Rat Creature's Journal

Does anyone else have trouble with the Cascade Library site? I wanted to check something for fanlore and it didn't load right.

Right now for me sometimes pages load with the proper content, but sometimes some kind of weird spam site loads, with annoying links and I assume malicious Javascript. (I have NoScript on, and linux tends to have vulnerabilities different from Windows which is most commonly targeted by website hacks, so I don't know what it does to other computers.) Has skeeter63.org been hacked? I have the same problem with all the site's there, that sometimes they load okay and sometimes this crap loads. It might not be a good idea to go there right now if you don't have NoScript and adequate precautions enabled, but I'm wondering what is up with the domain.

At first I thought it was just Gmail that had trouble loading for me, but their search engine is timing out on me as well. And I seem not alone. I actually found twitter useful for just about the first time and searched there for Gmail and Google complaints happening right now, and it seems I'm not alone with this problem.

I'm so glad I finished, scanned and submitted my yuletart picture last night, even if I stayed up until 4 a.m., because today my desktop (the computer of the mysterious, intermittent hardware problems that don't materialize in the repair place) crapped out on me again. Incidentally that is also the computer with which my scanner works. Anyway, while my desktop fails to work once again *curses the stupid piece of crap*, at least I was lucky enough that I completed my assignment before.

What the frell did photobucket do to their image upload? It's been a few months since I last uploaded a photo to my account, but I never had a problem, though their flash(?)-thingy for bulk uploading never worked for me. But now I click on the upload button, and a small window with the title bar "select files" pops up, but I don't actually see anything in the window, just some wildly flickering movement, and then my browser crashes.

What is wrong with these people? Why did they have to break their site?

Are there other ways to upload to photobucket, like FF extensions or something, that don't use the website? Or do I just have to stop using their site entirely?

ETA: After looking at their help I found a way to use the old uploader, which I would have clicked had the link to it been visible in the box at my screen resolution and font size, but it was not, but cut off by the box frame and thus hidden. FAIL, photobucket, FAIL.

That Scott McCloud drew the promotional comic for the upcoming Google Chrome Browser made me actually curious enough to read forty comic pages explaining why Google's browser is going to be better than the others. Unfortunately the comic doesn't say anywhere whether there'll be a Linux version any time soon.

The browser does sound neat (as it well should in its own PR material), and if it would really make bloated javascript applications run faster as they promise, I'd try it if only to see whether maybe there'll finally be a browser that might make the delicious tag bundle interface usable for me.

After I looked around some in the news covering the Google browser, I found that apparently Mac and Linux versions are planned, but I didn't see anything specific. :( However if you use Windows you will be able to download a beta version soon.

When I had trouble accessing Gmail yesterday afternoon I soon chalked that up to the more widespread problems accessing any Google service around here for a couple of hours, at least if you have the German T-Com as your ISP.

Okay whatever, my ISP broke their internet, it apparently happens even if they still can't explain what exactly caused the glitch. Though it is very annoying to have all Google services (not just the search engine and Gmail, but everything including Blogspot, YouTube and so on) return with DNS errors for you -- the internet looks very broken all of a sudden. Not to mention that this came on top of LJ's problems yesterday.

But a few hours later in the evening Google's search engine would load again for me, same for most of their other stuff, and I can get even to my mail through POP, which is something at least, but the Gmail webinterface still stubbornly refuses to load for me, just giving a DNS error.

This is very annoying. I also find it baffling -- how can everything be up again with the rest of the Google website, and my email be there too somewhere, seeing how I can get it through POP, but the two sides won't come together as webmail?

So my desktop computer, which is fairly new but not under its six month warranty anymore, has a problem. Sometimes it won't boot when I turn it on. It doesn't even show the BIOS screen nor the graphics card notice. The on/off switch diode lights up, and the case fan works, however I don't see the hard disk diode blinking.

So when it happened the first time out of the blue (there weren't any signs of incipient failure the last time I had turned it on) I thought the worst, tried the turning it off and on again once to no effect, and then pulled out my computer, intending to check all cables, then open it, see whether the processor fan starts, and whether maybe just some connection is loose or too much dust had accumulated or anything. So I pull it out, wriggle all the outside cables, try once again, and miraculously it starts before I even open it. And the computer worked fine, no errors, no freezing, or anything.

So I thought that maybe it was nothing after all, clearly going with my hopes for a best case scenario, because I really don't want to spend money repairing or replacing it fully or in parts. Also seeing how it is still fairly new I didn't anticipate any such extra computer costs, I'm still recovering from buying it this spring, no matter that it was a relatively cheap one as far as computers go, but it was still a big expense for me. (I did however backup the data I hadn't already.)

But then today it fails to start again. So again I try a couple of times, futilely hoping that it might resolve itself on its own like before, then pull it out, open it, and all cable connections I can see seem fine, so I try starting it while open, and again it suddenly works, and now seems to run okay. It did give me BIOS notice that I had pressed the cold reset button too often in sequence, so clearly something registered even as the computer didn't seem to do anything.

Does anyone have any idea what produces behavior like this?

I've a question about the gmail interface that is really starting to bug me: In the standard web interface you get a navigation/menu bar at top of the page leading to other google services. However for me its look isn't consitent. Sometimes it looks like in this screenshot, with the link to the google reader hidden in the "more" menu, which is somewhat inconvenient because besides the mail itself the reader is one of the services I actually use, unlike the calendar for example.

I still could live with that if it was just the standard organization, however sometimes it tantalizes me with a more useful arrangement, and the menu looks like in this screenshot, with the link plainly in sight, not hidden beneath the "more". I have no idea when or for what reasons gmail chooses to display one or the other. I have tried to reproduce the different menus by logging into gmail first, or logging into the reader first, by having both open at the same time, but it seems random. And nowhere in the settings have I found anything to choose how the menu is displayed.

Why does gmail do this, and how do I get it to display the menu like in the second screenshot permanently?