Archive for the ‘blog meta’ Category

Adapting Images to Small Displays

Friday, 15 January 2021

This 'blog has yet to fully accommodate mobile computing. Images in entries have usually had an absolute width of 450 pixels, which made sense when displays were 640 pixels or more wide (and seldom more than 1920 pixels wide), but is now too wide for some devices.

I've been occasionally patching old entries to fix this problem. With IMG and IFRAME elements, the trick is to add

max-width: 100% ; max-height: Rvw ;

to the string-value of the style attribute, where R is the ratio of the height divided by the width, multiplied by 100. For example, if the image is 450 pixels wide and 900 pixels tall, then

R = 100 · (900 / 450) = 200

Just what happens when R is not an integer seems to be browser-dependent.

An example of an IMG element could be

<img src="wp-content/uploads/2020/11/A6_corrected.png" alt="[image of formula]" width="449" height="92" style="display: block ; margin-left: auto ; margin-right: auto ; margin-top: 1em ; margin-bottom: 1em ; border: none ; width: 26.4em ; height: 5.4em ; max-width: 100% ; max-height: 20.5vw ;" />

When BitChute gives code to embed a video, it looks something like this:

<iframe width="640" height="360" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border: none;" src="https://www.bitchute.com/embed/QKOTRHgzsuQE/"></iframe>

It should look something like this:

<iframe width="640" height="360" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border: none ; max-width: 100% ; max-height: 56.25vw ;" src="https://www.bitchute.com/embed/QKOTRHgzsuQE/"></iframe>

A New Projectionist

Tuesday, 3 December 2019

I am in the process of relocating video embedded in entries to this 'blog. (Only a few and rather old entries have such content.)

My experiences with YouTube have been unhappy. It routinely messed-up the synchronization of sound with image for my content. Without a ready appeal process, YouTube disabled videos that made fair use of copyrighted content. Although my content has not been affected by the political bias of Alphabet Inc. (the parent company of YouTube), it was grossly unethical for YouTube to get people to cluster at their site by representing itself as an honest broker, and then to bring a bias to bear. And, when YouTube disabled a video for one reason or for another, the embedding code responded inappropriately.

For now, I am moving most or all of my video content to BitChute; I don't know that my content will remain there. But any host that does not apply an ideologic filter will attract a disproportionate share of content from those penalized by the biases of YouTube; the main-stream of the media (who share the ideologic bias of YouTube) will seize upon this disproportion to claim or to insinuate that the host and those who use it are sympathetic with the more repellent of those filtered-out by YouTube. The sophistry will be evident to all but the rather stupid, but a much larger share of people will rôle-play as if the argument were sound.

'Blog Blues

Friday, 12 July 2019

DreamHost, the hosting service that I use, recently broke this 'blog in at least two ways.

First, they deleted one or more files from my installation of Wordfence, which deletion crippled security. Second, they corrupted the database that underlies the 'blog, causing an old entry on usernames to be very imperfectly duplicated, with a date-stamp of 30 June 2019.

I noticed the problems in the wake of an up-dating of the operating system used by DreamHost; I infer that something went wrong in that process.

I contacted DreamHost and then stewed for some days, leaving things as they were to allow the support staff to set things right. They repaired the installation of Wordfence, offering an implausible conjecture about what had gone wrong. They did not repair the database appropriately.

Bitten

Friday, 28 December 2018

This 'blog has been bit hard by a bug in a plugin.

WP-Sweep includes an ostensible ability to purge categories and tags that are not used for any entries. Unfortunately, the programmer made an error such that the categories and tags purged are any not used in generally accessible entries; tags and categories used exclusively in restricted entries are therefore purged.

Still more unfortunately, I did not discover the bug until after I had made various content changes; simply restoring a previous version of the database would undo those changes. I don't remember what they were, and my only records are the database and saved versions thereöf.

I will, over time, try to repair the damage.

Technical Difficulties

Saturday, 14 April 2018

Readers may have noticed some technical problems with this 'blog over the previous few days. I believe that the problems are resolved.

Recently, browsers have become concerned to warn users when they are dealing with sites that do not support encryption. Simply so as not to worry my visitors, I have tried to support the HTTPS protocol.

But I found that WordPress was still delivering some things with the less secure HTTP protocol, which in turn was provoking the Opera browser to issue warnings. At the WordPress site, I learned that I needed to modify two fields.

Unfortunately, changing these two fields broke my theme — my presentation software — so that fall-back text, rather than the title graphic, was sometimes displayed; but I didn't discover the breakage for a while, because the symptom wasn't always present. Ultimately, I realized that something were amiss. I tracked the problem to inconsistencies in how WordPress determines the protocol of the URI of the 'blog versus that of the directory holding the themes.

I recoded my theme to handle this inconsistency. (In the process of this recoding, my 'blog was made still more dysfunctional over several brief intervals.) My code is now sufficiently robust that it should not break if WordPress is made consistent in these determinations.

'Blog Presentation Tweaks

Sunday, 5 November 2017

I've made some changes to the code that determines the presentation of this 'blog, in order to make it more useable with devices such as cellular phone sets and tablets. Some visitors will observe substantial improvement.

There will probably be more changes to come, and during my attempts to effect such changes, the 'blog may occasionally behave dysfunctionally. If you observe a persistent problem in presentation, even if one long-standing, then please contact me, being as precise as you can about which device, operating system. and browser you use.

HTTPS

Friday, 2 June 2017

This site now supports HTTPS connections. For most visitors, an HTTPS connection will mean no more than that they won't receive a spurious warning from their browsers about the site being insecure. For friends with accounts giving them access to restricted entries, HTTPS will allow them to be less concerned about whence they log into the site.

Passcodes Redux

Friday, 1 July 2016

To-day, I found myself unable to log-in to this 'blog. I got a diagnostic that I were entering the wrong password. I don't want to burden my readers with a detailed retelling, but what had actually happened was that an up-date of WordPress rejected my password — it wasn't that I were entering the wrong password; it was that the password that I was entering was now prohibitted.

On top of the login code misreporting the problem, the code for resetting the password wouldn't tell me why my password was being rejected. But it was rejected for containing a particular sub-string; and when I removed that sub-string, the password was then accepted.

If you understand passcodes (perhaps in part from reading my previous entry in which they were discussed), then you should see that there is something literally stupid in the WordPress software. Let's say that the forbidden sub-string were 8675309 and that my password were X.52341-hunao-8675309.Y. If I drop the 8675309, the password becomes X.52341-hunao-.Y. That is now accepted, though it is less secure!

If a would-be intruder knew where in the original password 8675309 appeared, and knew the length of the password, then the password would effectively be p1p2p148675309p22p23 where each pi were an unknown character, and the new password would be p1p2p14p22p23 so that the two passwords would be equally secure! (Either way, an intruder must find a sequence of sixteen unknown characters.) But, as it is, would-be intruders wouldn't be sure that the sub-string appeared, let alone where in the code it would appear, nor how long the password were. One could, in fact, conceptualize the sub-string 8675309 as if it were a single character of extraordinary length (a macro-character) and of great popularity which character might appear within a string of equal or greater length, in which case prohibiting the sub-string would be rather like prohibiting the use of E.

That's not to say that common sub-strings should simply be accepted as passwords or within passwords. A great many systems have been hacked because someone foolishly used passwords such as password, root, or batman. But, instead of rejecting a password because it contained a popular sub-string, the software could, for example, test to see whether the password would be secure if the sub-string were excised, in which case it should be at least slightly more secure if the sub-string were retained.

(Note that this approach works with popular sub-strings of any length, including those of just one character! In fact, when there is no upper-limit on the length of passcodes, they may be securely constructed of nothing but popular sub-strings each of which has multiple characters; a secure password could be made by concatenating ten or more of the one hundred most popular passcodes. Mathematically, the problem of using just one popular passcode is fundamentally the same as that of using a short passcode!)

Sometimes, it's smart programming to write stupid programs, because the costs of designing, implementing, and maintaining more sophisticated software out-weigh the benefits. But, here, the WordPress programmers have opted for cheapness in a way that needlessly thwarts and insults some users, and can actually make systems less secure in those cases. (And the poor diagnostics are simply inexcusable.)

Behind the Veil

Saturday, 28 May 2016

Yester-day, I made the unhappy discovery that seven entries to this 'blog that were intended to be publicly accessible have instead been restricted. Apparently the restriction was caused by a bug in a WordPress plugin or in WordPress itself. The bug doesn't seem to have bitten since 2010, so I believe that it were resolved by some software up-date.

I used a little MySQL to set things straight, then went over a back-up copy of the dB to identify all the affected entries, so that I could list them here.

Three of the affected entries are simply trivial. One is about poor performance by my previous site host 'Blog Bog [16 March 2008] and two are about entries to a contest to create types of jelly beans. and why it should win [16 March 2008]
Full of Beans [19 March 2008]

Two of the entries are on IT A Useful Bit o' PHP Code, Set Right [16 June 2008]
Installing Firefox 3.0 under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x [17 June 2008]
and that second IT entry now has very little marginal value except to someone making odd software choices.

The remaining two entries are also the most recent. A Big Ol' Entry on Patents and Copyrights [20 June 2008]
Thoughts on Boolean Laws of Thought [13 February 2010]
I very much regret that the entry on intellectual property has apparently been hidden from most visitors for more almost eight years!

Looked and Felt

Thursday, 26 May 2016

Some days ago, people who consume this 'blog by an ordinary visit with a graphics-enabled browser were confronted with different graphics within the header. The prior and present graphics look like this [image of archaic header lettering, white] but, for a while, the graphics looked like this [image of art-deco header lettering, metallic with grey borders] and then like this [image of art-deco header lettering, the larger being metallic with grey borders and the smaller being white with grey borders]

I had been in the mood to try a change. I constructed some new letters of a general form that I like, which used to be popular for the cover titles of pulps and of comic books. I decided to give them a metallic look (which was done by layering gradient fills of blue-grey).

But my big problem with the results was readability, especially of the subtitle. Changing the subtitle fill from a metallic texture to a solid white helped somewhat, but readability still wasn't what I wanted. The problem was even worse when displayed on my tablet, which resizes images to suit itself and can thereby further blur graphics.

Additionally, though I don't worry a great deal about the æsthetic opinions of others when it comes to my 'blog, both of the people who expressed a preference expressed it for the prior lettering. (One of them declared the newer graphics to be faux-cool.)

I may not be done with these experiments though. I've been thinking of converting the visual theme of this 'blog into a meta-theme, whose graphic components vary, perhaps as a function of time or perhaps randomly or pseudo-randomly.

I have played-around with elements for a distinct presentation to mobile devices, but I note that the screens of typical mobile devices are now fairly large and of high resolution. Meanwhile, the current presentation actually seems pretty good on my agèd cellular phone, which has a screen with a 3.1-inch diagonal, with 480×640 pixels.