Hacking away in latex again, and I had divided my bibtex files into two areas because I had read that you could do this and include multiple separate .bib files no problem. I read that:
would work - but it didn’t. Bit tricky to find the easy answer… which surprised me. (The “tricky to find” bit, not the answer… kinda obvious hack to try before I started googl’ing, but never mind.)
\bibliography{bibfileone,bibfiletwo}
On a related note, I had no idea how to get an “å” character (or an “a” with an “o” above it as I was thinking of it) happening in latex. I tried \oa but alas no.
Turns out you’ve got to ask the right question - I was searching for an “o” accented “a” character. Wikipedia helped me on that one - some nice info. It’s an “a” and an “a”…. so \aa does the trick. Obvious. Not. :)
(I love how someone added a wikipedia reference to the character in Stargate title. )
Who needs AI when you can just plug a cockroach into your robot?
Now, i’m not going into the ethics of this, and the youtube comments are a major mix of “that’s cool” to “that’s so wrong”… which is to expect. My favourite was along the lines of “why not just train monkeys to use machine guns”. Okay - why not? ;p
I know - emotive title, but zoneedit.com downtime does suck. Yes, I was using their “free” service, but if it doesn’t work it doesn’t matter what the price is. Not working still equals not working.
So, I have been a long time user of ZoneEdit.com, and although the web based interface is clunky (I’m sure it’s someones pride and joy, but I’m sorry, it really is poor) and in the past the pages only looked right in IE (its better these days…) BUT their reliability was good and their extra features (mail handling etc) were really good. I’ve recommended them to people many times.
Yesterday, one of the sites I host on my server wasn’t working for people. Specifically, email didn’t work. Then everything stopped. Eh? Problem? nslookup couldn’t resolve the domain. After some searching, I confirmed my suspicions with http://www.dnsstuff.com/ which gave me a lovely (exterior) view that the two nameservers were not responding at all.
Zoneedit allocates two (random?) nameservers when you add a zone. (They have many and they are well distributed as they should ideally be.) Unfortunately (?) the two allocated to that domain happened to be 2 of the 4 that, according to their online network status report were experiencing “issues”… aka not responding. Yes, that happens some times. It’s not a multi-million dollar ecommerce concern. Ok. But… it had been over 24hrs and still not working. Below is a later message when 3 were still not working.
We are currently experiencing issues with NS2.ZONEEDIT.COM, NS3.ZONEEDIT.COM and NS6.ZONEEDIT.COM. We are aware of the situation and our engineers are working diligently to get this resolved.
If reliable DNS service is critical for your site, we recommend logging into your account, clicking on “Nameservers” and purchasing a “tertiary” nameserver. 3 nameservers are exponentially more reliable than 2 nameservers.
So… I waited the day out. Like I said, not a critical site. I’m patient…
Note the advice to purchase a “tertiary” nameserver for “exponentially more reliable” service… urgh, whats an exponential of zero? ZERO!
Today: still not working. Okay, I thought, I need some working nameservers.
I’ll login to zoneedit and remove the zone and re-add it. I’ll get new nameservers allocated to me (each of the domains I’ve added in the past have different nameservers allocated to them - just as long as ONE of them works I’m happy.) WRONG. Only the first 5 zones (domains) added are free and I’ve used that quota now. If you remove one completely, you’ve still “used” it, so there you go.
Please genie in the bottle… can I have more wishes? :~)
Anyway, I’m not that bitter except that it feels like a ploy to get people to purchase zone credits. I hope it’s not, because it would be much better to just straight up say “we want money now”. I’d consider that. But not some underhanded “oh, sorry. We are diligently working on this…. but buy a nameserver and it will be working again.” Hmm… I wonder if “paid” zones get hosted on the “down” nameservers. I suspect not, but maybe that’s not fair. What I would have liked is a new nameserver for that zone, even temporary. Oh well.
Google time… free DNS service.
I’m now trying http://www.everydns.net and it’s been fine so far. They even have a PHP API if you want to code into that. They do ask for a donation, and after I’ve tried it for a while, I’ll do that.
For some reason I prefer to give everydns.net a donation when zoneedit.com felt like they were trying to squeeze $$ out of me. Maybe I just like conspiracy theories…
I was thinking about adding some extras to our wordpress install now that the marking is out of the way. So, for those of you with a byteclub blog hosted here, let me know (email or comment) what you would like. That goes for themes too. I know that people have posted on themes and plugins in the past, but in order to make an up-to-date list, let me know now and ill make it happen.
This is a limited time opportunity for me to do things, so let me know. :)
Once I have the aggregated blog+comment feeds they way I want (i’m working on getting blogger comments as a feed… not as easy as I would have hoped - suggestions), I’m intending to send the aggregated byteclyb feed out to feedburner. What do you think? I’m also thinking of a aggregated byteclub “activity” feed that could include changes to the wiki, news and the blogs. Hmm…
So you need a local host file entry in Mac OS X eh? It’s
/etc/hosts
However you’ll need to sudo to change this (say sudo nano /etc/hosts).
So you change the hosts file, and save it, but you see no change in behaviour … unless … you flush the name lookup cache of lookupd. How do we do that?
lookupd -flushcache
This might help others.. but it’s mainly to reminder me in future. :)
It’s been a while since I compared php opcode cache accelerators, so it was nice to read a quick summary of the current players. Thought others might enjoy: http://www.ducea.com/2006/10/30/php-accelerators/
Seems eAccelerator is a good open source option.
This came from a recent sampling of an easy OS X (~L)AMP install option (because although I don’t mind a good-ole compile from source experience myself, there has to be an easier way and I like to be able to recommend something easier when asked), and the MAMP programme (love that e) at http://www.mamp.info/en/home/ is a nice piece of work so far (ymmv).
I recently used apt-get upgrade on my Debian server, and that included a new version of apache2 (2.2.3) and suddenly the two uses of .htaccess+htpasswd files I have were broken! (Didn’t break anything but my personal stuff, so it wasn’t then end of the world, but I still wasn’t happy). The apache error.log gave me ... access to / failed, reason: require directives present and no Authoritative handler.
hmm… i thought. :)
Google’d with the error string (how did we solve problems before Google? can’t remember…) and found this post which really helped, but unlike their direct creation of a symlink (ln -s …) I used the a2enmod command to do the trick. a2enmode authz_user
Then called /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload (or alternatively apache2ctl restart). I always baby-sit a Debian update, and on the few occasions there’s a problem it’s never been too bad. I’m happy this one didn’t take too long thanks to someone else posting their experience in a forum - I like the ‘net.
Moving between home and work, I sometimes have issues with the proxy settings of my web browsers.
Today, I was trying out Eclipse, and while looking at the “what-new” and other tutorial related into, I had problems. The proxy.pac file that work has was making requests for 127.0.0.1 (aka “localhost”) also go through the proxy. Now, 1) I think that’s the wrong setting - if I ask for localhost it should go straight back to me - not to the local proxy and (then be ignored). 2) yes, I could set up the manual proxy settings with the appropriate “ignore proxy for” … addresses, but… i’m a coder at heart, so what I could I do?
Write my own (local) .pac file, and tell my browser to use that of course! :)
// Clinton’s custom proxy files - works at home and at work.// Change the work vars to suit your home/school/work needs// If you have multiple proxy setups at home, double-up the proxy behaviour.function FindProxyForURL(url, host){var work_ip = “136.186.0.0″;
var work_ip_mask = “255.255.0.0″;
var work_proxy = “PROXY 136.186.1.14:8000; DIRECT”;
// If only hostname specified, local host so go directif(isPlainHostName(host))return“DIRECT”;
// local host is always direct if(isInNet(dnsResolve(host), “127.0.0.1″,“255.255.255.255″))return“DIRECT”;
// Am I at work? Check for my IP in the work ip rangeif(isInNet(myIpAddress(),work_ip,work_ip_mask)){// Connect directly to local work domainsif(isInNet(dnsResolve(host), work_ip, work_ip_mask))return“DIRECT”;
// Is this a protocol that needs to be sent to the proxy?var bits = url.split(‘:’,2); // set limit - only need 2var p = (bits.length==2) ? bits[0] : ‘’;
if(p ==‘http’ || p == ‘https’ || p == ‘ftp’ || p == ‘gopher’)return work_proxy;
}// if you get to here, you don’t get a proxyreturn“DIRECT”;
}
It’s a quick hack, it works (so far) for me, and ymmv, but if you find it useful as well, that would great. This technique could be (and has been) extended to support ‘ad’ filtering from known URLs as well. There is a shExpMatch(url, “http://ads.somedomain.com/*”) function - I was hoping for regex powers, but alas it just supports “shell expressions” and that ain’t half as fun. :)