Category Archives: Computers

Whew — A Five-Hour, Four-Way Support Call Gets Closed

One of Dakim’s [m]Power devices (located at a client site) wasn’t communicating with our servers correctly, and it took five hours and a bunch of people to correctly diagnose the problem.
On the call we had a member of the client’s IT staff (at the corporate office), a member of Dakim’s support staff (on-site at the [...]

“Keyclick” and a Real F’ing Keyboard

I first heard about the Unicomp reincarnations of the original IBM “clicky” keyboard on Mark Pilgrim’s site. (Look for the heading “A real fucking keyboard.”) I’ve long been a fan of IBM keyboards — I used to pick them up at thrift stores. If you bought three you could usually end up with two working [...]

Using gMail Securely, Even on Wireless

If you see “http://” in the address bar for a website, that connection is unsecured. Anyone eavesdropping can access everything sent and received between you and the website. Which is no problem if you’re reading tmz.com, but a big problem if you’re on wamu.com.
If you see “https://” in the address bar, that connection is generally [...]

John MARK Schofield?

People who have known me for a while are slightly puzzled. Why am I semi-consistently using my middle name now, when I never did before? Sudden attack of pretentiousness?
Actually, no. When you Google for “John Schofield,” I’m WAY down on the list — not even on the first page. (Some Civil War General gets all [...]

Terminally Incoherent’s “Linux Fuckup Of The Day” — Using Single-User Mode To Recover

From Terminally Incoherent:
Yep. I just removed myself from all the groups except for vboxusers. Brilliant! I absolutely hate when I do stupid shit like that. It’s not like this was hard to fix – I just didn’t remember of the top of my head what groups I was supposed to belong to. Of course since [...]

How to Remove All Subversion Folders From A Directory Tree

Say you’ve got a Subversion source code tree checked out, and for whatever reason you want to remove all Subversion directories inside that tree. (The thing that makes a Subversion tree a Subversion tree is the presence of a “.svn” folder in every folder of the tree. If you had a complicated source tree with [...]

Possible Wordpress Future Post Bug

I reported a bug to WordPress  and I’ve apparently gone as far as I can go with the folks on that bug.
I’ll be continuing this at the URL they suggested, and I’ll update this post.

Site5.com Lost All My Data, Then Warned Me That Closing My Account Might Cause Data Loss

Summary: Site5 sucks. They lost all my data and took my site down until I could restore from backup.
Wednesday night my site went down. Consider it a comment on the level of service site5.com provides that this didn’t worry me too much. I knew it would be back up shortly, like it always is when [...]

I’m so Web 2.0 I’m Practically Web 3.0

OK, that headline is a little ridiculous. But for a number of reasons, I ended up creating a lot of accounts lately — so here’s some pointers to other places you can find me on the web:
Things I use every day: (Just about)

twitter.com/schof
flickr.com/photos/schof/

Things I’m not sure about yet:

www.friendster.com/schof
www.linkedin.com/in/schof
www.myspace.com/johnmarkschofield
www.socializr.com/user/schof
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=684838741

Note that Facebook knows me as [...]

My Workflow: TextMate, Subversion, and Python

I’m focusing in on some very important parts of my workflow. Version control is Subversion. I’m most of the way through the book on it.
Text editing is TextMate. I was trying to use vim, because it’s one editor I can use both on my OS X desktop and SSH’d across the network to linux boxes. [...]