crap

Amazing photos from Kentucky's horrendous ice storm

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Kentucky has been going through some tough times with a horrendous ice storm that has devastated the western side of the state. Someone posted a link to a blog of a KY inhabitant detailing the destruction with some breathtaking photos and a note that they don't expect to receive power for several more weeks. Ugh. The conversation with my wife included the following:

Wife: "This is a storm of a century, something that only happens once in a lifetime!"

Me: "How many of those have we had in the past few years?"

Working around Exchange Webmail / OWA constant logoffs

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I've always found that Exchange's webmail system, aka "Outlook Web Access", to be extremely buggy regarding remembering who you are. It sets sessions cookies with a pretty far-away timeout but regardless of whether I'm connected via a VPN or from the public internet it always delights in logging me out as quickly as it can. Well, I've worked out a work-around for these all too frequent occurrences. Here's what you do:

  • When you are provided with the login prompt, login.
  • Click the Back arrow in your browser until it asks if you would like to resubmit the form again.
  • Click Cancel.
  • Click Back again. This will take you back to the original edit window with the fresh empty (or if it was a reply, the original quote) edit page ready to go.
  • Click Forwards. It will say that it needs to resubmit a form in order to proceed.
  • Click OK / Accept / Aye Cap'n, whatever is the appropriate response to the affirmative.
  • Your message has now been sent, just like when you originally clicked Send.

Hopefully this will help some others who are also loosing their hair over this stupidity.

rubygems 1.2.0 causing problems for anyone else? (SOLVED!)

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After updating to rubygems 1.2.0 I've noticed that my mongrels started returning the following colorful error on every XHR load, i.e. all AJAX requests fail but regular page loads are fine:

Mon Jun 23 23:39:15 -0400 2008: HTTP parse error, malformed request (127.0.0.1): #<Mongrel::HttpParserError: Invalid HTTP format, parsing fails.>

Given that rubygems was the last thing I updated, I figured I'd try reverting to the previous 1.1.1 release using the following steps:

  • uninstall all versions of the rubygems-update gem that were installed:
    sudo gem uninstall rubygems-update
  • install the v1.1.1 rubygems-update:
    sudo gem install --version '1.1.1' rubygems-update
  • manually run the updater to ensure that the stable v1.1.1 release was active:
    sudo update_rubygems

A few minutes of churning away and... still no biscuit! ARGH!

More updates when I get this working.

UPDATE: This is a weird one. I was poking around working on an official bug report to the error when I noticed that my ~/.gemrc had a duplicate source entry for github. I removed the duplicate, restarted the mongrels and... it worked! Go figure.

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