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he never got back
Wednesday, February 29 2012
A wet snow fell throughout the day, resulting in the largest accumulation of snow for this season. It was only about four inches at its peak, though over time it compressed down to two or three inches.
I spent some time today dealing yet again with the continual problem of how to stay in contact with a server enforcing an access policy dependent on a whitelist of IP addresses. Obviously, such a whitelist cannot work when one is assigned dynamic IP addresses, and I've found that Verizon DSL likes to change IP addresses every few hours. So again I found myself setting up a fixed-IP intermediary, in this case to serve as web proxy. Since the intermediary ran Linux, it made sense to use Squid as my proxy. I successfully installed Squid, but then I couldn't get the proxy service to work at port 3128. I tried a bunch of things that didn't work, but then I tried changing the port to 90 and suddenly it worked perfectly! The proxy server is a virtual private server at Godaddy.com, so I'm guessing they have some policy of filtering out port 3128 or a range that includes 3128. Or perhaps the Linux VPS itself filters out that port, but there's no easy way to tell (believe me, I tried techniques I looked up on Mr. Google, and they all told me that port 3128 was open).
Later today I found myself researching "polar shift" as it applies to crazy pseudoscientists. Some of them think a 12th planet occasionally comes close enough to Earth to cause its poles to shift, reminiscent of the Worlds in Collision nonsense, representing weeks of Carl Sagan's life he spent debunking that he never got back. Dear crazy people who think massive forces can be visited on Earth by the close passing of large planetoids: it would be almost impossible to gravitationally induce any effect on Earth without also crashing said planetoid into Earth.
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