Last night or this morning, I installed the the pending up-dates for various WordPress plugins that I was using. I've discovered that various things have consequently been broken. Please bear with me as I try to put things back into working order.

(And please comment to this entry if you note something specifically amiss.)

I called GeekAvailable.com at just before 18:00 PDT to query about the status of my computer. I was told that they are trying to get a tracking number from their parts supplier to ascertain what has happened to the part that was ordered to fix my computer, and that they would call me as soon as they had any news.

As the Woman of Interest subsequently noted, it is really poor practice for them to have waited for my query rather than calling me to tell me where things stood. I need to decide on a response to further continuation of this situation.

I've received no phone call to-day from GeekAvailable.com; I'm quite unhappy with how a turn-around time estimated to be 72 hour has thus far run something more than 150 hours.

Meanwhile, Bessie is being further cantankerous, confusing two separate drives, and deleted files from the one when told to remove files from the other.

I called GeekAvailable.com this morning at about 10:00 PDT; I was told that they expected receipt of a part to-day, and to have my note-book computer fixed about half an hour after that; and that they would call me as soon as it was ready.

I surely hope that I'll have it back to-day.

On Wednesday, while waiting at IAH between flights, I spoke with a representative from GeekAvailable.com about repair of my note-book computer. The rep said that turn-around time would typically be about 72 hours, allowing for order and receipt of parts.

I took my computer to them on Thursday morning. On Saturday after-noon, a technician (the same fellow with whom I had spoken on Wednesday) told me that he believed that a voltage inverter had failed, and that he had ordered a replacement on Thursday or on Friday. (My computer has a large screen with an odd aspect ratio — 1920×1200 — so it's no surprise that this part would require a special order.)

(It's not good policy for them to order such a part without my clearance to actually effect the repair, but in this case I would have given my okay.)

I'm hoping, then, to have my note-book computer back to-morrow or on Tuesday.

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While I await the return of that computer, I am using Bessie, a desktop computer that I maintain as a Win9x legacy machine.

As such, Bessie has only 512MB of RAM — Win9x actually becomes more dysfunctional if there is more RAM than that installed, though Win9x can handle GBs of virtual memory. But, with that memory constraint and with Windows' otherwise poor memory management, applications frequently hang or crash or otherwise do intensely annoying things. I really need to clean-up Bessie's file system and free-up a drive so that I can alternately boot Linux on it.

And Bessie connects to the 'Net at noticeably lower speed, probably because of crummy telephone wiring to the computer room.

So I am not doing nearly as much on-line as I otherwise would.

(The Woman of Interest has been kind enough to manage my principal character in the Kingdom of Loathing since my return to San Diego.)

I am visiting the Woman of Interest, my having left home to do so on Thursday morning. On Wednesday night, the display of my notebook computer apparently fried, so I've not brought it.

I'm very uncomfortable with the general feel of her keyboard; and her computer, being a Mac, uses different meta-key combinations from those now familiar to me. (I used to use Macs a lot, because one of my employers insisted on such, but that was long ago.) So I won't be on-line much before I get home, on Wednesday.

When I do get home, I will have to use my cranky old desk-top computer or rental machines, until I get the notebook computer fixed. So my on-line presence will still be more limited for a while.

28bytes alerts his readers to the fact that 3 May 2008 is the 30th anniversary of the first piece of spam e.mail.

Although — because spam e.mail can cross national borders — there is a limit to what the Federal government might practically and legitimately do about spam e.mail, the Federal government doesn't do what it could. In fact, Federal legislation actively subverted the efforts of some state legislatures to battle spam.

My suggestion is this: On 3 May of every year, send one piece of email, objecting in your own words (however brief) to poor Federal action against spam, to each of the following:

• your District Representative to Congress
• the two Senators of your State or Commonwealth
• the President
• the Democratic National Committee
• the Republican National Committee

(If one of your Senators is hiding his or her e.mail address, then send e.mail to curator@sec.senate.gov. I don't have a fall-back address for Representatives.)

Encourage each of your acquaintances, friends, and family members who are unhappy about spam e.mail to do the same, and to likewise encourage those whom they know.

This year, there will be very few people sending such objections, but next year there could be substantially more, and the numbers could continue to grow each year.

[Edit (2013:07/17): As part of an SEO programme to get sites to link to Politics.Answers.com, Stuart Hultgren, of Answers.com, contacted me to let me know of a dead link and of a good replacement.]

In various user environments, with various mouses, if one is highlighting within a text field by dragging the mouse from left-to-right, and then moves the mouse just slightly upward, then the highlighting is switched to running leftward from the original cursor position; similarly, if one is highlighting by dragging leftward, and then moves the mouse just slightly downward, then the highlighting is switched to running rightward.

I've observed this behaviour in Linux GUIs and in the Windows XP native GUI; the Woman of Interest tested for me and found this behavior in Mac OS X 10.4. I think that such behaviour is widely standard.

I don't know why mouse software is programmed thus. I don't know why anyone would want a small gesture, easily made by accident, to switch the selection from one set to its complement. In the event of such an accident, if the mouse button has been released then, at the least, one must repeat the highlighting procedure.

In my case, I have repeatedly made such a gesture by accident. In releasing the mouse, so that I can use my right hand to type, I frequently give it a tiny forward push. Since I am generally not watching the screen as I begin typing — my muscle memory is not so good that I will position my right hand properly on the keyboard without looking at the keyboard, and I tend to begin typing before my eyes return to the screen — I often discover that I have over-written text that I had meant to save, and that text that was meant to be replaced is what remains of the original.

Best practice in HTML is to put quotations into Q[uotation] elements, so that the mark-up looks like this:

Sam growled <q>I asked him, and he said <q>I swear on me mother's grave!</q></q>

rather than like this:

Sam growled “I asked him, and he said ‘I swear on me mother's grave!’”

Note that it is possible to have one Q[uotation] element inside of another — a good style-sheet will handle that.

Unfortunately, the WordPress editor seems to have been written by a programmer who believes that Q[uotation] elements must not nest, and the editor tries to fix things when it encounters nesting, by closing the outer element when it comes to the inner element. In the case of my previous entry, it then discarded the original closing </q> tag of the outer element, but (who knows why?) added an extra </div> at the end of the entry. The appearance of the whole page went to H_ll.

I fixed things by by-passing the WordPress software, and editing the 'blog's underlying dB with phpMyAdmin.

I've filed a bug report.

(I still need to arrive at a good specification of the list-bug that plagues my entry on installing Open Office.)

I've been pondering the problems of creäting decentralized equivalents to social network sites such as LiveJournal.

A 'blog per se comes fairly cheap. At the low end, one could form or join a syndicate, jointly register a second-level domain name (eg, oursyndicate.com) with GoDaddy for about $10 per year, jointly lease 500 GB of housing from AN Hosting for about $85 per year, distribute third-level domains (eg, winky.oursyndicate.com) amongst as many syndicate members as you might have, and install WordPress for free. Give everybody a whole gigabyte, and we're still talking just 20¢ per person per year. (Let everyone have his-or-her own second-level domain, and 25 GB, and we're talking about $14.25 per person per year.)

The challenge is in giving such 'blogs — across second- and third-level domains — the connectivity of Friendships, and of Interests.

As a first-pass approximation, imagine each 'blog as having a link that will deliver two data: an OpenID associated with the 'blog, and a reference (pointer) to an RSS feed for the 'blog. These data allow one to distinguish the 'blog owner, and in some sense beFriend him or her.

The next stage is to support a Friends page. A question is of whether to just deliver a set of references (presumably URIs) for the 'blogs of one's Friends, and leave aggregation to the visitor's software, or to assemble a Friends page at one's own site. The advantage of the latter is that the visitor needn't have aggregation software; the disadvantage is that either the page will have to be aggregated on-the-fly, or it must always exclude protected entries. I'm inclined to opt for aggregation on one's own site and for aggregation on-the-fly. However, a standard could support all of these options, leaving it to a given 'blog to decide whether to deliver just references, just Friends pages, or both, an whether any Friends page were aggregated on-the-fly. The next piece is Interests. A perfect decentralization of these is possible but (as I think) not reasonable; it would involve shipping copies of a large dB repeatedly to each 'blog. My thinking is that, instead, we should accept there being Interests servers, at which 'blog owners could register their 'blogs as corresponding to given Interests. However, no 'blog need be dependent upon just one particular Interests server; it should be possible to register with multiple servers, so that any Interest-search censorship on the part of one server could be overcome by merely additionally registering with another server that did not censor that Interest. It might be possible for these servers to be supported charitably; but, frankly, I imagine them supported by advertising or by registration fees.