Why the Password-Protected Posts?

Things change, and change is bad.

One bad change you may have noticed is that a handful of the posts here are now password-protected. This isn’t something I’m especially happy about, since these posts are about things I think are cool, and which I want to share with everyone. But someone smart (and with a significant stake in the matter) made the case that these posts also leaked information which could put me and others at risk.

I’ve tried to adopt the most measured response that still fixes the problem: hide only the posts I have to, and put those behind a wall rather than destroy them entirely. While I hope this is the last time I’ll have to do this retroactively, we don’t always get what we want or expect.

If you see a password-protected article, and have reason to believe I know and trust you, then you can always send email and ask for the password. Unless that trust is already established, though, you’re wasting your time — if it were something I could show to just anybody, I’d already be doing that.

Minor Site Outage 20100203

Tonight, 03 Wed 2010 from about 2000hrs to 2045hrs CST, we seem to have had an outage. Thanks to the staff at hostmonster for speedy detection and correction, and apologies to our two readers and forty-eight million spammers.

Additional information (if any) will be added to this post as it becomes available.

Dwi Handayani is a Thief and a Liar

I just submitted my first DMCA takedown notice, and even though it was obviously justified, it sure didn’t feel very good. Everything I write here, I share under what I think is a pretty generous license, so I get a bit peeved when people repost my writing elsewhere without the minimal courtesy of attribution. The entire sordid story is after the jump.

Wherein the author both tests WordPress and inaugurates the site…

Is this thing on?

I’ve been henke@insync.net for a long damn time.

To the best of my ability to recall, my first email address was something or other @lanl.gov. This would be around or about 1987. After a four-year (somewhat overlapping) stint as something boring @rice.edu (Go Owls!), I wallowed in low-grade snark and minor infamy as henke@netcom.com and henke@scaly.ssc.gov. This would bring our timeline to approximately 1993.

After that, it was a move to Houston and henke@phoenix.net. I have fond memories of the phoenix account, notably the improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio of my email stream stemming from the inability of stupid people to spell “phoenix”. This was about the time spam was becoming a real problem, so although I was a frequent poster to UseNet, I munged addresses.

That brings us to 1999 (party as though it were same) and henke@insync.net. As of this writing, that account it still active. As of the dawn of 2010, it will not be. Alas, the fantastic, local, hacker-run insync.net was too good for this troubled world, and was gobbled up by texas.net lo, these many years ago. While the original domain still stands, I’ve grown tired of shelling out the Croessian sum of twenty bucks a month for a simple email forward and POP mailbox.

Thus, I’ve hired hostmonster and registered the domain ‘mythopoeic.org’, at which I’m dhenke (as there’s an ahenke also, with whom I desire email parity — while I’m still Henke of Clan Henke, that’s only for formal occasions).

While hand-crafting HTML (and/or XHTML) with a plain old text editor has long been my habit, I have come around to the view that time spent on that sort of attention to detail is time that would serve both my readers and myself better were I to spend it on content. And, Hostmonster had an easy way to install WordPress, so, well… here we are.