After what seemed like an interminable series of obstacles and delays, the Race To Space project finally not only has an Affiliate Program but an Affiliate Dashboard as well. Anyone who buys a pre-publication copy of the book is automatically enrolled in the Affiliate Program, entitled and encouraged to earn commissions by helping to spread the word about the project.

In case you haven’t heard, Race To Space is an infotainment book combining predictive fiction with a solid development plan to entertain and educate the reader in an effective way about the only grid-level long-term solution (solar power satellites in geostationary orbit) for the looming end-of-oil crisis.

The fictional story is built around competition for The Nebula Prize, a major prize being offered for achievement of a significant space settlement objective. The development plan will be a “take it to the bank” business plan explaining how that prize will be won.

Please visit https://RaceToSpaceProject.com to learn more about the effort, and to find links to many of the other projects being developed in parallel to achieve these ambitious goals.

          

I have finally gotten the Race To Space Affiliate Dashboard to where I don’t feel like I have to do more coding before I can proceed: It has transitioned from being a schedule delay into a valuable marketing asset: The logged-out Dashboard is now an exhibition of the benefits of becoming a Race To Space affiliate rather than a promise of what you might get if you join the team; the logged-in page includes all of the materials promised in the marketing brochure.

This event is a rather liberating experience, and I really wish I had someone special to share the achievement with…

          

What, exactly, has the “divine right of kings” been throughout history? From my observation, it consists of two things:

1. the “right” to collect tribute (taxes) from their subjects;
2. the “right” to impose arbitrary rules on their subjects,

In writing the Constitution of the United States of America, its framers intended to put an end to the “divine right of kings” by removing the “king” from the society they intended to establish. However, instead of removing the “divine right of kings” they merely transferred it to the incorporeal entity of the “government” they were establishing.

Because the “government” has “inherited” the “divine right of kings” including the “right” to impose taxes on its subjects, it seemed “obviously necessary” to prohibit governments from entering commercial business enterprises because they could use taxes to underwrite unfair competition with private enterprise and drive any other businesses out of the market. However, if the government were prohibited from collecting taxes and required to operate within a balanced budget as any other business must do to survive, today’s financial crisis would not exist.

We now also have things such as the “war on drugs” resulting from those in power deciding they must interfere with the right of an individual to use (or abuse) their own body in any manner they see fit as long as it doesn’t intrude on the rights of others – and because the drug trade is “too hard” to tax successfully.

I have been thinking about these subjects for a long time, and will have more to speak on them in the future …

          

One way or another my blog has been broken to some degree for a couple of months. It’s not the blog’s fault – the ground was changed underneath its feet, and the building it lives in was reconstructed, altering all of the door and window locations. (Metaphorically speaking, of course…)

More than half of my sites had been running on a CentOS 5 VPS for almost 20 years. (ChatGPT described the system as “museum grade obsolete” – which was “a little” too close to true.) In the middle of April I undertook moving everything from that server to a much newer environment. When I started, I had the “extremely” optimistic expectation it would take a day or two to make the swap. Reality, however, had other plans. After a grueling 3 weeks of working days, nights, weekends and most of everything between, I’d finally gotten all of the functionality moved and the migration complete late in the afternoon of May 6. I notified the the hosting service they could shut down the old VPS, which I strongly suspect was the one remaining instance of CentOS 5 they had been needing to keep running.

There were some hiccups in moving this site and my blog, but it was working happily on the new server – accessible using HTTP only: I hadn’t set up SSL certs and all in moving any of the sites from the old VPS to the new one, everything was carried over as-is.

Being able to change my sites from HTTP to HTTPS was one of the big reasons for moving to a newer operating system, and changing all of my sites to HTTPS was done in just a few days. It almost seemed too easy …

Meanwhile, the laptop I’ve been doing most of my work on, where I’ve got just about everything installed and properly configured, started being more and more unreliable. The BSOD rate started climbing from where it had been 2-5 weeks between crashes – and when I’d had three bluescreens in two days, I had to stop to deal with the problem. I replaced the graphics drivers. That helped – or did it? I replaced the disk drivers. That seemed to make more of a difference – for a short time. I’d at least been able to get a little work done in those two weeks – but then another BSOD stopped me again – and hours later, I ended up disabling everything that might launch DeFrag.exe. winDoze started behaving properly until I used NoScript to disable Amazon’s JavaScript (20% CPU) in one Firefox tab, then went to refresh another Amazon tab (so it would know JS had been stopped.) As the screen went dark before turning the all-too-familiar shade of blue, I thought to myself “I shouldn’t have just done that right then …” At least I knew where that problem came from.

As if I didn’t have enough to keep me busy, I needed to install PHP-FPM on the new server so I could simultaneously have the current version of PHP available for new software, and the “older” version needed by a large part of the massive PHP code base I’ve built up over the past few decades. Getting the extension working “properly” had been a required part of the migration that I had done on May 6, so I should be all set, right? Wait, what does “Primary script unknown” mean in the error log? What primary script? … and when there’s an error saying “Undefined variable: ... in ... on line 74” how did that happen – who called that script, what parameters were passed in the original request? I ended up spending a week and a half exploring the PHP-FPM source code and building a new version of the package on my server that has reasonable error reporting that is now a diagnostic tool rather than noise – but another big chunk of time had gone by.

I was wrapping up something else when I happened to pass by my blog here and discovered it had pretty much become completely broken. A few other fairly serious problems had also come up on the rest of the site. I’ve become quite anxious to get back to being focused on the higher priority work I’ve got “on the stove,” but investing “a little” time to get my “Internet Home” into order seemed like a good idea. It’s now about 26 hours of wall clock time later, but I’ve now gotten to where I can say “wfredk.com and its blog are now presentable enough that I can leave further work until ‘later’” and I can close the book on this chapter.

The patient is being discharged from the hospital and can go home to return to normal life.

          

NEVER write some random piece of bare data to common (system-wide, site-wide, etc.) logs, e.g. in PHP using error_log(), even during “quick” debugging: ALWAYS include some kind of tag identifying the piece of data and why it is being logged.

If you get interrupted and forget you put that logging in, and don’t discover it in the logs until a week later when that task had long since gone out of your mind, you could end up spending easily half an hour chasing the source of the “problem” down.

          

Me:

I know that BOM in this context means “Byte Order Mark” but in my experience, it has also (perhaps more often) meant “Bill Of Materials” which is where part of my initial confusion came from when I first encountered UTF-8 BOM (in an extremely negative way – it cost me at least 8 hours trying to find a PHP bug that I had no clue about) – and if you ask me, it’s missing a B at the end: The encoding format should be named UTF-8 BOMB because it blows up anywhere but in tiny parts of the evil micro$hit universe.

ChatGPT:

laughing — yes, UTF-8 BOMB is a completely fair name for it.

That “invisible” 3-byte gremlin — EF BB BF — has ruined more otherwise-perfect PHP, Bash, and Python files than just about anything else that’s technically legal. I’ve seen it sneak in via Notepad, Notepad++, even some FTP clients doing “auto-convert.” The interpreter hits those bytes before <?php or #!/usr/bin/env bash, and suddenly nothing works, sometimes with no error at all until hours later.

So yes: in web and UNIX land, the only correct number of BOMs is zero.

It’s funny how the same acronym went from “Bill of Materials” (useful list of parts) to “Byte Order Mark” (useless source of pain).

Your instinct to avoid it everywhere outside the “tiny parts of the evil micro$hit universe” is absolutely right. UTF-8 without BOM is what every real operating system expects, and it’ll keep your toolchain predictable—no hidden payloads waiting to explode.

          

This past Friday (October 17), I undertook making chicken vindaloo and spinach saag.

After hours of work, all of it came out absolutely amazing.

I’ll have more details (and recipes) in a future post.

Tonight (Monday, October 20), I decided to go for something simpler, a single-pot “comfort food” meal – mac & cheese with tuna & peas – quick, simple and nourishing. Sometimes I eat it as it comes, tonight I added more extra sharp cheddar cheese and some hot sauce. Other times I’ve used BBQ sauce to give it a more interesting twist.

Again, I’ll have more details and hits in a future post…

          

After finishing the diverse leafy green salad with multiple mix-ins I’d fixed, I was busily programming and forgot that I’d left some homemade meat sauce simmering on the stove. When I got up from my desk to prepare the macaroni main dish I thought I’d heated and left cooling, I found the tomato sauce boiled almost dry, mostly blackened halfway through. Being one game for experimentation and not inclined to throwing away something I’d put a fair amount of work into, I added some water to the pan and stirred the resulting mixture – how bad could it be? Well, it was pretty bad, but not completely horrible: Surely there must be a way to recover this! From the suggestions that were offered, I decided to stir in some butter, honey and cumin powder. A couple of adjustments later I had an interesting kind of barbequed flavor with a hint of Indian cuisine that was actually pretty good: What had started out as likely to be a plain (somewhat boring) bowl of elbows and tomato sauce, and could easily have been discarded as a disaster, turned into a rather new and unique eating adventure.

Recipes are great, but knowing how to cook and not being afraid to try something new can definitely lead to some unexpected palate discoveries!

          

I realized a day or so ago that I haven’t posted anything on my own blog for over a year. It’s not because I don’t have anything to say, I’ve just been busy with a host of other things. I will be writing here more often because I need a centralized place to point to, so you can expect to see pointers in a lot of different directions appearing here in the near future.

Thanks for your patience 😉

If you haven’t looked at it yet, please be sure to check out the site for the Race To Space book I’m writing.

          

I no longer have an empty house to return to at the end of the night. I want to go home, but that’s going to take a girl being there. I’m looking …