Lose, humans will, in a competition with a bot. Smarter people in the stock market know this and acknowledge that bots play a major role in their online trading system. This has yet to occur in the online ticket sales area. The CBC documented an ex-bot operator on how bots rig the system. I do agree, and something must be done about it. Tragically Hip concert tickets selling out to bots before humans means that fans will pay a huge premium for tickets, and none of this premium will go to the artists. This is simply not right.
Raining, it is today and 14C, but my new-to-me Toro CCR 2000 snowblower, last winter (2015), started once, sputtered and quit. I changed the plug but it did not restart, so I had to resort to my trusty Canadian Tire snowblower, which I do maintain. The Toro needs a carb clean, which I will do today.
Big Weed told me to not ban Pinterest. While I am not a huge Pinterest fan, she is/was so I listen to her. The problem is that Pinterest is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud host provider infamous for hosting bad bots. Here are the IP ranges to ban AWS but keep Pinterest coming back.
Damn, Magento is difficult, and more than a little fickle. This eCommerce open source package runs on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySql, php) and seems popular enough, but wow, there’s not much community support. Scary,when you need help but cannot turn to your people.
My client’s Magento site runs on Porto 1.2.0. The front page has a products slider that only displayed “;”. The products slider shows he most recently added products. Like, what? It used to work, I did not even know where the code was located, and now it broke? I tracked down the html with Firefly but even with the identified html could not find it in Magento or the Porto theme. I get a hint from the client that it is the homepage_15. Lo and behold, there is the code.
I have upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. There have been very few issues for what is essentially an engine swapout.
Wireless Lan not recognizing Old Connections
On my home wifi I hide the SSID. After the upgrade these connections do not seem to work. Or rather they worked for a while and then seemed to slowly stop working.
When I edit my hidden network connections, the old connections are there but the connect button is greyed out. I thought I had to go to my router, broadcast my SSID, get a connection, then re-hide my SSID. This did not work. It turns out there is a bug for hidden networks.
Pressure cooked pork ribs, Toronto, Canada. Photo by Don Tai
Meat, always seems to be on Little Weed’s mind. As parents we know this, so when NoFrills offered pork ribs for $1.99/lb there was no question we would be going home with a sizable hunk of pig. But how to cook it, Eschewing the usual 3 hr bake time, the pressure cooker did it in 25 minutes, followed by a sauce glaze and 20 minutes in a 400 degree oven. It came out great.
My friend was surprised when I told him that I banned all IP ranges of Amazon Web Services (AWS) from my site. It is particularly ironic considering that we both had recently attended an AWS Cloud Computing IoT presentation, which was well done and interesting to both of us.
AWS accounts for a huge chunk of the world’s cloud computing platform, and my decision to ban all IP ranges did not come lightly. I just simply could not keep up with all the comment spammers and scrapers coming out of AWS. It seems like I am not alone. This has been by experience as well. There are others.
Surprised, I was, that mice seem to really like my 2016 Honda Fit, in Toronto, Canada, and I am not alone. There was evidence of infiltration into the car, and I was not willing to give them a pass. Vermin, tell your friends.
2016 Honda Fit: 4, Mouse: 0
It seems like in their efforts to improve ecology the Honda engineers have opted to use soy based coating on electrical cables, foam, and other items that used to be plastic-based. There are numerous complaints of mice eating away at electrical systems, causing much heartache to car owners.
Puzzling, it is at times, that my htaccess does not always behave as intended. As a computer scientist I expect that my programs and file input should output consistent, stable and reliable results immediately. This is not the case with my htaccess file, hosted on Site5, my internet service provider.
Delays in htaccess Implementation
When I do certain changes to my htaccess, there may be delays of a day or two. This is very odd to me, because supposedly the htaccess is checked for every server request. Maybe there are some caching that I do not know about. Nevertheless it seems like the htaccess has a unique personality. I know that I should not anthropomorphize a computer, much less a security file such as htaccess on an Apache server, but it is difficult to not.
