Year: 2007

Debian 4 and PPP

Yes­ter­day the latest release (4.0) of Debi­an came out. I decided to be big and brave and upgrade imme­di­ately; I’ve nev­er had any prob­lems with upgrad­ing Debi­an before and did­n’t expect to now. It took forever to down­load, ages to install (with me keep­ing all the old con­fig files as I always do). And then, at the end, our inter­net con­nec­tion was dead. Our inter­net con­nec­tion is via PPP, which was tricky to set up, so it seemed best to tackle the prob­lem in the morn­ing rather than risk mak­ing things worse.

This morn­ing I found that the ppp script in the /etc/init.d dir­ect­ory was­n’t there, but a #ppp# script was, with the right con­tent. So I renamed the file back to ppp, checked the backups to put the right sym­links into the vari­ous /etc/rx.d dir­ect­or­ies, and rebooted. Voila! An inter­net con­nec­tion. Now I just have to fig­ure out why apache2 isn’t run­ning. [Update: because it was upgraded to ver­sion 2.2 and the authen­tic­a­tion con­fig file syn­tax was changed, that’s why.]

I have no idea wheth­er the PPP prob­lem came from the dis­tri­bu­tion, or some­thing odd in my con­fig­ur­a­tion (although I’ve done full dist-upgrades before with no prob­lems). I did a hunt on the Debi­an wiki and found that Debi­an has added more PPPoE sup­port recently, so maybe there was a clash in there some­how. I’m glad I was para­noid enough to make backups of the /etc dir­ect­ory to com­pare with. At some stage I guess I should fig­ure out wheth­er to replace the cur­rent con­fig­ur­a­tion with the new Debi­an sys­tem, although I don’t like muck­ing about too much with things that actu­ally work, espe­cially when it comes to some­thing as vital as being able to con­nect to the Net. 

Bad Behavior

I’ve star­ted using the Bad Behavior/Bad Beha­viour plu­gin for Word­Press, which is meant to cut down on the num­ber of spam­bots that attempt to access my site. In the­ory it should­n’t block any real vis­it­ors, although this has been known to hap­pen, so if you notice any prob­lems (e.g., can­’t get to my blog from a feed, or from a link or search), please let me know. The plu­gin has been installed a week and nobody’s repor­ted any prob­lems so far. It works nicely with Spam Karma, the spam block­er I use.

I can recom­mend this plu­gin based on my exper­i­ence so far; I’ve noticed the amount of spam that I get is much less, which means that I will be able to check the Spam Karma logs for any real com­ments that were inad­vert­ently caught. If you’re plagued by spam bots on your blog and you have some con­trol over the envir­on­ment, it might be worth try­ing out.

Twins and Genetics

Mod­ern genet­ics some­times has a bit of a “believe it or not” feel­ing to it, things are repor­ted that sound like they come out of Greek myth­o­logy. One of the recent news items on the BBC had that feel­ing for me, where they write about semi-identic­al twins. These babies, who come from one egg fer­til­ized by two sperm, have the same mater­nal genet­ic mater­i­al and each has some of the paternal genet­ic mater­i­al from each sperm. So they’re both chi­mer­as, and one is also a herm­aph­rod­ite. Search­ing through the web for inform­a­tion about soci­ety’s treat­ment of herm­aph­rod­ites through the ages is a good way of spend­ing a lot of time read­ing inter­est­ing art­icles; vari­ous cul­tures and soci­et­ies have differed greatly in how they treated these people. But I digress. 

In myth­o­logy chi­mer­as are those beasts that are partly one anim­al or mon­ster, and partly anoth­er. In the mod­ern med­ic­al usage of the term, a chi­mera has two sets of genet­ic mater­i­al, so a DNA test taken from one part of the body will give a dif­fer­ent res­ult to a DNA test taken from some oth­er part of the body. Some people with eyes of dif­fer­ent col­ours are chi­mer­as, for example, the dif­fer­ent col­ours com­ing from the dif­fer­ing genet­ic material.

Anoth­er genet­ic­ally inter­est­ing con­di­tion that involves twins is the van­ish­ing twin syn­drome, where one twin absorbs all the genet­ic mater­i­al of the oth­er, some­times lead­ing to a chi­mera. The per­son, if born before early ultra­sounds were com­mon, prob­ably won’t even know that he or she star­ted off as one of twins. There was a well-known case of a moth­er who could only accept a kid­ney trans­plant from one of her three sons because the oth­er two had genet­ic mater­i­al from the van­ished twin rather than the moth­er who gave birth to them (see the above link or this one for more details).

These things give rise to some inter­est­ing issues, such as what about DNA test­ing? If one per­son can have the DNA of two people, with one set of DNA in some tis­sues, and the oth­er set in oth­er tis­sues, DNA test­ing becomes prob­lem­at­ic. Cur­rently there’s no way of know­ing the real pro­por­tion of van­ished twins, since there is only sel­dom a reas­on to test any giv­en per­son thor­oughly enough to find out (one example being need­ing to prove par­ent­age of chil­dren, as in the rel­at­ively recent Lydia Fairchild case). Chi­mer­as can have two blood types as well, mak­ing them ideal blood recip­i­ents, but less than ideal blood donors. That’s anoth­er way people may find out, I guess, when they get their blood type tested, but again it’s hard to know what pro­por­tion of chi­mer­as have two blood types.

I hope the par­ents of those babies (now tod­dlers) suc­ceed in keep­ing their names and oth­er inform­a­tion private. The interest in their unusu­al genet­ic make-up could badly affect their lives if the par­ents aren’t strong enough to with­stand pres­sure from the press, or sci­ent­ists, or the curi­ous pub­lic. I also hope they’re treated with com­pas­sion and empathy as they grow older, rather than intrus­ive nosiness.

HotMetaL

When I first came to Canada I worked at SoftQuad. SoftQuad was one of the first SGML com­pan­ies, well known (in some circles, any­way) for its Pres­id­ent, Yuri Rub­in­sky. And well known in many oth­er circles for its HTML edit­or, HoT­Met­aL. The Sur­rey office did most of the devel­op­ment work on HoT­Met­aL and it was my main focus for quite some time. So it was with a cer­tain amount of nos­tal­gia that I saw HoT­Met­aL lis­ted on eWeek’s Jim Rapoza Picks the Top Web Tech­no­lo­gies of All Time — gone but not for­got­ten, as they say. Thanks to Kim for send­ing me the link.

Flu Survival Kit

The Moose Fever that befell what seems to be half the North­ern­Voice attendees (although to be fair, lots of oth­er people I know in Van­couver are down with the flu as well, it seems par­tic­u­larly vir­u­lent this year) is slowly loosen­ing its grip. It’s more than a little dis­con­cert­ing when you go through the list of symp­toms in the BC Health Guide and real­ize you have all of them, plus a few more (what’s with the tin­nit­us?). So now, the res­ol­u­tions for next time, aka the flu sur­viv­al kit:

  • get the flu shot; even if it does­n’t always work, it prob­ably does often enough to be worthwhile
  • make sure the medi­cine cup­board always has the basics: ibupro­fen, phlegm loosen­er (pure Guaifen­es­in works best for me), decon­gest­ant (pseudoep­hedrine for when the cough no longer brings up phlegm but the ears are still plugged and I have a sinus head­ache), cough sup­press­ant, acetaminophen/paracetamol (in case the fever responds bet­ter to that than with ibuprofen)
  • herb­al teas help a lot: ginger and lem­on, cam­o­mile, mint
  • get lots of tissues
  • keep a few days worth of easy-to-pre­pare food around. Cook­ing from scratch is nice, but not when you can­’t stand up for very long.

Now all I have to do is remem­ber to read this list before the next flu sea­son starts!