An Exercise In Futility

Data, Encrypted,
Through the tunnel flows, But then –
Dropped. Link Lost, AGAIN.

I have had this insane problem for over a year where youtube would not work in Internet Explorer or Firefox on one particular machine. In both browsers, the youtube website looked like crap (as though CSS was not rendering) and it whenever i tried to play a video, a message appeared indicating that I had to install flash player or enable javascript. Based on things i had seen mentioned in many posts on the interweb, I fiddled with all sorts of settings, updated Java, updated Flash player, updated Shockwave player, uninstalled Quicktime… nothing seemed to help. Something else i saw mentioned a lot was that Norton, or some firewall system, or some ad blocker, or some popup blocker, was blocking ytimg.com. Well, i knew for a fact i had no firewall software running on that box, no ad blocking, no Norton anything.

Then today i had a brainstorm — What else could cause ytimg.com to be blocked? a hosts file entry to deliberately redirect requests, perhaps? YES, sure enough, i had pointed s.ytimg.com at an unreachable local private IP address, a very long time ago, and had completely forgotten about it.

Finally moved the blog to WordPress, since i do not foresee writing my own blog engine any time in the next decade. The only major to-do is to fix the old RSS feed to somehow point to the new one, i wonder how i might do that. I am thinking an http ‘moved permanently’ redirect; must figure out how that works.

Due to thunderbird and firefox having built-in update checker, i now keep them up to date instead of running 2-yr-old versions. So i updated thunderbird the other day and was met with some annoying changes. Firstly, they changed the icon set. They have a new folder icon which only sort of looks like a folder, because counter to any other folder icon in windows history, this one is on its side. it looks more like an oddly shaped brick. They kept the old application icon, good, but the new icon set is a totally different style; Grr — When alt-tabbing through windows, there is no similarity between thunderbird ‘main window’ icon and ‘compose mail’ icon. They also randomly changed email ‘flag’ column to a ’star’ column. How could that have been a necessary change? You don’t star things, you flag them!

Wow, everything has to be difficult. I decided to do a big upgrade on one of my servers which runs debian, and for each package it tried to install it could not successfully run dpkg –configure. the python component would error out and it would just fail. this meant that many packages would not get configured (like debconf) and so many other packages would not get upgraded at all! What a PITA. to top it off, i could find no mention online of the particular python error message i was seeing (in this context) — something about assignment to None). Fortunately i was able to determine what script was being run by dpkg when the error occured (thanks strace!), which allowed me to narrow down the source of the problem and find out what lines the error occured on. Taking this newfound information i googled for the most interesting part of that line of code: “None=None”. Sure enough i found someone’s patch which solves “None=None” warnings (and errors in python2.4). The patch shows that the fix is simply to change ‘None=None’ to ‘none=None’! After modifying the following files, dpkg finally worked and the upgrade was able to continue through to completion without any further problems. hooray!file list:

• /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mx/Tools/mxTools/bench2.py
• /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mx/Tools/Tools.py
• /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mx/DateTime/DateTime.py
• /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mx/BeeBase/BeeStorage.py
• /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mx/BeeBase/BeeDict.py