GoComics.com changed their Web page format and broke my screen scraper again last night. I’ve updated my comics aggregator to support the new page format as of this morning.
Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
GoComics.com changed their Web page format again
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011![[Digg]](http://blog.kamens.us/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
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Fedora 14 -> Fedora 15 upgrade notes
Thursday, July 7th, 2011
For some reason lost in the mists of time, I decided at about 7am yesterday that I just had to upgrade my Fedora 14 desktop to Fedora 15. Sometimes I get these weird ideas…
I followed the instructions on the Fedora Web site for upgrading using yum, and 2,978 downloaded packages and several hours later, I had a Fedora 15 system. But the fun was only beginning. Here, for the benefit of others who follow me, are the problems I encountered after the upgrade and what I did to fix them. Much of this I learned from other helpful people on the web, but some of it I had to figure out for myself.
- First and foremost, my network performance went totally to hell immediately after the upgrade. With the F14 kernel, I was getting about 7 megabit/s on my cable-modem connection, while after the upgrade, I was getting around 500 kilobit/s, i.e., 1/14th of the pre-upgrade speed. It appears to be a problem with kernel support for my network adapter, a Realtek RTL8168c/8111c NIC that uses the r8169 kernel driver. I filed a bug about it, and then went out today and bought a Netgear GA311 PCI network adapter (RTL8110s using the same r8169 kernel driver), which so far appears to be working just fine.
Note that before I replaced the network adapter, I was able to improve network performance a bit by reducing the MTU on the ethernet device to 1000 (“sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 1000″). - Grub no longer lets me hit ESC or any other key while it’s doing its boot countdown to bring up a menu of kernels to choose from. If I want to boot a different kernel, I have to edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and reboot. I still haven’t figured out how to fix this, but I did file a bug about it.
- The files in my desktop folder weren’t showing up on my desktop. To address this I had to run gnome-tweak-tool (you may need to “yum install gnome-tweak-tool” if you don’t have it) and enable “Have file manager handle the desktop” in the “File Manager” settings panel. While I was at it, I made some other settings changes in gnome-tweak-tool:
- I reduced the default fonts from 10pt to 11pt, since things got a little bigger after the upgrade and I wanted to fit more text on the screen.
- I enabled “Show date in clock” in the “Shell” panel.
- I changed “Arrangement of buttons on the titlebar on the “Shell” panel to “All” because I wanted maximize and minimize buttons in addition to the default close button.
- I wanted the Delete key to delete files, but alas, the default Nautilus binding for deleting files changed from Delete to Ctrl-Delete in F15. I found these instructions for fixing this, but I had to tweak them slightly. In particular:
- Run gconf-editor, not dconf-editor as the other web page suggests.
- Find org > gnome > desktop > interface > can-change-accels and check the checkbox next to it.
- Open a Nautilus window, e.g., double-click the “home” icon on your desktop. Note that it took me a while to figure out that you must do this in a window, i.e., you can’t do it by right-clicking on a file on the desktop. Yes, this is counter-intuitive.
- Select a file in the Nautilus window.
- Open on the File menu and move your mouse down to “Move to Trash”.
- Hit the Delete key to remove the old Ctrl-Delete key binding. Hit it again to create a new key binding, just for Delete.
- Uncheck the check-change-accels checkbox and close gconf-editor.
- For some reason I’m not sure of, I had nfs-utils and ypbind, neither of which I need or use, installed, and after the upgrade, systemd was trying to start ypbind and idmapd from nfs-utils. I removed both packages with “yum remove”.
- For some bizarre reason, a bunch of my contacts in Pidgin moved from the groups they were in before to “Orphans” at some point during the upgrade. I had to move them all back into their correct groups one by one. Ugh.
- No weather applet! Must have weather applet! A little googling led me to:
- run “git clone https://github.com/simon04/gnome-shell-extension-weather.git”;
- follow the instructions in README.md for building and installing the extension;
- run “python weather-extension-configurator.py” to configure the extension settings described in README.md, which is easier than using the gsettings commands there; and
- type Alt-F2, “r”, Enter to restart the GNOME shell and activate the extension. Thanks very much to the authors of this wonderful extension!
- I had a launcher file (i.e., a “*.desktop” file) created in GNOME 2 that I wanted to add to my GNOME 3 favorites. Unfortunately, it appears that to add a launcher to your favorites it has to be in /usr/share/applications (well, actually, I probably could have put it in ~/.local/share/applications, but I didn’t think of that at the time). So I copied it into /usr/share/applications, launched it by moving my cursor to the “hot spot” in the upper left corner of the screen and typing the name of the launcher; and then when it was running, right-clicked on it in the favorites bar and selected “Add to Favorites”.
- I wanted to be able to easily clear my desktop, like the “Show Desktop” button I had in my GNOME 2 panel. I found these instructions for fixing this.
- The MySQL daemon wasn’t starting up properly after the upgrade. Apparently one of the ib_logfile* files in /var/lib/mysql was truncated or something. I did “sudo rm /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile*” and then “systemctl start mysqld.service” worked just fine.
- The ddclient program which I use to update my dynamic DNS record with OpenDNS.com and DynDNS.org was generating an error on shutdown because it was failing to create its PID file properly on startup. I fixed its init script to address this and submitted a patch here.
- I desperately wanted an old-style dock visible all the time with my running applications in it. Fortunately I’m not the only one… I did “sudo yum install gnome-shell-extensions-dock” and then logged out and logged back in, and presto, I’ve got a dock.
- In F14, I used the mail-notification program to generate notifications about new email. It stopped working after the upgrade so I thought it wasn’t supported in F15. Turns out I just had to weak it a bit.
- launch gnome-session-properties;
- select “Mail Notification” and click “Edit”; and
- remove “–sm-disable” from the command field.
- The cron daemon wasn’t starting properly after the upgrade. I’m not sure why, but I fixed it by doing “sudo systemctl enable crond.service” and “sudo systemctl start crond.service”.
- I had an old-style init script in /etc/init/foo.conf that looked like this:
start on runlevel 5
stop on runlevel [!5]
exec /home/jik/scripts/foo.pl
respawn
I had to replace it with /lib/systemd/system/foo.service which looks like this:[Unit] Description=Foo server After=network.target [Service] ExecStart=/home/jik/scripts/foo.pl Restart=always [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target
Then I did “sudo systemctl enable foo.service” and “sudo systemctl start foo.service”.
- In F14, you could rely on the GNOME session launching script to execute the contents of your .bash_profile file, so that environment variables you set in .bash_profile would be inherited by all child processes. This doesn’t work in F15, so you have to set environment variables in .bashrc.
I’ll continue to update this list as new things come up.
It took a day or so to get used to, but I think the GNOME 3 UI is growing on me.
Who’s using my email address, and why?
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
Somebody seems to be using my email address in a weird, ongoing way that doesn’t seem to be benefiting them in any way. The fact that I can’t figure out why they’re doing it concerns me, because I have to suspect that there is some benefit to them, which I just haven’t been able to figure out. I’m worried that if it’s helping them, it’s probably hurting me, even if I don’t know it.
Therefore, I’m blogging what I know, in the hope that perhaps someone else will be able to look at the facts and point out something I missed about why this is going on.
comics.com has merged into gocomics.com
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011For those who use my comics aggregator, note that as of yesterday, the comics.com web site has merged into gocomics.com. I’ve just updated the aggregator to reflect this. The comic strip “That’s Life” appears to have been lost in the shuffle; I’ll check again at some point in the future to see if it resurfaces so I can put it back. All other comics are intact.
I’ve also fixed Mother Goose & Grimm, which stopped working at some point in the past and I just noticed today.
As always, please let me know if you want me to add a comic to the line-up.
Enjoy!
Google AdWords is still staffed by poorly trained monkeys
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011Last month, I wrote about Google’s surreal attempts to collect from me a debt I don’t actually owe, and my unsuccessful attempts to make it stop.
Things have gotten much worse since then.
I sent a letter (appended below) to the office of Google’s CEO over a month ago. There has been no response.
Today, I received notice that Google has turned the bogus debt over to a collection agency.
It’s looking like I’m going to have to hire a lawyer to sue Google for defamation of credit to make this stop.
I just can’t believe this is going on. It’s totally absurd. (more…)
A study in contrasts: handling stolen email lists
Monday, April 4th, 2011I try to make a habit of giving out “tagged” email addresses to web sites when I sign up for accounts / mailing lists / whatever. For example, when creating an account at widgets.com, instead of just signing up as “jik@kamens.us”, I might sign up as “jik+widgets@kamens.us”. It ends up in the same mailbox regardless, and it gives me some visibility into who is sharing or selling or allowing my email address to be stolen.
About six months ago, I started getting spam from an email address that I had only used in one place: signing up one of my kids for a Scholastic, Inc. book club through their web site back in 2007.
I contacted Scholastic and told them that either they were selling my email address and it needed to stop, or they had suffered a data breach of at least customer email addresses, if not more.
In response, Scholastic’s CISO informed me that Scholastic doesn’t sell email addresses to third parties; their children’s book club business was sold to Sandvik Publishing in 2008; the email address in question was no longer in Scholastic’s database; and I should contact Sandvik if I wished to pursue the matter further.
I sent a reply to the CISO which read as follows:
I don’t recall ever being asked whether I considered it OK for Scholastic to sell my PII to another company. This is especially disturbing since at that point I was no longer a customer of Scholastic’s for the business that was sold.
Granted, your privacy policy gives you the legal right to sell any information you collect to anyone you want. The fact that you are legally permitted to do that doesn’t make it right.
Your privacy policy also says, “Scholastic ensures that all personally and non-personally identifiable information that it receives via the Internet is secure against unauthorized access.” Alas, you apparently do not consider it your responsibility to ensure that the third parties to whom you sell PII keep it as secure as you claim to do yourselves. That is rather disappointing.
I will contact [Sandvik] as you have suggested. However, if I were in your shoes, I would be extremely concerned that a third party to whom Scholastic had sold PII allowed it to be compromised, and I would consider it my responsibility to investigate the issue myself, rather than leaving the wronged (former) Scholastic customer entirely on his own.
I received no further response from Scholastic.
Google AdWords is staffed by poorly trained monkeys
Monday, April 4th, 2011Back when I was doing my week-long Shave a Redhead for Israel fundraiser, Google’s search index was taking an unusually long time to index the fundraiser page. This was a problem because I was publicizing the fundraiser and telling people they could find it easily by searching for “Shave a Redhead for Israel”, but they actually couldn’t.
The fundraiser was only a week long, and four days in, Google still hadn’t indexed it. Luckily, Google had recently sent me an offer for $100 in free AdWords advertising to get me to try AdWords. I decided to take advantage of that $100 offer and set up an AdWords campaign to match searches for “Shave a Redhead for Israel”.
I called Google’s AdWords department and worked with the sales representative there to set up the campaign. I told him, several times and in several different ways, that my only goal was to direct people who Googled for “Shave a Redhead for Israel” to my campaign page. I told him I didn’t wants ads to be placed on other pages — I just wanted sponsored links on Google’s search page — and I told him specifically that I just wanted that one phrase, “Shave a Redhead for Israel”.
Despite my repeated instructions, he set up a campaign which matched all sorts of keywords and ran ads all over the Internet, not just sponsored links. By the time I discovered this the next morning and fixed the campaign, it had racked up almost $60 in charges for ads I didn’t want and didn’t need.
But that’s not the worst of it. In addition to screwing up the campaign, he failed to apply the $100 promotional credit to my account. As a result, a few weeks later Google charged my credit card for almost $60 in advertising that was supposed to be free, and, to be clear, was for a non-profit fundraiser from which I didn’t make a cent of profit.
Astroturf for (or against?) Obama
Thursday, March 24th, 2011An interesting comment showed up a few hours ago on an earlier blog posting of mine about Barack Obama: “Just wanted to say that I am eployed at a large Pharmaceutical company in Clayton NC and I support Barack Obama with all my heart. I would love for all my friends and colleagues to re-elect Obama in 2012!! I LOVE YOU OBAMA.”
The commenter gave the name “Diane Pearce Votes for Obama Again” and linked to my.barackobama.com. I thought it was slightly weird, but not weird enough to merit further investigation.
Then, three hours later, another comment came in on a different blog posting, this time from “Diane Pearce Loves Barack Obama”: “All I know is that I work at a large Pharmaceutical corporation in Clayton NC and I endroce Barack Obama with all my being. I would love for all my friends and colleagues to re-elect Obama in 2012!! I LOVE YOU OBAMA.”
That exceeded my weirdness threshold, so I looked into it a bit further.
The two comments gave two different email addresses, Reitter@gmail.com and Lipovsky@gmail.com, both of which appear to be based on people’s names and neither of which is related to the full name given by the commenter.
One of the comments was posted from an IP address in the United Arab Emirates. The other was posted from Indonesia.
I Googled for pages matching “Diane Pearce” and Obama, and there were 264 matches, many of which were similar comments. I did the same Google search a half hour later, and the count was up to 270.
Someone is clearly astroturfing here. The motives for this, and whether the people doing it are in reality trying to help or hurt Obama, are left as an exercise to the reader.
 Diane Pearce Votes for Obama Againmy.barackobama.com Reitter@gmail.com 86.96.226.22 |
HSBC gets it wrong a second time
Monday, March 14th, 2011Today, I received a second letter from HSBC, claiming once again that they sent me a Statement Available Alert on January 13, despite my twice providing proof that they did not.
They also claimed that they were not in violation of the Truth in Lending Act because the Act only requires them to make statements available on their Web site at least 21 days before the payment due date. I.e., the law does not actually require them to notify customers that their statements are available and they have a payment due.
It turns out they’re right… I also received today a letter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency confirming that the law does not require banks to send electronic statement notifications to customers who agree to receive their statements on-line.
In short, customers who agree to save the bank money and help the environment by not receiving statements on paper, lose the protection of the law when it comes to requiring the bank (or not) to notify them about payment due dates.
Here is the letter that I would send back to HSBC were I willing to waste paper, an envelope and a stamp on it (the HSBC “Executive Liaison” with whom I have been corresponding has not provided either an email address or a fax number, and I refuse to waste my time conducting business of this sort in telephone conversations):
HOWTO: run jabberd and MU-Conference on Fedora
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011
Please see this how-to I just posted on running jabberd and MU-Conference (XMPP chat room server) on Fedora Linux.
