How To Spot A Psychopath

Some users of the Optus ISP here in Australia are having problems accessing dansdata.com. It’s been happening for a while - here are people complaining about it in September, with the later reports only a few days ago.

I think all of the people with this problem have Optus cable Internet (as opposed to DSL or dial-up or satellite or carrier pigeon), though, fortunately, very far from all Optus cable users seem to have the problem. The nature of the problem is pleasingly clear: Dansdata.com has, from their point of view, been completely gone for weeks now, if not months.

Except it’s not, of course. I may only put up one new article per decade on dansdata.com, but I have not died or been abducted by Zeta Reticulans or decided to reject technology and return to the land.

In the olden days of the late 1990s, the first diagnostic step when you wanted to see if a site was really down or if the problem was to do with your own Internet connection was to feed the site URL to Babelfish or one of the numerous dodgy proxy sites, and see if they could see it.

Now we’ve got more elegant solutions, in isitup.org and, if you prefer more verbose URLs, the very-similar-looking downforeveryoneorjustme.com. (I hope those two sites are actually run by different people - they seem, at least, to be on different servers - so they won’t often ironically both go down at once.)

Anyway, I’m not certain about the exact nature of these problems, because a few people have e-mailed me about them, but when I ask them for details, they don’t reply. I don’t get a bounce message, either. This is exactly what you’d expect if some Optus router has decided that www.dansdata.com and mail.dansdata.com and everythingelse.dansdata.com are filthy spam servers all traffic from which is to be subjected to damnatio memoriae.

I’ve asked my Web hosts, SecureWebs, whether this is anything to do with them. It isn’t. Well, it might be, very indirectly, since the server dansdata.com is on has occasionally been blocked on one or another of the many spam-server lists because of real or imagined misdeeds by other sites that share the server or nearby SecureWebs IP addresses. The Optus block could have been caused by that sort of thing, and then accidentally never cancelled. But Blogsome, who host this blog, stack rather more blogs per IP address than SecureWebs do sites, and the worst that’s resulted from that to date has been a few days when bit.ly was warning people who clicked links from my Tweets that dansdata.blogsome.com might be bad.

I’ve also asked Optus, and they replied almost instantly to tell me that they could not replicate the problem, please send soil samples, et cetera.

So we need two things.

One: Some more detailed info about who using Optus can’t see my site. This can easily be acquired by means I am about to explain in tedious detail.

Two: Complaints to Optus from the people who can’t see my site, including the above info. Send the results to me as well - just posting them as a comment here will do very nicely - but you’re much more likely to get action from a giant ISP on a weird problem like this if lots of people report it than if one person aggregates info and forwards it like a petition.

I could keep fiddling around trying to contact the Optus-using complainants from my addresses at other ISPs - I reckon my Optus account ought to be able to reach ‘em. And I will. But I’ll just point them to this blog post, so now that I’ve finally gotten around to writing it, so we can all try to figure it out together.

(I freely admit that I’ve known some people were having this problem for weeks now, but I was hoping the problem would just go away when someone at Optus hit a reset button or finally got rid of zzzzmust_delete_this_by_sep_9_09.cfg.)

The Whirlpool forum thread I mentioned earlier points to an excellent article on the Whirlpool wiki, “Is this site down?“. The instructions there pretty much cover what you need to do, plus some other possibly-helpful stuff.

Basically, people who can’t see dansdata.com need to ping and traceroute dansdata.com, and see what they get. Optus themselves turn out to have a Web-accessible Looking Glass server and a traceroute one too. Those can see my site, so if you can’t, comparing and contrasting their results with your own could be helpful.

The easiest way to ping and traceroute from your computer is via the command line. In Windows, click Start, type “cmd”, and in the resultant window just type

ping dansdata.com

and then

tracert dansdata.com

If your local DNS doesn’t resolve dansdata.com to anything - “…could not find host dansdata.com”, “unable to resolve target system name dansdata.com” - you can try bypassing the DNS and just going straight to the server’s IP address, which is 64.85.21.19:

ping 64.85.21.19
tracert 64.85.21.19

(You can just type or paste 64.85.21.19 into your browser address bar to go to the site, by the way, if you actually can get to 64.85.21.19 from where you are. This advanced hacking technique has delivered precious, precious boobies to countless office workers and teenagers toiling under the yoke of sufficiently stupid site-blocking software.)

You can copy-and-paste the results from a Windows command-line window to somewhere else - like a comment and/or complaint message - by selecting the text, to do which you’ll probably need to use the cumbersome Edit -> Mark option in the command-line window’s lone menu.

If you want to be all fancy and bypass the Mark-ing, you can do this:

ping dansdata.com >>c:\dan_results.txt
tracert dansdata.com >>c:\dan_results.txt
ping 64.85.21.19 >>c:\dan_results.txt
tracert 64.85.21.19 >>c:\dan_results.txt

Presuming you have a C: drive, this will create a text file called dan_results.txt there and append the results of the commands to it, instead of just displaying them in the command-line window.

(If you used a single > instead of >>, each new output would overwrite the contents of the text file, instead of being tacked on at the end.)

Like all hip and happening ISPs, Optus only want you to contact them via some stupid Web form that redirects to a billion-character URL and that could be sending your message to screwyou@example.com for all you know. But with any luck a dozen or so people all suffering from the same disease will cause some action.

Now fly, my pretties! Fly!

Ever since I started this blog, people have been complaining, quite rightly, about the dumb comment box, which was tiny and had no preview feature.

Blog comment boxes are generally unsuitable for posting really big comments, because it’s painful to edit a lot of text in even a large preview box, and because if something times out or otherwise dies when you click “submit”, you can easily end up losing everything you wrote. But there’s a large grey area between “quick one-liner” comments, small enough that you could dash them off via SMS if you had to, and “comments you obviously have to write in a text editor”. Numerous people found themselves lost in this grey area, and many comments were hideously maimed.

I presumed it would be difficult for me to fix this, and back-burnered the problem for years on end. (I also hand-corrected comments that were screwed up because the author couldn’t preview them. It was the least I could do.)

As it turns out, though, it’s piss-easy to give a Blogsome blog a proper JavaScript live comment preview. All you have to do is paste some stuff into one of the template files.

So now, at long last, there’s a proper comment preview on How To Spot A Psychopath. Do tell me if it doesn’t work properly in whatever browser you’re running; I’ve only checked it in Firefox, Chrome and IE6 on Windows.

(Bonus points if you have to tell me via e-mail, because the preview box screws up your browser so badly that you now can’t post a comment at all! Oh, and because the preview is done in JavaScript, it of course won’t work if you have JavaScript disabled or blocked, or if you’re using some antediluvian/mobile-phone/C64 browser that doesn’t support JavaScript at all.)

Yes, I am suitably embarrassed about not having taken the five minutes to do this at some previous point in the last two and a half years.

(I still have the silly CAPTCHA thing, where if you’re not logged in you’re told to fill out the CAPCTHA to post your comment, and then you discover that you actually can’t comment at all unless you’re logged in, and further discover that the CAPTCHA disappears entirely once you are logged in. I consider this slight imperfection in my blog to be evidence of its hand-crafted nature, and may take another two and a half years to fix it.)

This post on the bitter and twisted Coding Horror alerted me to two significant problems with this blog.

I had a Useless Calendar Widget, and no way for readers to figure out who the heck I was.

Both fixed now.

I’m pretty light on the rest of the Web 2.0 bingo stuff, but perhaps your own beautiful and unique snowflake of a blog is not.

(And actually, I always figured that Phil Greenspun punctuated his writing with random pictures just to make sure that his readers never forget how many photos he’s taken of naked women.)

In homage to dansdata.com’s humungous altindex.html, this blog now has a full index page.

I know the formatting’s a bit wiggy at the moment, but at least it’s there. It ought to help Google straighten out their results, too; currently there are various odd feed pages and such that come higher in Google results than the actual straightforward post pages that people want to find.

I’ve made a page with a bunch of my old free-gift wallpaper images, and a couple of new ones. Enjoy!

Dan’s Data has a new reviewer.

Every now and then someone offers to write reviews for Dan’s Data. Some of them seem to be reasonably talented, some don’t, but I reject them all, for this site is mine, all mine, and has been for eight years, which is longer than Rupert Murdoch’s been alive, in Web years.

But, you see, I went to school with Mark Cocquio.

So his first review is here.

What can you say about Mark?

Man of action, gadget enthusiast, seasoned IT writer, Touched by Lord Vader. And, as you may have noticed, he’s also a comic strip character, which is more than I’ve ever achieved.

(Plus, his comic strip character looks quite like him. Cough.)

Mark’s own site is here. His trip around Australia is particularly good.

It is decided. At least for the time being.

This blog is, as of now, “How To Spot A Psychopath”, as suggested by user Stark, who signed up (Userid 2! 1337!) almost immediately after I asked for suggestions. For which promptness he was punished by having his comment eaten, thanks to my developmentally-delayed fiddling with the spam blocker.

The title, of course, comes from my Dan’s Data page of the same name, which is celebrating its seventh birthday around now.

(How To Destroy Your Computer could have been in the running, too.)

Those in search of further evidence of my unbalanced nature may care to read what I have to say about deadly poisons, killing yourself with electricity, and bombs, of both the sparkler and atomic variety.

Oh, and kids: Don’t pay attention in school.

At last I have taken the mighty leap into the late ’90s, and added my own tiny rectangle to the blogofractal.

If you add the man who came up with the term "weblog" to the man who shortened the word to "blog" and divide by two, then you get something that looks quite like me.

So, clearly, my own idle words of timeless wisdom, and of course the insightful commentary of my faithful readers, will similarly revolutionise the weblog, uh, paradigm.

I’ll still be doing Dan’s Data, of course; the reviews and endless bloomin’ letters columns will continue. This blog’s for… everything else.

First order of business: This blog needs a name (and a tagline).

I’ve never been very good at names. I came up with "Dan’s Data", in 1998, because Blue’s News seemed to have been doing quite well. That’s about as far as my own naming talent goes.

So I invite you all, friends, strangers and spambots, to make your name (and/or tagline) suggestions in the comments.

[UPDATE: My brillant Spaminator config just terminated the first few comments, probably because they contained the letter "i" or something. I’ve set it back to defaults. E-mail me if your valid comments keep being flagged as spam, especially if you have a deep and intimate understanding of Wordpress and can put me on the fast track to Getting It Right. I hate overactive comment spam blockers (hello, Joe!), and I’m determined to make sure that jive don’t happen here. Well, not often, anyway.]