Currently Browsing: Blogs
Dec 31, 2011
Posted by Sebastian in Blogs | 16 comments
In our house, 2011 has not been the best of years. In May, over lunch with the CEO, I was told that the Board had decided to dissolve my employer of ten years, and that I would be retained to help wind down the company until the end of June. Everyone else was gone within a week. Many of my co-workers, who over the course of ten years also became friends, are still out of work in a pharma industry which is in utter turmoil. I spent four months unemployed until deciding to accept a job for considerably less pay and in a more junior role.
As for the blog, it’s been an eventful year. We ditched the name Snowflakes in Hell, and adopted a new title and theme. Along with that came accepting advertising. I am pleased to report that the advertising is paying for the Internet connection and related server costs. So what were the most highly trafficked stories this year?
Other than ones that tripped over a lucky keyword, Racist Motivations vs. Racist Outcomes was one of the most popular posts this year, which I’m happy about, because I spent time on that post. It’s most frustrating when “Look! Something shiny!,” fetches tons of traffic and something you spent time on doesn’t. But sometimes it works out. There were a few other stand outs traffic wise. People were concerned when Obama finally spoke out on gun control. No one particularly liked it when NPR set us up the bomb, and I guess a lot of Floridians stopped by to laugh at my reaction to a little bit of rain. Not a highly ranked story traffic wise, but I think the victory in Ezell is one of the biggest successes of the year, which was balanced by a significant loss in Heller II. Let us also not forget HR822 passing the House, on the legislative front, and Pennsylvania finally getting Castle Doctrine.
My top referrers were Say Uncle, Glenn Reynolds (the good Professor can bring in more eyeballs in a single link than a peep show near a naval port), Tam, The Firearm Blog, Robb Allen, and John Richardson. I thank my partners in crime.
Other big news of the year is the precipitous decline of our opponents. We all remember CSGV getting their Twitter account suspended for trying to “out” everyone. Howard Nemerov takes a look at just how bad it’s been for the Brady Campaign, and we’ve certainly closely followed their descent into irrelevant madness here as well.
For gun rights, 2012 is going to be pivotal. The Second Amendment can’t afford Barack Obama stuffing the federal courts, or God forbid, the Supreme Court, with more anti-gun judges. Even Romney, as bad as he might be, is an improvement over the status quo, particularly when it comes to judges, since any GOP President knows that court appointments are where you throw bones to your interest groups. Bush forgot that with Harriet Meyers to his peril.
I sincerely hope everyone has a healthy and happy 2012, and here’s hoping the Second Amendment (and given the Title of this blog, Article I, Section 21) has a successful 2012 as well.
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Dec 20, 2011
Posted by Sebastian in Blogs | 2 comments
I had to be at work today long before the sun came up. That meant getting by today on only a few hours sleep. Needless to say, tonight, I’m beat. Going to try to get up early tomorrow to get some posts queued for the day.
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Dec 15, 2011
Posted by Sebastian in Blogs, Law | 13 comments
The blogosphere loves itself a good controversy, and it looks like we have yet another one generated by the folks at Truth About Guns, courtesy of Weer’d Beard, who also links to a thread over at Reddit. Once again, this involves accusations of appropriations of intellectual property, refuted with a claim of fair use.
There have been accusations of a similar type made against Truth About Guns that I do indeed think fall quite probably into fair use. Their use if Weerd’s banner, for instance, is arguably fair. I use the word arguably, because there’s a lot of room for that when it comes to the legal implications of this topic. It’s not nearly as cut as dry as TTAG’s responses would have you believe. Fair use is kind of like Justice Potter’s infamous statement about pornography, in that he knows it when he sees it. While their are some pretty sound guidelines as to fair use, what is and isn’t fair use is not so cut and dry that one can just declare it, and that is the end of it.
You will get no argument from me that the Internet implicates necessary adjustments to how our society thinks about intellectual property, and copyright laws in particular. But the law is what it is. We’ve all used bits of material derived from other works, at one time or another, in the course of blogging. This is not what I think is imprudent behavior on the part of TTAG. What is imprudent, among other things, is blowing off a copyright holder when he claims your use is infringing, with claims that it’s clearly fair. It’s not clearly fair, because the law doesn’t work that way.
The prudent reaction is “What can I do to make this better?” All the author may want is clear attribution, or some other minor concession, and you both get to walk away happy. Even if the demand is to cease using the work, it’s a one post loss. What’s it to you? A blogger should be willing to work with a copyright holder who claims his use of their material isn’t fair. The copyright holder has the upper hand in this matter legally. So why make an issue of it?
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Nov 5, 2011
Posted by Sebastian in Blogs | 10 comments
To the script kiddie that tried to hack my server — you’ll have to try a lot harder than that if you want to exploit my box. But congratulations, you managed to launch a wild perl process and take up half my CPU power for a couple of hours. Had it not been for the fact that your socket code writing skills aren’t very L337, I might never have noticed.
That you got in at all is due to an oversight on my part in not locking down a directory, and due to an exploit in a theme we were using on one of my other blogs. That exploit has been removed. I also removed your fun little script, and am analyzing it now. I am not impressed with your lame hacking skills. I’d strongly recommend sticking to masturbating to porn in your parents’ basement. The next person might call be annoyed enough to call the cops.
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Oct 31, 2011
Posted by Sebastian in Blogs | Comments Off
It turns out our WordPress caching plugin has been broken since we did the migration. That might help explain some of the issues I’ve been noticing with performance. It might also explain why some people weren’t seeing the posts from today while others were.
I should be fixed now, and hopefully pages should be loading a bit faster.
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Oct 30, 2011
Posted by Sebastian in Blogs | 3 comments
Someone (I can’t remember who) asked if the subscribe to comments feature, which will send you an e-mail alert on future comments, could provide a link to the specific comment, rather than the comment section as a whole. This was never a problem in the past, because I didn’t have threaded comments enabled, but now we do, and that makes finding the new comment more difficult.
The plugin I use does not have many options, but it was fairly easy to find and make the change in the PHP code. That plugin hasn’t been updated for years, so hopefully I’ll remember I made a change if it ever does. Either way, the e-mail will now link directly to the new comment.
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Oct 29, 2011
Posted by Sebastian in Blogs, Personal | 11 comments
Decided to sleep in today, but apparently I woke up having slept through fall and gone straight into Winter. Not much accumulation on the ground here, but it’s coming down. The real concern is there are many outages on power. We’re pretty good here so far, but if the blog disappears, you’ll know why. I have about 50 minutes on UPS if things go south, so I’ll update in that case, assuming it doesn’t happen in the middle of the night.
My relatives up in Connecticut are reporting 7 inches. I’m hearing reports from New Jersey that it’s more like 4 inches there. We’re in the “Wintery Mix” zone, which means we’re getting wet, heavy slush like accumulation. My only concern is my trees still have their leaves, and freezing water over that large a surface area, with wind gusts, is a lot to ask of a tree. And much like the Money Pit, we have very weak trees.
Been working on getting some performance tracking working for the new server. I never really cared that much previously, but I decided to put some time into getting some MRTG tracking working. This way if we get a traffic spike while I’m not paying attention I at least have some data to analyze. Here’s some preliminary stats if anyone is interested.
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Oct 25, 2011
Posted by Sebastian in Blogs | 7 comments
I have acquired a rather large UPS. Used of course, but wasn’t of much use to its previous owner. I also have come across a quad-Xeon workstation, with 16GB of RAM, which I think would make a splendid server for the blog. I’ve had the Xeon for a while, actually, but what’s kept me using the older box is that it’s pretty miserly with electricity, giving it a nice run time on UPS power. Well, now I have a big honkin’ UPS, so that’s less of a concern.
But the quad-Xeon is much faster, and has twice the RAM. The only issue is, I’m using dmraid (FakeRaid) in the current box to do mirroring, because I was short sighted, and didn’t think through the consequences. Ordinarily, I’d just move the mirrored pair over, and things should be fine. But I have to break the dmraid pair, and convert to to Linux software RAID. This is doable, but a bit of a PITA. So I need to do this after hours. I think I can make the transition without incurring any serious downtime.
My plan so far is to remove one drive from the current mirror, and let it run degraded. Set up a degraded software mirror on the new system with the drive I took out, and then copy data from the current box over, while live. Once the new box is running as a copy, albeit an outdated one, briefly shut down the current box and update the files that have changed. After that I should be able to come up on the new server, add the other drive, rebuild the mirrored pair, and we’re good to go.
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Oct 25, 2011
Posted by Sebastian in Blogs | Comments Off
Looks like it’s all the rage today. At least I’m in good company, but I completely understand feeling stuck with a name that you just don’t think works for you. As Glenn Reynolds notes,
“Pajamas TV sounded a little too Hefneresque (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), so it quickly became PJTV, and now Pajamas Media is being “rebranded” as PJ Media.”
It’s funny because I had considered changing the blog name to SIH for a bit, but was talked out of it. Ultimately I just decided to jettison the old name entirely. So far, I don’t think it’s worked out too badly, despite the fact we had a few little issues here and there. Hopefully PJ Media will have a successful transition as well.
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Oct 23, 2011
Posted by Sebastian in Blogs, Gun Rights Organizations | 20 comments
Sometimes the stuff that comes out of Truth About Guns just boggles the mind. I have no idea how Robert Farago came to the conclusion that NRA was ripping gun bloggers a new one, but that was most decidedly not my takeaway from NRA press release, which seemed aimed more at the accusations of one Dudley Brown of National Association for Gun Rights, who has been spreading paranoid nonsense around the Internets in an attempt to derail the bill. This has been covered extensively here and elsewhere in gun circles. So I have no idea how TTAG came to characterize this as an attack on gun bloggers.
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