Twitter aren't there to tweet so much as to collect followers. Getting their 1000th follower is more important than posting their 1000th tweet. So, I normally don't do the mutual follow-back thing on Twitter; follow me and I'll follow you. I changed this policy, however, when I set up the account for our local NRA Members' Council. I figured that the point there is to get pro-RKBA news to as many eyeballs as possible; even if those eyes only have eyes for the count of their followers. However, I just made an exception to that.

I had a follower who had no eyes.

I had this one follower show up to both accounts. On my BrewingAle account, I just didn't bother with the mutual follow back. I looked at this "person's" recent tweets and there was nothing interesting there. If they want to keep following me, fine. I'll pass on the clutter, though.

For the MC account, on the other hand, I did the follow back. At first I just ignored the tweets; silly, vacuous stuff that looked as though this person didn't understand how to reply to a tweet. Then I notice that the tweets fell into two categories: Tweets that referred to women's clothing and accessories, and tweets that looked like collections of random words strung together into somewhat grammatically correct sentences. It was that second group that tipped me off.

This is a robot!

The sentences followed a pattern: A proper name as the subject, not a Twitter handle; A verb, usually come conjugation of the verb "tweet"; and an adverb. Then I noticed another pattern: This person never sleeps. The tweets were showing at all day long, several every hour, 24/7. Also, the clothing related tweets looked like auto-generated responses to other tweets that mentioned these products. I'm guess that a search engine touched these off.

So what's the point of this 'bot? I suspect that it was a proof of concept program. The random sentences are just to collect followers while the product tweets were the payload. In this case, the writer was tweeting about other people's merchandise, but the final release would probably push his own wares.

Well, at least this spammer isn't stealing bandwidth or processor time on an infected machine.

ATT Uverse... Don't do it!

I've decided that ATT Uverse just plain sucks. I haven't had Internet that cuts out this often since this ol' dial-up days. If you've been considering ATT, my advise is to go with anyone else!

BTW: I'm posting this via Verizon. ATT is on the fritz again!

The host saga

If you will recall, I wasn't very happy with the responses I got from FreeServers.com when I complained about their antiquated software (including an out-of-date server kernel). I never got a satisfactory answer from them; just apologies without any pledges to actually fix the problems. As a result, I moved that site off of their servers and onto a new host. The billing department, as opposed to tech support, actually sounded concerned about my complaints. To their credit, they didn't try to hard sell me into keeping their crappy service. I guess they've heard this before.

I moved that site to a host I've used before for other projects: ipower.com. I'm very happy with them. If you're looking for a web host, give them a look.

Not a pretty mental picture

Software Firm Looking To Hire Naked Coders - Slashdot

Atlas-Shrugged-Movie.com unavailable

This is a good sign, no matter how you look at it.



Either there are tons of people interested in the movie, or it's generating enough buzz to attract a DDoS attack from concerned looters.

So that's how that works

I was wondering how that last picture got to the right place. Clever Blogger uploaded it to my Picasa account. I had just hit the picture button without thinking about it.

I also got rid of that Tweety button thing

Either no one clicks it or it doesn't work.

An unfortunate change

There used to be a list of FReeper blogs over there on the sidebar. I had to remove that because most seemed to be dead. The one exception is AnnaZ, who I've added to the blogroll.

Now I'm not the guy to lecture about neglected blogs, but at least one had never been posted to. Others hadn't seen the light of day since 2005. Why am I complaining? I got that list from another FReeper who put in quite a bit of effort compiling a list of FReeper blogs. I wish I could remember who that was. It's sad to see their work go for naught.

Bad host! No biscuit!

I'm getting increasingly annoyed with FreeServers.com.

I manage a website there using one of their paid plans. (Not the freebie service!) Specifically, the plan is advertised as one for those who want to use WordPress to manage a blog. (I used to use Blogger.com for that site's blog, but they stopped supporting self-hosted blogs using ftp. In short, I didn't want Google to have an off switch for that blog. They have that here with this blog, and they should. It's hosted on their server and on their dime.) The problem started when I decided that I wasn't happy with the way the thing looked.

WordPress, for those who don't know, is a blogging program that's hosted on a blog's web server. It runs using the common web site programming language PHP. As such, all of the templates that one can download to change the look of a blog are, in fact, little PHP programs themselves. They interact with each other and the main WP software. WP is now on version 3.1. FreeServers uses version 2.0.4; a rather hoary old version. Modern WP templates assume that a more modern version of WP is on the server. Do you know how difficult it is to find one that will work with 2.0.4?

Now, I could try a hack solution. The WP software actually lives in a directory that a FreeServers subscriber has access to. I could just overwrite the old software with the latest version. There's a problem with that plan, however. The latest WP requires the latest PHP to work; at least something newer than v.4.1.2. (PHP is now on v.5.3.5!) It would also require a more modern version of MySQL. WP uses this database to keep track of posts. The latest version is 5.5.9. FreeServers uses v.4.1.22. These two items can't be upgraded by a mere subscriber. The PHP and MySQL installations are out of reach to subscribers.

I did a little searching and found out just how old these versions are. WP and MySQL date to 2006. The version of PHP they are using dates to 2002.

And then it gets worse!

While I was digging, I found that they are also running an out-of-date version of the Linux kernel on their servers. V.2.4.9-31 also dates to 2002. This just went from irritating to scary! I'm no expert, but I'm guessing that any script-kiddie worth his proxy could find an old exploit code and pwn my site and every other site on that server.

And I'm paying for this?

I complained to FreeServers. They responded that upgrading software requires time. I guess 9 years isn't enough!

Will FreeServers tech support read this, get off their lazy asses, and fix the problem? I doubt it. They're probably still using IE6. I'm not sure they can view this page!