The Substantially Similar Weblog

I’ve been happy to see WiFi appearing on nearly every MBTA commuter rail car recently. I was less happy to see this:

No TPM on MBTA

I guess I’ll have to wait until I get home to find out why this bothered Steve so much.

Oddly, the MBTA’s web filter also blocked access to my WordPress editor, but unlike the TPM block, I could select “yes, I really want to do this” to get here.

I’ve never understood why web filters so often block these sorts of sites on apparently generic settings. “General News/Blogs/Wikis” are dangerous? Reputation “neutral”? I’d be surprised if anyone at the T actually did this on purpose, but I suppose it would fit the general pattern of operational incompetence.

Update: the problem appears to be real.

I’ve got to give a shout out to my brother Jonah’s new photo blog, so you can finally keep up with his exploits via RSS. His recent work from Algeria is amazing:

Cell phone photo from West Palm Beach Gas Station:

It’s this sort of fuzzy accounting that got us into this mess to begin with.

I’m on my first Virgin America flight. WiFi connected instantly. It turns out that the Internet is pretty much the same at 40,000 feet.

Addendum: Apparently there is also still spam email at this altitude.

Technorati Tags: Virgin America

Excellent summary of where we find the newspaper business today:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

Oops 3/16/09. “Shirky,” not Sharky.

I recently upgraded my home router box to Debian Lenny. Everything went fairly smoothly, with a few exceptions. My NFS mounts no longer worked because apparently wildcards are no longer allowed in IP addresses in /etc/exports; the export addresses needed to be translated to subnet format (e.g., 192.168.98.* becomes 192.168.98.0/824).

But after a power failure last night, the router box rebooted and I was no longer able to access the Internet from any clients on my LAN. Strangely, I could ping or traceroute external hosts and perform DNS lookups, but web surfing and ssh timed out after an initial handshake. I noticed by telnetting to port 80 of an external host, I got an error back from an invalid HTTP request (e.g. “oeunthioues”), but if I sent a standard valid request (GET /index.html HTTP/1.0), the connection just hung with no response.

I won’t recount all the false leads I had in diagnosing this problem. It turned out that the Internet-facing NIC on my router box had been reset to a low MTU. By setting the MTU on the LAN clients to that low number, or raising the MTU on the Internet-facing NIC back to 1500, the problem was solved:

# ifconfig eth2 mtu 1500

After restarting networking on the router box, the MTU was again set back down to 576, which is apparently the default MTU for an X.25 network. I have no idea why the interface is getting that value by default (where it wasn’t before), so I just added a hack to /etc/network/interfaces to fix it:

iface eth2 inet dhcp
  post-up /sbin/ifconfig eth2 mtu 1500

Interestingly, pre-up didn’t work.

Hopefully I’ve included enough relevant terms in this entry that others with this problem will find it. It was hard to diagnose because no errors appeared in any log file, and I had partial but not complete connectivity from internal clients to the Internet. My first guess was that it was due to the iptables upgrade, but in fact it was entirely unrelated.

Technorati Tags: Debian, Lenny, iptables, firewall, router, MTU

…of Nova Scotia.

My past and future colleague Trevor Smedley just lost his appeal to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia of his criminal conviction for having pet chickens.  As the Supreme Court noted in Trevor J. Smedley and Her Majesty the Queen:

They are not just any chickens – they are special chickens. They are heritage chickens that are brought to this province from Quebec.

Indeed, the court agreed with Mr. Smedley that there was nothing wrong with the chickens:

The trial judge found that they are in every way inoffensive. There is no excessive or even noticeable noise, no odour. The way in which they are kept is not unsightly. The chickens remain on their property seemingly doing no harm to either the aesthetic qualities or the quiet enjoyment of the property of the immediate neighbours. So finds the trial judge.

As I haven’t seen much news about this case in the mainstream media, I’m posting a copy of the complete opinion here to shed public light on the matter. I know very little about Canadian chicken law, so I’m not sure whether further appeals are possible, but I hope Mr. Smedley can keep up the fight.

When did it become so fashionable for the United States to have czars for everything? Apparently, the first “drug czar” was appointed at the height of the cold war. Do we have nostalgia for the good old days in pre-communist Russia?

Technorati Tags: Working Families Czar, Joe Biden, Czar, Language, Politics

Still Falling

Technorati Tags: Snow, Blizzard, Boston

Via Steve (new domain name, otherwise as usual), this inspiring little PowerPoint-ish presentation from Dr. Steven Chu, Obama’s choice for Secretary of Energy:

This video features about as many charts per minute as did An Inconvenient Truth, but left me far more hopeful about our long-term prospects on Earth. It is reassuring to see so many powerful positions being filled by people with domain expertise, rather than partisan hacks. If this administration doesn’t get us back on course, we might as well stop having children.

Technorati Tags: Steven Chu, Obama, Climate Change, Energy, Environment