Category: Internet

I’m dabbling in gaining experience with web services in my spare time. I decided to bring my blog up under nginx rather than Apache. Everything seemed fine except that the category links oddly stopped working and led to a 404 result from nginx. Googling was strangely unproductive at first until I realized that the common guidance for fixing permalinks (which I did not see a problem with) also applied to category links.

The solution is to modify the location / directive in the server block to include a last-change rewrite to feed the URI back to WordPress’s index.php, and more importantly, to remove the =404 that causes nginx to fail when it can’t match the permalink to a file on disk. Specifically, my location originally read:

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}

and needed to be changed to:

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}

Now nginx will do the right thing. Yay.

I hate ’em, you hate ’em; even the writers hate ’em as well.  I finally got fed up enough to figure out how to completely block the autoplaying videos on the Macworld website.

Most instructions tell you to disable Flash, but I don’t even have Flash installed on my main computer (outside of the player embedded in Chrome, but I primarily use Safari).  It turns out that the Macworld website will then load a video player from Brightcove, so you have to block that too.

I’m using AdBlock, so I click its toolbar icon, choose Options, and go to “Manually Edit Your Filters”.  Click “Edit” and insert this text:

! Block autoplay videos on Macworld/PCWorld (need to block Brightcove as well)
www.macworld.com##DIV[class="video-wrapper small-player"]
www.pcworld.com##DIV[class="video-wrapper small-player"]
players.brightcove.net

That seems to be the lowest common division; higher level entities are named “how-to” or “security” or some such. Might as well get PCWorld while we’re in there. Don’t forget to click “Save”, and you’re done. (Also don’t forget to pay for AdBlock; I’m doing that right now…)

So, facing the “Would you like to install Flash Player 10?” message in the browser page at Adobe’s, I had a micro-aneurysm or something, and thought, my daughter spends all her free time playing Flash games, so I’ll need this soon anyway, right? So I clicked “Yes.”

[If you’re reading along at home: STOP! DON’T DO THIS!]

Whereupon Flash downloaded and tried to launch some oddly named helper program which bounced in my dock for about a minute, while Safari spun its rainbow pizza. Finally, the system asked me to confirm I really wanted to run this program downloaded from the Internet —

[Reader, I implore you again, turn back!]

— and finally launched the installer. Which proceeded to ask me to close all running browsers. OK.

No. Wait. I can’t close my browser BECAUSE YOUR STUPID PLUG-IN IS STILL SITTING IN A LOOP WAITING FOR THE HELPER PROGRAM, so it won’t respond to the quit request.

Criminey. Doesn’t anyone at Adobe ever test this stuff out?

I know, I must have this odd configuration where I’m running the latest update of the operating system with the standard system web browser. There’s no way they can be expected to test for that.

Which slightly annoying and possibly overused net meme best describes this effort by Adobe to publicize the new features in Flash Player 10?

Adobe outlines Flash 10’s new features on a page that, for people running older Flash versions, leads off with the following instruction:

“To view the feature tour, please upgrade to Adobe Flash Player 10”

Is it:

1. FAIL
2. EPIC FAIL
3. UR DOIN IT RONG

To be fair, when I tried it just now, I got a different result: a pseudo-dialog appeared in the middle of a gray box, with the message “This content requires Adobe Flash Player 10. Would you like to upgrade now?”

No. Not really.

… but news items like this one make it hard:

An insidious computer virus recently discovered on digital photo frames has been identified as a powerful new Trojan Horse from China that collects passwords for online games – and its designers might have larger targets in mind.

The virus … recognizes and blocks antivirus protection from more than 100 security vendors, as well as the security and firewall built into Microsoft Windows. …

Deborah Hale at SANS suggested that PC users find friends with Macintosh or Linux machines and have them check for malware before plugging any device into a PC.

As Gruber points out, it seems inaccurate to call this a “computer virus” and not a “Windows virus”.

Remember, folks, if you must use Windows … be careful out there.