July 31, 2023 Reading time: 6 minutes

Where I am with all this

I am not a professional. I have worked on web pages since the late 1990s, but I am neither a professional web designer nor a computer scientist. While I have dabbled in Python and NodeJS, I still do everything of my own in PHP and static HTML. All of my pages are not mission critical. They are largely things I just picked up and either carried on from some previous person or stuff that I want to put up on the web.  As a result, my priorities for both hosting and registration have been price and ease-of-use. That said, I generally haven't wanted to either host with or register domains with companies that are total jerks.

Back in the day, I would register with Network Solutions...well, because that was the only registrar around. When GoDaddy and the others came around as new registrars became a thing, I moved there. I used GoDaddy for registration for a number of years. Then, as smaller, even more inexpensive registrars came around, I continued to move to one after another every few years as long as I didn't see really bad behavior on the part of the registrar or find any horrible reviews online.

Several years ago, I moved to Google Domains because their pricing was good and generally the service was OK.  However, I started having second thoughts being once again with one of the "Big Boys" and also Google's behavior in general. Long ago they had abandoned the 1999ish "Don't be Evil" motto, and they had not only obviously abandoned that ethos but were also increasingly admitting it and no longer using the motto. Two years ago, in my effort to move away from Google Domains, I started searching for registrars that had a good reputation, realizing that it seems no one out there is an angel. At that time, I settled on Gandi, a registrar and host I had heard about but never used. Several people online were pleased with the fact that they were based in the EU, had good pricing, and had good customer service.

Gandi is sold

In February of 2023, Gandi was sold to a new private equity firm. Apparently it had been bought and sold several times throughout the years, but remained largely unchanged. At that time, I took a wait-and-see attitude. In March, Gandi announced that they were no longer including email hosting with their domains but were going to begin charging an extra fee. I don't use Gandi for email, so I thought I would just hold tight. In June, Gandi posted about the email price increase.  At that time, they also sent out an email to customers that included new pricing for domain registrations, and it looked like pricing was going up considerably—depending on the TLD, it was going to go up 50-100%. At this point, it looked like it was worth moving.

At that time, I started asking around Mastodon to see if anyone had any suggestions.  While I didn't see anyone respond to me directly, I did see others using the #Gandi and #registrar hashtags to express their dismay and to announce what registrar they were picking. I heard about Porkbun at that time, and all the chatter seemed to be positive on both pricing and service.

Making the move

When I received my notification from Gandi that one of my domains was expiring in 60 days, I planned to move.  I went to Porkbun.com and I at first typed my domain name in the search spot, it told me that it was already registered (duh), and it did not say "Do you own this? Would you like to transfer to us?"  So then, I clicked on the link at the top for Transfer.  I saw on that form that it needed what they refer to as an "Auth Code" on the the transfer page. Going over and signing into Gandi's domain administration page, I selected the domain I wanted to transfer. From there, there is a tab on the upper right labeled "Transfer out." Clicking on that tab, the page says "Transfer lock" and "Transfer lock is a protection mechanism. When the transfer lock is enabled, the domain can't be transferred."  As soon as I slid the Transfer lock control over, Gandi issues a code that is good for two months.  I cut and pasted this code from Gandi to Porkbun's transfer form.

After submitting the form, Porkbun prompted me to register for an account, providing the usual identifying information and payment information.  Once I did that, and was charged for the transfer, I received an alert email from Gandi notifying me of the move. I didn't have to respond to that email, and if I didn't respond, the transfer would have happened in five days.  There was a link that I didn't notice right at first that would speed this process up.  So if you submit the correct code to the new registrar and do not confirm with Gandi, your registration will still go though, just five days later.

Back on the Porkbun site, I was now in the administrative page of their site. It complained that I didn't have any 2FA set up.  I followed the instructions there, under the accounts tab, only to see that they had a variety of options, including email, authenticator apps (including some FOSS options), and physical keys (such as Yubikey).  I used my authenticator app to set up 2FA using the QR code.

At this time, I looked at the status of the transfer in the list of domains at Porkbun, and I saw that the transfer had been requested and that it may be accelerated by following any instructions from the original registrar.  They even included a link to GoDaddy's instructions on transfering a domain out. This got me to look back at the email from Gandi and notice that I could approve it immediately.  

I left everything for a few minutes, then came back. I could then see the domain on Porkbun's site and it was gone from Gandi.  Success!  Overall, it went rather smoothly, and if I did this regularly I think I could be fast at it (I'm not doing bulk here, just a handful now and then, obviously). 

July 24, 2019 Reading time: 2 minutes

Henry Louis Mencken, American iconoclast and “Sage of Baltimore” wrote:

All of us, if we are of reflective habit, like and admire men whose fundamental beliefs differ radically from our own. But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or count himself lost. … All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Baltimore Sun, 26 July 1920

Image credit: By Theatre Magazine Company; Ben Pinchot, photographer - Theatre Magazine, August 1928 (page 37), Public Domain, Link

July 17, 2019 Reading time: 5 minutes

tldr; Access VBA script to edit Excel only works when Excel application object Visible property is set to True.

I have this VBA attached to an MS Access form.  The worksheet is previously created in Access VBA, and resides on a shared drive (although I have moved it to local drive to see if that affects it...it doesn't). Before sending the spreadsheet to a remote server, however, because the recipient expects there to be no header row, we first remove the first line of the sheet using the following script:

Public Sub DeleteFirstLine(strReportName As String)
'Deletes first line of an Excel file.  Relies on reference to Microsoft Excel 15 Object Library

    On Error GoTo DeleteFirstLineError
    Dim wb As Excel.Workbook
    Dim xlApp As Excel.Application

    Set xlApp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
    xlApp.Visible = False 'Hide it in the background
    If FileExists(strReportName) Then

        Set wb = xlApp.Workbooks.Open(strReportName, True, False) 
' above line currently causing error.
        wb.Sheets(1).Rows(1).Delete
        wb.Save
        wb.Close
        xlApp.Quit

    Else
        MsgBox ("File not found when looking for " & strReportName)
    End If

    GoTo DeleteFirstLineExit
    DeleteFirstLineError:
    xlApp.Quit
    MsgBox ("Error deleting first line of Excel file. Permissions issue?" & vbCrLf & "Error: " & Err.Number & " - " & Err.Description)

    DeleteFirstLineExit:
End Sub

Ideally this creates an Excel application object, sets its visibility to false, and opens the worksheet. The first row is then deleted, the worksheet is saved, and the worksheet is closed.  Then the app is quit.

This was working until this week, when suddenly, when it get to the .Open() line it fails either by saying

Error: -2147417851
"Automation error
The server threw an exception."

or

Error: -2137417851
Method 'Open' of object 'Workbooks' failed.

Neither one of these is particularly helpful. In the past, I've run into similar issues when the spreadsheet is corrupted, as in the export in the previous step isn't completed or there is something permissions-based, but neither appears to be happening at this time.  I am able to manually open the Excel spreadsheet and see it looks fine and no error is reported. 

Now, to top it off, as an experiment, I changed the line xlApp.Visible = False to xlApp.Visible = True, and suddenly it works. This makes no sense to me. 

As you know, always a dabbler...

April 18, 2019 Reading time: 7 minutes

I was involved a while back in a brief and inconclusible Internet "discussion" of socialism. This stemmed from my criticism of a news article on KERA-FM in which a highway developer claimed (and was not challenged by the reporter) that the new toll lanes were the ultimate in "democracy."  It seemed clear to me that the speaker did not really understand democracy. In fact, it seemed to me that toll roads have very little to do with a governmental system. If we wanted to use "democracy" as a metaphor for a market system, it seems to me that the toll system is more of a plutocracy.  Those who can afford better roads get them. This simply doesn't seem fair if we agree that a fully functioning transportation system is a right of all people—but obviously we don't agree on that. Regardless, "democracy" isn't the right word. Democracy means everyone gets to vote about something. Everyone doesn't get to vote about which road to take if you have a toll road. If you cannot afford it, you don't take the toll road. You sit in traffic on the freeway. It may be representative of a "Free market" perhaps, but the free market is not the equivalent to democracy, although some seem to conflate the two.  There are plenty of examples of democracies that have tightly controlled markets in many things.

Basically, we live in a world of mixed economies.  Unless you live in Milton Friedman's world, we make trade-offs between freedoms and protections. Hopefully, along the line we strike a balance. Where that balance is, of course, is up to negotiation and debate.

So, after making my comment that democracy was perhaps incorrectly used in this context, one person said that it was just a matter of time before the government messed it up by providing discounts for poor people and that socialism never built good roadways.  I beg to differ! This person obviously has bought into the boogeyman theory of socialism. They do not realize that in fact our highway system has traditionally been socialized since the early twentieth century and culminated in its greatest achievement in the form of the Eisenhower Interstate System. The person responded that socialism would mean giving the poor a discount. While one can conceive of any system of production having needs-based pricing, that is not an inherent feature of socialism.

This is the problem with discussing anything in our society with regard to government and the economy. We're still suffering from being piled under the weight of the Cold War: Socialism = BAD. Democracy=GOOD.  The problem with this is that it's a false dichotomy that has been reinforced through years of ideology.  Why not have democracy with a little socialism for things we care about?  Look, we did it with the fire department. 

The other challenge here, however, is that we have competing definitions of fairness. In America today, some of us celebrate a definition of fairness that revolves around equality. Equality, however, is not all there is to fairness.  It also involves equity or justice. In some ways, this comes down to a "give a man a fish, and he's fed for the day, teach a man to fish, and he's fed for a lifetime," being taken to an extreme of "don't give anyone fish, and teach a man to fish only if he can pay." So if Billy and Bob both have two fish, and George has none, don't you dare take ½ a fish from Billy and Bob to give to George because that wouldn't be fair to them. Built into this scenario is a belief that someone (George) has done something to deserve that lack of fish.  That's "fairness." Taking one away Billy and Bob in the name of humanity is "unfair." This is a little outrageous, but that's what it has come down to. That man should starve because taking fish from the others who have more than enough fish is unfair and "undemocratic," some would say.  Really?  What if we have a vote and every person has a vote, and the question is raised, "Should everyone who has more than one fish give half a fish to someone who has none?"  If Bob and George vote "yes," and Billy votes "no."  Is that not democratic?  I say that it is indeed. Is it socialist? Maybe, in a non-traditional sense. Is it redistributive? Certainly. Taking from others can be totally democratic. Is it fair or unfair?  I don't know. That's why there is a certain tragedy in the power of the majority at times, and why many societies rely upon the courts to protect the minority in the face of a majority that acts with cruelty against the minority.  After all, Jim Crow laws were legal.

At this point, I'm getting off the track a bit, but the bottom line is that the free market's "pay what the market will bear" is not an example of democracy in action. The laissez faire is not the equivalent of democracy. One is how we  organize our economy, and the other is how we organize our communal decisions and shared resources.  In a pure free market, there is no one deciding. In a pure democracy, we all decide. How can there be a crossover in such a case?  In the end, it doesn't matter, because we don't live in either. We make compromises about what we think is important as a community.

Photo by David Martin on Unsplash

April 8, 2019 Reading time: 3 minutes

A teacher at my daughter's school has a signature, motto, or tag at the bottom of her emails: 

Arranger, Ideation, Intellection, Learner, Responsibility

This appears to come from the Gallup (Clifton) StrengthsFinder, an inventory that is similar to all those other scientifically questionable categorizer that do more to allow us to label ourselves than do much of anything else.  In some ways, they give us an excuse to explain our behavior:  "I can see why I can't work well with you, I am a NFSP and a 9 while you're an INFJ and a 6."  Of course, the main reason for their existence seems to be to make money for those who administer and score the inventories.

But let's ignore that for now. This post is really about the different labels themselves. I will not complain too much about a couple of words in there that are somewhat problematic for me personally, but I will question what appears to me to be a lack of parallelism. That said, it would be tough to write. All are nouns, which is often the first hurdle, so we cleared that.  The first and fourth are identifiers that seem to identify the writer as an arranger and learner. Perhaps these are identities that we want our children to aspire to be. The second and third go well together, but do not seem to fit. They are qualities rather than identities. The last is also a quality. The problem is perhaps a deficiency of the English language.  We do not have words that work well to capture these concepts.  One stab might be:

Arranger, Ideator, Intellectual, Learner, Responsible Party

Ideator is not great, but it does seem to be in use for this exact sense: one who creates ideas. That last phrase is horrible, but there is apparently no good word for it, perhaps, except to rely on the poetic. During a brief Internet search, I've found several other people looking for a good single word for "the person who is responsible."  While we have words for people who are responsible in a negative way, we do not seem to have a good, single word.  Somewhat poetic words suggested on the web include catalyst and architect. I even came up with captain.

Arranger, Ideator, Intellectual, Learner, Architect

Bleh. This and catalyst capture the creative and operative nature of responsibility (i.e., people who do things are responsible doing what they do), but these words do not embody the concept of duty or onus, which is a key concept we are trying to latch onto when we use responsibility here.

So should we go the other way and approach things from qualities?

Arrangement, Ideas, Intelligence, Learning, Responsibility

That's just as bad, if not worse. Suggestions?  I wonder if anyone who is more of an "expert" on the Clifton StregthsFinder might have some sort of insight into why the words seem to be all over the place.

March 5, 2019 Reading time: 6 minutes

In which we go off the deep end with tree

Yesterday, maiki posted on Mastodon asking if tree was included in modern versions of Microsoft Windows. maiki wanted an easier way for some friends and family to show them the directory structure of their computer without doing screenshots. Frankly, I didn't know the answer to that as I haven't had the need to use it in quite some time.

My first thought was just to try it.  I use Windows 10 at home, and I just opened a cmd prompt, and sure enough, output started pouring onto the screen. I hit ctrl-c to stop it. I started wondering, though:  Was that tree Windows tree or some other tree I might have installed. Typing tree /? gave me no real indication of its source. A quick trip to a search engine led me to the Microsoft Docs page on tree.  The documentation clearly lined up with the command I was using in the cmd shell. I also wondered, however, what versions of Windows supported tree, since one person said that it had been removed from DOS at one point.  I was not really sure if that was the case, but usually in Microsoft online documentation, the version that it applies to is given at the top of the page. I did not see anything indicating the Windows version this applied to, though. I was a little concerned, also, that the page appeared to be geared towards "Server," and presumably this could apply only to certain server versions rather than all versions. A little clicking around led me to this page where it mentions the command line reference page applies to several Windows versions, including 8.1 and 10.

I reported to maiki my findings that it worked on my copy of Windows 10 and would work on 8.1.  I suggested the form tree c:\ /A >out.txt which should give the output in plain ASCII format and redirect the output to a file out.txt.

Can we accomplish this another way?

I started wondering what if these users have some other version of Windows?  Can they accomplish the same task?  If we're talking about an unsophisticated user, it may not be possible.  After all, you have to get them to install a utility or something else entirely. That may be more complicated than the average user can achieve.  For example, Cygwin comes with tree as a package. Also, there is a tree for Windows with GNUWin32. Both of these require a separate installation and possible dependencies. That may not be too difficult for the average user.

A little search engine work led me to believe that there are several "free" utilities out there that may be able to do this, but none were particularly comforting to me.  While "free," as in beer, they were not "free" as in speech.  I wasn't willing to install them, particularly since tree was clearly working in Windows 10 for me.

A user here suggested you can use dir in Windows to get the directory tree, and even apply some sorting.  The problem with Windows native tree is that it simply dumps the results to the screen (or file) as it finds them.  While it may appear to be sorted, it really isn't.  So if you want sorted output, dir might be the answer.  Microsoft documentation for dir is found here.

A small diversion to WSL

Windows 10 now has what is called Windows Subsystem for Linux which is a bash shell with Ubuntu. If you install that, you could then use an Ubuntu shell to run tree. It does not come installed by default.  Install it with the following:

sudo apt install tree

Once you do that, you can run tree as you would in Linux. To address the Windows file system run it on /mnt/c where c: is the Windows drive you want the tree of.

tree /mnt/c/ -d >output.txt

Use the -d flag to only show directories.

Surprise! tree works on Windows 7

I came into the office today and logged into one of our Windows 7 computers, and found out that tree runs in Windows 7 as well, even though it isn't mentioned on the docs page. I ran it with tree c:\ >out.txt and found that I needed to be in a directory where I could write the output file.  I ran it again. This time, it took a long time.  Later I timed it and it took over three minutes to write a file over 5mb in size! You don't expect there to be that many directories, but indeed there were.

[Edited to add the -d flag for the WSL version. Re-posted to new installation of Bludit on 2019-03-05]