Monthly Archive for December, 2007

Steam account deleted

Published
by
Eengstro
on December 8, 2007
in Technology
. Closed

It seems that my Valve Steam account has been deleted. I can’t log in, and my account doesn’t show up in my friend’s accounts either. Further, the “retrieve lost account” functionality isn’t sending me a temporary password.

The last time I logged into Steam was on Wed Dec 5 to play Team Fortress 2, so it appears that the fuck-up happened sometime after then.

I’m very annoyed at this — just as I was almost getting to actually like Steam, it goes and pulls something like this. Wonderful.

Update Dec 9: Steam tech support says that my account was possibly hijacked or stolen. I’m not sure how that could have happened (I’m not a complete idiot when it comes to security), but I’ll go along with it for now. They said that they would email me new login information. It’s been a day since their initial answer, and that email hasn’t arrived yet.

Update Dec 11: I had to re-open the support ticket to get a response. At least this time they actually emailed my new login info. So, I’m up and running again with Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, etc.

The SKS is not an assault rifle

Published
by
Eengstro
on December 6, 2007
in Guns etc
. Closed

The loser kid who shot up a mall in Omaha yesterday did so with an SKS rifle. Many of the press reports I’m seeing today are referring to this as an “assault rifle”. Repeat after me:

The SKS is not an assault rifle.

The SKS is not an assault rifle.

The SKS is not an assault rifle.

The SKS is not an assault rifle.

The SKS is not an assault rifle.

The SKS is not an assault rifle.

The term assault rifle has a very specific and technical meaning: an assault rifle is a rifle that is capable of selective fire. That is, it’s a rifle that can fire both semi-automatically (one shot per trigger pull) and fully-automatically (multiple shots per trigger pull).

The SKS is not an assault rifle because it is not capable of automatic fire.

The SKS doesn’t even count as an “assault weapon” — that chickenshit, scary-sounding, made-up word that leftists use to refer to semi-automatic rifles that simply look like assault rifles — because it doesn’t have a pistol grip or a detachable magazine.

I’m not sure if the press has an agenda or is merely incompetent when they report on shootings. Certainly, using a real term incorrectly (assault rifle) is little improvement on using a made-up word (assault weapon).

Update 12-7-2007: It looks like it was a Kalashnikov, not an SKS. Most people refer to these as “AK-47s”, probably because that sounds scarier. However, while these commercial sporting rifles are based on the AK-47 design, they are not true AK-47s, nor true assault rifles, because they are also not capable of selective fire.

AK-47 (and later AK-74) refers to the assault rifle issued to Communist bloc soldiers. Kalashnikov (also AK clone) refers to semi-auto sporting arms sold commercially and resembling the AK-47. So:

The Kalashnikov (or AK clone, if you like) is also not an assault rifle.

The Kalashnikov is considered by some to be an “assault weapon” because of its pistol grip, detachable magazine, and general resemblance to the military AK-47, but remember that “assault weapon” is just a made-up word that doesn’t mean anything.

Yet another “gun-free zone” bloodbath

Published
by
Eengstro
on December 6, 2007
in In my opinion
. Closed

Putting up a “No Firearms Allowed” sign at the mall entrance doesn’t stop everyone from bringing guns inside — it only stops the law-abiding ones. Those law-abiding people are then left at the mercy of those who ignore the sign. This is so simple, so common-sense, yet the irony is that the left will use yesterday’s mall shootings in Omaha to call for even more gun prohibitions.

UPDATE: An excellent essay by John Lott.

Bad Behavior glitch

Published
by
Eengstro
on December 6, 2007
in Website
. Closed

When I tried to log in to my blog this morning, I was blocked by the Bad Behavior plugin. To get into my website, I had to SSH into the host’s server and delete the Bad-Behavior directory from the wp-content/plugins directory in my WordPress installation. (Deleting a plugin’s files from the plugin directory is the usual method for dealing with misbehaving WordPress plugins.)

On the Bad Behavior blog is this post describing the problem:

All users should update to Bad Behavior 2.0.11 immediately to prevent being blocked from your own site.

Within the past two days users have found themselves blocked from their own sites while using recent versions of Bad Behavior. A third party blacklist which Bad Behavior queries recently began sending false positives for any IP address queried, causing everyone using Bad Behavior to be blocked. This issue is fixed in Bad Behavior 2.0.11.

I’ve installed 2.0.11 and all is well once again.

Norton 2007 subscription problems

Published
by
Eengstro
on December 2, 2007
in Technology
. Closed

My installation of Norton Internet Security 2007 stopped working recently. The main dialog said that I had a “subscription problem”. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense, since I still have at least 6 months remaining on my Norton subscription.

As it turns out, I received an email from Symantec recently, advertising that the latest and greatest Norton Internet Security 2008 was available as a free upgrade. So, apparently, once Norton 2008 was released, Symantec stopped supporting 2007! Downloading and installing the free upgrade solved the subscription problem, and all is once again happy in Norton-land.

Now, this rather annoys me. Free upgrades are well and good, but forcing the user to upgrade to receive continued support is, to put it lightly, quite rude. Perhaps I wouldn’t have minded so much if the original error message said something like, “Subscription Problem: Please upgrade to Norton 2008 (it’s free).” But no, all it said was “subscription problem”, which left me scratching my head quite unnecessarily.

Bad Behavior has blocked 34 access attempts in the last 7 days.