When I started blogging I used Blogger.com because it was the easiest way to start a blog. I quickly added several blogs and converted existing sites to blogger. This was a simple process because blogger supported FTP publishing. This allowed me to use blogger, but have the pages on my own domain. I did this with this blog, Jt30.com, Harpamps.com, Too Many Damn Cats, and Bee Progress. I have since been slowly converting these to wordpress sites.
Wordpress gave me much greater control over the site and all of the pages. It also allowed me to optimize the sites for search engines and I am now getting twice the number of hits in some places.
A few of my blogs still need to be converted. This is now important because Blogger has stopped support of FTP publishing. If I want to post to a blog and have it appear on my domain I must either convert to Wordpress or other content management software or point my site to blogger. If I point my site to blogger I lose all of my ability to create and publish pages separate from the blog.
I start today converting Harpamps to Wordpress. This is a large site with several hundred pages of amplifier information, and will take a month to convert. I will also have to convert all of JT30.com. I started with jt30.com, but never finished. Lots of work to do.
Erica and I watched the film Moon tonight. This is a good little movie that chooses an interesting thoughtful plot over flash and special effects. It is good hard SF and will be the movies that I nominate for a Hugo award. The only problem was that there were long periods of time where the pacing was a little slow. I particularly liked the use of models instead of computer graphics. CGI effects still look fake compared to a well done model.
A movie about clones is a real risk because the popular idea of clone and the scientific reality are totally different. But, Moon pulls it off and makes you care about the way a plucky clone analyzes his situation and copes.
Snow is coming our way. It looks like just a few inches for us, but maybe a foot or two just a few miles south.
I saw this on Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools this morning. It looks like something I could use if it didn’t cost $120 plus a fortune to ship.
After a week and a half, I finally finished this hard cover book of the “best” short stories of Henry Kuttner. This is from three boxes of hardcover books that my brother found at a garage sale. The reason it took so long to read this is that the stories were not very good.
The best story, Mimsy Were The Borogroves, I had read before. The story is not that great a story. It is an interesting idea, but Kuttner doesn’t take it anywhere and as a result it winds up with just the expected outcome.
Another story, What you Need was cut up and turned into a classic Twilight Zone. It has the O Henry ending that you see so often in the series, and as such is not much of a story.
One story, Nothing but Gingerbreak Left, involved intentionally writing a song or poem that people would get into their heads and not be able to shake. In the story, the song was written in German and Hitler gets it stuck in his head and it helps shorten the war. Kuttner stole the idea from me by going ahead in a time machine and reading my idea log. Now I can’t write my version of it.
Overall I was not happy with the collection and avoided reading when I was tired. The best part of the book was Ray Bradbury’s introduction and the Kelley Freas cover.
I was talking to Steve from Rimworlds.com about installing Wordpress MU. I have never done this before, but I gave it a try and it works. I have a shared blog now on one of my unused sites. I don’t know if I want to make it public or not. Steve is considering doing this for a project he has in mind, and mine might clash with his idea. It is nice to know that it can be done, though.
Wordpress MU is like Blogger or Livejournal, except you can run it yourself. It is user unfriendly and not well documented. I had to dig to get it going.
I searched for Science Fiction Wordpress themes and made an ugly discovery. Some of the themes from obscure sites had hidden PHP programs in them that created back doors for hackers. Unless you are willing to go into the themes you download and look for instances of the eval() function, do not download themes from anywhere except the Wordpress repository.
When you search for “package bees for sale”, this blog, where I write mostly about science fiction, comes out #2 on Google. That means that I have the lock on the phrase. I happen to get lots of hits on this so I’ll do a little referring here.
I am buying my bees this year from: Adam Fuller of AZ Apiaries. We are all meeting at the Palisades Mall at 3AM on March 25th to meet a truck. So if you are in Rockland County, NY, Northern New Jersey, Southern CT or Lower Hudson Valley, this would be a nice party to attend, sing songs, drink wine, and get 3 pound packages of Golden Italian Bees. The guy will be coming around twice more in April.
Last year I ordered bees from Betterbee.com up in Greenwich, NY, but they changed the date to one that I could not make and I had to back out. (cost me money, too).
I got my bees from HiveDepot.com in Rhode Island, and it was a very good deal, but this year the owner is not answering his email.
I’ve been working on Steve’s hacked blog and I think I found what happened. As I browsed his data I kept finding all of this sql injection stuff and then I found one of PHP’s most dangerous commands – eval().
eval() lets a program take something and execute it like it was php code, but without it being programmed. If a hacker can execute the eval function he can execute any command he wants.
I found the eval on Steve’s blog in the permalink decode. This is the entry that makes a blog have real pages like (see the url for this post and you might see one.)
It might not be obvious to you, but now all a hacker has to do is request a page and put the malicious code in the referrer information in the web request.
Now I have to see if I can get it out.
Update: I cleaned a lot of crap out of Steve’s DB. There was a huge file in his uploads directory that gave hackers complete control over his site and would even decode the root password. I don’t know what they were doing with it. Steve was getting lots of spam, but the uploaded code could also send out spam.
Steve at the Crotchety Old Fan has been hacked. Someone got onto his site and screwed it all up. Google has removed him from their index and he’s not getting any traffic from the search engines. I’ve been reading Steve’s blogs every morning for about a year now and he feels like a friend, although we’ve never met. When I heard he had been hacked, my instinct was to load my tools in the back of the truck and ride up to New Hampshire to see what I could do. He doesn’t need my sawsall and wrecking bar. He can’t use my hammer, but I wish there was something I could do.
Getting hacked can be a little like being raped. Although not nearly as traumatic or violent, there is a similar feeling of violation. Steve’s site is like his child and he’s been building up circulation and making the site pay little by little with care and worry over each detail.
Every blogger who passes by here, and I know there are a few, please add Rimworlds – http://www.rimworlds.com/thecrotchetyoldfan/ – to your blogroll. Steve needs the inbound links for when Google starts indexing the site again. The best way to help Steve out is to stop by his site and see how he is doing, make a comment (there’s plenty to comment about). Please spread the word. Make a post on your blog or set the status on your facebook page and get Steve as many links to his site as possible so he can spring back from this.
I am in the process of cleaning up a database that has user passwords. I just did a check to find the 50 most common passwords out of a database of about 50,000 users. It is pretty sad. Who uses bubbles as a password?
I, like most readers of my generation, read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager and have probably reread it few more times since.
There’s not much to say about the man, and that’s how he wanted it, but there are supposed to be a dozen or so unpublished books locked in a drawer somewhere that might appear now. I am interested in these. I foresee J.D. Salinger hitting the best seller lists in 2010.
I ordered two 3 pound bee packages that will arrive some time on March 25th. They are coming up in a truck from Georgia. We’ll all be waiting for him in the parking lot of the Palisades Mall. The price is good ($80 each). I spoke to Adam Fuller of AZ Apiaries on the phone and he seems like a good guy.
If you want bees, order NOW because the truck is almost full.
I have two hives now, but one probably won’t make it. I have another hive box for the hive that already died. I have a spare hive box. This is a total of 4. If both hives that are alive now make it through the winter I will have 4 hives.
$499 base price. 3G is an extra $130 + $30 a month unlimited data.
Damn!
I want this thing.
I have to think of way to come up with $650 bucks. This is truly amazing.
Down size is no multitasking and no phone.
It runs at 1 Ghz, so I can expect an operating system upgrade eventually that runs apps in virtual box so that it can multitask. It has a built in mic and speaker, but it is a little overlarge to use as a phone easily.
The $29.99 a month for unlimited 3G will start a price war. I expect Verizon and T-mobile to drop their prices. It won’t affect Europe and Canada where there are state enforced monopolies. It will still cost an arm and a leg there.
There is a signed copy of John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Who Goes There? for sale on eBay for $1,500. This is the story that the movie “The Thing” was made from. Campbell, of course, did more to shape modern SF than anyone and should be remembered for his work as an editor. I am not such a big fan of his fiction, though.
This is an historical book and I think $1,500 is cheap.
Steve over at the Crotchety Old Fan has one of those omnibus posts that covers soup to nuts. Included in it is the factoid that if you want to get lots of traffic, just include the phrase XXX Heinlein in your tags.
He mentions me as a someone to vote for in the Hugo awards short story nominations. – Thanks, Steve.
He also suggests that one might want to consider Fred Pohl’s The Way the Future Blog for best fan writer. I was going to vote for Steve anyway, but I really enjoy Fred’s musings on the early days of SF, so I’ll vote for him, too.
Steve makes lots of sensible recommendations. Steve and I would beg you please do not vote for Avatar in the movie class. The story is an embarrassment to anyone striving to be a Science Fiction author.
Lost is coming back. I thought it was dead. Erica watches this, but I have had no idea what the show has been about for the past few seasons. Erica doesn’t know either. I usually like time travel stories and I find paradoxes intellectually interesting. “Lost”, however, is just plain impossible to follow.
This is a Gnome Press 1959 edition of one of the master’s early collections. I just finished rereading this a few weeks ago.
Signed copies of Heinlein books go for a couple of thousand, unless they are the copies of Friday he signed at one of the cons. He signed lots of them and Friday is not considered a Heinlein classic.
I found this site that has extracts from the New York newspapers from the middle 1700s. They are a very interesting read. Here are a couple.
New York Mercury December 12, 1763 My perfidious wife Catherine, by her disobedient and incontinent behavior towards me, hath obliged me in justice to my honor and fortune, to publish her as a disobedient and scandalous person, both in the New York papers, and on the most noted places of the town where I dwell, prohibiting all persons to trust her on my account, or to conceal or harbor her at their peril; yet she hath still persisted (in spite of age and infirmity) in the most shameful manner, to prostitute herself and my estate to the rapaciousness of those as infamously scandalous as herself; and hath eloped once, and again, robbing me of some hundred pounds worth in goods from my shop, which she hath prodigally dissipated to the ruin fully of my quiet, and almost of my fortune: and that this Catherine of Pollution, may be no longer seen than detested, I hereby specify her to be a thin spare small woman, having lost partly the use of her lest arm, and before finger of the same, is dead; usually wears a black patch under he left eye, to conceal a fistula, and is in the 53rd year of her age; and that she may carry her extravagance to the highest pitch, some times assumes the name of Catherine Fowler, and practices that art of peddling, selling partly the goods she hath thus robbed me of. These are therefore to assure any perform a reasonable reward that shall seize the goods she may be possessed as on my account, hereby warranting any lawful proceedings thereof. New-Branford, September 20, 1763. Patrick Hayes
New York Gazette February 13, 1764 Whereas Oliver Loshier, on Friday last the 10th instant, very falsely advertised me as having eloped from his bed and board; that I had not only run him in debt, but was continuing to do so; and afterwards forewarns all persons either to credit or harbor me.—The public may be assured, that he very shamefully and abusively turned me out of his house on occasion of only a single and most trifling family occurrence which his impatience, (through liquor) could not overlook, when a more considerate personwould.—I also declare, I have neither run him, or attempted to run him in debt: nor do I intend it: –It is therefore a false and malicious advertisement. Elizabeth Loshier.
Time is running out to gain eligibility to nominate for the Hugo Awards! Nominations must be received by 13 March 2010. In order to participate, you must have purchased an Aussiecon 4 membership by 31 January 2010 or have been a member of the 2009 Worldcon, Anticipation. More information is available at http://www.aussiecon4.org.au/index.php?page=66
Vote for Bleak History by John Shirley. Vote for Shaun Lawton’s Freezine for best fanzine (only place he fits). Vote for Steve Davidson as best fan writer.
You only need a dozen or so votes to get on the ballot, so vote soon and vote often. You get to vote for 5 entries per category.
Please, Please, vote for my story The Nigerian Soul at AtomjackMagazine.com. I don’t expect to win a Hugo, but I do want to be nominated. Pay by paypal and mail in the form this weekend or it won’t get done.
It costs just $50 and you get about $125, at least, in free books, plus all that great worldcon bling in your mailbox.
Continuing the theme of this weekend, after a night where I was unable to sleep, I received a reject on my robot detective story. I guess the world is not ready for a robot detective. I will trunk it for another 5 years.
I am closing down Freenameastar. I’ll keep it open until next Saturday and then it is gone.
I got a takedown order today for this site from the competition that charges big bucks for something I gave away for free. I’ll be shutting down operations.
I’ve had a story out a venue for 35 days, now. The magazine reports on the average of 36 days. They have an edition coming out on February first. As Jim’s mother used to say, “I am walking on thin eggs”.
This story is one that I wrote 5 years ago and only submitted a couple of times, both with very negative reactions. It was about a robot detective. I wrote five or six stories about this detective, but the only one that I sold was the one where I rewrote it and made him a human. I decided that a robot detective was a bad idea and trunked the stories.
I found the story recently and decided that it wasn’t that bad at all so I gave it a polish and sent it out. It is written in a 1940s hard boiled detective style and the hook is that the detective reacts emotionally to the murder and mayhem in the story, but doesn’t show it. The story turns into a private view into a cybernetic psyche. I still don’t think that it is an easy sell, after all it has no vampires or zombies.
I mentioned Cyril Kornbluth in the previous post. Kornbluth was a good writer and frequent collaborator with Fred Pohl. I saw the Golden Age magazine Dynamic Science Fiction, March 1953, on eBay and noticed the name “Cyril Judd”. That is the name that Kornbluth used when he collaborated with Judith Merril. Wikipedia shows the name was used twice, but here is a Novelette called Sea Change, that is not listed. It is almost worth buying. Kornbluth was at his best working with other writers, and Judith Merril was a good writer and an excellent editor.
The link below goes to a short video at Bigelow Aerospace. Bigelow is in the business of making a commercial space station and they seem to be well on their way. I can’t say that the odds of success are good, but they it is not impossible that they could put a commercial space station in orbit.
C.M. Kornbluth’s best novel Takeoff was about a commercial space flight venture, and of course, Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon was about an entrepreneur who financed the exploration of space. For a while it looked like only governments could finance space exploration, but now there is good reason to believe that the technology is cheap enough so that someone like Virgin Galactic, Spacex, Blue Origin, UP Aerospace, or Bigelow could actually take over the exploration of space. (There should be a mutual fund that invests in these companies.)
I applied for a job at Bigelow today. I am available if they need anyone over the age of 50 to check out their space station when it gets launched. Actually, I’ll probably be over 60 by then.
Bigelow had a “Fly Your Stuff” promotion where you could put things on one of their space flights. The video in the link shows the stuff all drifting around in microgravity. It is evocative of the computer Wintermute in Gibson’s Count Zero that became an artist in an abandoned space station.
I added some content related plugins. I got rid of the SI Captcha plugin as it did not seem to be doing anything and I was getting spam anyway. I was getting quite a few hits on the captcha image and I believe that the spammers were running OCR on it. I replaced it with the Math Comment Spam plugin. I like the idea that only people who can do simple math can make comments on my site. I was thinking about making a Calculus Comment plugin so that only people who can solve calculus problems can make comments. Perhaps a little science quiz comment plugin with questions about evolution?
I added two plugins that send email. This is a might be a little spammy, but I want to try it anyway.
The first is the Subscribe to Comments plugin. This is good in that it allows a commenter to get updates if anyone else makes a comment on a post and encourages dialog. If you make a comment you can get an email notification when someone replies to your comment.
The other email plugin is the Thank Me Later Plugin. This plugin lets you send a thank you message to anyone who makes a comment. The message is mailed a day or two later so the user who surfs by, leaves a comment and then does not bookmark the site will be thanked with suggestions of interesting things on the site. It is an invite to come back and enjoy the site.
I think the Subscribe to Comments, and Thank Me Later plugins are very good ideas.
I get lots of website statistics information. I like to keep measuring how my pages are doing. I recently was able to install AWSTATS on this site to access my web server logs and get some nice statistics. This was quite complicated and I believe well beyond what a casual user can do. This site is hosted at 1and1.com which has a non-standard hosting environment which made things that much more difficult.
I am now presented with several different sources for statistics.
The 1and1.com stats show that CThreepo.com gets about 2,000 unique users per day, but that includes bots and spiders. I think that the 1and1 software does not count the uniques correctly.
AWSTATS show this site as getting around 600 unique users per day.
The Wordpress Stats Plugin shows around 300 unique users a day, but not all of my pages are presented by wordpress. In fact, I have three wordpress blogs on the site, the star finder pages and the book blog, each of which get lots of hits.
MyBlogLog shows about 300 unique users per day.
Quantcast.com shows about 320 per day.
Google Analytics shows about 350 per day.
The last three are based on javascript so a user must have javascript enabled and also not be running firefox with one of the extensions that blocks the statistical sites.
About 60% of my traffic is now firefox, so I do believe that the 300 range is low, but that the 600 range is high. I would guess that I have between 400 and 500 people each day visiting my pages and reading my blog. This spikes every few weeks up to as high as 2 or 3 thousand users when I am getting hits from BoingBoing, Delicious or Stumbleupon.
I generally get about three page views for each visit no matter who counts.
I noticed that I was getting thousands of hits to the captcha images that I use for spam prevention. It looks like there are bots that try to OCR the captcha codes, but then they are caught by the other spam prevention measures that I have. I uninstalled the captcha plugin, just to prevent all of the hits. I now have a a “math question” antispam. This seems easier than the captcha, but I am not sure that the spambots are aware of it.
The traffic is about double what it was six months ago. I credit the change to Wordpress with the SEO optimization for much of this. I also check the Google Webmaster Page regularly and watch their recommendations. I submit my sitemaps to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask every time a make a post or change something on the site.
Has anyone ever written a story where Martians really did land on Halloween eve 1938? What if Orson Wells was actually reporting real events and it was covered up afterward as a hoax in order to cover up the Martian victory?
I thought of writing this on the bus this morning. I hesitate to write such a story since it appears to be so obvious. I wonder how many times this story has been written?
I was once at a party where I had a conversation with a woman artist about Robert A. Heinlein. When I told her that he was my favorite writer, she told me I was an idiot and that Heinlein was a fascist woman hater. This is an attitude that I have come across from time to time, especially from women. It could not be further from the truth, and I don’t know how this has happened. I have read everything that Heinlein has written at least four times and one or two of his books as many as 20 times. He is not a woman hater. He is not a fascist. To me his an intelligent and reasonable observer.
At the The Lensman’s Children blog, Sarah Hoyt has an article defending Robert A. Heinlein. She discusses Heinlein’s problems with women and how they are dead wrong. It does my heart good to read something like this.
Here’s a sample:
But I was raised by Heinlein through his books, and I hope at least the spirit and the intention of the search for truth and individual freedom remains in my work. As well as the certainty that it’s always easier to be a live lion than a live lamb or a dead lion.
After a week and a half, I finally finished this hard cover book of the “best” short stories of Henry Kuttner. This is from three boxes of hardcover books that my brother found at a garage sale. The reason it took so long to read this is that the stories were not very good.
Steve over at the Crotchety Old Fan has one of those omnibus posts that covers soup to nuts. Included in it is the factoid that if you want to get lots of traffic, just include the phrase XXX Heinlein in your tags.
