December 4th, 2018
Now that I am retired, I have time to fiddle with my blog. I’ve decided to go back to Blogger, and I have set up a new Core Dump blog. This blog will remain as an archive, for now, but I won’t be updating it.
As for why I chose Blogger, I just didn’t want to fiddle with setting up a WordPress blog from scratch. The Blogger platform is easier to use and modify and I don’t have to worry about security updates and things like that, all of which are handled by Google. I don’t have the customization freedom that I did with WordPress, but I don’t really feel like fiddling at the code level any more. I just want to write posts.
Some time in the next few days, I’ll revamp the home page to point to the new blog, with a link to this one if people want to browse the archives. The rest of the site will be getting revised as well, but probably not until the new year.
Posted in Blogger, Core Dump | No Comments »
November 25th, 2018
No, I’m not dead. I am, however, now retired.
So what does that mean for this blog? Well, it’s probably going away. DotEasy (my hosting provider) has been snarking at me about blog traffic, despite the fact that I haven’t updated it in ages. And I’m running an old, old version of WordPress that really must be updated.
My current plan is to back up the blog and try to install it locally on my PC. I really don’t want to lose the archives. Then it will come down from DotEasy.
I will then create a new blog, possibly under a different title, with an up-to-date version of WordPress. All of this requires that I learn more geeky stuff so it won’t be immediate, but my goal is to have it done by the end of this year. I have missed blogging and now I have the time to indulge myself.
Oh, and by the way, the rest of the Soltys.ca site will get a makeover. The Internet Resources for Technical Communicators part is horribly stale and the rest of it even more so. I may put up a photo gallery although I need to check my bandwidth status for that.
So stay tuned. Updates are coming.
Posted in Core Dump | No Comments »
September 9th, 2017
I hadn’t planned on posting here before doing blog maintenance, but I haven’t had a chance to start on that, and I can’t let this go without comment.
SF writer Jerry Pournelle has died. According to reports I read, he passed away in his sleep just after attending DragonCon over the Labour Day weekend.
I am truly sorry to hear that. I enjoyed most of his fiction, both his own and collaborations, especially those with Larry Niven. The Mote in God’s Eye, Lucifer’s Hammer, and Footfall, were both best sellers and true classics of the field. He was also a well known and influential columnist; his Byte columns were required reading in the early days of personal computing. His conversational yet informative style was a definite influence on my own writing. Perhaps his most important role will have been as a passionate champion of space exploration and development, especially during the Reagan administration.
I never met him, although we’ve exchanged emails several times, some of which he published on his blog. I didn’t agree with most of his political views, which seemed to become more reactionary and strident as he aged, and sometimes reading his blog could bring my blood pressure to dangerous levels, but I still kept reading him up until the end – the hallmark of a good writer. I will miss him.
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August 25th, 2017
You may have noticed that this blog doesn’t look right.
A couple of days ago I got an automated message from my web host saying that my website had exceeded my plans resource limits (number of connections, server CPU usage) and it was causing connection problems. After some back-and-forth with (the very helpful) support group, we established that it was probably due to web crawlers like Google’s indexer running through the 10+ years of blog entries and bogging things down.
So … it’s time to do some maintenance on this blog.
In the next week or two, I’m going to set robots.txt to block (temporarily) all bots from all of the blog. Then I’m going to do a full backup. And then I’m going to try to upgrade my WordPress to the current version. That may or may not work without some serious under the hood tweaking, so it’s likely that the blog will be either down, at worst) or on hiatus for a while.
It’s been a long time since I got my hands dirty under the hood of this beast, so bear with me. I will be back (if nothing else, it’s too valuable a resource for me to lose).
And then it will be time to look at the rest of the site, which is pretty mouldy.
Posted in Core Dump | No Comments »
August 20th, 2017
Robert A. Heinlein was a major formative influence on my life. I discovered his books (Red Planet was the first) and science fiction in grade school and they’ve been a major part of my life ever since. Ditto for SF writer, David Brin, who looks back at one of Heinlein’s most prophetic novels, Revolt in 2100, which takes place in a theocratic United States. Heinlein has faded from literary favour over the past few decades, but Brin makes a good case that we should be taking another look at least some of his work, in particular, his Future History, of which Revolt in 2100 was a part.
“Could it be otherwise here? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not – but a combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday’s efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck.
“Throw in a Depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negrosim, and a good large dose of anti-“furriners” in general and anti-intellectuals here at home, and the result might be something quite frightening – particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington.”
Jiminy! Heinlein wrote that in the early 1950s! Is there anything he did not hit right on the head? Heck, he even nailed the dominionist “Prosperity Gospel” so popular among Ted Cruz types, promising fervid followers that their “material heaven here on earth” will come by righteously seizing the property of unbelievers. (Late note: a prosperity gospel preacher keynotes Donald Trump’s inauguration.)
Seriously, read his last paragraph (above) again. Then recall that Heinlein portrayed Nehemiah Scudder taking the White House against the will of a majority, in 2012. (He also spoke of America sinking into “The Crazy Years.”)
Posted in SF, books | No Comments »
August 15th, 2017
I finally upgraded my 2-1/2 year-old Samsung Galaxy S5 to a Galaxy S8. My original idea was to get a Google Pixel or Pixel XL, but with the upcoming refresh of those phones, the original Pixels are not available, at least through Rogers. So I took the path of least resistance and got an S8.
It is a very nice phone, fast and with a gorgeous display. Samsung’s TouchWiz skin is still a bit more intrusive than I’d like but it’s closer to stock Android than what was on my S5. I’ve dialed the resolution back to 1480 x 720; with my vision, there’s no point in pushing 4x the number of pixels around and it saves on battery life). The camera is much better than that on the S5, has manual exposure controls, and can save in RAW format.
My only real concern with the phone is the potential fragility of the curved glass screen. I have the phone in an OtterBox case and have added a tempered glass screen protector. Hopefully that will be enough.
I did have a few issues with the phone while I was getting it set up. I’m going to describe them and the solutions here. I’ll probably add to this as I go along, just so I have the information handy for future reference.
- While fiddling with display resolution and fonts, I somehow set something that made text with a dark or coloured background show up in outline, which made it almost impossible to read. This affected both content (tweets in my Plume Twitter app when I used the dark theme and text in some app menus and dialogs. The problem was caused by turning on High-Contrast Fonts in the Accessibility options. Disabling that fixed it.
- I have the ES File Browser app installed. The first time I went to set my ring tone, it asked me what I wanted browse ring tones with, I selected ES File browser by mistake. After that, I couldn’t select ring tones or notification options. (You should select Media Storage).
- The tempered glass screen protector does reduce the sensitivity of the touch display. I sometimes have to press more than once to get it to register. Adjusting the pointer speed under the Language and Input option seems to help.
- My preferred keyboard is SwiftKey using the Holo theme and with the number row turned off.
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