Dream: a box of cards
Monday 18 April 2011, 08:06Dream transcript from the morning of May 2, 2009. I posted it in my Dreamwidth journal at the time, and I'm pretty sure I know what it meant because it tied into events in my life at the time, but I felt like posting it again today.
４月１７日の日記
Sunday 17 April 2011, 13:01久しぶりに日記を書きました。日本語の勉強したいので、ここによく書くようにしています。しかし難しいです。たいていな友達は日本語をよめません。読まなかったら、書き物の意味ありませんか？
Fixing Alpine's broken subject sort
Monday 4 April 2011, 10:09I use the Alpine email software, which is successor to Pine. I mostly like it, but its implementation of "sort by subject" is broken and annoying.
It is documented that Alpine will strip "Re: " and variations from the start of a subject line before sorting, and that seems like something I would reasonably want: replies end up getting sorted with the things they are replies to, instead of all being grouped confusingly under "R". However, what is undocumented and unwelcome is that Alpine will also look for and remove strings enclosed in square brackets, which are typically used to identify mailing list messages. I subscribe to several mailing lists that identify themselves by square-bracketed tags at the start of the subject line while leaving the From: headers unchanged (messages are from the person who sent them instead of from the list). If subject sort worked, then as a natural consequence of how string sorting works, I could group all messages from the list together, sorted within the group by the rest of the subject. But because square-bracketed tags are silently ignored, I can't do that, and there is no way to group the mailing list messages together. There is no option to make subject sort sort on the actual subject, no really, the string that is in the Subject: header and not a munged version.
Fixed by deleting lines 4562 to 4565 of imap/c-client/mail.c in the Alpine 2.00 distribution, which check for square brackets and invoke mail_strip_subject_blob().
Henry and Eliza
Friday 7 June 2002, 14:21Henry came home from work feeling as horny as Hell. He threw his coat across the back of a chair, kicked off his boots, and picked up the mouse from its spot on top of the pile of books on the kitchen table, next to the breakfast dishes. He didn't shower. Eliza wouldn't care.
Chinese Seal Script fonts
Friday 25 February 2011, 06:51Here's a page of Chinese fonts including a few for the Seal Script. Could come in handy...
How Wikipedia could save itself
Saturday 19 February 2011, 00:15I don't think Wikipedia wants to save itself. But if they really wanted to, I know how they could do it.
On bible-ophilia, and a call for better pagan book design
Friday 18 February 2011, 16:56I hope to push the first release of Tsukurimashou out the door tomorrow, and as part of that, I was looking at the possibility of adding optical sizes to it. That won't happen in tomorrow's release, but it will happen eventually, and the train of thought led from there to a thing I once saw in an historical mail-order catalog: an entire multi-page selection of Christian Bibles, organized by different optional features, such as type size, paper and binding quality, and so on. It occurred to me to look on the Net for the current state of the art in such things, and that led me to this site, which is fascinating. It's an entire Web log about the design of Bibles.
ブリード神様のお願い
Thursday 10 February 2011, 21:00『ブリード神様のお願い』とは約束でした。遅刻でも、これは。
謙遜で天后に成った聖ブリード神様は神聖の切望の翼で上げられました。
聖都に至って
処女性以外何も着ないで
お宅の前に見えて
いたころ、
ブリード神様の事に訴える人を覚えての公約を守りました。世界に恵みが降らさせて
今でも神業が増えさせて
います。
インバルクと言うお祭り
Wednesday 2 February 2011, 21:47２月２日くらいは、インバルクと言う記念日です。ブリード神様のお祭りです。何回「Groundhog Day」と言っても、インバルクですよ。
今ブリード神様は私の氏神いません。２００９年の春に起きましたものので 氏神は戴かないで来ました。しかし今日はブリード神様のために儀式をしました。
Fixing "unexpected RCODE (SERVFAIL)" and "unexpected RCODE (REFUSED)"
Wednesday 26 January 2011, 18:55This is another one where I searched the net, the answers I found were very unhelpful, and so I'm posting what worked for me for the benefit of anyone making similar searches.
The problem: new ADSL connection from MTS Allstream, which is the deregulated ghost of the Manitoba telecom monopoly. Works pretty well, except they do that damn misguided "helpful" redirection of failed DNS requests to a search engine, thereby screwing up all non-Web activities that depend on the DNS actually working according to the protocol. They offer opt-out but that doesn't work. So I set up my own caching DNS server and everything seemed fine... except just a few Web sites wouldn't work. Always the same sites; little or no rhyme or reason to which ones they were. Penny Arcade, Weather Underground, the Canada Revenue Agency, and the CBC, were the most annoying examples. The browser would hang, trying to connect, forever.
Digging through the system logs revealed lines like these:
Jan 25 11:34:38 tetsu named[1613]: unexpected RCODE (SERVFAIL) resolving 'art.penny-arcade.com/A/IN': 72.52.2.1#53 Jan 25 11:37:55 tetsu named[1613]: unexpected RCODE (REFUSED) resolving 'cbc.radio-canada.ca/A/IN': 207.164.234.37#53
Searching on the Web produced many people complaining about error messages like these, and the following answers on how to resolve it:
- "You must be the authoritative server for these domains, and you haven't given BIND the correct path to the zone files." No, I am not the authoritative server for these domains.
- "You must be the authoritative server for these domains, and someone on the Net is trying to break into your nameserver." No, I really am not the authoritative server for these domains, the failing requests are coming from an authorized user on localhost (namely me), and incoming unauthorized DNS requests would be stopped at the firewall anyway.
- "The remote authoritative servers for these domains are misconfigured and you must contact the admins and tell them to fix the problem." Yes, I REALLY HAVE THE TIME AND ABILITY TO CONVINCE EVERY ADMINISTRATOR OF A MISCONFIGURED NAMESERVER ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET TO FIX THEIR CONFIGURATIONS BECAUSE THEY WILL ALL LISTEN TO ME! Also, of course, I can contact these administrators by pure mental telepathy, since my computer cannot connect to theirs to send them email.
Clearly, none of these answers was helpful. Here's the actual answer: The MTU on my Ethernet connection was set to the default of 1500. Packets that size cannot pass through the ADSL connection; and to make matters worse, MTS apparently drops ICMP traffic (this could be my fault because it may be happening at the firewall box, which is theirs but was reconfigured by me), so that Path MTU Discovery (which would automatically adjust the setting) doesn't work. It wasn't really anything specific to DNS, but would cause subtle effects in a lot of places; DNS was just the most visible thing failing. Solved by changing my MTU to 1400; there may be some slightly larger number that will work (I'll experiment), but 1500 evidently is too big. It appeared only, but consistently, on a few domains, because those were the ones where the DNS query or its answer (which would generally be consistent per domain) happened to both exceed the ADSL connection's real MTU and not be fragmented anywhere else in the network.
