Unrepentant | sorabji at WSBJ.com

Here’s What Happened When I Tried To Cancel New York Daily News

Biographile.com: Steve Jobs, Guantánamo Detainee?

The cover for Walter Isaacson’s book “Steve Jobs” was probably not intended to accompany this blurb for an upcoming book by a Guantánamo detainee detailing his experience at the infamous detention camp.

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Microsoft Outlook: General Failure.

This is an error that evidently cannot be fixed. The fundamental act of clicking on a link to a web page from within an e-mail message returns error spew like this when using Microsoft Outlook: Microsoft Outlook: General Failure. The URL was: “http://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/e11401.m44.|1503/7?euid=d3d3d1…”. Application not found. Microsoft Outlook: General Failure. The URL was: “http://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/e11401.m44.|1503/7?euid=d3d3d1…”. Application […]

Google Voice: Internal Server Error

You don’t see errors like this from the big G too often.

Windows Script Host. Unspecified error. Code: 80004005 (null)

MediaMonkey: Access violation at address 00AD4A9B in module ‘MEDIUM~2.EXE’. Read of address 000000EC.

Google Chrome

I’ve lost count of how many times I see this crash.

Cafepress: Reference Cart Number: 115342571

I don’t remember if I was ever able to complete this purchase.

Oxatis eCommerce: Error Message In 6 Languages

NY State Health Insurance Exchange

Error: 1603

Bar Graph

One of my web sites saw a spike in traffic on September 11 and September 12, 2014. Specifically the traffic went to Jason Florio’s amazing photo of a payphone caller near Ground Zero on September 11, 2001. I licensed the photo from Mr. Florio for use on the Payphone Project, and wrote a story around it. […]

Days. Weeks. Months.

Flipping

The time-consuming but rewarding process of turning “The Etude” scans into flipbook format is moving along. Some of these I have to re-do but there are now 15 issues available. “The Etude”, February, 1899 “The Etude”, March, 1899 “The Etude”, June, 1899 “The Etude”, October, 1899 (Added June 1, 2014) “The Etude”, November, 1899 (Added […]

At a Starbucks

Sitting at a Starbucks, using a Galaxy Note 10.1 with a Bluetooth keyboard to ruminate on my profound and important observations about humanity, God, existential ennui, and squealing dogs. I haven’t posted text matter to Sorabji.MOBI in a while. I have not been especially .MOBI myself. The .MOBI top level domain was intended to be a […]

Relying on the Unreliable

Someone came by to visit a few weeks ago. Addresses and directions around here can be confusing to anyone unfamiliar with the area, so I’ve assumed a habit of giving unusually detailed instructions for how to get here from the subway. It is not far at all but one wrong turn will send you on a ½ hour […]

FlexPaper Redux

An e-mail to the support folks at FlexPaper returned a quick fix to an annoying bug. Search engines were indexing the Flipbooks all right, but after indexing the real pages they continued on into infinity, following hundreds of links to non-existent pages. A code fix to the index.php file looks like it should fix it, but I’ll […]

FlexPaper Revisited

The goal of converting “The Etude” magazine to Flipbook format was to make the text searchable by commercial search engines without losing the fundamental character of the printed matter. I’ve given it a couple of weeks. Searchability appears to have been accomplished, but with a lot of caveats. Unlike the flat HTML pages of etudemagazine.com, which were carefully […]

Speak

This is not the first time I have attempted to speak a posting to a website. I am using industry-standard voice-recognition software to transcribe these words as I speak them. The only difference this time around is that I am attempting to take it a little more seriously. I use the voice recognition on my […]

Google-HTTP-Java-Client

Whilst posting a string of posts to a new site on my WordPress Multisite I spotted something odd. Tailing the WPMS access_log, looking for 404s and 500s and such, when I noticed that every new post I put up was followed by a couple of HEAD requests for the image contained in that post. The […]

WHOIS.sorabji.com

WHOIS.sorabji.com uses Google’s Custom Search Engine (CSE) product to index web sites that harvest public WHOIS records and other information about public web sites. I have been using this targeted WHOIS search to discover who owns web sites and/or domain names in my neighborhood, on particular streets, and even at particular addresses. The results have […]

WPMS For A Beer

My hours spent slaving over the idiosyncrasies and inexplicablenesses of a WordPress Multisite installation earned me some sweet sorrow. A techy friend bought me a beer. I do not talk to many techies in person so it was gratifying to find one among my peers who recognized that WPMS is a quixotic pain in the […]

Using WP Flickr Plugins

A small furor erupted some weeks ago when Flickr announced its API was changing to all SSL. On account of this the myriad of WordPress plugins which allow viewing of Flickr photos through WordPress had to change their code just a bit. This happened at the same time I first started exploring WordPress/Flickr plugins, so many of the plugins […]

WordPress MultiSite Redirect Loop

I never quite solved this problem as thoroughly as I would have liked, but it seems to work. According to various documentations a subsite of a WordPress Multisite (WPMS) can be assigned a default directory under which its content will appear. This would be handy in analyzing access_log files, as it is not always obvious which site is […]

Fun With Maps Marker Pro

This turned into a shit show. I mean, this is what Szapp.Com is about: documenting the amount of time wasted on stuff that just does not work as specified. The Maps Marker Pro plugin for WordPress (which I expect to purchase after getting to know it better during the free 30-day trial) is the most beautiful […]

No More Yahoo Support For Paying Customers

I’ve subscribed to Yahoo’s Ad Free Mail (previously known as Plus) for many years. I’ve contacted reach support once or twice. Issues were resolved although I was not given the benefit of a human response to my question. Evidently this support for paying customers has been suspended. All roads to “Contact Us” lead to the community […]

Tweaking the OSM Plugin

Unless I simply forget to do it every post at Szapp should be followed by a map of a random place on earth. I do this with the OpenStreetMap (OSM) WordPress Plugin. I made a small change to the plugin. By default the OSM maps are output at 600×400. I wanted to make it 800×640, […]

CSE fail

Trying to assemble a custom search engine (CSE) focused on historical information about real estate properties, but with certain web sites filtered out. Google provides this CSE service for free with ads. Sites to be filtered include zillow.com, homes.com, and similar web products containing property appraisals and other information. Nothing is wrong with these sites but there are so many of […]

Talking Szapp

I registered Szapp.Com a long time ago, intending to use it for what I have no recollection. It seemed like a snappy URL, and surprisingly available for such a short word. The word Szapp appears to mean something to some people on earth. It is an uncommon surname. Whatever its meaning I was not using […]

FlexPaper Flipbook

I decided to take a new approach with the scans and OCR-conversion I did with “The Etude” music magazine a couple of years ago. I took a long break from that project, in which I scanned hundreds upon hundreds of pages into the ABBYY Finereader OCR software, then hand-edited the errors as best I could. […]