Chrononautic Log: log

September 19, 2006

And Jon Hansen wins the prize!*

Comments are now disabled.

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* May not be an actual prize.

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September 18, 2006

Some time in the next week or two, chrononaut.org and allstarstories.com are going to be moving servers. I’ve been meaning to upgrade my blogging software forever (maintaining MT-Blacklist gets old), and rather than try to upgrade and transfer all my MT stuff at once, I decided to take the lazy way out: just install WordPress and copy over the MT archives. You can see the staging area for the new site at http://www.discontent.com/log/. Comments welcome — for instance, on the theme, which is really just the WordPress default theme with some new images and some CSS hacks. The URL for the blog won’t change, and any permalinks to old posts should still work.

Anyhow, at some point before the move I’ll be shutting comments off here so I can copy the archives over. If you want to get a last word in for posterity on any of the past three and a half years’ slapfights, this may be your last chance. :)

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September 6, 2006

Apologies to anyone who’s been gleefully celebrating the demise of my website (I'm talking to you, Skip!), but it was only a billing mix-up.

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June 23, 2006

Two recent discoveries:

1. In a comment thread on a non-friendslocked LiveJournal post: I’d like to link to this. In other words, the implied social norm is: just because something is displayed in public view, that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to draw other people’s attention to it.
2. In a robots.txt file: User-Agent: * Disallow: /. In other words, it’s LiveJournal’s fault, not Google’s, that LiveJournal is largely unsearchable.

Comments (23)

December 8, 2005

I’m pleased to announce that All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories made the Locus Magazine 2004 Recommended Reading List. Isn’t it possible — likely, even — that science fiction’s traditional forward-looking orientation is as much a product of the forward-looking Zeitgeist in which it originated as nostalgic SF is a reaction to a Zeitgeist of millenial alienation? That science fiction used to imagine the future because society used to imagine the future, and not the other way around? I want my 20th-century schizoid art. Live veiled Amazons. And there’s ELIZABETH BEAR up there on the video screens over his head in letters two feet high. Man, I would totally become a mystery writer if it meant trenchcoats and fedoras and water pistols. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling pretty depressed about the ultimate fate of the universe lately. And damn William James and Geoffrey Sonnabend for being born half a century apart, anyway. Must. Destroy. Ivan. Tribble. I was going to move anyway. Clearly, going from the movie theatre, to Telegraph Avenue, to an Art Deco monument filled with exotic spuds of all ages, colors, shapes and sizes — following two hours of space cowboys and exploding spaceships with a comforting dip into familiar countercultural strangeness, that with the raucous but innocent carnality of Bow Wow Wow and that with the full-on, space-age, Technicolor, punk-rock superluminality of Devo — was asking to have my brain scrambled. If you weren’t there, we missed you; if you were there, I’m probably missing you already. ’nough said? In other words, as long as I’m in trouble I may as well compound it.

(Concept kinda-sorta stolen from Mr. Schwartz. I think his madness might have had method in’t, though, unlike mine.)

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September 22, 2005

(This is mostly in answer to Ben.)

I never used any software in the 90s that was as painful to install, configure, use, or (god help us) upgrade as Apache or Postfix. I’m sure it was out there, but I wasn’t using it. (Admittedly, there are people who like mucking around in configuration files. I understand how such people could consider administering Apache to be less painful than administering, say, AppleShare. However, I am no longer one of these people.) I can’t speak to Google Earth because it only runs on Windows. But I’m not claiming that nobody today is writing good desktop software, or that the state of the art in desktop software hasn’t moved forward. I’m bitching about the state of the art in server and client/server software.

SQL and I had our honeymoon. We still see each other from time to time, but the romance has long since gone out of the relationship. What’s not to like about MT being on mysql is that I don’t want to have to learn to be a mysql administrator just so I can have a blog. Admittedly, I’ve managed to get away without having to learn to be a mysql administrator so far, but the price of that is never being able to upgrade it or back it up. (For the record, all commercial RDBMSs that I’ve ever worked with suck from this point of view, too.) Likewise, the fact that you can hack the scripts MT is made of is certainly handy, but since I didn’t go to the trouble of, say, setting up a source control system and a test environment before I started hacking it, I now can’t remember what I’ve changed and when it comes to upgrading I have, again, screwed myself.

As far as local vs. remote goes — well, I’ve been lucky, I guess. In twenty years I’ve never actually destroyed my own computer, or even come particularly close. And since we’re still five or ten years away (as the Glasgow Internet Experience showed) from me being able to access my stuff anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world, I prefer to keep the files I might want to look at where I can get at them. (Email is another story. But the primary use case for email is when I definitely am connected, not when I mgiht-or-might-not be.)

Also, when it comes to remote file management, there’s this:

Figure 1. Why I don’t use any of my Linux accounts as my primary file storage.

Admittedly, there probably is a way around this, too, like WebDAV or something. Or Samba. Or God-knows-what. But all of that comes around, again, to administering more server software. Which is what I’m sick of.

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P.S.: And while the folks at Six Apart have done as well as anybody could expect with the web interface to MT, can I just say, for the record, how much fun it is to edit large rich-text documents like this one in a web browser text area? No fun at all, that’s how much.

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September 21, 2005

So, during this discussion over at Jed’s place, I figured out that my annoyance with MT is mostly tied up with my annoyance with administering a Linux box, particularly remotely, and with a vague feeling that I’d like my important files and other data to be on a machine I have physical access to, preferably in formats that are easy to understand, back up, fix problems with, etc. (Which, among other things, kind of means “not in a database,” particularly not in a database like MySQL that I barely know how to use and that I don’t have very good tools for.)

There’s this truism in technology that the new thing is always good at being the new thing and bad at being the old thing. PDAs are good at being PDAs, bad at being personal computers. CDs are good (relatively) at fitting on bookshelves and maintaining their sound fidelity over time, bad at displaying cover art and liner notes and at satisfying the sort of ears good enough to insist on the warm humanistic glow of a tube amp. MP3s are good at being traded on the Internet and carried around in your pocket, even worse at displaying cover art and keeping audiofreaks happy.

What I’ve realized — over a decade or so of this Internet thing, a decade or so of giving the free software people the benefit of the doubt, etc., etc. — is that, basically, postmodern, server-based, internet-related software all sucks at being old-fashioned desktop software. Even the stuff you pay money for is broken in all sorts of ways that you wouldn’t have put up with in a DOS or System 7 program from the mid-90s.

At this point I’m supposed to say “on the other hand” and talk about all the stuff that the postmodern software can do that the mid-90s software can’t. (Such you reading this, with no intervention by me. FrameMaker isn’t so good at that.)

But you know, I’m not gonna. I’m just going to whine about it.

Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine.

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February 15, 2005

And running late on a couple of things. Further bulletins as events warrant.

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January 24, 2005

This weblog just passed its second anniversary.

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December 15, 2004

I’ve just spent half [Updated] an hour dealing with a denial of service attack in the form of comment spam. MT-Blacklist no avail. Brought the server to a complete stop; luckily Rob was home for lunch and was able to flip the big red switch, but as soon as it came up again — bam, same thing. Managed to stop the web server; problem went away. Log messages are full of:

[Wed Dec 15 12:14:09 2004] [error] [client 66.119.33.153] Premature end of script headers: mt-comments.cgi

from four IP addresses: 66.119.33.153-156. Those, in turn, resolve to proxyche01-04.ia3.marketscore.com, said domain being allegedly based on Sunset Hills Road in Reston, VA. I’m not going to link to or even describe their web site, except to say that it’s professionally designed and looks like it might be supporting three or four different kinds of scam.

And they definitely need to have their asses kicked.

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November 22, 2004

Looks like the discontent.com / chrononaut.org / allstarstories.com internet connection may have gone down some time this weekend, and it also looks like since the boxes moved down the Peninsula we haven’t got any external email backups any more. So if you sent something to one of those, and you think you should have received a reply, and you haven’t, you might want to send it again.

It looks like a fair bit of mail did get through, so probably all it did was save me some spam, but just in case . . .

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July 9, 2004

Starting some time tomorrow, chrononaut.org and allstarstories.com will be down for 24-48 hours, while they move from San Francisco to Redwood City. (It’s a long story, and not very interesting. Thanks Brandon for the unpaid IT work, and thanks Rob for letting me dangle my server off your DSL line.

Not sure what'll happen to email during that period. It may disappear into Neverland. We'll see.

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UPDATE: Rob wishes to point out that the server is in fact moving to Foster City. My mistake.

Comments (5)

May 11, 2004

Looks like chrononaut.org/allstarstories.com is happy enough sitting on the corner of Brandon’s desk. Hope the intermittent high-pitched chirping noises aren’t keeping him awake.

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May 6, 2004

chrononaut.org and allstarstories.com will be down for a day or two starting this evening while I move the server down to San Francisco. Even after it’s plugged in again, it’ll probably still take a little while for the DNS changes to propagate; so don’t be surprised if things stay dark for a couple of days.

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April 7, 2004

And why people are willing to do this to the people they love and trust best in the world is beyond my understanding. If you had some kind of sexually transmitted virus, and you woke up in the morning dripping pus, I would hope that you would understand that there was some kind of moral need for immediate action. Even if it was kind of inconvenient and humiliating and personally degrading.

But if you’re running Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, it somehow seems kind of okay to spew Klez-H, Sircam, Klez-E, Magistr-B, Hydris-B, Magistr-A, BadTrans- B, Vavidad.E1, Yaha-A and MyLife-J.

And you’re not just infecting your girlfriend, boys. You can hit your mom, your grandmother, your maiden aunt, your ten-year-old daughter! “Gee, why didn’t you teach your ten year-old not to click on the attachments?” Because she’s ten years old, you moron!

—— Bruce Sterling

I’m getting all kinds of Outlook viruses turning up in my (luckily MS-free) mailbox this week, and judging from the forged “From” addresses — Susan Marie Groppi and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, among others I recognize — I’m pretty sure it’s somebody in the SF community that’s running the infected machine or machines. Probably I’m not lucky enough for it to be someone who reads this weblog, but just in case — for God’s sake, people, either check your machines, or don’t use Outlook.

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January 23, 2004

January 20, 2003 - January 19, 2004. Observations on

• art: 87.
• politics: 47.
• life: 37.
• madness: 26.
• economics: 17.
• science: 19.
• this weblog: 14.
• history: 10.
• religion: 7.
• nature: 3.
• voodoo: 1.

Time flies when you’re having fun.

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August 11, 2003

Ken “Caesar” Fisher of ArsTechnica (one of the more venerable and respected blog-like sites from the days before blogs were called blogs) notices an interesting dynamic:

There seems to be a growing disparity over just what the point of an online discussion is. . . . Sometimes I think we forget that the kinds of discussions we have online are totally different from most real-life conversations. There’s the obvious stuff: we're not discussing things in person, and we may not know who we’re talking with. There’s a bigger issue, however, and that’s the illusion that the discussion’s partners are limited to only people participating in the thread by posting in it.

I think the purpose of online discussions is in part about informing that third party, all those people who read, but don’t reply. That’s why I’m not typically bothered by topics that seem to end up in stalemates. A good online discussion should inform people as to multiple sides of an argument.

One of those things that we all ought to know, but often forget anyway.

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July 29, 2003

Here’s a new trick: “spamming” people’s web sites with false referrer information in order to get your porn site to show up on the site’s stats page.

This week I noticed that, all of a sudden, the “link from external page” section of my stats page had suddenly filled up with sites called things like antispamfilter.com and stopallspam.com. What does that have to do with porn? Well, nothing, really, except that the same client IP address left those referrers in my server log that left free-hardcore-sex-pictures and free-hardcore-porn-pictures, among others.

(Oh, for what it’s worth, according to whois, most of them seem to be located in Neutral Bay, Australia. If anyone reading this happens to be from Neutral Bay and knows Angus McKinnon or Russell Banks, tell them to knock it off.)

I know this site is fascinating, but I doubt it’s fascinating enough to entice some philanthropic porn / spam filter merchant to link to it, or to entice said merchant’s customers to click on said link several hundred times in the course of a couple of midnight hours. (Even if “whores” is consistently one of the most common search terms to turn up in the logs.)

What I can’t figure out is why anyone would go to the trouble. The stats page motivation is the only one I can think of, but I’m probably just biased because that’s how I noticed the phenomenon; I can’t see how that would actually drive enough traffic to a site to make it worth hacking. Any guesses?

Anyway, I’ve now stopped the stats page reporting referrer info, period. It was fun while it lasted.

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July 27, 2003

So I thought I had mail.chrononaut.org fairly well locked down, but it appears that the spammers discovered a new trick or two and have been using it as a spam relay for at least the last several weeks. Naturally I don’t discover this until one of the various real-time black hole servers sends me a helpful note yesterday letting me know that I’ve been added to it.

Instead of writing, therefore, I spend all of yesterday evening digging through mail logs (you wouldn’t believe how quickly your mail server’s log grows when someone’s trying to span through it every four seconds) and Postfix configuration files and mailing lists and black-hole sites trying to plug the holes. For the moment, at least, there doesn’t seem to be any water coming through the dike, but naturally it’ll take anywhere from 24 hours to infinity to actually get de-listed from all the black-hole servers — some of which are very aggressive about taking one another’s word that a site should be on the list, but passive to the point of immobility when it comes to taking it off.

Luckily I don’t use chrononaut for much of my personal mail — though it is the address that gets published on this web site, and the one I get cc’d to when someone posts a comment here; mostly I use discontent.com. And I’m embarrassed to say that Brandon seems to have done a better job administering Postfix than I have (even though I’ve been using it for years, he’s been using qmail till quite recently, and he started by copying all my configuration files) so discontent seems to be okay.

But, still, it’s a pain in the ass. And I’m sure in a few months someone will find another hole and it’ll start all over again.

Have I mentioned that I hate the Internet?

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July 26, 2003

If y’all in the 219.95.x.x address block are wondering why you can’t post, it’s because your comments look an awful lot like spam. If you’re reading this message, though, you’re probably human after all. Let me know.

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July 21, 2003

Okay, it’s not spring, and it’s too damned hot to do much about the apartment. But I have revised the official page to clean things up a bit. (Though I won’t be surprised if, as usual, it looks a little odd in IE; and I’ve finally abandoned Netscape completely.)

Of note is the new bibliography, which now includes:

• review excerpts;
• illustrations (stealing a leaf from Greg’s book);
• and citations in something that would vaguely resemble OUP standard format, if there was such a thing.

Also it is, I hope, easier to read.

I still need to do something similar for the academic un-publications, and I’m sure I’ll be tinkering with the format for a while. Comments sought from graphic designers, librarians, and anyone who wants to get their two cents in.

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May 8, 2003

Too busy working and writing to post much lately. Jay Lake tells me he writes 1,500 words an hour. Boy, do I feel like a slacker. Anyway, it doesn’t leave me much time to pay attention to whatever’s going on out there.

In the mean time, if you’re looking for something to read:

I read Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead this weekend and it’s as good as everyone says it is. Much less messed up than I expected from the reviews. If you’ve read other infantry memoirs like Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier or Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried you may not learn a whole lot that you didn’t know already, but Swofford’s an excellent writer, and you should definitely check him out. (And then you’ll be able to get the jokes in the Chris Offutt story in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, too.) I hope we get some guys like him coming out of this war.

From the department of unimbedded journalism, Phillip Robertson doesn’t quite have the technical chops of a Michael Herr or a Robert Kaplan, but the stories he’s filing from Iraq for Salon have a visceral immediacy that’s hard to match. I need to go back and check out his Afghanistan stuff.

And I’m glad to hear (via William Gibson) that Salam Pax seems to have made it through so far.

A conversation overheard by G. while in the Meridian Hotel — the Iraqi media center:

Female journalist 1: oh honey how are you? I haven’t seen you for ages.

Female journalist 2: I think the last time was in Kabul.

Bla bla bla

Bla bla bla

Female journalist 1: have to run now, see you in Pyongyang then, eh?

Female journalist 2: absolutely.

Iraq is taken out of the headlines. The search for the next conflict is on. Maybe if it turns out to be Syria the news networks won’t have to pay too much in travel costs.

You want something in between the Potemkin village statue-topplings and the radical Shi’ites’ anti-US rallies, something a little nuanced, Salam Pax is your man.

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April 25, 2003

It’s been a slow morning here at the Institute for Applied Chrononautics, and, now that I’ve got enough entries to archive, I’ve finally got ‘round to doing something about the archive pages. In particular, I’ve added category archives, and a master archive page listing them. Also, the icons for each entry should now take you to the appropriate category archive.

So those of you who’ve been wondering about the funny pictures can finally find out what they’re supposed to mean.

And complain about ithe system, I hope. :)

Apologies to the people running IE 6, by the way, which apparently has some weird behavior involving tables or CSS or something. I’ll hook up the Windows box again one of these days and try to do something about it.

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March 25, 2003

Some of you may have noticed the outage here a week or two back; the reconditioned Digital box (you know it’s old when the company that bought the company that made it doesn’t exist any more) that was running the site has been getting increasingly unreliable. The outage last night, then, was me finally breaking down and porting everything over to a new server, a Shuttle XPC. It’s about three times smaller than the old box, only about 8" × 8" × 12", and quieter, too. (Not like that matters to all of you out in webland, but it’s not your room it’s taking up space in.)

It’s a nice side effect of the stagnation (or should I say “maturation”) of the computer industry that manufacturers can finally start to compete on grounds other than speed and price — the premium for ‘mini’ was only about 10%, and well worth it. It’s not quite as cool as Lara’s G4 Cube, but for a PC, it’s not bad. And it’s cheap.

The new box should be more reliable. It’s also about ten times faster than the old box, which is probably three times faster than it really needs to be — but it was the slowest and cheapest I could get without spending four hours of my own time messing around with cables and screwdrivers, which really is not, in any way, as fun as it was when I was fourteen years old.

Anyway, while I was at it I also figured out how to hack MovableType’s database to make all the links on the site relative, which means that it’s no longer the case that the only place I can’t post from is home. So — not that this is necessarily a good thing — you may see updates a little more frequently in the future.

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March 19, 2003

According to my web server stats, rdu163-56-153.nc.rr.com accounts for about twice as many hits on this site as the rest of the Internet put together. My guess is it’s some sort of robot, maybe a screen-scraper looking for email addresses to add to a spam database or something. Or it’s some poor worm-infested ISS host looking for a vector; I get a lot of those, but I thought I was filtering them out of the stats. Or maybe it’s the Mailman from Vernor Vinge’s “True Names”.

So, rdu163-56-153.nc.rr.com, here’s your chance: identify yourself, or face the consequences. If you’re human, I’m sure you’re reading this — possibly several times a day. If not, then — sorry, Hal old buddy, I’m going to have to pull the plug.

Mystery Solved

It’s J-Walker. (Thanks for letting me know, Scott.)

What would be interesting is to figure out what causes my log stats software to identify a request as coming from a search engine robot, and then see if we can get it to also treat J-Walker that way — since that’s basically what it is.

I suspect my sort of confusion will become more common as more web traffic starts to be programs talking to programs, rather than people reading files.

Comments (3)

March 4, 2003

Rob has a nice post about the propriety of blogging about one’s meat-space friends and family, not to mention the perennial problem of trying not to blog about one’s day job.

In some ways, that is a frustrating limit on my ability to write; not surprisingly, frustration with ongoing work makes up a sizeable portion of what I would want to talk about during the day, while i'm actively working. But in another way, it seems to me that this limitation is a feature; it ensures that this log will not be a series of frustrated, poorly-written rants about whatever mishap happened at work today, or tomorrow, or any other day; it forces the content placed here to be directed at other things. By blocking obsessive discussion of my day job, the fear of inadvertant disclosure of corporate secrets forces me to discuss the other, more intellectually interesting, parts of my life.

Something I should bear in mind, particularly as the news that I have a blog is starting to get around at work. (Dale, if you’re reading this, play nice, y’hear?)

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January 28, 2003

Yes, Morlock (morlock.chrononaut.org, the server this is running on) was inexplicably down from about one this morning till a couple of hours ago, or at least its Ethernet connection was. This is what I get for buying five-year-old refurbished hardware. One of these years I will decide that a new server is as reasonable an impulse buy as, say an intercontinental airplane ticket, and maybe this will stop happening. (Times like this it would be handy to be able to channel the fifteen-year-old self that actually enjoyed taking computers apart.)

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January 21, 2003

All right; all the templates have been depositioned and entabulated, and you should have a fighting chance of seeing this as it was meant to be seen in almost any browser but Netscape 4.x.

This is why I hate the Web.

Comments (3)

January 20, 2003

By popular demand — well, by popular frank assessment of the existing situation, at least — I've thrown out the CSS absolute positioning and gone back to laying out my HTML with tables, the way God intended it.

I've also added a hack to the front page that should prevent the background image from showing through and making the text illegible on browsers that don't understand the CSS “background” attribute. I'll have to do something similar for the archives and the comment preview, but since I do have to get up for work tomorrow, it will have to wait.

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Okay; if William Gibson can bite the bullet and start a weblog, I guess I should stop making excuses. (Anyway, it was embarrassing at Conjosé, having to tell Ben Rosenbaum that I didn’t have one.)

This doesn’t come as naturally as it would have a few years ago. In — oh — October of 1995, say, when I was really really excited about this “Internet” thing, it would have been another story, but a few years of working in the industry have burned most of that out of me. Now the whole idea seems vaguely pretentious. If I find my own personal life rather dull, I can only imagine what soporific effect it might have on strangers. And while various people — friends and enemies both — have pointed out that I never have a shortage of opinions, there are plenty of equally opinionated people out there who are much more energetic about their opinions than I am about mine. (You can find links to some of the more interesting ones over at Patrick Nielsen Hayden's Electrolite.)

I expect I’ll get over that — probably about a week after I get over being self-conscious about writing speculative fiction.

So bear with me.

Technical note

Updates may be intermittent for a while; ridiculously, the one place from which I can’t actually access the site is my home network, including the server the site is actually running on — the vagaries of Network Address Translation prevent me from using the external address www.chrononaut.org from my side of the DSL router. I've been running Mozilla off a box in San Francisco using an SSH port-forwarded X session, but that's even slower than this Internet thing was in 1995, and anyway Brandon probably doesn’t appreciate it when I steal all his outgoing bandwidth. Sooner or later I’ll have to set up my own internal DNS server or something, but in the mean time I'll have to brush up on my warchalking.

Also, I’m aware the site looks like crap in Internet Explorer for Windows, and that parts of it look quite odd even in Internet Explorer for Macintosh. It looks great — modulo your graphic design tastes — in Mozilla, honest. :). It also looks pretty decent in Lynx, and in any antique browser that doesn’t even try to support Cascading Style Sheets. Sometime soon I’ll risk the flashbacks and dig out some of that old browser-detection code from my SGI days, and do something about it.

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