Category: IDTENT
Error stuff.
macos Big Sur 11.1 — ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
A while ago sudo gem update started throwing the following error: This wasn’t a big deal, as I wasn’t doing any any active ruby development, but it was still a minor annoyance. Missing directories reported in mkmf.log hinted at the cause: Searching for fixes resulted in a bunch of dangerous cargo-culted answers suggesting to curl […]
It’s Not a Conspiracy Theory — USPTO Just Doesn’t Like Facebook’s FBCLID URL Tracker
An acquaintance on Facebook was sharing some interesting information about the US Army’s Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process. It was a fun read, and a few sections paralleled Maat Magik’s take on astral projection, and the binaural meditation tapes that my late father, who was an instructor for Dale Carnegie, had me listen to […]
Is Google Chrome running obscenely slow on your obscenely expensive Mac Pro or Retina MacBook Pro with 4K or UHD monitor? Fear not…
My shiny Mac Pro just arrived along with a pair of Dell 28 Ultra HD (P2815Q) Monitors (2160p). I anxiously plugged everything in, fired up Google Chrome, and waited…and waited…and waited…and waited. The dreaded spinning pinwheel of death greeted me and it took minutes for each page to load. Not even the chrome://settings/ or chrome://version/ pages would load. Chrome was basically unusable. […]
How to murder a Blog
Short of a server going down, one of the quickest and most effective ways for a Blog to die is for it to drop out of search engines. Sure, you might have a ton of repeat visitors, but no search ranking means no new visitors because, well, no one can find you. What a blinding […]
Round 7: Spammer vs. Barracuda…FIGHT!
Just in case you’ve been keeping track, this is the seventh time a Spammer has forged one of the domains under my control as the return address of their Spam run. The first time it happened I felt shocked, angered, and betrayed. After I lost count of the incidents on my left hand and had […]
Add more Courier-IMAP connections under Plesk
By default, UNIX-based servers running Plesk and the Courier-IMAP e-mail server drastically limit the number of inbound connections to prevent users from opening up too many concurrent sessions. Unfortunately, this artificially-low restriction can impact legitimate users who have multiple computers connecting to the Courier-IMAP server from behind a firewall or a single computer that runs […]
August RedHat Enterprise fixes break Plesk DNS
The most recent batch of RedHat Enterprise (RHEL) fixes rolled out this past week break DNS (bind) on servers running Plesk. My Plesk 7.5.4 installation was effected as well as many other Plesk 7.x and 8.x users. The problem appears to be with a conflict between RedHat’s bind-chroot RPM and Plesk’s chroot system. When the […]
They do more than just protect you…
One of my co-workers called me over to his desk this afternoon to show me an e-mail thread that had been bouncing around between a few of his family members. It went something like this: Original E-mail: Save those old phone bills! NY Times Article USA Today Article If you can’t access those articles for […]
MRTG cronjob derp
I’m running a combination of IOG and MRTG to keep track of network traffic and ran into a little bit of MRTG cronjob derp. In my haste to get MRTG up and running I forgot that it’s enabled by default on RedHat Enterprise Server even if you haven’t configured it yet. So, when I manually […]
