Entries tagged with internet

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options for Unix shell accounts? (email, web)

I've been pleased with the service I've gotten for the last 14 years from a small, independent provider, but they, like many of their peers, are having trouble staying afloat. I really hope they make it, but it would be wise for me to find out what else is out there. So, dear LazyWeb, since I haven't done this in a very long time, I figured I'd start with the counsel of my friends (and anybody else who's reading this), before I start a wider search.

I use my Unix shell account for two primary purposes: email and basic web stuff. The reason I don't just do email locally on my home machine is that I want it to be accessible from anywhere; my current employer doesn't permit outbound SSH (or personal email), but that hasn't always been true and, anyway, sometimes I'm away from home.¹ So I use ssh to log in to a machine somewhere out there in the ether (ok, in Philadelphia), and run Pine there. Pine (or I suppose Alpine, from what I've heard) is important because it's plain text. I don't want to have to deal with all the formatting crap that people send in email these days. If I really need to see it I'll bop over to Gmail, but I want to read in plain text in a font size of my choosing. Pine does that for me.

As for web stuff, we're talking a small number of static pages, and I don't have my own domain name. (Separately I'd like to learn "personal domain management 101", but it doesn't need to be now.) I'm not doing anything with SQL, ASP/PHP/CGI, or server-side anything.

A couple other things that ought to be "duh": FTP to move files back and forth, emacs for local editing, and some reasonable backup story at their end (for the mail, mainly). Procmail, too.

I want to purchase this service, not mooch off of the kindness of friends (who may get distracted, or busy, or less interested later, or whatever).

So who do y'all use?

¹ Why don't I just run locally on my machine and accept ssh connections from outside? Well, mainly because my DSL doesn't come with a static IP, but also because I don't know how.

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seeking halacha relevant to online religious discussions

Can anybody answer this question on Mi Yodeya? Is it permissible for a Jew to participate in an online religion-related community that is largely made up of Christians?

The halachic issues are, I am told, complex and nuanced, and that's even before adding the internet into the mix. (Maybe in-person meetings like local study groups are different from internet-wide discussions that leave a permanent record.) I'd like to see, if not a definitive answer, a summary of the relevant issues (with sources). I've just dropped a bounty on the question. If you can answer this, or share the link with someone who can, I'd appreciate it.

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brain trust: low-volume email forwarding?

Dear LJ brain trust,

What is the current wisdom about special-purpose email forwarding? I need an email address that is not my own main one, whose purpose in life is just to forward email to me (I don't need outbound anything), for which traffic will be very low and probably infrequent -- maybe a message every month or two, maybe less. Because of that last I don't want to set it up on some service where I have to go check the email, hence the forwarding. I could define a pobox alias (I already use pobox), but I'd prefer an extra degree of separation. I do not have my own domain name or mail server. Free is good; cheap is possible.

Thanks.

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random bits

In the last two weeks we lost both

merle_ and

pedropadrao. I will miss them both. :-(

And there's no good transition from that to, well, miscellany, so this paragraph will have to serve.

I suppose, technically, if you're not sure if a TV show has jumped the shark, then it hasn't. But, that said, I doubt I'll be back for the next season of "Once Upon a Time", a show that got off to a good start in season one, carried it through part of season two, and then started going farther and farther afield of its original context. In addition to links to "the enchanted forest", the land of fairy tales, they mixed in an Arthurian knight (short-lived), Captain Hook, I think a couple other odd ones, and now, in the season finale, it's clear that Never-Never Land is going to be a major factor. If they were doing the work to tell a Gaiman-style story about all these realms being intertwined or some such I'd be on board for that, but it sure feels like they're just making things up as they go along now. Oh well.

Links:

Full moon silhouettes, a really gorgeous video of the full moon rising over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, NZ. (Link from Dani.)

Best court sanctions... ever! from osewalrus. As Ose says, best use of the term "Red Shirt" in a legal decision. And you thought court decisions had to be dull...

This is great (given that such idiots exist, which is not great). Bill Walsh was riding his bike and happened to be running a helmet-cam when a cab made an illegal U-turn across the bike lane, after being warned that it was illegal, and promptly got pulled over by an oncoming police officer. The video is short and cuts out before we get to see the expression on the cabbie's face, alas.

Feast of the ravens, a photo with an interesting story behind it. What do you expect to find when a large group of ravens congregates? Not this. From shewhomust.

siderea posted an excerpt from (and link to) an essay about libraries, mandatory internet use, and the very poor that is well worth a read. As more and more stuff moves to "online only", whom are we leaving out in the cold? The ones who can least cope, it seems.

I hadn't realized that 3D printing was advanced enough to make medical implants... a year and a half ago. Ok, this was an airpipe splint, but are plastic organs in our future?

Sad cat diary, a video in the general style of Henri (but not just one cat), from Talvin over at DW.

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design failure

Dear First Data (online payment system):

If, on the first page of the transaction, you asked me for the credit-card type, and then on the second page you gave me a text-entry box for the card number that allowed enough characters for me to type the spaces between the groups of numbers on the card, do not get all snippy at me about "wrong format". First, you should have told me "no spaces" up front; second, you shouldn't have let me type more than 16 characters there for my Visa card. You had enough information to present a correct-for-my-card-type input box and remove all doubt. It's not 1995 any more; we have web technologies that can handle this. Actually, given your multi-page setup, we could totally have done that in 1995 too. I think I did, actually.

Also, after clicking the "pay" button I should not be presented with a blank page that takes nearly two minutes to show a receipt, leaving me wondering what happened. A simple "working, please wait" could do wonders.

I would be happy to refer you to someone who could fix your user-experience problems for a reasonable fee.

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small world

Tonight I attended the first session of Curious Tales of the Talmud, a six-week class. I hope to write more about the class itself later (good stuff), but for now, something else:

The world is a small place. The class is offered by Chabad, with whom I have no prior connection. There were about a dozen people in the class. One shows up at a writing group I'm part of, one is a user on Mi Yodeya (I didn't know there were any other locals, but I'm a moderator and I use my real name online, so when we did introductions that person recognized my name), and the person sitting next to me recognized me from a past Pennsic. *boggle*

This last was an interesting story, and I wish I remembered our past encounter better (it obviously made an impression on him). He said he had talked to me while walking in the Pennsic marketplace on Shabbat many years ago, and I had said that I could look at the crafts being offered as we walked by but I couldn't shop then, and he took that as a nudge to do better about Shabbat. Now that's not something I would just blurt out so there must have been some background there, something I don't remember and he didn't tell me tonight. So here it is, something like ten years later, and he's part of the Chabad community, "not 100% shomer shabbat but getting there", and apparently a passing comment I made had some tiny part in that? Um, wow. Perhaps I will learn more at next week's class.

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Haggadah Mi Yodeya!

I am thrilled to announce the publication of Mi Yodeya's haggadah supplement! At the Pesach seder we are supposed to ask questions (about the exodus from Egypt and about the rituals of the seder, and anything else that comes up along the way). Mi Yodeya, a top-notch Jewish Q&A site (if I do say so myself :-) ), is all about questions. So we compiled some of ours that are on-topic for the seder into a book, a supplement to the haggadah. I hope you'll download a copy for possible use at your own seder (or just to read) and that you'll tell all your friends.

Go to http://s.tk/miyodeya for more info and a download link.

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Internet time

This is how Internet time works.

Late Tuesday night, somebody made the following observation in the Mi Yodeya chat room: hey, the text of the Pesach haggadah is freely available in digital format, a key element of the seder is asking questions, we're all about asking and answering questions, and we've got a lot of good Pesach-related content...so why not publish a haggadah with material drawn from our site? Reality set in soon thereafter and the proposal was amended to: why don't we publish a haggadah supplement this year, as a free PDF download that people can print and take to their sedarim?

The real discussion started on Wednesday, with people posting lots of suggestions, voting positively, and volunteering to help. Someone asked how we were going to organize the content since some copy-editing, filtering, reformatting, and whatnot would be needed and we'd need a template and... and I said leave that to me. (Organizing multi-author writing projects on tight deadlines? Been there, done that. :-) ) So I proposed a format that could be easily transformed to the final product, mocked up a couple questions as proof of concept, and got buy-in. We were, by this point, collecting links for questions to harvest, and somebody collected a list of useful tags to search for questions. I said I hoped we could ask our site's designer to design a cover page for us. Style and review guidelines were suggested somewhere in here. I started planning the formal call for submissions and its logistics.

Today Stack Exchange's lead designer showed up saying he has permission to do our design and production for us if we can give him the content. Awesome! And he can work quickly. I never would have thought we would get that kind of support (and asking for it had not been on my radar). So tonight I posted the call for submissions with detailed instructions (designed to make this as easy as possible for everybody), and off we go.

I'm excited because not only is this a cool project, but I can personally benefit from it this year. I'm not going to Toronto with Dani, and if I can round up enough interested people I'll be holding my own seder on the second night for adults who want to engage with the text and who don't care how long that takes. In other words, I'm aiming for the opposite of the "when do we eat?" seder.

I will, of course, share a link to the results later. Meanwhile, if you have any burning questions about Pesach this would be an excellent time to ask them, and if you're somewhat knowledgeable in this area and inclined to do some editing, drop on by. :-)

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sunk costs

Friday I closed a (previously-)permanent browser tab. A web site that I've been quite active in helping to build over the last year has gone in an unpleasant direction in recent months with no sign of improvement, and recently the badness has accelerated. Badly-behaved people do not have my permission to live rent-free in my brain, so it was time to sadly say "enough" and move on. (No, I won't be naming the site here. It's nothing I've ever promoted in this journal, to be clear.)

This was hard because I struggle with sunk costs. In principle I know that once you've spent money or time or effort on something it's gone and you can't get it back -- so if it's not paying dividends, hanging on "to preserve your investment" does not help. There's no such thing. If it's a faulty product and you can possibly get some of your money back that's one thing, but otherwise, sunk costs are gone and should not affect current decisions. This idea usually applies to investments (if the stock is tanking and you don't think it'll change, get rid of it), but sunk costs aren't just about money.

Yeah, intellectually I know all that, but it was still hard to close that browser tab. I want the time I spent on that site to matter; I want to feel good about what we built. It was hard to start to walk away from the SCA years ago too -- same principle, though measured in years rather than months. (I'm still minimally active, but I choose carefully what I want to do.) And historically I have had a great deal of trouble leaving jobs that are no longer fulfilling because I've invested in them. In all of these cases the answer is to be happy for the good times and recognize that things change and that can mean that things you invested in are no longer worth sticking around for. My intellect knows this; could it please arrange to convince my heart of it too?

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misc updates

We did Thanksgiving dinner with my parents, sister, and niece, as usual. (My nephew is currently away at law school.) Someday my parents will decide that this is too much fuss and that's what they have children for, but apparently not yet. My niece brought her boyfriend, who I enjoyed talking with. I overheard my mother say to my father "that's the most I've heard Monica talk in ages" and, well, it's because there was more to talk about. Old family tropes only get you so far, and my mother and sister, at least, share basically no interests with me and Dani.

I've decided that Felix and Oscar aren't the right names for the cats; the initial behaviors that prompted them haven't continued. I'm currently leaning toward Orlando and Giovanni, which pass the random-friends-and-relatives test and the neighborhood test (would I be embarrassed calling an escapee?). A pair of perfectly-nice Italian names will suit, and if you happen to know that I'm a fan of Renaissance music, you might correctly detect a further inspiration for those names in particular. :-) (Orlando is the brown one, who's also the lovey guy who sleeps in my lap purring loudly.)

We had a couple of people over for board-gaming this weekend. History of the World plays differently with four players than with six. We also played San Juan (a "light" version of Puerto Rico), Automobile (only our second time playing), and Pandemic. I suspect we haven't really "gotten" Automobile yet; our scores were pretty close and nobody did anything really unusual. (Well, only one player took out loans, but other than that we seemed to be playing similar strategies.)

Some links:

HTTP Status Cats: the HTTP return codes illustrated. I've seen 408 (timed out) around, but many of these were new to me. Also, I didn't know about some of those status codes (402 I'm looking at you).

Are Twinkies really immortal? Snopes weighs in.

This recipe for schadenfreude pie looks delightfully yummy. Alas, I saw it the day after the annual baronial pie competition. Maybe next year... Hat-tip to

siderea.

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S'lichot

Technically the high-holy-day season began with the first day of the month of Elul a few weeks ago, but some think of it as starting with S'lichot, the recitation of penitential prayers that begins (for Ashkenazim) several days before Rosh Hashana. That was last night.

Until now I had only ever gone to Reform services for this, and this year I was feeling the need to experience something more traditional. My Orthodox shul of choice for such things is Young People's Synagogue, which I've visited a few times on Friday nights. They didn't publish a time for S'lichot on their web site, so I sent email to the president of the congregation to introduce myself and ask. I got a nice, prompt reply welcoming me and giving me the information I needed. He mentioned that Dan Leger would be speaking; Dan is a member of Dor Chadash who I know from the Tree of Life morning minyan (yeah, Pittsburgh is like that), so that was an extra bonus.

( would go again; in fact, will on Sukkot )

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internet,
judaism

a challenge of globalization

I love the Internet. Among things, it brings me together with people I never would have encountered otherwise, many from far-away places. Hold that thought.

Mi Yodeya, the Stack Exchange site for Jewish life and learning, is currently in the midst of its first election for moderators. (Until a site graduates from beta it is assigned interim moderators. We graduated a couple months ago and now we're having our election.) I think I'd do a good job and I've been active on the site for a long time, so I threw my hat into the ring. There are six candidates for three positions.

It is customary to have a town-hall chat where the candidates answer questions from the community. It starts in an hour and a half. The Israelis will get up early (7AM), we in the US eastern time zone will stay up late, the folks on the west coast and in Australia are happy, and, well, if we have any Europeans, they're kind of out of luck. Scheduling is hard.

The chat is optional. I'd like to be a part of it, but I'm looking at that 1AM end and that 7:30AM minyan and...oof. We'll see.

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random bits

Some professions require a certain amount of ongoing education every year, usually in the form of several-hour seminars. At least for the legal field, it seems like the subjects do not have to be all that closely related to American law. I routinely see advertisements for these in the Jewish press covering topics in halacha or Jewish ethics. But even so, I was surprised to see that Law and the Multiverse was offering one on superheroes, comic books, and constitutional law. If I were a lawyer I would totally go to things like that. :-) (The blog is fun too.)

Language Log recently wrote about an unusual keep-off-the-grass sign: tiny grass is dreaming. That's a neat image.

shewhomust recently posted a picture of a neat woodland "sculpture".

Everybody's probably seen is Facebook making us lonely? from the Atlantic, but I wanted to stash a link somewhere anyway so I may as well share.

And finally, Mi Yodeya (formerly known as Jewish Life and Learning) recently launched as a full-blown Stack Exchange site after a year in beta. I've enjoyed participating there -- lots of good questions and answers and discussion, but in a useful format that isn't "just another forum where you have to wade through the junk to get to the good stuff". There's going to be an online launch party on Sunday. More info:

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weird DSL problem

We came home to no internet service tonight, but the failure mode is odd. We do have connectivity, but no DNS -- so that would be a well-understood problem, except that I can use ssh to get to my shell provide -- by name. I can also ping that host by name -- but I can't ping anything else by name. Does MacOS maintain some sort of cached state for ssh?

And when did browsers start rewriting IP addresses to domain names? I could visit my favorite web sites by IP address in principle, but when I type in an IP address the browser turns it into a domain name, tries to load that...and fails, because there's no DNS. WTF?

Verizon has been underwhelming so far, and I even mean compared to other Verizon experiences. At one point they said the line must be bad and they'd send a technician in a couple of days, then put us on hold for 10+ minutes. But how could it be a bad line if we have any connectivity at all? When the guy came back he said that there's an outage (previously he had said there wasn't), so with luck it'll come back on its own.

But if anybody reading this could tell me where to find some DNS servers that I'd be allowed to hit, I'd be grateful. I'm trying to find that on my own, but using the phone is slow going.

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internet,
news

some SOPA links

This stuff is important. Have you contacted your senators yet?

"Now, it may seem like SOPA [the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act] is the end game in a long fight over copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copyright, because the copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on computation." - Cory Doctorow. More here.

A not-so-brief history of DNS blocking, and why it still sucks.

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a few links

Thanksgiving food: it's not too late! Thanks to

shalmestere for pointing out this Thanksgiving dinner flowchart.

A great rant on web-service protocols (that is, SOAP versus REST) from a former coworker: the S stands for simple.

Law and the Multiverse on Once Upon a Time: is Rumpelstiltskin's contract valid?

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brain trust: Firefox 7, 8, neither?

Dear LJ brain trust,

Upgrading a browser is a dangerous thing because you never know what'll happen to your add-ons (or UI experience in general, really) until you get there, and rolling back isn't always smooth. In the past I've used my iBook to test-drive new versions of Firefox before committing on the machine where it really matters, but apparently OS 10.4 is no longer good enough for Firefox (and the iBook isn't good enough for newer operating systems, which I knew when I bought it).

I was hoping that I could just visit the pages at the Mozilla add-ons page for the add-ons I care about to find out the latest versions of Firefox on which they're supported. No dice. I can apply Google one at a time to look for evidence one way or the other -- for example, I found a Stylish user script to change something in the Firefox 8 UI, which suggests it works with Firefox 8 -- but is there a better way?

I know some of you are already using Firefox 7 or 8, so just in case there's overlap in our add-ons, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know if you have direct knowledge (and for which versions of Firefox) for any of the following: AddBlock Plus, Flashblock, Ghostery, Greasemonkey (I assume, but...), HTTPS-Everywhere, Image Zoom, NoScript, Stylish. I use others, but these are the important ones.

Thanks.

PS: I'd also appreciate hints about major UI changes.

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humor,
internet

so true!

Found via Google+; let's hope this works without a G+ login since the post was public:

Somebody commented: add "check Snopes before forwarding that crap for the 10,000th time". Yup.

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triskaidekaphilia

Via

tangerinpenguin: List thirteen things that are going well for you this Friday the 13th:

1. The customer who sounded like he wanted Big Complicated Things (In A Hurry) thought my first draft was about 80% while I was assuming 25%.

2. Two significant projects (and some lesser ones) at work want me and my manager will support whatever I want to do. Cool!

3. I read a letter on the eye chart this week that I don't usually get.

4. Some more e-books that I want to read are available as free downloads.

5. Good conversation with my rabbi last night.

6. Bought gas for $3.09/gallon (loyalty card) and it should hold me for a month.

7. Cirque du Soleil is coming to Pittsburgh and this time their web site allowed us to buy tickets. (Totem -- not interested in the Michael Jackson thingy.)

8. Waking up to a cat on my feet every morning still, even though the weather has gotten warm.

9. Baldur is eating better.

10. Mesura et Arte del Danzare -- lovely recording!

11. Neighbors taking care of things along the property line that they might have been able to get away with not doing.

12. The rain seems to have ended before I have to leave for Shabbat.

13. Dani makes me happy. (Why yes, that is redacted. :-) )

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interviewed by metahacker

I've owed these answers for, um, a while. Sorry about that!

( Read more... )