Tag: Site issues
Technical difficulties
So, the reconstruction referenced yesterday didn't happen; I discovered some other minor problems before uploading and am having to address those first. Also, I've been spending a lot of time cybershopping because my TV is failing, and I need my TV. I mean, not really, I could live without it and could watch most of what I watch on a computer or even my phone, but how could I have my Trek Night parties or baseball gatherings if all I have is a 14" PC monitor?
So I'm shelling out for a new set. I could repair this one myself if I want to get adventurous, but even that would cost me money for parts and I don't really have the room to disassemble a 55" flatscreen and keep all the parts organized and free of cat hair and (if in the garage) sawdust. Paying someone else to replace the LEDs, which is the failing component, would cost about as much as I paid to buy the thing in the first place. So, new one it is.
Initially, I figured as long as I'm getting a new one I might as well go up a size since I have room, but it's $100 more for the bigger one unless I get a lesser quality model, so the decision came down to what do I want more, a better screen or a bigger screen? Better won. So, same size Roku Plus model is on the way from Best Buy. Even if the current one was still watchable for a while I figured better to buy this now before the tariffs kick in, because our new POTUS is a fucking idiot that still thinks tariffs are magic money that comes from Chinese genies or something and not effectively additional sales taxes.
Anyway, all of which is to say that the site update is still to come. Hopefully in the next couple of days. Unless things go awry yet again.
Now I'm off to umpire in the frigid cold again.
Tagged
Site issues,
President VonClownstick,
TV |
Posted on January 20, 2025 at 5:43pm | Permalink | 
| 
Reconstruction
My project to update the guts of starshiptim.com is near completion, all that's left to do is take this version down and replace it with the new guts. And, inevitably, things will go wrong, so I'm not going to undertake that until after my umpiring shift tonight. Meaning that tomorrow morning things might be broken here, and if so, it's 99% certainly because of problems with the transition from old site guts to new site guts, not the transition from the United States to Trumpistan 2.0.
Though that latter transition will also break things. Many, many things.
Tagged
Site issues |
Posted on January 19, 2025 at 4:54pm | Permalink | |
The more you overtake the plumbing...
I've been spending some time this week upgrading this here website's under-the-hood guts. Or, more accurately, I've been putting together new guts with an eye toward moving the database making up all of my posts and such from these old guts into the new guts. But it may be more trouble than it's worth.
StarshipTim.com has been in this basic configuration for many years now, and over that time I've made modifications to so many different elements of its core infrastructure that whenever I think I'm about ready to make the switch I realize another of my custom mods is missing from the new guts. The latest is in the commenting system—I need to have some form of spam filtering or else I just get inundated with bot comments (that's one reason I was even contemplating a guts upgrade), and I can't seem to get my foil-bots-with-math thing to function in the new guts. That may end up being an easy fix, but in the meantime I've spent all afternoon/evening on this and though I realize it's good "exercise," as it were, to bring things up to PHP conventions that are less outdated, it won't really affect anything that anyone will see. Unless I inadvertently break things. Which seems likely at this point.
The upgrading is only going to be useful to me on the back end of things, and really it functions just fine now; I just know that eventually servers will insist on running more modern PHP code and while I have a slow week it seemed like a time to get ahead of that. But right now I'm just cursing the march of progress and am abandoning the effort for the evening while I raid my fridge for dinner.
This has been a Pointless Blog Entry™.
Tagged
Site issues |
Posted on January 8, 2025 at 10:17pm | Permalink | |
Miscellany
Weird but fun, Interior Chinatown is worth a watch
Today's post: A random assortment of disjointed stuff!
- The dishwasher saga is over, with a new one purchased, delivered, and installed and the old one carted away to whatever scrap heap such things are taken to. I hadn't initially planned to replace the broken one so quickly, but holiday sales at Lowe's convinced me I was better off spending $600 now, on a good one on sale, than later on a cheaper one at regular price. It works, it's quiet, and most importantly, it doesn't leak into Rachel's kitchen downstairs.
- I've spent a chunk of time doing maintenance on this here website, including recreating the sketches page and beginning to populate it with stuff readily available, i.e. mostly stuff from the last few years that was either already scanned into my computer or at hand in my currently in-use sketchbook. There's other stuff in my hard drive already digitized, things that were on prior versions of my blog, but they were posted in the olden days of the Internet when nobody had a screen resolution bigger than 800 pixels and are thus pretty lousy scans. I'll have to find the originals and rescan them at some point. Anyway, the current format has clickable icons that produce a fullscreen image and a button to continue to "notes and comments" that takes you to a page for that individual sketch and any blathering I may have done about it, plus a commenting form just like a blog post. Click anywhere other than the button to close the fullscreen image and return to the sketch menu.
- I had my Christmas the other night at K&E's place, enjoying delicious food and talking about the world and also TV. All three of us love the Hulu show Interior Chinatown, starring Jimmy Yang and Chloe Bennett. It's a wacky comedic sendup of action movies, the Law & Order franchise, and meta-storytelling that takes place both within a Law & Order-style TV show and around a mild-mannered Chinese-American's family in a fictional Chinatown neighborhood. Recommended. We also agree on the greatness of Michael Schur's A Man on the Inside (Netflix), which I discussed briefly earlier but deserves a second recommend. The Diplomat (Netflix) also works for all of us, and we commented on the overlap of cast and crew from The West Wing on it (even though neither of them have ever really watched West Wing, which is really a bummer for them). Shrinking (Apple TV+) wasn't something they'd seen but which I think is terrific; they liked Slow Horses, which I've not sampled to this point. I'm very much into Silo (Apple TV+) and, naturally, the just-concluded (boo) Star Trek: Lower Decks, but know better than to try to convince K&E to watch those.
- I was gifted the book What's Next on that early-Christmas evening, and though I've yet to start into it, I am anticipating some great West Wing reflections and truly wonder how it will feel to revisit the details of the fictional Bartlet Administration while living in the impending nightmare of Trump 2.0, Now With More Oligarchy.
- I just learned that baseball Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson died today. One of the all-time greats, Rickey was a fantastic character with is arrogant self-assuredness, his speaking in the third person, and his generosity to others. Despite being exactly my kind of ballplayer—the stolen base king! Consistently walked more than struck out!—he was never one of my favorites, maybe because he took the steals record away from one of my faves, Lou Brock, or maybe because he spent his career primarily with the Oakland A's and the hated New York Yankees. He did spend part of one season in Seattle as a Mariner, in 2000, in the waning days of his very long career, and was always fun to watch no matter who he played for. My two favorite Rickey Henderson anecdotes come from other players. One, from former Seattle Mariner Harold Reynolds, who won the stolen base crown in 1987 with 66 steals (because Henderson was injured that year) and got a postseason call from Rickey congratulating him but also containing Rickey-style mockery, with Henderson ending the call with "Rickey would have had 66 by the All-Star break." Two, from fellow Hall of Famer Mike Piazza, who was Rickey's teammate with the New York Mets; Piazza recounted how Rickey voted when teams would be divvying up the postseason bonuses among the support staff. “Rickey was the most generous guy I ever played with, and whenever the discussion came around to what we should give one of the fringe people—whether it was a minor leaguer who came up for a few days or the parking lot attendant—Rickey would shout out 'Full share!' We’d argue for a while and he’d say, 'Fuck that! You can change somebody’s life!'” Apparently Rickey died from pneumonia, less than a week shy of 66 years old. Bummer.
- Earlier this week, Craig Calcaterra referenced a Washington Post article called "America's Best Decade" in his newsletter. The article analyzes results from polling 2,000 American adults on which decade was best for 20 different things, like best movies, best economy, best music, best reporting, and so on. There are some interesting (though not surprising) things, like Republicans are twice as likely to think the 1950s were awesome as other people are (hey, Republicans, that being the case, let's go back to the 90% marginal tax rate that existed then, which made for a lot of the circumstances you say you want!), or that people think the "best music" is the music they listened to in their formative years. But Craig's takeaway was surprise at the generational consistency of people liking their own youth (not just the music, but everything). "Americans feel nostalgia not for a specific era, but for a specific age," says the article. "The good old days when America was 'great' aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices." There's a handy graph to illustrate:
If they'd polled me, I might have skewed the results just a smidge. I mean, if I followed the pattern, I'd have my bests coming in the 1980s, and frankly there was a lot about the ’80s that wasn't all that. I mean, sure, those years were largely good for me (well, not ’89), but thinking big picture not so much. I'd say... Best Music? 1970s. Best Movies? I'm not really big into movies like some people, so I don't have a real feeling on this, but I guess the 2000s? Best Fashion? Hell if I know, but certainly not the ’80s; maybe the ’60s, since it spanned a lot of stuff. Happiest Families? Again, WTF do I know, but I'd say maybe 1990s since (a) women had far more agency than in prior decades, and (b) economically things were stable and good throughout. Most Moral Society is a question that inevitably tracks one's politics and I'd be tempted to say the 2020s if not for what happened last month to show us how many millions of Americans are still racist, misogynist, cruel asshats. Most Reliable News Reporting? 1970s again, though it really depends on how you quantify; there's a lot of fine reportage more recently, but also increasingly widespread BS from the dawn of cable TV forward. Best Economy? 1990s. Best Radio? I've no proper context for this, but given how much more radio was a thing the further back you go, maybe the 1940s or ’50s? For me, again the ’70s. Best TV? Right now, man. So much great TV being made even as the TV delivery system is transmogrifying. Least Political Division? Um...never? I mean, now is the worst in ages, but there's always been a lot; maybe the ’40s, what with the war being a unifying purpose. Best Sporting Events? For me, that's limited to baseball, really, and in this area I fit the trend—1980s baseball was great and I wish we could exhume Bart Giamatti to be Commissioner again. Best Cuisine seems like a dumb category, as food doesn't change, really, it's how we eat that changes. I like good food whenever it's eaten. Anyway, kind of an interesting survey.
Tagged
Site issues,
Politics,
West Wing,
Baseball,
TV,
Craig Calcaterra |
Posted on December 21, 2024 at 8:37pm | Permalink | |
Navigating our digital world
To those of you who receive email notifications when new posts arrive here aboard StarshipTim.com, two things: 1) Thank you; 2) I'm sorry.
Lately there has been an issue with one of the services that I utilize to generate those emails and in my sussing out the problem you may have received multiple copies of the same notification. Furthermore, depending on what email system you use, those duplicates may have tripped the spam filter and relegated all future notification emails to the spam folder. Or straight to oblivion if your filtering is hyper aggressive. So, I ask that you check your spam filter and tell gmail or whatever that those messages are not spam.
Of course, the best way to receive updates from this or any other site is to use the RSS feed, eliminating any potential trouble with a third-party intermediary service. Outlook and other similar email clients have RSS readers built right into them, items show up just like emails do (you add a feed to follow just like you'd add an email account). Browsers have extensions for RSS feeds that are super handy if you don't have or don't want to use an email client for them.
Relying on social media sites for web content is a losing proposition. The algorithms change all the time, and even if a notice does show up in your feed it can be buried under a hundred other posts. RSS feeds let you curate your own portal in one of these reader extensions:
I've got a miniature version of this on the desktop version of this site, the feedbox at the top right, but your choice of feeds may differ, so use one of these extensions/email clients!
The RSS feed for StarshipTim.com is https://starshiptim.com/home/rss, link always available in the right column (on desktop; that column is removed on narrow phones).
OK, enough of this, I have work to do.
Tagged
Site issues |
Posted on June 8, 2024 at 6:11pm | Permalink | |
Maintenance issues
The comments problem appears to be fixed now. Apparently there were enough spam comments getting through that the server security put up a block. We'll see how it goes now; if spam gets bad again, I may have to institute some kind of member login procedure for commenting. Fingers crossed.
Meanwhile, in fixing that I ended up inadvertently resetting the URL for the RSS feed, so if you've subscribed to email notifications via Feedrabbit (the button up top there), you may need to do it again. If you get email notifications via zapier, I've adjusted it for you already. And if you actually use the feed in an RSS reader of some sort, hats off to you, I wish more people used such self-curated things rather than depend on social media links to navigate the web. But you'll also need to update the URL in your reader: https://starshiptim.com/home/rss. We thank you for your patronage.
Tagged
Site issues |
Posted on September 1, 2023 at 2:09am | Permalink | |
Maintenance
I had free time today, so I finally got around to fixing some longstanding issues with the site as it appears on mobile devices. Long time coming, I know. Anyway, those of you viewing this on your phone or tablet should have a better layout now, though you may have to clear your browser cache if you've been by here before and it still looks wonky.
Firefox on Android is still giving me a little bit of flak, but it's minor flak, e.g. the rounded edges of the content window are still screwy there. Chrome on Android is still not spacing the text properly, but again, minor flak. For you iOS people I'm using simulators to estimate iOS responses since I don't own any Apple stuff, but it seems like it's all good there. Let me know if not.
Tagged
Site issues |
Posted on May 16, 2023 at 5:20pm | Permalink | |
Oops
Apologies, email subscribers—I made an edit to some code on the back end to facilitate the "tags" feature here and a byproduct was that you all got buried in "update" emails from posts going back years. Oops. Please don't unsubscribe. :-)
Tagged
Site issues |
Posted on March 5, 2023 at 11:29pm | Permalink | |
More maintenance
I'm sure this is going to keep happening for a while, but hey, more broken stuff!
Commenting was broken unless logged in with a user account, and since the only one with such an account is me, that meant nobody could comment. An endless feedback of captchas was there as a very specific circle of hell apparently designed for trolls. If only it could be deployed just for them.
It's gone now. New anti-spam code in place, but will it work? Probably not, but it won't keep commenters out either. Since I do not trust this code to actually block spam, the moderator function remains on. Comments will go through now, but not show up until I approve them. Damn spambots.
Two minutes later...
Damn, those bots work fast! Russian spam almost immediately. This is gonna be a long-term issue, isn't it.
Two days later...
Found a new method that seems to be way more effective and turned off the moderation function. We'll see how it goes.
Tagged
Site issues |
Posted on August 20, 2022 at 2:12am | Permalink | |
Behind the scenes
So, being 99% decided on shuttering grandsalami.net and moving stuff over here, I've spent some time going over the under-the-hood code over here to see what needs attention after a few years of neglect. The feedbox at right was broken thanks to some changes in browser security; that's now fixed on Chrome-based browsers but still busted on Firefox for reasons I've yet to identify (and I am looking for an additional feed or two to replace the couple I had before that have been abandoned). I see the main logo animation has some issues on some browsers (not Firefox, works fine there unlike the feedbox), I may need to adjust that somehow. I'm also looking at replacing the headline font to be less in-your-face Trekkie for when I invite the GS audience over for baseball posts. Anything else people are having technical difficulties with? Let me know, I will add them to the agenda.
4 hours later...
OK, feedbox should work in Firefox now, logo now runs properly in Chrome/Safari/Opera, we have a new headline font, and the RSS feed is fixed. Again, anyone having issues or noticing weirdness, please let me know.
Tagged
Site issues |
Posted on August 18, 2022 at 4:50pm | Permalink | |
Comments Fixed
It was brought to my attention that the comment feature on this site was not working properly. Oops. There was some alteration to the server setup during my time neglecting the blog. Fixed now! Comment away!
Tagged
Site issues |
Posted on February 19, 2020 at 5:44pm | Permalink | |
Occam's Razor Applies to Coding, Too
In the previous post I mentioned temporarily frakking up the comments here aboard StarshipTim.com, done while testing a feature I was putting together for a different project, and thought that since I'd solved the issue over there, fixing it over here would take all of five minutes.
Three nights later, I finally have it working. I still don't know quite why it broke in the first place; a compatibility issue with PHP versions and software updates and associated whooziwhatsises, to be sure, but specifically...still beats me.
However, I still could have fixed it in maybe half an hour instead of three days if I'd remembered the Holmesian credo to respect the simpler solution in the face of more complicated ones. I wanted my code to work within the bounds of nested PHP and MySql tables and cooperate with the database-oriented CMS. But the conflicts were making me tear my hair out (which is thinning enough on its own, thank you very much) and it finally occurred to me that I could accomplish the same goal with two lines of Javascript.
If you don't need the whiz-bang goodies and fancy whatsises, then—revelation—you don't have to use them. Go figure.
Anyway, the comments work now.
Tagged
Site issues,
Work |
Posted on February 11, 2018 at 1:41am | Permalink | |