My LiveJournal account has effectively been purged. As of yester-day morning, I can no longer log-in with it. The diagnostic says

The database is temporarily in read-only mode, so creating new login sessions is temporarily down. Please try again later.

and the account is not yet explicitly declared as purged; but it has been removed from the Friends lists of accounts that had beFriended it, and I deleted the account on the morning of 16 February, which would be 61 days before I was unable to log-in. (Though one is warned that the account will be purged after 30 days, present practice is that it will be purged after 60 days.)

When last I looked, the user-name had not been listed as again available.

I was looking at the version of Installing OpenOffice 2.4 under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x that is delivered for the LiveJournal feed of this 'blog, and saw that it has a bunch of unmatched closing p[aragraph] tags that simply aren't in the entry as I marked it up. Indeed, I don't think that I used p[aragraph] elements at all in that entry.

Looking at the entry that is delivered to visitors to my site, I see <p> and </p> appearing various places that I haven't put them. But they don't appear when I attempt to use the WordPress editor to remove them, nor are they in the entry as it appears in the raw dB. The problem, then, is in the preprocessing by WordPress.

I s'pose that I need to explore the problem and then file a bug report with WordPress.org.

If you’re actually trying to install another version of OpenOffice, then click on the OpenOffice tag, as there may be an entry on that other version.

OpenOffice 2.4 has been released. Users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x should not run the setup routine. Instead

1. Uninstall any existing installation. If you have yum, then as root run

   yum remove openoffice.org-*

   If you must or would rather use rpm then use the command

   rpm -qa | grep openoffice | xargs rpm -e --nodeps

2. Unpack OOo_2.4.0_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz (or the version appropriate to a devil-language, if you use one of those) to your filespace.
3. Go into resulting OOH680_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.xxxx/RPMS/ (or to the OOH680_m12_native_packed-1_xx-xx.xxxx/RPMS/ corresponding to your devil-tongue).
4. As root, if you don't have a more recent version of a JRE than 6u4, then run

   rpm -U *.rpm

   otherwise run

   rpm -U openoffice*.rpm

5. As root, run

   rpm -U desktop-integration/openoffice.org-redhat-menus-2.4-*.noarch.rpm

   (NB: You will need to log-out and back-in for the Applications menu to be up-dated and list the OpenOffice components.)
6. Go to the directory in which libvclplug_gen680li.so.1.1 is found:

   cd /opt/openoffice.org2.4/program

7. As root, enter the following to get SELinux to accept the interface:

   chcon -t textrel_shlib_t libvclplug_gen680li.so.1.1

8. If you did not install the JRE above, then
   • Launch OpenOffice.

     /usr/bin/openoffice.org2.4

     (It will not be listed on the applications menu unless you have logged-out and back-in.)
   • Select

     Tools | Options… | OpenOffice.org | Java | Use a Java runtime environment

   • Choose one of the environments that is then listed.
   • Click the OK button.
   • Shut-down OpenOffice. (The change will be in effect upon next launch.)

There's a fellow who frequently comes to David's Coffee Place who looks and very much sounds like Paul Adolph Volcker. Paul Volcker was the Federal Reserve Chairman who bit the bullet and broke the back of the inflationary spiral that threatened to destroy the American economy (and thence the world economy) in the late '70s and early '80s. (His immediate successor was Alan Greenspan.)

Anyway, I have discovered that this fellow at David's Place spends much of his on-line time playing on Neopets.com. At first, I though this an amusing juxtaposition. But then I asked myself

What if he doesn't merely look and sound like Paul Volcker? What if he is Paul Volcker?

The economy is acting all scary, and maybe Paul Volcker is responding by focussing on Neopets! Or maybe the reason that the economy is going wack in the first place is that Volcker started messing around with Neopets!

Should economists be rushing to Neopets? Should we drag Paul away? I don't know!

As well as continuing to desire an unusual amount of sleep, I notice that I have a persisting sensation of white noise. I'm definitely ill, though the symptoms remain low-level.

I did, at least, get PHPMailer working for me at PraxioLogic.com. That's good, because I've been approached to creäte a small website for a client, which would use such functionality, and FourBucks are probably the folks to host it, as its traffic should be relatively light and as the client apparently only wants one domain.

It is now possible for you to correct or otherwise to edit your comments to this 'blog, so long as three conditions are met:

• Not more than 30 minutes have passed since the comment were made.
• You must have been logged-in when commenting and be logged-in (with the same ID).
• You must be using a machine with the same IP number as that with which the comment were made (which would typically hold if your connection to the 'Net weren't broken in the interim).

When one saves an edit with Edit Comments XT, one none-the-less is returned by it to the comment-editing form, with no real indication that the change has been made; so confirmation is not ideal. One can go back to the main page and from there again click on the Comments link to double-check that the edit was effected.

I may have some low-grade illness. I fell asleep relatively early and quite quickly on Thursday night. Though yester-day morning I awoke from a dream that had left me furious and nauseated (it involved child abuse), I thought that I'd otherwise got enough sleep. But I fell asleep again in mid-after-noon, thinking that I'd nap for perhaps 20 minutes — I left my computer, albeït in its backpack, on the foot of my bed — and, instead, I slept until late at night. And for the last few hours I have been increasingly sleepy.

In other thrilling news, I'm having trouble getting various pieces of PHP code working for me on the FourBucks server that I use for two of my domains, but I'm largely working blind, since I don't have administrative privileges for the operating system itself. One of my subscribers here hasn't been able to add his OpenID to his account here. And I've not been able to get PHPMailer working at PraxioLogic.com.

I am going to respect the LJ content strike to-day by avoiding even visiting any LJ sites.

I believe that the strike comes far too late. I believe that mere strikes of any length are insufficient measures. I believe that this particular strike was announced with far too short notice (something like five days). And I believe that a one-day strike will produce unimportant statistical results, as it will be followed immediately by a surge of postponed entries and comments.

I also believe that, in response to any action that either seems serious or looks as if it might lead to something serious, the LJ administration will emit more unmeant pieties, and that a substantial number of those who engaged in the action will be all too eager to believe the pieties, rather than to extract genuine and significant commitments.

None-the-less, one forgoes very little not to under-mine this effort. Vayáis con queso.

In his angry response to American critics and elsewhere, Anton Nosik has flatly denied referring to the Friday LJ boycott as blackmail. Unfortunately for Mr Nosik, a recording of the interview in which he did has been put on-line (7210 KB).

In the same message that I quoted earlier, a member of LiveJournal staff writes

Open questions

[…]
• Subscriptions – Should moderators be able to charge for access to closed communities?

And people are responding, positively and negatively, on the interpretation that LJ is contemplating adding support for such subscriptions.

What is more likely to have happened is that LiveJournal has reälized that nothing in their existing rules prevents a maintainer from imposing subscription fees (collected off-site) as a precondition for membership in an LJ community journal, and that one or more cam ho is doing just this. LJ doesn't want to become known as infrastructure for sex work, but they'd probably rather not ban communities only open to dues-paying members of fraternal societies. So they're trying to figure out whether to effect some sort of ban; and, if so, then how to do so.