Author: lost

One of the unfortunate things about my day job is that I have to manage a server running cPanel. Some folks insist on cPanel because it has all these fancy gewgaws, features, widgets, and the like. However, once you start trying to manage a server running cPanel for more than a few trivial web sites, you start to discover just how terribly engineered it is, and it has absolutely no excuse for that. One particular feature I recently tripped over hard is cphulkd, which is cPanel’s answer to brute force detection. Continue reading “cphulkd sucks”

At $dayjob, I recently encountered a WordPress installation that was created by some overseas developers on behalf of our client. Let’s call the client Fred. So Fred asks me to make a duplicate of his site on a subdomain so he can have some development work done without messing up the live site. That’s perfectly reasonable and ordinarily poses no problems. You just duplicate the WordPress files and database, update the configuration file, maybe fix a hard coded URL or two, and Bob’s your uncle. Alas, this time it was not that simple. Continue reading “The PHP Encryptor Scam”

I just encountered a video done by one Matthew Moore. He calls it “Mythbusting Linux”. You can find it over on Youtube here. For the most part, what Matthew says in the videos is accurate enough. However, there are a couple of points where he misrepresents or misunderstands the specific situation. Continue reading “Responding to Mythbusting Linux”

I was just reading a professionally published novel. Normally, you expect some competency from the editors in such situations. To be fair, it is clear that there was editing and the editing was consistent. However, the editing had a consistent glaring error.

In at least three cases, the text read “adopt to”. In those cases, it was being used in constructions like “adopt to the new policies”. That is wrong. You can adopt a new policy but you cannot adopt to a new policy. The correct word is “adapt”. When your town adopts a new policy, you have to adapt to it. Now, in two cases, it was crystal clear from context that “adapt” was the intended word. In a third case, it was less clear and a case might have been made for “adopt”. However, it would have been a bit weak.

There are other usages throughout the same work (different words) that are potentially questionable. However, in those cases, a reasonable case can be made that it was a stylistic choice, a result of inner monologue by a character that didn’t understand nuances correctly, or what have you. There are other cases that are clearly typos or otherwise errors. However, the instances of “adopt” were significant in that they were consistent. That is, someone actually believes that they are correct.

It’s unfortunate that such an error slipped though. The novel in question is an otherwise excellent read.

I just encountered, for the umpteenth time, what is probably the single stupidest design decision I have ever encountered in the history of email applications. With the default Android email app, it is impossible to change the IMAP or POP3 username once the account is created. You can change everything else, including the username for SMTP, but not the username for incoming mail. The only way to change the username for incoming mail is to delete and recreate the email account, which is something you don’t want to do if you are using POP3 and storing email on the phone

Of course, you may be wondering why this is an issue? After all, usernames don’t change, do they? Wrong. There are two cases where usernames change:

1. You change email providers. That doesn’t always mean your email address changes since you may be changing the hosting for a domain. In that case, username required to log in to the new mail server might change.

2. Your email host changes the way it operates its email server and that changes the login format required. For instance, going from requiring “username” to requiring “username@domain”.

These two things happen more often than most people realize.

So, by the collected powers of the universe, good, evil, and neutral, fix the <bleeeeeeeeeeeep> default Android email app to allow changing the <bleep> username for incoming mail!

A recent discussion about a New York City request to Google proved somewhat interesting. The request itself was for Google to add an option to its navigation type products to avoid left turns. Their reasoning was that left turns are an inherently dangerous operation and reducing the number of them would be overall beneficial. One commenter brought up another question that is somewhat interesting, though. Continue reading “Traffic Signals and Pedestrians”