Category: Tech

Google Goof

At the moment, none of the Google hosted Blogspot blogs I look at are working. It’s error 502, and that’s a bad gateway. Bad gateway! Bad!

This site is WordPress running on Web host iPower. They moved my site from Phoenix to Burlington, MA, not far from from here, and it’s home of iPower’s merger partner Endurance International. The latency times are a fraction of what they were, but throughput sucks. Often it takes 30-60 seconds after clicking log on, or save, for anything to happen. And FTP upload speed is now 150 KB/sec, compared to the consistent 550 KB/sec it had been (yes, that’s bytes, not bits, per second — I have FiOS!).

So either the line into the data center in Burlington doesn’t have enough capacity, or the server I’m on doesn’t have enough CPU for the sites it’s hosting. Maybe it needs TCP offloading. Whatever the cause, I won’t let this continue, and if I have to switch hosting services to see an improvement that’s what I’ll do.

Congrats, Thanks, and Goodbye to Larissa Kelly!

Well, it sure was fun while it lasted! Larissa Kelly gave it a good run, but her reign as Jeopardy! champion has come to an end. Larissa is the first female to win more than five games, and she’s the #1 woman for money won in regular games. As my friend SamJay has pointed out elsewhere, she will undoubtedly be back for the Tournament of Champions. We look forward to seeing Larissa then. Here she is winning Tuesday’s show, and tomorrow I’ll wrap-up with her loss.

[flv:/Video/2008/MAY/Jeopardy3.flv 480 360]

This video is from an SD recording. The previous two videos were taken from Verizon FiOS HD. Even in this greatly reduced format I think the difference in brightness and color quality is apparent. The picture below is a cropped snapshot of my HD screen, as taken with a digital camera. Click to enlarge.

Larissa Kelly on Jeopardy!

Best wishes to Larissa and her husband Jeff! With the real estate market the way it is for the foreseeable future, they should have no trouble making the most of turning Larissa’s winnings into a down payment on a home.

Another Major Meltdown

You may have noticed earlier that the homepage was rolled back in time. The exact point, no surprise to me, was the last post before iPower switched me over to the new platform. This notice was posted on iPower’s support page:

DNS issues potentially affecting your Website and E-mail An unforeseen issue with our DNS system caused us to have to restore a backup from 3/16/2008.If your site has been transitioned to the new platform since 3/16/2008, or you have created your account since that date, your website and e-mail may be affected.

Transitioned customers may notice that your website is displaying an older version. We will be correcting this during the course of the day today (Mon 5/26/2008), as we restore our DNS.

New customers that have created their account since 3/16/2008 may notice that their website is offline completely. This will also be corrected over the next few hours.

We deeply apologize for this service interruption, we know that you count on us, and our team is working as quickly as possible to restore full service for all customers.

Everything seems to be back the way it was when I went to bed last night, but I’ll be on the lookout for further trouble. Needless to say, iPower’s shaky reputation can’t withstand any more incidents such as this one.

R2D2 Projector

Bismo has pointed out a rather unique item. An R2D2 DVD video projector. It’s the sort of thing The Sharper Image would sell — if they hadn’t gone out of business. But don’t despair, because you can order one directly from Nikko Home Electronics for only $2900 plus shipping!

[flv:/Video/2008/MAY/r2d2.flv 440 330]

It’s odd that R2D2 isn’t shown projecting scenes from Star Wars. The projector has a typical computer screen resolution of 1024×768. The feature list says it uses DLP, but the spec sheet says LCoS. I’m inclined to assume the spec sheet didn’t get updated when the product was finalized, because DLP is much less expensive and simpler to implement than LCoS.

WordPress 2.5.1 Bug

I’ve uncovered a bug in WordPress 2.5.1. It’s posted on their forum, but I’ll explain it here, too, in hopes of somebody catching it.

I used Add Media to upload a SWF file. Since doing that, when using Add Media to upload an image file the smaller versions of the image aren’t being generated. So the sub-folder within wp-content has only the original file. Deleting the SWF file didn’t help. Very annoying.

This is the second time I’ve found a feature within WordPress that can be broken very easily. The other is the post preview feature in the editor. It just shows the current home page. I’ve been living with that limitation for over a year. None of the updates I’ve done since then has fixed it, and my worry is re-running the update for 2.5.1 won’t fix the problem with the smaller image files failing to be created.

By experimenting with a modified version of the theme I use, I’ve come up with what seems to be a workaround for this problem. I don’t care for some of the changes in the modified theme, so I’m either going to modify it myself, or I’ll find another theme I like that’s more compatible with WordPress 2.5.x

If you happened to visit a little while ago you saw me playing around with a new theme, called Giraffe2. It’s flexible in some ways, but not in others. Still not quite what I’m looking for.

I’ve edited the sidebar so it now shows the five most recent comments, excluding my own. Unfortunately, clicking on one doesn’t take you directly to the comment itself, as it should. “Internal linking” is broken. Don’t know why yet. Also, searching has been enhanced and should now include comments, although it appears you’ll just be taken to the post that contains the related comments.