On with the daily web server overload today. Things were relatively quiet, but at one point
the load average on sea.lemis.com hit 100, while the others weren't affected:
And DDoS? The Vultrs obligingly noted that no DDoS had been
detected. So the service served no purpose here. Still, I have followed up what things I
can. Goodbye, sea.
What is this “Buyer Protection fee” that eBay added to yesterday's auction? There was a link under the text, so clicked on it. A popup
appeared—for one second, long enough to establish that the text was relevant, but not
nearly long enough to be able to understand it.
Off to “help” (what a euphemism), which led me to this
explanation, containing:
The Buyer Protection fee is applied to all items listed on eBay.com.au by sellers
registered in Australia who don't have a Pro plan (excluding Vehicles and Classified
Ads). It's not an optional fee, as we want everyone to be able to benefit from these
protections.
Wasn't buyer protection at no cost something with which they used to advertise? And now
they want money for it, which you don't find out until the item is sold. And do they
mention it on the item listing? Of course not. That would scare off bidders. eBay, you
disgust me.
While looking for perceived missing photos in the 1990s, found this collection of photos. They're
terrible:
They're apparently from a film that was very old before it was developed, and latent
image fade has taken its toll, particularly noticeable in the magenta image of the sprocket
holes at the bottom of this image:
Looking at the images themselves, they must have been taken from about 1988 to 1990. I
think they're all on the same film, which would explain some of the image quality.
Some of the images are badly exposed, like this one:
My guess is that the exposure meter was misled by the sky. I wondered for a while about
the dark strip in the middle of the image, but I think that it what I was trying to
photograph, maybe a plume of smoke. There are two other images with similar marks.
For reasons that I don't understand, a number of images are tilted, like this one:
Looking at modification timestamps, it seems that I have had multiple attempts at processing
these images.
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog home 0 5 Mar 2009 makejpeg
-rw-rw-rw- 1 grog lemis 903 12 Aug 2013 Makejpeg
-rw-rw-rw- 1 grog lemis 903 10 Feb 2025 Makejpeg
-rw-rw-rw- 1 grog lemis 903 6 Jun 2025 Makejpeg
And in at least one case, my recovery attempts proved negative. Here an old image (of
Yana, probably round 5 years old). Before on the left, after
on the right:
We're looking after Esperanza, one of Chris Yeardley's mares, and yesterday Yvonne found her lame. It wasn't any better this evening, so Chris came
by to take a look, and suspected that she had been kicked. A bit of bute and all should improve.
I went along, for the first time in months in that area. The ground was drier than I
expected, but the dam is full:
Read on Quora today: Der Triumph der Sehschlitze: Wie eine Generation das Sehen verlernt, by Alexander Steipe. It's in
German, but basically repeats some of my objections, so it must be right. The title
translates as ”The Triumph of viewing slits: How a generation is forgetting how to see”.
People buy enormous TVs (he mentions an average of 100", which is overstating the
case), but then look at things on mobile phones, requiring them to twist their necks by 90°
to do so.
Oct 9 14:29:51 eureka postfix/qmgr[98289]: 8492D2635AD: removed
May 5 23:00:00 eureka newsyslog[89480]: logfile turned over due to size>1000K
Dec 16 16:00:00 eureka newsyslog[66937]: logfile turned over due to size>1000K
The first entry is normal enough. But where did the others come from? They appeared round
the same time, and there was no other entry in between.
House photos today, as every Saturday.
The weather could have been better: bright sunshine invariably affects the images, requiring
multiple exposures of the same view, one with the sun obscured, and masking:
But I've been doing this for decades (well, for over 15 years; this is the 629th day for
Stones Road), and I've worked out a flow that is relatively painless. Sometimes, though,
things go wrong, surprisingly often with the view from the front of the house. Today I got:
What went wrong there? Yes, I can adjust the exposure, though it was fine on the original
images, but try as I might, I couldn't get Hugin to align the images correctly. What is it about this image that so
frequently gives trouble.
From there on, things only got worse. Somehow the old images kept getting in the way, and
after an hour trying to sort things out, put it off until tomorrow.
Saw an email thread about port conflicts today. Nothing unusual, except for the names:
It seems that Postfix wants lmdb v1.n, while Samba wants lmdb v0.9.
Huh? I thought that Samba used tdb, the Tridge database. lmdb
sounds like another acquaintance, Larry McVoy. But no, that proves to be an incorrect
guess. Larry has nothing to do with lmdb. And the current expansion of tdb
is “trivial database”, though I'm sure I heard it as “Tridge database”.
So the whole thing boils down to the issues with dynamic libraries. If they had been linked
into the binaries, this wouldn't have happened. Yes, they could get larger, but we have
space. They would save a lot of pain with this kind of conflict, and they would also run
marginally faster.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do
send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate
whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise
I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
