Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
hey all,
it's been quite a bit since I posted. The site went down for a little while when the domain ran out. Not a huge problem. However I have been feeling lazy about posting for a while.
I am doing an experimental video project for a little bit, and also back working at Politics in Minnesota for the next directory. This has taken all the brainwaves pretty much.
I have been getting some random feedback from the internet and hits from all over the place. People seem to like it, though of course we are the tiniest fish in the infinite sea.
Some searches on Google are coming our way well, and it's been interesting to see which stories are the most popular. I am still pretty pissed with the hosting company, they are not willing to do anything about the slow ass databases, so either way this site is 'geared down' until February or March. That's just as well.
It is a lot more fun to futz around with video than just do the same old writing. I will post what I come up with (with help from my friends)
On the upside, I am also going to whip up a spot for Chinibby.com before the end of the year, and Nick and Abby are going to do a bit of blogging from overseas. I've decided they're gonna have Wordpress instead of Drupal, especially since Drupal is way too pokey with the bad database servers.
So that is the plan right now. Best holiday wishes for everyone.
Thinking of M.F.
We miss you and your sense of irony...
Well that settles it. I am gonna try to dump Drupal into the current system in the Blitzkreig method of web development. and ya know i'll try to do it tonight. not sure if it's gonna work. the site may go down all day. if the whole thing gets messed up it will suck. that is all.
nick's gonna kill me if i don't get chinbby working. i know its possible. its just been frustrating to have the process go several steps back. and im not gonna feel motivated to try to hack it after my job here at macalester wraps up this Thursday... Gotta make it happen soon or it won't at all....
The new system, temporarily located here, is called Drupal and in it, basically all the content is called 'nodes'. There can be regular blog post nodes, image nodes, video nodes. They can be associated to other nodes, and have comments. There are a lot of RSS headline feed features around too, including an audio node + RSS feed = Podcast feature.
On the plus side, there is going to be podcasting support set up, image gallery handling, polls and more static content that is tied to dynamic content.
Overall the software seems to work pretty well. The addon modules might not work as expected, but I will basically turn stuff off and on until it works.
The site is going to replace the front page within this week. That's the damn goal!!!
There is also a page called the 'HongWire' which will have a lot of feeds from various sites. It needs to be cleaned up, but it works with new headlines every 30 minutes, and that'll give us something interesting every 30 minutes without any more work from me!!
'Nyarlahotep Chooses' is a block reserved for a random selection of David's artwork, when that gets put together after his new computer finally shows up.
There is going to be a box on the front page connected to the del.icio.us service that will allow folks to send links over from their browsers.
Basically most anything contributed by a registered user will be posted. I've got some individual blogs set up and they will always be marked at least on the sidebar and probably on the main page too.
These are the tricky things. So far the only major bug is that the auto-banner rotating feature is not compatible with caching. So it runs hella slow. So the fancy logo that changes every time will have to wait.
The "HongWire" news aggregator is probably going to have to be tweaked for it to work fast enough.
The other random image box is going to be random images from the library. Might not keep that.
Any creative contributions are appreciated and individual contributors keep their own copyright for their own work and if they ever want it taken down that's fine.
I'm probably going to have to put in ads to try to pay for the web hosting. If it breaks even that will be a shock.
Well, damn skippy!
All right, that took long enough. But yes, in fact, I was able to dump the entirety of HongPong.com into Drupal, by first going from MovableType to WordPress, and then using the fine and polished 'Wordpress to Drupal Migration Utility' module by Borek Bernard at borber.com.
Notably, my beloved lengthy headlines have been truncated a bit, but this is due to Drupal's maximum headline size, which is going to have to be hacked. This was not the fault of Wordpress or Borek. Also some HTML encodings, like for example ampersands, have become garbled. HTML encodings are the tricky monster of MySQL, so there are other messed up characters yet to be found.
I imported this onto a new test Drupal server at
http://drupal-test.hongpong.com .
This will probably be molded into the production server, and I will just copy over the customizations already at
drupal.hongpong.com .
Thanks for your patience with this process. The colossal technical hurdle that held things back (apart from my laziness) was overcome with a triple-bank shot. Thanks too to WordPress. Excellent software but not quite right for the task at hand.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING US OVER THE YEARS.
THANK YOU, C.I.A., DEPTS PENTAGON, STATE AND JUSTICE FOR VISITING AND AMUSING ME.
(you guys ain't seen nothing yet)
THANK YOU CONTRIBUTORS FOR ROCKIN.
THANK YOU SPAMMERS FOR BOOSTING OUR GOOGLE RANK!
MOVABLETYPE IS AT AN END.
HONGPONG.COM (VERSION 6?) IS ON THE WAY.
This is one of those annoying times for engineering this site. Currently running on MovableType 2.661, the last free version they offered, but on the new, faster and generally good web hosting I now get from PowWeb, it glitches out. I get out of memory errors when posting, and the Total Post Exporter function doesn't work completely.
I want to get the site into Drupal, and I've decided it's gonna 'go live' before I have perfected its design. Anything would be better than this situation, and I have a couple folks who want to contribute goodies when it's finally working. They have been very patient, but it's taken far too long to kick this process into action.
Unfortunately, the big stumbling block so far has been getting the data from MT into Drupal. There are a number of methods that people have devised, but each suffers from certain drawbacks: version incompatibilities, failing to import categories, and other toxic problems.
So I have been checkmated and unwilling to deal with muddling through this while programming all day at work. But just now, an obvious potential solution has popped into my head.
Last summer I experimented with yet another popular Open Source blog platform, WordPress, which is quite good and fairly mature now. I got most of the site put together, but there were some problems I didn't like in how it structured things. Drupal solves these problems - namely heirarchical categories/tags/taxonomies. All these billions of del.icio.us bookmarks I've been making in the last couple weeks are closely related to this scheme.
Most importantly, I was able to import all of Hongpong.com, including the comments, from Movable Type into WordPress. I did this at least twice, so I know it works.
So today I thought, if MovableType > Drupal is not working, why not try MovableType > WordPress > Drupal ?
So I just installed Wordpress again, simply to pull this off. It's so crazy, it just might work!! Please stand by............
Drupal.hongpong.com - i swear it'll happen!! (Currently it's just a few test posts) Eventually!!!!
I had a power failure and lost some goodies. Not a colossal disaster, but lame! I used to have a backup power supply but the damn battery gave out. Anyhow, I discovered that there are some plugins that let Firefox remember what tabs you have open if it crashes or there's a power failure. There are lots of awesome Firefox plugins and extensions, and Tab Mix Plus is among the best. It will save the browser windows and tabs you have open if Firefox or the computer suddenly konks out!
Del.icio.us experimentation: del.icio.us is a 'social bookmarking service' that allows you to save bookmarks to the public, attaching tags so that you can have a sliceable and diceable batch of links. Right now I have a home page on del.icio.us, organized with quite a few bookmarks.
My plan is to have the Del.icio.us bookmarks appear on sidebars in their respective category pages, once I switch to Drupal (this is not too hard to do). In the meantime, I'm going to have del.icio.us spit out my fresh links to the HongPong.com front page every day. Ideally this should produce some more daily bite-sized content. The usual style around here is to aggregate stuff into huge, unwieldy posts, and a good strategy is to give everyone more little things on a more regular basis – and it's easy to do from other computers. Our other occasional contributors will also be able to include their del.icio.us bookmarks when the Drupal site FINALLY comes together. (see del.icio.us tags on Drupal!) Drupal kicks ass, i really gotta get this moving.
In lieu of writing this evening, I have decided to attack the 7000+ individual items of comment spam that have flooded into the server. As per our long-standing strategy to take over the internet, this collection of spam helped elevate our rank in the search engines, but overall creates far more static than anything funny (though sometimes, of course, it's pretty funny).
Some of the crew have been waiting patiently to contribute to this website once I get it switched to Drupal. One of the major barriers was getting the comment spam cleaned up. I want to import the comments into the new site, but I sure as hell don't want all that spam messing up the process. A little bit of spam, perhaps, for fun, but not all that shit.
So now we are already down to 1,464 from some 7000+. Basically once it's down to a few hundred, that will be good enough. Of course, I also gotta close off many old stories to comments, since those are the ones that get pounded by spammers.
If anyone's real comments got deleted, I am really sorry. I personally glanced over each entry and I hope none of the good stuff got nailed. When I switched over to PowWeb, all the old comments from the last site got detached, even a really interesting thread by a few Turks on the Kurtlar Vadisi Irak story. With a bit more engineering I'll get the old (also spam-filtered) comments back up onto the new site.
So to recap, this was one of the shittiest steps to deal with before going to Drupal. Now it's basically ready to go!! On the content side, that is.
Yet again movabletype is bitching out over posting a major, long update on Lebanon-Israel situation. Damn it.
Fortunately this past week i put together a Plan for the New Site, finally, with all the layout details really needed to get rolling. i have decided that we are going with structure first, filling in content as its ready, rather than waiting for all the content i want to put up to actually come together (meaning the batches of photos, especially).
What does this mean? Pretty much that more about the war is going to have to wait until I get the damn Drupal site done. It's going to take a sacrifice of some hours that I would rather spend in any other way during the summer. But now, obviously, it's gotta happen.
However I don't think it will take an inordinately long time to get the major parts together. I have promised various parties that their new areas were going to gear up a while ago. Since the damn old scripts this site runs on are finally just shitting out too much, it's back on the front burner for this week. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow night – I just can't bring myself to code like that during the day. Shit!
there is some kind of glitch that truncated the end of the post. no time to deal with it now, but the rest will be put up tomorrow. another reason to get moving on the new damn website.
update: the post is split in two now. lame.
Sorry for the lack of updates. I have decided there is something unsavory and a tad depressing about a blogging lifestyle in June. I am moving out of the spot in Loring Park right now, getting into the web development job at Macalester. Right now I gotta take apart my desk & get it ready for my dear roommate's movers or his head's gonna explode.
There are quite a few separate things I wanted to write about, but first I wanted to do a little *actual* research with some books from the library. I've got the books now, so I'll be on that once things are set up in St. Paul.
Don't expect much for updates until Saturday at the earliest.
Michael Bower, known for playing Donkeylips on I think the old Nickelodeon show Salute Your Shorts, says Scientology is bollox.
This shit is disturbing: WWTDD.com: Connie Chung is insane.
You can watch "Why we fight" the documentary on Google Video.
Juan Cole is always the go-to guy for Iraq analysis and his bit on post-Zarqawi is good.
AP:News analysis: Iraq insurgents fight on despite major setbacks:
Sunnis demand the release of a top Sunni religious leader Saturday in Tikrit, Iraq. Protesters said the United States wrongly detained him. (BASSIM DAHAM/Associated Press)
Now that's what I call freedom!
Tony Snow and Dan Bartlett don their Darth Vader helmets on the Bush plane to Mess'o'potamia
It is late but I am just posting to note that the major barrier in moving the site over to the Drupal - a problem so onerous that has delayed me for weeks while I hunt for a real full-time job and chill at political conventions - has abruptly been solved this late Thursday evening. All true computing breakthroughs occur after 3 AM, it is well known.
I started from scratch on a new Drupal installation now at Drupal2.hongpong.com, and basically I discovered that I did entirely foolish things when trying to install the AcidFree gallery/media juggling system. There was no flaw on the developer's work at all, just my own dumb ass.
Behold a working gallery page as the cops march towards protesters in New York City at the RNC - 2004. Register for the site if you like (registered users from the old installation will be brought over in a bit).
In other positive news, I found a benefactor on the Internet to refer me into the BlogAds system so there will hopefully be enough revenue to cover the web hosting fees.
Get used to seeing this little Drupal face. It's happening!
How to Pick a Satisfying Career: Know Yourself
Hongpong.com Drupal development: Some new advancements: I have organized the menus a bit and set up a basic forum. It is colossally easy to register an account on the new system, which allows you to put up files and such, as well as personal blogs and polls. Anonymous comments are also turned on.
Check out the new RSS headline aggregator thingy set up - viewed here as a big list of mixed things, or here broken into the component sections (or "wires")or a set of the sources we're putting together. NOTE: Right now the auto headline updater doesn't work - in other words it won't check sites on its own yet. Therefore I think anyone can hit drupal.hongpong.com/cron.php to force updating the feeds. (we're gonna do some SEO somehow, too)
Meanwhile some randomness: Bill Salisbury on polarization in MN nominating processes. He is an intrepid reporter who's been around the Capitol for a long time.
Help Palestinians but dodge giving Hamas government money? Sounds dubious.
Aspyr is releasing Civilization IV for Macintosh tentatively in June. I just saw it on PC again, and it is excellent.
Porter Goss: shitty leader goes back to Capitol Hill. Never should have brought his greasy face outta the House.
You gotta see the Truth live. The word is law, bitch! Wayne Madsen promotes Al Gore comeback in 2008 in the Salt Lake Tribune.
If you care at all about South America you need to check out Greg Grandin's "Rumsfeld's Latin American Wild West Show" on TomDispatch.com. Basically the U.S. is militarizing its relations with the whole region, as one country after another slips out of Washington's orbit. Only a small part of a CRUCIAL read about how direct American imperialism/Full Spectrum Dominance has been field-tested south of here:
Latin America, in fact, has become more dangerous of late, plagued by a rise in homicides, kidnappings, drug use, and gang violence. Yet it is not the increase in illicit activity that is causing the Pentagon to beat its alarm but rather a change in the way terrorism experts and government officials think about international security. After 9/11, much was made of Al Qaeda's virus-like ability to adapt and spread through loosely linked affinity cells even after its host government in Afghanistan had been destroyed. Defense analysts now contend that, with potential patron nations few and far between and funding sources cut off by effective policing, a new mutation has occurred. To raise money, terrorists are reportedly making common cause with gun runners, people smugglers, brand-name and intellectual-property bootleggers, drug dealers, blood-diamond merchants, and even old-fashioned high-seas pirates.
In other words, the real enemy facing the U.S. in its War on Terror is not violent extremism, but that old scourge of American peacekeepers since the days of the frontier: lawlessness. "Lawlessness that breeds terrorism is also a fertile ground for the drug trafficking that supports terrorism," said former Attorney John Ashcroft a few years ago, explaining why Congress's global counterterrorism funding bill was allocating money to support the Colombian military's fight against leftist rebels.
Counter-insurgency theorists have long argued for what they describe as "total war at the grass-roots," by which they mean a strategy not just to defeat insurgents by military force but to establish control over the social, economic, and cultural terrain in which they operate. "Drying up the sea," they call it, riffing on Mao's famous dictum, or sometimes, "draining the swamp." What this expanded definition of the terrorist threat does is take the concept of total war out of, say, the mountains of Afghanistan, and project it onto a world scale: Victory, says the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, "requires the creation of a global environment inhospitable to terrorism."
Defining the War on Terror in such expansive terms offers a number of advantages for American security strategists. Since the United States has the world's largest military, the militarization of police work justifies the "persistent surveillance" of, well, everything and everybody, as well as the maintenance of "a long-term, low-visibility presence in many areas of the world where U.S. forces do not traditionally operate." It justifies taking "preventive measures" in order to "quell disorder before it leads to the collapse of political and social structures" and shaping "the choices of countries at strategic crossroads" which, the Quadrennial Defense Review believes, include Russia, China, India, the Middle East, Latin America, Southeast Asia -- just about every nation on the face of the earth save Britain and, maybe, France.
[Read the next one carefully then check your phone records: -Dan]
Since the "new threats of the 21st century recognize no borders," the Pentagon can, in the name of efficiency and flexibility, breach bureaucratic divisions separating police, military, and intelligence agencies, while at the same time demanding that they be subordinated to U.S. command. Hawks now like to sell the War on Terror as "the Long War," but a better term would be ‘the Wide War," with an enemies list infinitely expandable to include everything from DVD bootleggers to peasants protesting the Bechtel Corporation. Southcom Commander Craddock regularly preaches against "anti-globalization and anti-free trade demagogues," while Harvard security-studies scholar and leading ideologue of the "protean enemy" thesis, Jessica Stern, charges, without a shred of credible evidence, that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is brokering an alliance between "Colombian rebels and militant Islamist groups."
.....In Latin America more generally, it is increasingly the Pentagon, not the State Department, which sets the course for hemispheric diplomacy. With a staff of 1,400 and a budget of $800 million, Southcom already has more money and resources devoted to Latin America than do the Departments of State, Treasury, Commerce, and Agriculture combined. And its power is growing.
For decades following the passage of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, it was the responsibility of the civilian diplomats over at Foggy Bottom to allocate funds and training to foreign armies and police forces. But the Pentagon has steadily usurped this authority, first to fight the War on Drugs, then the War on Terror. Out of its own budget, it now pays for about two-thirds of the security training the U.S. gives to Latin America. In January 2006, Congress legalized this transfer of authority from State to Defense through a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, which for the first time officially gave the Pentagon the freedom to spend millions from its own budget on aid to foreign militaries without even the formality of civilian oversight. After 9/11, total American military aid to the region jumped from roughly $400 million to more than $700 million. It has been steadily rising ever since, coming in today just shy of $1 billion.
Much of this aid consists of training Latin American soldiers -- more than 15,000 every year. Washington hopes that, even while losing its grip over the region's civilian leadership, its influence will grow as each of these cadets, shaped by ideas and personal loyalties developed during his instruction period, moves up his nation's chain of command. [And that in turn, could be the backdoor for American-directed coups and direct political pressure --Dan]
Training consists of lethal combat techniques in the field backed by counterinsurgency and counter-terror theory and doctrine in the classroom. This doctrine, conforming as it does to the Pentagon's broad definition of the international security threat, is aimed at undermining the work civilian activists have done since the end of Cold War to dismantle national and international intelligence agencies in the region.
BagNewsNotes on Pitching the Zarqawi bloopers.
The Ny Times says today:
Two related National Security Agency surveillance programs begun after the Sept. 11 attacks have provoked legal controversy because the agency does not seek court warrants for their operation.
In the domestic eavesdropping program, the N.S.A. listens in on phone calls and reads e-mail messages to and from Americans and others in the United States who the agency believes may be linked to Al Qaeda. Only international communications — those into and out of the country — are monitored, according to administration officials. Until late 2001, the N.S.A. focused on only the foreign end of such conversations; if it decided someone in the United States was of intelligence interest, it had to get a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Now such warrants are sought only for communications between two people who are both in the United States.
In the telephone record data-mining program, the N.S.A. has obtained from at least three phone companies the records of all calls — domestic and international — showing the phone numbers on both ends of each conversation, and its date, time, duration and other details. The records do not include the contents of any call or e-mail message and do not include personal data like credit card numbers and home addresses, officials say.
Security agency employees perform computer analysis in an effort to identify possible associates of terror suspects.
Meanwhile a nice birthday present from the AP - May 11: Justice Department Abruptly Ends Domestic Spying Probe
The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.
"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey.
Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
"Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," wrote Jarrett.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."
Meanwhile it is interesting that the Carlyle Group has some control over how those security clearances are handed out via the U.S. Investigative Services, USIS, entity. $13 million in a recent contract.
Man, to hell with it. I'm gonna go have fun now.
....But I've been hanging out with people all over the place, and right now I need to run to the RiverCentre for the graduation ceremony. We'll get some goodies up later this weekend, but not now. Deal!
For my birthday I decided to give myself the gift of a brand-spankin new website system that blows everything else away.
I am throwing a party later today, after 9:30 PM or so, at 1764 Portland Ave. APT 4, St. Paul. Everyone who manages to read this is very much invited. It would be nice if people could throw in some beer but that's not required at all! My cellie is 651 338 7661 if anyone needs info.
There are a number of good Content Management Systems out there. A CMS is basically the back-end of any dynamic website - from a newspaper to a band to a blog to whatever. I like to tinker with these different systems, but HongPong.com itself has been hosted on MovableType 2.661, the last free version ApartSix released, quite a few years ago. Sadly, the spammers know MT's weaknesses all too well, and since I switched to Powweb hosting, I've gotten a torrent of comment spam that I just don't care about enough to erase.
Anyhow, the final decision is Drupal, a really great system that runs The Onion, for example. Most any site where you see "node" in the URL is a Drupal site.
See Drupal.hongpong.com for the test site, and register if you want. That part should work already. We get all kinds of bells and whistles with this, including photo galleries, easy file uploading, events and other cool dynamic shit. Also there is already a massive RSS syndicator thing in operation that will give you fresh headlines from around the internet constantly.
It will be put onto the front page when I am done working on it. In the meantime there's a new banner and a sweet upcoming features menu I just whipped together.
It's gonna be frickin' sweet. What more can I say?
"While I don't doubt any word of Hong Pong's diary, I have to wonder...hmmm...is Hong Pong actually just playing the part of a nice Minnesota conspiracy buff with a web log...but he is actually holed up deep inside a secret bunker in rural Virginia, with dark sunglasses and a black jumpsuit on, sucking us deep inside a complex web of psyop war games designed to further alienate the most politically informed American progressives from the public at large. Behind him, Dick Cheney stands, rubbing his hands together, cackling gleefully..."
--DailyKos member themank - eerie, isn't it
My computer is acting a little dodgy so I'm a bit concerned right now. Hopefully one of the interested parties that's been around Hongpong this week didn't hack my shit.
I crossposted Monday's Zarqawi PSY OPS story to the DailyKos and The Agonist, where it got read by thousands of people! (and featured on the Agonist's front page!) Within a few hours, as I slept Monday morning, my DailyKos entry had been voted up by dozens of people as a "recommended diary," which caused it to be listed in a privileged spot on the front page. Also a top DailyKos contributing writer, SusanG, included a plug for my story in her main frontpage story at 12:15 PM. Which was sweet:
If you think "leveraging xenophobia," as the Washington Post article examined by Hong Pong claims the military is doing in Iraq, is confined to our Middle East policy, think again.
The story sparked a lively discussion in which all could take a certain freaky pride in the fact that in this case, Paranoia is Right. All could agree that this Psychological Warfare planning against the American public is some fucked-up shit, and since my sources were Sy Hersh and the Washington Post, it was pretty hard to refute what I was saying. It got more than 160 comments. A huge counterintelligence success!
I wrote a poll for "Favorite Pentagon PSY OP of the war", which 887 people voted in. Results:
"It's like every day is an October Surprise!" polls really well. Though my veiled suggestion that the Nick Berg decapitation video was faked also did surprisingly well. (I don't really believe it was faked, but its worth considering how it could fit into a PSYOPS "marketing strategy"). And of course Jessica Lynch's fabricated Pentagon tale is still a classic favorite.
So within the 24 hours of Monday, a deluge of hits came mostly from the DailyKos. Damn, it sure caught the interest of some Big Wheels. And lots of government agencies. So these were some of more interesting visitors: either some random worker was surfing around, or else the word got passed and the story was Monitored by Gray Actors. Or a good bit of both.
Readers In 24 Hours: Most of the cabinet? Including the federal courts, NASA, the FAA, the FCC, the Postal Service, NOAA, NIH, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Health and Human Services, the State Department, Treasury, Homeland Security, many Army, Navy and Air Force computers, iraq.centcom.mil, army.pentagon.mil. And "croydon.gov.uk".
Many esteemed members of the military industrial complex, such as Boeing (several different hits), Halliburton, ChevronTexaco, the Citadel Group, SAIC, Northrop Grumman, the Shaw Group (of Katrina contract-hustling), Raytheon, Citgo (Chavez!) and even the Rendon Group. Now they are some shady cats.
Some in the media liked it too: E Entertainment, Disney, CBS, ESPN, NBC, NY Times, Scripps, Al Hurra (the American-funded mid-eastern TV network: [are they also tied to Zarqawi ops?]), TimeInc.com, Reader's Digest, Sony Pictures, RandomHouse, the Prague Post, McGraw-Hill, Discovery.com, PR Newswire, Union Tribune, HarperCollins...
Why not? WalMart, Napster, Intel, Microsoft, PlayBoy, Adobe, Apple, Ford, Kodak, Philips, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Progressive.com, Blockbuster, and a ton of random law firms.
Traffic Tuesday was back down to normal levels. Oh yah, check out Rolling Stone's National Affairs Daily page, in which Tim Dickinson uses the same opening quote for a fine piece along my lines -- Hyping Zarqawi, and also The "Selective Leak", about how Dexter Filkins at the New York Times was made into a cut-out for Pentagon disinformation about Zarqawi.
So the story has not been missed by the mainstream, I think it's safe to say (see above). I wonder if this counts as a dangerous counterintelligence effort?
The recent adventure in Arizona, (of which I still have some nice bits to put up), provided a few minutes of video that I want to get edited together. That will have to wait for the weekend, if I get ambitious.
In the meantime, I just made some tweaks to the site layout, adding a block of links to various places that friends are at. If I left some people out (i know i did) let me know and up it goes. I also shrank down those avatars to 40 pixels, and made a nice little table, so they are iconic yet not intrusive.
To inspire me to try a video blog, consider MNspeak.com's Videoblogging Week 2006. On an unrelated but cool note, see City Pages: 30 years of Minneapolis punk.
Well that is all for this evening. It seems that a swing through St. Paul is in order......
If this works, it means that the new hosting system XMLRPC works completely. And that is fantastic news because it means I can get down to Tucson and land... exactly 24 hours and 10 minutes from now.
So... does it work?
Ok, here's a first test entry to see if the new webhosting actually works. Sweet!!!
I feel very much obliged to write something about the entering the fourth (fourth!) year of the Iraq war, seeing as how our side was pretty much right about the likely problems and eventual sectarian breakdown of the country. However, that is hardly any comfort to anyone, since it's everyone's national disaster.
Since March 10, 2003, when the post-high-school version of this site was inaugurated from my sophomore Dupre single, this has been pretty much the loose axiom:
There is something wrong. There is a war about to go underway which will kill thousands without just cause. People must object to the unilateral, hasty, and unjustified conflict. We have to get the word out and the Internet is an exceedingly valuable tool for this. There should be several news and opinion links a day as we go forward into what Thomas Friedman is already calling "World War III."
Well, I would say that this website has scored pretty well, in terms of exposing the conspiracy of War Lies, rationalized annihilation, the vile agendas of radical right-wing Zionists, the humorous hypocrisies of the War on Drugs, and other assorted favorite topics. While these have been gratifying to share, it is not always a productive element connecting me to the real world rushing past me.
Either way, over the last few days my calcified and generally unsatisfying order of priorities in my life has been shaken, but I think in a good way. I have to take some actions to get rid of really negative and contemptuous facets of my own life. My birthday is in less than two months, and I feel that this year of my life has mostly been one of waiting for things to happen, unhappily. Part of that was due to being under an indictment for many months, which put me in a bit of a Scooter Libby/Abramoff frame of mind.
But January/February/March 2006 have been a kind of continuous slouch that has provided no real benefit. Seasonal Existential Horror Disorder is a deeply-rooted problem at these latitudes. I need to get into another line of work. I have to take my own fool problems head-on because no one else will.
What does that mean for the website? Oh well, i don't really know. Thanks for sticking with us over the last few years. I think I at least ought to put up a tip jar or something to cover the technical expenses.
We will remain vigilant, resolved, ever watchful for Psychological Operations, information operations, the men in the military-industrial complex stealing money from our wallets and eating the government, messianic and eschatological structures of political thought, humorous tidbits and technological wizardry, the many benefits of open-source software, the nature of fourth-generation warfare, the corrupt state of American partisan politics in the 21st century, the glories of atheism, and the latest words from the friends who follow this website from half a world away.
I am going to hang out with Mordred in Tucson during March 27-April 3rd. I have never felt the need to get out of town so badly as now.
Welcome Back to America, Buddy...
Eat Up.
I apologize for the delay in this posting. I've been in Mexico, on the worst vacation of my life (more on that later). As we've seen little action from our merry band of HongPosters, I am going to offer up some Saturday Grab Bag™ action for anyone out there who's just looking for something to pick at...
Dean Johnson: I'm a Flippin' Idiot, Give Me Another Chance: Why oh why, Deanster? Had to laugh at this news item, actually. It seems that MN-DFL Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson (or MNDFLSMLDJ for short) met with a group of Pastors in his constituency some time back to discuss the proposed ban on Gay Marriage (I assume this is the one being forwarded by the great Satan herself, Michelle Bachman) and told them that he had spoken to members of the state Supreme Court, who had assured him that the 1997 law that defined marriage as [blah, blah, blah] would be sufficient to hold off any advances on the homo-hitching front. Well, turns out that not only was Mr. Johnson apparently lying (no MNSC members recall ever discussing the issue with him) but he was being taped by one of the pastors in attendance. As you might have guessed, the Forces of Medievalism have already pounced on the issue as proof of the need for stricter anti-non-white-middle-class-suburban-protestants legislation and Johnson's essential unfitness in his role as Majority Leader. Well, they're right about one thing; Johnson is a hack politician extraordinaire, and hopefully this ugly episode will make room for someone too bright to lie to a bunch of spies for Jesus. [Story Here]
Navy Exchanges Fire With Sexy Pirates: Two American ships, the USS Cape St. George and the USS Gonzalez (A guided missile cruiser and guided missile destroyer, respectively) came upon a 30 foot fishing boat towing several smaller skiffs this morning while in a Dutch-led patrol off the coast of Somalia. When the American craft moved in to board the Somali boats, they were fired upon by small arms and possibly an RPG launcher. The Navy fired back, wounding five and killing one with no American casualties. I had to read the article a couple of times first in order to giggle, and then I had to find this picture (this is what I imagine the lead pirate to have looked like) before I could really consider where the pirates went wrong. I think I've got it now, though; Their first mistake was probably firing AK-47s from a 30-foot boat at 300+ feet of American military hardware, packed to the gills with a terrifying array of missiles, artillery and, apparently, more conventional heavy machine guns. Interestingly enough, Piracy is actually on the rise around the world, especially on the coasts of East Africa (where there were 35 attacks last year) and in the South China Sea, where large-scale piracy against major shipping craft and, in one case, a racing yacht have become commonplace in recent years. Personally, I think it is time to declare a Global War on Sexy Piracy, if only to hear all of Rummy's iterations on the theme as he fails to do anything about it- "Worldwide Struggle With Extremely Provocative Maritime Thievery", anyone? [Story]
Cheeseburger in Paradise
Mexico was a bust this Spring Break '06, for a variety of reasons. A trip to the Baja with Tha Fam went horribly wrong. Dreams of sandy beaches and great seaside food gave way to days of huddling indoors as the 50 degree winds whipped the windows of the darkened, unheated house we were staying in, forcing water under the doors and leaving all of our clothes smelling dank. The first problem was planning- the planner of the trip, who shall remain unnamed, didn't bother to find out that Baja California Del Norte is, as a rule, cold in March. Quite cold, really, rarely climbing out of the mid-60s during the day. Also, Baja California Del Norte sucks, a collection of corrugated shacks clinging to the side of a cliff along a steep, rocky, unprotected coastline, with no culture of any sort, a complete lack of any kind of shopping (other than, of course, I Fuck on the First Date t-shirts) and shitty restaurants whose defining feature is the zeal of their employees in their attempts to coerce you to eat at their establishment, including (no joke) jumping in front of the car in order to entice you to park (for free!) outside of the joint. Should you get in, you will be met by the likes of this gentleman above, fat southwestern types who come down in droves to sand race on the dunes in heavily-modified trucks and ludicrously overpowered sandrails. Apparently, driving around in circles on sand is a sport, not just something that ataxia-addled meatheads do in the absence of a real life. The less said about it the better, really. We left early, and it is 80-some degrees here in Tucson.
Hopefully Dan will be down here soon and we will keep you guys posted.
I noted earlier that someone was forging Russian spam emails from 'thwart.net', one of the mysterious domains that I purchased because they seemed like good ideas at the time. (some people get tattoos, I purchase little slices of the information universe).
Anyhow, since email header forging is trivially easy (faking the 'from' address), the spamming continues, and my inbox gets all the rejection notices sent to thwart.net. It would appear that besides the advertisers noted before, a Russian web hosting company is also doing it.
It would appear that a Russian web company named web-911.ru has been spamming various Russian email servers with promotional advertising, faking email addresses owned by me. This would anger me, although there's little to be done about it. However, upon viewing the site, I have decided that those who operate web-911.ru have an excellent sense of humor:
From: earth-bounces@mlist.sgu.ru
Subject: The results of your email commands
Date: March 16, 2006 2:14:14 PM CST
To: info@thwart.net
The results of your email command are provided below. Attached is your
original message.
- Results:
Ignoring non-text/plain MIME parts
- Done.
From: "Web-911" <info@thwart.net>
Date: March 16, 2006 11:46:04 AM CST
To: downhill <aspirant@mlist.sgu.ru>
Subject: Юридические услуги в Москве
I know better than to break off a spat with Russian IT experts. Who knows what kinds of interests want Ethernet and web hosting in those parts. Actually, it would probably be sort of a fun industry. But if they sent me some good local vodka I would be happier.
Well it had to happen finally. Those naughty Pakistanis trashed Ronald McDonald, thus finally giving life to the "Jihad vs. McWorld" thesis of Benjamin Barber.
You may notice the array of icons along the side, to indicate our expanding circle of contributors. I won't ask anyone to do anything on a regular basis, just whenever they feel like it. I also did a little CSS trickery to get the appropriate icons to appear next to our posts, which should add a certain ego-projection/avatarity quality to things, helping to disambiguate us and provide a more amusing environment for the site.
My own avatar is India's fourth prime minister, Morarju Ranchhodji Desai (1896-1995), the first leader not from the Congress Party. A Brahmin from Gujarat, he was selected to lead the Janata Party in 1977, at the age of 81. Apparently he drank a cup of his own urine every day and lived to be 99.
If anyone else wants in on the gig email me. Or if anyone wants their icons changed.
I am working on a badass Politics In Minnesota thing right now so I won't write further, but I wanted to take my new Icon out for a spin.
...I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in...
My condition is: Lots of Wisdom Tooth Vicodin + I hate Valentines Day.I have been laying low and taking Vicodin after my wisdom teeth operation on Wednesday. That's five straight days of codeine, and my moods are kind of weird and raw by this point.
Introducing:
From the depths of the Intarweb comes a shadowy character known only as Pixeldusted. S/He works in the shadows, interacting with the most arcane and mysterious parts of a vast and sprawling industrial complex.
Well sort of. I'll leave it to Dusty to explain. Pixeldusted is not a fictional character, though of course, in the current climate of Information Operations, a reader cannot assume such things.
So currently our stable of contributors includes:
And that's about it. Any of our regular visitors (and irregular confused lookers-on) are invited to contact me at NOdan.feidtSPAM@gmail.com if they would like to get an account here. I am trying to expand the operation a bit here. I have the inklings of long-term plan to design a better site. I would like to get friends contributing. There are no real hard and fast rules about it, because I don't really care that much. But I know a lot of smart people that could add some stuff.
So along with this polite general invitation to the visiting public, please keep my heavy recent course of painkillers in mind when reading the rest of this post.
Because yes, the structure of the site is antiquated and needs to be replaced. The HongWiki is probably not long for this world -- I look towards a better Content Management System setup like WordPress. In my day job, I am designing a new site for Politics in Minnesota's campaign coverage. Once that is done, I will actually have a very useful template for a new HongPong.com. Sweet.
*******
I looked at my web server logs for the first time in a while, and it turns out that well, things are going pretty well on the site. We are averaging 744 visits a day in February, of which I would estimate that 30% are spammers and 30% are search engines, but that's a rough estimate.
Here are the most popular search phrases of the last 13 days: (hits, then percentages)
And i don't even have the damn cartoons. Or a Mamoon falafel. Last month's search phrases were sort of funny:
"Amadeus Pegasus Watchtower" being the supposed three names of the CIA programs bringing cocaine into the United States, which Ruppert claimed to uncover (as we noted earlier). HongPong.com is now like #5 for that on Google.
U.S. Concludes 'Cyber Storm' Mock Attacks By TED BRIDIS
The Associated Press / Friday, February 10, 2006; 8:37 PM
WASHINGTON -- The government concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.
Bloggers?
Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events.[......]
There was no impact on the real Internet during the weeklong exercise. Government officials from the United States, Canada, Australia and England and executives from Microsoft, Cisco, Verisign and others said they were careful to simulate attacks only using isolated computers, working from basement offices at the Secret Services headquarters in downtown Washington.
[.....]Homeland Security coordinated the exercise. More than 115 government agencies, companies and organizations participated. They included the White House National Security Council, Justice Department, Defense Department, State Department, National Security Agency and CIA, which conducted its own cybersecurity exercise called "Silent Horizon" last May.
An earlier cyberterrorism exercise called "Livewire" for Homeland Security and other federal agencies concluded there were serious questions over government's role during a cyberattack depending on who was identified as the culprit _ terrorists, a foreign government or bored teenagers.
It also questioned whether the U.S. government would be able to detect the early stages of such an attack without significant help from private technology companies. [I sense a Blackwater Offensive Hacking contract in the works -Dan]
Please recall the "Fight the Net" Defense Department concept in the "Information Operations Roadmap" (PDF) from earlier. Let's add a bit from the BBC:
A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.
Bloggers beware.
As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer. From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
[.......]
The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.
All these are engaged in information operations.
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads. "Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.
"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.
So your own [American] brain is a target of military spending.
Accidentally.
Tax dollars >> Military-engineered thoughts.
Now that's what I call a feedback loop of sinister proportions. As for this site, well, it got 57 hits from the military just so far this month.
Jane Cat had surgery to repair his hematoma on the same day as my Wisdom Teeth, and the feline is now kinda tired, and pretty dusty. Tragic that a cat gets dusty when it can't groom its face.
Here, through my hydrocodone haze, Jane Cat is grabbing onto "Crossing the Rubicon" by Michael Ruppert, the conspiratorial work of parapolitical mega-non-fiction leading up to "Cheney did 9/11". I had pulled out this weird book because an old high school friend randomly stopped by today, and we talked about the likelihood that Wellstone was assassinated.
Could he have been Done In?
"People have been killed for less," I said. And Ruppert has an extended conspiracy theory about the subject, included in his book and featured on FromTheWilderness.com (and a followup). I tend to favor the electromagnetic pulse weapon theory – which explains the cell phone anomalies in northern Minnesota that day.
(My photo from a peace march in St. Paul on March 23, 2003)
The leading book on the Wellstone assassination theory, though, is apparently American Assassination by Don Jacobs and Jim Fetzer, a U of M professor. From a review:
Since becoming active in this issue, local residents have contacted Dr. Fetzer and related strange electronic interference in the area at the time of the crash. One experienced an odd cell-phone phenomenon with a form of noise unlike any he had heard before.
Its auditory pattern appears consistent with the use of "electro-magnetic" (EM) weapons developed by the Pentagon to take out computerized systems and wreak harm on human targets. It was part of the plan to bring down the plane using kinds of weapons of which most Americans are unaware.
These weapons can disable radio communications, stall warning systems, course deviation indicator, and electrical switches controlling the pitch of the props, causing substantial loss of control. They can render persons unconscious, incapable of muscle control, or even bring about their death.
In the wake of the crash, 69% of Minnesotans blamed a "GOP conspiracy" for Wellstone’s death.
I want to know where that statistic came from.
I got an oil change today and the mechanic noted my Wellstone bumper sticker. "We were just talking the other day about how great he was," she said. "It's always brought me good luck," I said. "Never been pulled over as long as its been on there."
And it is worth noting again that Wellstone was the only Democratic Senator to vote against the war who faced election that November. His political "survival" — assured in polls just before the election – posed a grave threat to the rationale for war - the rational public of Minnesota threatened to upset the spectacle.
And then there was all that damn bad weather (or not). Wellstone was afraid of planes, that's why he had the bus. And he was once sprayed with coca defoliant in Colombia. Tangle with the Establishment's cocaine friends in the Global South, who even knows what trouble you'd get into...
Amadeus, Pegasus, Watchtower. Information Operations.
The Vice President shoots a man, and they cover it up for 22 hours just for shits and giggles.
Time for another Vicodin. Official candy of Valentine's Day 2006.
Hello, readers.
I am here to make a terrible confession. I have to admit to something, before shame eats away at me like salt-laced plow-snow on the rocker panels of a '74 Dart. I am totally, ridiculously, blindingly head-over-hells in lurve with NBC's The Biggest Loser.
For those of you unfamiliar with the program, NBC finds dangerously obese Americans who share a desire to lose weight. Competing either individually or in (generally) couples or family teams, these contestants are physically-trained within an inch of their lives for ten days, whilst learning about healthy eating and whatnot. After the ten days, they are weighed, and a preliminary prize (tonight, in a 'dream wedding' themed episode, a lavish honeymoon) is given. After that, they are turned loose and return to their hometowns to do all the work themselves without trainer supervision for something like six months. Aided by numerous sepia sequences bip-bopping gooey melodies in the background, we the viewers get to see the remarkable transformation in the lives of these people as they transition from prize hog to deflated balloon. Sometimes the fat dissolves to reveal beautiful, picturesque individuals and sometimes they look like trolls in wet gunney sacks, but their delight is always evident- the patina of exploitation just cannot dull the shine these people accrue through months of grueling physical labor.
And what labor it is- a good quarter of the show is the workout sessions of these individuals, pockmarked nodes of fat wriggling about under the voluminous skin of the heifer-human hybrid huffing it through another hill climb. Now is the time to feel smug, before the hard work and restraint force you to reconsider your wicked ways and sympathize- nay, connect, with the rapidly-dimishing men and women on the picture box. Muscles and smiles and puppies and special "surprise" visits from the telegenic and intellectually unintimidating personal trainers are harnessed together for a kind of tearjerker deathray, a combination of so many instinctual cultural cues that all Americans are rendered powerless to resist. In the face of such an authentic forgery of actual human emotions, one's eyes well up as quickly as if one had been pepper sprayed. With the twin voyeuristic urges of pleasure and pain sated, the show maintains your interest with the siren song of an eventual, winner-takes-$50,000 weigh-in.
I needn't tell you that I am practically salivating by the time the two tubby teams tilt the scales at the final weigh-in, aprons of lard disappeared from their body and tingling with anticipation. Sometimes the contestants are hardly recognizable by the end, having lost as much as 94 pounds and 30+% of their body mass. The rising strings, the transformation tale of grit and determination and a high tolerance for public humiliation, all in the name of fifty thousand bucks and half column in next week's People- Fat Ass Not So Fat, Anymore- Thinks America Cares About Her Life. The story is pure Horatio Algier, the kind of inspirational influence that has driven American efforts to expand our minds and extend our abilities to their furthest- so long as there's cash in it. When I see those whittled figures take to the stage and weigh in like steer at the 4-H show, I too dream of one day being obese enough to qualify as a contestant on a fat farm TV show. It is a dream I think we all can share, having a major network pay for us to undo thirty years of neglecting our bodies and stuffing our faces, possibly even rewarding us with large cash prizes at the end. In exchange for my dignity, I would snigger at the sucker's deal I was giving them in exchange for my fifteen minutes, a home gym, and thousands in specialists' bills.
God Bless America for having an endless supply of the morbidly obese. Without the Calorie-Industrial Complex, none of this would possible. Fifty years of research have gone into creating the starchy, fatty, greasy cuisine that is the real star in this drama. When one thinks of all the poor, urban populations that this food was tested on before it was deemed worthy of more widespread distribution, the dedication of company's like RJR Nabisco is all too evident. Outside of the watchful eyes of horizontally-organized global conglomerates, a show like The Biggest Loser mightn't even be possible.
"You have won the battle of the bulge, and that makes you the biggest loser."
Oh, and the host who says that is a little porky herself- I'm just saying, special "biggest host" episode?
At least they knew how to spark it in the old days. Ja made the Herb for man, they say. (timestamp a joke, kids)
The Guardian: Jesus 'healed using cannabis'
Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Monday January 6, 2003
Jesus was almost certainly a cannabis user and an early proponent of the medicinal properties of the drug, according to a study of scriptural texts published this month. The study suggests that Jesus and his disciples used the drug to carry out miraculous healings.
The anointing oil used by Jesus and his disciples contained an ingredient called kaneh-bosem which has since been identified as cannabis extract, according to an article by Chris Bennett in the drugs magazine, High Times, entitled Was Jesus a Stoner? The incense used by Jesus in ceremonies also contained a cannabis extract, suggests Mr Bennett, who quotes scholars to back his claims.
"There can be little doubt about a role for cannabis in Judaic religion," Carl Ruck, professor of classical mythology at Boston University said.
Referring to the existence of cannabis in anointing oils used in ceremonies, he added: "Obviously the easy availability and long-established tradition of cannabis in early Judaism _ would inevitably have included it in the [Christian] mixtures."
Mr Bennett suggests those anointed with the oils used by Jesus were "literally drenched in this potent mixture _ Although most modern people choose to smoke or eat pot, when its active ingredients are transferred into an oil-based carrier, it can also be absorbed through the skin".
[......]
"If cannabis was one of the main ingredients of the ancient anointing oil _ and receiving this oil is what made Jesus the Christ and his followers Christians, then persecuting those who use cannabis could be considered anti-Christ," Mr Bennett concludes.
The question is: how deep was Buddha in the opiates? A shortcut to spacing out by a tree...
I have just killed around 12,000 bits of spam on the site. Tragically this may have swept away some legitimate comments in the past few months, but we don't really get too many of those.
Also I changed the hosting around a little bit, so the pictures here should load a lot more quickly. I also finally got around to obfuscating the basic ways that the spammers add spam, so the incoming flow should be cut by 99%. Not sure if you care, but I think this will provide a better experience for all!
Ugh. The site went down for a couple days after I installed the Linux 'udev' module which happened to be totally worthless. When I had to reboot the machine, it would not start back up because it couldn't find the filesystems. Really bad.
Then I had to patch some changes into Apache, and for the last few days I haven't wanted to bother with this crap, despite all the fun scandals we're hearing about.
Upcoming Indictment Day will be known as Fitzmas. Presents and drinking as the Empire goes down in flames. Nice.
Uhm, well I have to move out on Wednesday and nothing has been worked out yet, so it looks like I will take the default option of going back to Hudson for a while. On the plus side that means that the website will probably only go down for a few hours as I drag the server to Wisconsin. On the minus side, well, Hudson really sucks.
Fortunately I made a lot of progress with the apartment search today, so I think I will be back out on my own within a week or so. It will be weird to be in Hudson, it will be weirder to leave St. Paul as school starts for these youngsters.
Life is too weird right now, too weird to find suitable synonyms for weird.
A mercilessly geeky tale: I am recording this so that myself and others may deal with similar problems better in the future. I will soon forget the details of how I fixed it, so it is best to write it down now.
It took a couple days, but the Linux server (Tarfin), a reliable Dell Dimension 4400 running Gentoo Linux, is back from its brush with Hardware Hell. The problems began after I found out about my new mysterious Politics in Minnesota project... The work at this stage would best happen using MediaWiki, I reckoned. MediaWiki has performed well as the HongWiki platform, and has reliably served wiki pages that have done Real Well on Google, although with the service problems it's gone south a bit.
So my new WordPress-powered HongPong website (under development) takes a lot more RAM to serve PHP files than this current MovableType-powered HongPong.com, and as I sat down to get the Politics in Minnesota project going, I noticed that Tarfin was basically maxed out for RAM. It only had 128 MB, which is really way too low for this. It only had a few megs of RAM available and had 80 MB in the swap partition (which is the same as Virtual Memory on a PC or Mac). Gridlock.
So in other words the stress of serving had totally maxed out the RAM, which I noticed when the site -- which is usually lickety-split quick over the LAN here -- was going much slower. More RAM, always a good solution. I looked up my usual suspects, namely Tran Micro and General Nanosystems on University, whose prices will pretty much always beat Best Buy type places. Only Nano had the type of RAM for Tarfin, PC2100 SDRAM. So I got two 256 chips (though I'd have liked a 512, they didn't have).
The Dell only has 2 slots, thanks Dell, so I pulled the old 128 and put these in. Turned it on, it booted fine, and I ran 'emerge sync', the nice Gentoo command that permits me to update all the various Linux software packs I have running. This streamlines one of the bitchiest problems in systems administration - tracking down the damn software packs and keeping up with their security patches.
It ran alright until suddenly it hit a Segmentation Fault, followed shortly by a Kernel Panic, the hardest Crash that Linux can Go Down with - it's real ugly, gibberish and Hex codes spilling all over.
So I have to reboot. The file system checker program, fsck, auto-scanned the main partition and found all sorts of horrible errors. I tried to have it fix, but then it hit another Segmentation Fault:
A segmentation fault occurs when your program tries to access memory locations that haven't been allocated for the program's use.
Therefore I should have thought that maybe it was the damn new chips. I had a flashback to the death of the first Hongpong.com (the one that got me suspended from MPA) - which was an old PowerPC 6100/60 running a hacked old Linux, whose hard drive abruptly refused to come back from a nasty death right around when I graduated from high school. And I had no backups. In other words, the first HongPong server died almost exactly four years ago, and took with it the great contributions of everyone in that strange season of 2000-2001. It couldn't happen again, could it?
So I started looking around the various forums for a solution to a sudden filesystem corruption, one of the true hells of computing. To compound this, I hadn't backed up all the new HongPong site stuff, nor the Mysql databases that run the sites, in quite a while. Fortunately I had just exported this entire site a few days ago to put it into WordPress (as it is now - mostly purged of the spam), so if it truly crashed, the Bulk would be safe.
After reboots, I could come back to the low-level emergency maintenance fsck (file system check) shell, and from there I could READ the messed up drive, but not write to it without risking more damage. And I could see that most files seemed ok. But I couldn't get the file sharing, or Apache webserver, or MYSQL database running again, without risking wrecking it. And I couldn't figure out what was really wrong. The solution?
Install a brand new Gentoo Linux setup on another old hard drive I had sitting around, and then pull the old stuff of the messed-up drive in Read-Only mode. After I put the drive in, the handy BIOS error light told me something was dreadfully wrong and it wouldn't boot at all. I found that on a Dell you have to only set the 'cable select' ATA hard drive jumper pins - the machine automatically takes the last drive on the ATA cable to be the Master drive. So I did that but it was still stuck.
I had pulled out the new RAM earlier, but I'd put it back in by this point. Then I tried taking out one of them. It booted! I pulled that one out, and put the other in. It halted! When I put both in, it would boot, but if I switched them, it would halt. In other words, the Dell could detect the bad RAM when it's by itself, but NOT necessarily when it's with others, BUT this depended on their order.
So I returned the bad RAM to Tran Micro the next day, and they nicely exchanged for another one and tested it there in the store. It was OK, so I was on my way, and everything went smoothly afterwards. (Other than this incident of random bad RAM, Tran Micro are fine folks - this could happen anywhere - their service was all right)
I used the memtest86 memory checker on the Gentoo Linux install CD to Make Very Sure they were ok - i wish I'd done it earlier. So it took a few more hours, especially since when I installed Gentoo on this machine a year ago, I hardly took any notes about it. There are some weird things about the Dell machine - in particular, (some/all?) Dells have a strange first boot partition or /dev/hda1 in Linux parlance, which makes the Dell screen and some BIOS stuff happen. I think I destroyed this partition last time, and it's a huge pain in the ass to repair with floppy disks and stuff.
The problem is that Gentoo Linux install instructions tell you to put GRUB, the bootloader, on /dev/hda or /dev/hda1 , and this time I almost commanded grub-install /dev/hda before I caught myself. That would have taken hours to fix. Instead it must be on /dev/hda2 or /dev/hdb1. hda2 is I think automatically loaded up after the Dell thing is done. But I did it right, and so I was able to reboot Linux and finish installing the system.
Downloading & installing the key web programs was easily done with 'emerge apache php mod_php' and the correct USE flags. Other various things were properly updated and recompiled.
I was able to get back into the messed-up drive using read-only mode, which doesn't touch the filesystem. All the elements of the site easily copied to the new drive. Happily, the Mysql database -- which can really be a bitch to put together from a crashed system, if you don't export it cleanly first -- went over VERY easily. All I had to do was 'cp -av * /var/lib/mysql' from the old /var/lib/mysql. Then a reboot, plugging it back where it belongs in my bedroom, and All Systems [ OK ].
So now, in short, I have a TON of Actual Real Professional Work for both Politics in Minnesota and Computer Zone. I don't have time to say much else about the Gaza situation and so forth. sry!
Sorry we are temporarily offline. I purchased some more RAM to speed up the server and one of the chips was bad. But I didn't realize this right away, and then fsck got involved.... Please Stand by.
Nevermind. The cat is observing matters from the kitchen, we are waiting for the weekend to start. Crushingly ordinary.
On the plus side I accomplished some useful PHP coding after 2 AM, which as usual is the most insightful time for these sorts of things. Right now I am trying to get a news aggregator type program put together, which will take posts from other blogs & news sources, and recombine them in order by date, so I can put together specialized subject news pages. It seems to work so far: http://wp.hongpong.com/agg-test.php.
I succeeded in importing all the stories from this HongPong site into the new one, but there are still some anomalies to be worked out (and I want to get rid of another 50% of the comment spam), so it's not quite ready yet.
I am trying to determine the best way to organize the new operation, and I have settled on making a few top-level categories, while stuffing the usual things - Iraq, Israel-Palestine, War on Terror - into subcategories, so that these posts don't wash out everything on the front page. Here is the topic layout so far:
Topics
• Uncategorized (36)
• geo (3)
• Iraq (168)
• Israel-Palestine (93)
• Afghanistan (20)
• Iran (1)
• War on Terror (114)
• politics (1)
• Military-Industrial Complex (57)
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Another CIA guy, Pat Lang, started a blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis, and he even put up some novel he wrote. Good for him.
Disturbing stuff about that "Over There" series on FX. Ok that's all for now. It's a really nice day, I want to go ride my bike. Syd Barrett knew it well. (Album: Piper at the Gates of Dawn, 1967):
I've got a bike, you can ride it if you like.
It's got a basket, a bell that rings
And things to make it look good.
I'd give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it.
You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world.
I'll give you anything, everything if you want things.
I've got a cloak it's a bit of a joke.
There's a tear up the front. It's red and black.
I've had it for months.
If you think it could look good, then I guess it should.
...
I know a mouse, and he hasn't got a house.
I don't know why I call him Gerald.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
...
I've got a clan of gingerbread men.
Here a man, there a man, lots of gingerbread men.
Take a couple if you wish. They're on the dish.
You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world.
I'll give you anything, everything if you want things.
I know a room full of musical tunes.
Some rhyme, some ching, most of them are clockwork.
Let's go into the other room and make them work.
As I have previously explained, my ironclad Internet marketing and search engine strategy so far has relied upon comment spammers or spambots to regularly plug their crap into old posts on my site, although periodically I close threads older than a month or so.
About a week ago, the number of comments on the site reached beyond a staggering 10,000 (10,921 was the highest comment serial number). This has a negative effect on MovableType's ability to export the entire contents of the site. in other words, it hasn't yet been able to create the complete export file because it gets overwhelmed with spam.
So I spent a few hours today trimming the fat off the spam, while opting to preserve the spams with funny quips and philosophical fragments about Hegel above the cialis links.
I also ran across *real* comments that I'd never seen before, as they were tucked away in infinite Texas Holdem plugs. It seems that, shockingly enough, people these days actually look at their referrer logs (which indicate to a website where surfers come from). I found that the proprietor of "NewsCorpse" took some umbrage when he found i'd described his site as somewhat "pretentious." I suppose I should clarify: I thought the graphics are a little cheesy, but NewsCorpse has an all right name and metaphor for its purpose. Anyhow...
There was a CNN reporter who responded to my post that addressed the Pentagon's new plans to scoop up high schoolers' data for recruiting purposes. They were wondering if I was someone who had initially supported the war, and become pissed off by the new policy. Unfortunately, as this site documents pretty well, I was opposed to this mad conflict before it started, and have since followed along by publishing stories (169 about Iraq, in all) about the deceptive and intentional schemes of fake intelligence and disinformation that were used to sell it to the public.
So if the draft comes along, I have enough evidence to prove I'm a conscientious objector. At least I'm planning ahead for a change. This from a kid who had to pay more than $140 for two incredibly late parking tickets today >:-(
This may be part of the reason that I keep getting all these hits from the government. The CIA openly returned on July 7, on a Google search for "text messaging IED" and ended up on the Afghanistan page. The "text messaging" keyword appears in a blockquote from, who else, Michael Ledeen, who is talking about what a great idea it is to arm the Iranian opposition. Fortunately the rest of it goes on to make fun of John Bolton and his potential connections to the Iranian terrorist group, based in Iraq, the MEK.
So let us consider the IP numbers of the CIA's openly marked relays. This is information released publicly (over DNS) - so don't anyone accuse me of going Novak. The CIA obviously has computers whose IP numbers don't say friggin "CIA.gov" when you look them up. 198.81.129.194 and 198.81.129.193. On the 193 address they came on a google search for "goss punish cia analysts cold war 2004" back on Nov. 10, 2004, when surely Agency employees were pondering the blowback from the election. They ended up on the War on Terror index page.
So for some bizarre reason the CIA also looked for "bloomington lrt condo" on March 17, 2005, and landed on some nighttime light rail shots.
Blah. Who knows what intelligence agencies want these days: condominiums or text messaging?
Anyhow here is a grand old list of every domain containing ".gov" that visited since the sta