Yesterday I complained about a hopeless situation where Blogger, my Webhost (Charter) and some browsers (read: Mozilla) interacted to result in some of Recondite's readership not being able to post comments.
Turns out the fix was simple: Blogger stores permalink files with the same extension as archive files. I told Blogger to archive into "archive.html" (I let it pick its own name before) and after reposting every stinking article, comment links work.
Try it and see. And comment!
Recondite readers who use standards-compliant browsers rather than, say, IE, may notice that this blog's permalinks and comment tags (at the bottom of every post) don't do the right thing when you click on them. Rather than seeing a formatted page of HTML, you see a page of text containing, well, HTML. This is because, as Eric Rescorla points out, this blog's web server offers those pages as Content-Type: text/plain rather than text/html. Don't blame your faithful correspondent.
To format this blog, I use Blogger. For the webserver, my ISP, Charter provides. Blogger writes permalink (and comment) pages as files named as it chooses, without an extension. Charter runs Apache, apparently configured to serve extension-less files (as opposed to files with the extension .html) as text/plain. The server is also apparently configured to ignore .htaccess files in my directory as well (not that this is unreasonable), so I can't change anything. So the wrong thing happens, unless of course, your browser does the wrong thing itself. Get it?
So run IE. Or don't. But don't blame me.
Update 6/24: I just got a response from Blogger technical support with a suggested fix for my configuration. We'll see this works. If it does, perhaps we should title this post Oh, that's different! Nevermind....
On my XP machines, I run Norton AntiVirus 2003 and hope not to be bothered. In addition, I manually run Ad-aware because of Symantec's stance regarding trojans and spyware (they're not viruses, hence Norton doesn't bother to protect against them).1
Well, this apparently wasn't enough. For the past two days, I've had various horrible symptoms: home page hijacks, toolbar reconfigurations, popups when no browser is running and other irritating things as well. I update Norton and scan: nothing. Update Ad-aware, and get all sorts of malware detected, which Ad-aware removes. But the symptoms reappears some time later.
I check the websites that the pop-ups and hijack destinations reference, nothing interesting and googling them yields nothing either. Trend Micro's HouseCall ActiveX-based malware scanner doesn't run at all — IE crashes.
Without any clues other than the fact that HouseCall won't run (suspicious in itself) I download the trial version of Trend Micro's stand-alone antivirus product, PC-cillin. Interestingly, the installer refuses to run unless Norton is uninstalled! After some thrashing around, I decide to uninstall Norton and install PC-cillin. After installing and updating PC-cillin I get to run it. Immediately, it finds TROJ_AGENT.AC and JAVA_BYTEVER.A.2 Problem solved.
This experience doesn't give me a whole lot of faith in Norton. I do get a giggle, though, from the thought of a silent war for disk space between software trial versions.
[1] This policy was changed in the 2004 version.
[2] Turns out what my PC had was the CoolWebSearch hijack trojan which uses the ByteVerify exploit in the MS Java VM and is notoriously difficult to get rid of.
To the Editor:
Re "To the Fringes of Space" (editorial, June 23)
Hmm. Perhaps this would be a good time to rerun another Times editorial, "A Severe Strain on Credulity" published 13 January, 1920. In this, one of your predecessors, also apparently an expert on space travel, points out that Professor Goddard's invention could not possibly work since rockets "...need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react."
Given that the Times changed its opinion on Goddard's work in mid-1969, should I be watching these pages for a retraction around 2053 or so?
Allan M. Schiffman
Lake Tahoe, Nevada