gray/matter » Administration

Back to Life

admin — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 06:30:50 +0000

I won’t make any promises, but I am going to see if I can’t restore some life to this place. Be aware that I may end up posting in both directions, chronologically speaking, as I have a lot of material stored to write about that makes more sense to me when put in the correct calendar context.

Encyclopædia Britannica WebShare

admin — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 06:50:59 +0000

The Encyclopedia Britannica has launched a program allowing free access to their online edition for ‘web publishers’ and their readers. I have submitted gray/matter for registered access, which if approved will allow you to read any linked articles without an account. The goal is to provide some alternative background references besides the obligatory Wikipedia, which arguably outstrips the EB in breadth but not in depth or validation (the crux being Wikipedia’s uneven record for veracity).

britannicanet.com

No word yet on whether WebShare access would allow anything like A. J. Jacobs’ quest to become The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by reading through the entire collection.

Anything > Nothing

admin — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:00:16 +0000

I’ve started overhauling the site – using a new theme, switching to a sidebar orientation, converting previous categories to tags – in an effort to make it simpler to post shorter pieces. My momentum has been caught up in collecting material to write about with the actual composition seeming difficult with the long-form orientation I had adopted. So you should start to see a more typical linkblog structure interspersed with occasional essays and reviews.

Registration should now complete

admin — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 02:24:33 +0000

I had not previously tested rigorously enough the process of registering to post comments, and I suspect that the email notices containing initial passwords were not being delivered due to the nonstandard MTA I have running. I switched the SMTP settings around and it should now complete the registration process. In case, you know, that was why anyone was waiting.

[Edit: Okay, that worked only for local accounts, which is of marginal use given that no one else has accounts on that server. With Atuarre's guidance, I tore out the supplemental SMTP module which was munging relay headers and thus causing peer rejects, and just symlinked the standard bin/sbin shims provided with the MTA. I had previously only changed the hardcoded sendmail path, but the script must prefer mail() over sendmail() so it would have still been hitting a bound port conflict.]

Welcome to gray/matter

gray — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 04:34:12 +0000

A forum with purpose TBD.