When I was 10 my teacher told us this joke. So in the old Wild West… General Custer was chasing Sitting Bull. He had his cavalry and supply wagons and soldiers. They’d been chasing Sitting Bull for days and the weather was starting to go bad. A lieutentant came to Custer and told him “Sir, the men are tired, the weather is bad, we need to rest.” Custer thought about it and replied “OK, I’ve been here before; a couple of miles ahead is a valley where we can make camp”.
So I wrote that Voyager was the worst ST ever. I still agree with that, because of the overall structure. This doesn’t deny that some episodes were good though. Viewing Voyager as a “old school story telling” structure allows you to see each episode as an individual story. One really good one is “Child’s Play” (season 6). This is a “7 of 9 episode” (one of the downsides of Voyager was “harry episode”, “tom episode”, “tuvok episode” etc etc), but it was one of the better standalone episodes, talking to what it means to be an individual, to have self-agency.
“Voyager” has a reputation for being awful. And I agree with this. But maybe not for the reason commonly cited. It’s an article of faith amongst some people that Voyager is panned simply because it had a woman in the captain’s chair. I have no doubt that there are plenty of Neanderthals out there who do have this stupid knee jerk reaction. I remember some of the media speculation around having a female captain, and how the audience would take it.
I hit a web page which, naturally, refused to work properly. So I looked at the NoScript report. This one page ws pulling in scripts from (hand-typed so maybe tpyos) adobedtm.com cdna-assets.com chartbeat.com cloudfront.net criteo.com disqus.com disquscdn.com doubleclick.net dunhilltraveldeals.com effectivemeasure.net facebook.com gigya.com google.com googlesyndication.com googletagservices.com imrworldwide.com inksinmedia.com krxd.net mediavoice.com mmcdn.us ooyala.com optimizely.com outbrain.com parsly.com quantserve.com qubitproducts.com revsci.net scorecardresearch.com skimresources.com visualrevenue.com whistleout.com Boggle!
I have a linode and a Panix v-colo. These servers do everything I want. But OVH do a physical server rental program. It’s not necessarily the best server in the world, but it’s pretty good. The So You Start(SYS) server starts at around $50 month. Now a linode is $20/month. 10% discount for paying 1 yr in advance, so $18/month. To compare; for $18/month I get a 8vCPU, 1Gb RAM, 48Gb of disk on my linode.
Discussions elsewhere (in more than one place; coincidence?) reminded me that in the long long distant past I was “hot” java programmer (“hotjava”, geddit? Ah shaddup!). I actually wrote what I believe was the first website Java applet sold commercially in the UK, back in 1995. It was a teaser site for the SciFi Channel (which was due to launch around then) called “zorg”. We got involved ‘cos we were Sun partners and the client had gone to Sun asking for some Java development.
So I decided to play a little bit with google authenticator on my systems that are visible to the internet. ie my linode, Panix v-colo and ‘bastion’ host at home. The way sshd works, if you authenticate with public keys then PAM “auth” doesn’t seem to get called. So this is pretty much for “ChallengeResponse” (instead of “password”) authentication. Which makes it great for my need; if I’m coming from one of my own machines with my SSH key then I’m not impacted.
My web design skills are a little on the old side. Probably frozen around 1997; Netscape Navigator 2 would probably render most of my stuff properly. As part of the “make work” project I did last month I wanted to try something new. With the existing version if you clicked on a link to get cover-art then it would just be a simple link. You see the image then press “BACK”.
In the early 90s I was learning DOS and Unix. One thing I really liked about Unix was the concept of “symbolic links”. It meant you could install programs in their own directories and symlink the executable to somewhere in your $PATH. DOS couldn’t do that. So you ended up with horrendously long path names. And DOS had a 120 character limit. Ugh. So I wrote a TSR, called “exelink” which kludged it.
Just two weeks ago, I revisited my virtualization options with a view to making the system more reliable - primarily by using mirrored disks. In the end I stuck with a kludged up process for Citrix XenServer, but with a worry about how this would impact patching and upgrades. This week my XenCenter instance told me that 6.0.2 was out and I should upgrade. Now there are two ways to upgrade a XenServer; one is via the XenCenter console where it pushes the updates, the other is to boot off the CD and upgrade.
