Yes, all of the inline blog images are gone. Toast. Kaput. One hundred percent operator error.
I made a mistake in copying over data from the previous server to the new one, and some of the contents of the all-important /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content directory tree didn’t get copied.
Then I compounded the fault by not doing enough checking post-migration.
Then I compounded that by re-using the backup drive on the new system.
I am deeply embarassed by this. I know this is a low-traffic site, but this is the sort of amateur-hour error that has me questioning my compentence.
There are 849 posts in the blog, so it’s not feasible to manually try and fix each, so I may just declare Blog Bankruptcy and start over.
Sorry.
Yep, finally retired the Atom 330 box and moved everything over to the new server I got for my birthday a few months ago. It’s lots faster and uses even less power - under 20W max versus 90W for the last one. Smaller, nearly silent, SSD (256 mSATA), Core i3 CPU, 16GB of memory, just a delightful little box.
And it’s tiny, this is the Intel NUC hardware. Recommended.
Anyway, think I’ve got most of the services and such migrated, ping me if there’s things broken.
The net is raging with reactions, but I have to indulge in a bit of I told you so here.
Anyway, do as I did and buy yourself a copy of Fever. And install my Meltdown app or, on iOS, Reeder.
You’ll be happier. Fever is solid, and I like running it on my own server. (EC2 micro instances work well too.)
For a while I paid for and used NewsBlur but the iOS app was too unreliable for me. By now it should be fine.
So, as previously ranted Twitter has slowly closed off my access to my phubbard account
Today I stuck a fork in it. Two-fold approach going forward, I created a new account pfhubbardand re-followed my list, and have also started being more active as phubbard on app.net
I got one more followup from Twitter support; suffice it to say that ‘support’ is not the first adjective that springs to mind.
We know it can be difficult when you lose access to an account, but we use these verification requirements to make sure we don’t give out any user information to the wrong person.
I’m now looking for a similar crowd on app.net and will migrate there as much as is possible. Please consider doing so as well - app.net now has a free tier and how much do you like ads anyway?
A quick note - full docs and code are on Github for my project creating analog metering of my network usage. Visceral, visual and immediate. I like it a lot.
The ham radio category here has been pretty bleak, mostly because I got my Technician license in a weekend and haven’t had a need that’d get me to buy a radio. This post on Hack A Day changed that. Let’s talk.
The Baofeng UV 5RA (Amazon link, non-affiliate) is between 40 and 50 bucks online. That gets you a handheld with plenty of functions and extras like desk charger, earpiece, belt clip, strap and such. It’s dual band, 136-174Mhz and 400-480, plus FM receiver (e.g. bog-standard FM radio, receive-only). And it has a 0.5W LED flashlight. And you can hack it.
In other words, its the perfect and cheap way to try ham radio if you, like me, have that shiny new license in your pocket and a wife intolerant of expensive new hobbies.
Some notes and links to help others:
- Amazon is a good place to buy it, but there are plenty of others.
- You want and need the USB cable, which is an extra nine bucks.
- The USB cable is actually a USB-to-serial cable with a Kenwood-style end. The USB chip is my least favorite, the Prolific PL-2303. For OSX, go here for the driver you’ll need to install before it’ll work.
- The open-source software you should immediately get and install is called Chirp. More on this below.
- Start reading on the Baofeng UV5R FAQ
- The FM radio is accessed by pressing the ‘call’ button briefly.
- The flashlight, via the ‘Moni’ button.
- Tons of information at http://miklor-uv5r.99k.org
- ARRL has a nice one-page color PDF of ham radio bands. The radio can do the 2 meter and 70cm bands.
- I’ve not tried this yet, but it can recieve NOAA weather broadcasts as well.
- Haven’t tried this either, but the Chirp radio unlocks additional functionality. Out of the box, the radio does 420-480Mhz; with Chirp it now goes to 520Mhz.
- The radio can handle FRS/GMRS but is not legal on those bands. Design and power limits.
- It gets pretty good reviews and the Amazon reviews are very positive.
- The in-box manual is just a brochure. Head to http://radiodoc.github.com for a vastly better one.
- It has a basic scanner, and from an hour of listening 447.64Mhz seems to be a repeater with lots of folks talking. Coincidentally, I heard a conversation about this very radio; a negative review from a long-term ham.
- One strong plus of Chirp - you can go the menus, tell it where you are and it’ll pre-program the channel memories with all of the local repeaters automatically. HUGE WIN.
Overall? Strong recommend. Cheap and capable.
So I’ve been phubbard on Twitter since 2007 or so Just a bit shy of six years.
Earlier this month (Feb of 2013), Twitter got hacked and lost
250 thousand accounts. Or so. Apparently, mine was one of them.
So starting on the second, when I tried to login to the website, it required that I reset my password. And there the problems started.
I have a lot of email accounts. In 2007, I was working for sdsc.edu; but it wasn’t sent there. Nor my phubbard@computer.org (IEEE), phubbard@acm.org (ACM), home email, gmail, or even my mailbucket.org account, worked. I have no dang idea, and that’s quite unusual for me. Email archives are barren in this regards, suggesting that I may have used a temporary address.
Yeah, oops indeed. It gets better.
You can request a reset via email address or username. Neither works. Or cell phone - but I’ve never tied my phones to Twitter, so no help there either.
The twitter tech support was pretty blunt:
garciaunicorn, Feb 19 02:51 am (PST)
Hi,
Sorry, but we are unable to verify you as the account holder. Please note that an email address can only be associated with one Twitter account at a time. Support cannot tell you what email address is associated with an account nor send password information to an alternate email address.
If you're unable to access the exact email (or verified mobile device) for this account, we can't continue troubleshooting this issue. You might consider contacting your email provider for help getting back in to an old or inactive email account. Here is some contact information for common email providers: http://support.twitter.com/articles/107907
Even if you mistyped your email address on signup, we require that you write to us from the exact address that is tied to the account.
Unfortunately, if you don’t have access to this account’s email address or verified mobile device, we are unable to assist you in regaining access to this account. There are no security questions you can answer nor additional information you can provide as proof of ownership.
While we understand that it can be disappointing when you lose access to an account, we use these verification requirements to make sure we don’t give out any user information to the wrong person.
If you'd like to create a new account, you can do so here: https://twitter.com/signup
Again, I'm really sorry.
garciaunicorn
Really, Twitter? I had asked them to tell me the email address I used. They won’t. That’s pretty fucking annoying.
BUT IT KEEPS GETTING BETTER!
You see, Twitter uses Oauth, so clients I authorized before this mess stil work. I can tweet from my phone, and probably other clients as well. I’d be happy to tweet a code or something to validate. But no.
So I’m debating. I might setup another account. Or decamp to app.net, already have phubbard there anyway. Since this clusterfuck I can’t even login to download my tweet history, which is really sad. 5k or so, some of which would have been very nice to have a record of.
My fault? Yes, I should have updated my email and (arguably, I don’t see much value in SMS) my cell. But Twitter’s handling of their security failure is the proximate cause, and their rigid procedures have screwed me.
I’ve been meaning to set this up, and finally got it done. https://fnord.phfactor.net/ should work with no CA errors or hassles. I ended up buying a 1-year cert from GoDaddy for $7, which is quite reasonable and should be trusted by most browsers.
Install pretty straightforward, gotta love Apache2. Right now both HTTP and SSL work, might put in an auto-redirect just on principle.
Now that I’ve done it once, I think I’ll buy another cert for www.phfactor.net; that’ll also allow me to test SSL support in Meltdown.
A quick note for anyone else out there seeing this particular problem: Starting in October or so, iPhoto would hang during startup, endlessly displaying a busy cursor. I tried restoring older backups, to no avail, and finally manned up and used lsof and some patience. The fix was to remove a directory:
mv ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iPhoto old-iPhoto
and we’re back in business. I’m actually ashamed to admit it took me this long; in my defense each restore-from-backup took almost 3 hours (USB2 backup drive, 130G of pictures) so it was a very tedious exercise.
I spotted the culprit with
lsof | grep iPhoto | grep -v System | grep -v Application
which reduced the list down to something possible.
So it’s on the Google app store, now called Play:
(I can’t figure out how to make the badge a clickable link in Markdown, so click here if you want to see it in Google Play.)
And as of today, it’s now available on Amazon too.
Still working on bug fixes, and planning on doing either SSL or Fragment-based layouts for tablets next.