Month: October 2024

Firefox temporary containers fix

about:addons

Temporary Containers > Disable

Try the operation again; this time you’ll get still the wrong container, but at least the URL is in the location bar. Click the Firefox Multi-Account Containers icon in the extensions bar, and choose “Always open this site in …”

Temporary Containers > Enable

Unfortunately, there isn’t a way (at least that I can tell) to edit which websites are to be opened with which containers. The only way to change the map is via the Firefox GUI. This leads to broken behavior.

What I’m saying is that I cannot simply open a file and type in a host.domain combination into the “Always open this site in …” database or policy or JSON or whatever.

For example, I want a particular type of pant clothes hanger. Amazon has a hundred different items with the cheap plastic clip which breaks when I try to hang denim. They have a single item where the clip that supplies the leverage on the clamp is metal. When the fabric is thick, like denim, the plastic clips snap like dry twigs. So I want the old-fashioned metal hangers, only.

But I’m not going to pay Amazon’s stupid price of $7 per clothes hanger. Go kick rocks, you fools.

Okay, so eBay is the answer. I found what I wanted, they came in at $2 each: great! I want to sign in to pay.

Temporary Containers says that’s a nope.

Here’s the deal: I was able to add signup.ebay.com to an assigned container. It was the first site I was on, and the webpage patiently waited for me to sign in, so I could click the “Always open this site in …” menu item.

Similarly, I was able to add www.ebay.com to the same container. But I’d never been able to get to pay.ebay.com added, because to get there, you have to authenticate, first, and then be redirected in. The password login website was in the correct container, but pay.ebay.com was not. And because it was not, it didn’t get the cookies required to prove that I’d typed in my password correctly.

Because I’d never been able to visit pay.ebay.com, I’d never been able to add it to “Always open this site in …”

I can’t get there because it opens in the wrong container. I can’t add it to the right container because I have to get there first. It’s a Catch-22.

To me, the best answer would be for me to be able to edit the list of which host.domain pairs get mapped to which container. It kind of kills me that I can see which domain Firefox is trying to redirect to: pay.ebay.com. I can copy it to the clipboard; where can I paste it in? Ugh: nowhere.

Apparently manual edits are not at all easy, because containers have ID’s, but the policies that move webpages there don’t track the ID’s, or something like that. All I really know is that this has been a problem for a really long time, and the plugin author has said that this is a more difficult problem than one might surmise. I can believe that.

So the answer is to temporarily disable the Temporary Containers plugin, and then do the management of Firefox Multi-Account Containers. Hence, the quick shortcut to get to Firefox extension management.

Anyway, my high quality, old, hangers at $2 each are now on their way. 🙂

Ballot Measures: Just Vote No

If it was such a great idea, your representatives would have voted in favor of it, passed it, and then told you how great they are for getting it passed.

The only reason the ballot measure is being put in front of you is because when given the opportunity to put their name on it, your representatives shuddered at the idea and opted-out.

If this terrible idea passes, it’s your fault, not theirs.

That I am aware of, there was a single ballot measure that was a good idea: California’s Proposition 13 of 1978.

Prop 13 limited the taxes that the government could collect, so zero representatives were going to vote in favor of it: it had to come from the voters and be put in front of the voters. Governor Jerry Brown was warning everyone ahead of the election about what a disaster it would be, if it passed.1 It turned out to be the best idea ever.

Why was it the best idea ever? Because it limited taxes to a stable metric: property values. Before Prop 13, collected taxes were highly variable both by time and location. After Prop 13, Sacramento knew with high precision how much money was going to be coming in.

That didn’t stop the bureaucrats from spending foolishly; but it did remove the excuse that they overspent because revenues fell short this year. They overspent because they wanted to overspend.

Anyway, when your ballot has measures on it for you to approve, and they aren’t a grassroots movement to limit government reach, just vote no.

  1. After the election and it passed with an overwhelming majority, Jerry Brown tried to claim he was in favor of it all along, adding evidence to the old adage: “How do you know when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.” ↩︎

Proxmox copy of WordPress virtual machine – changing the siteurl

I’ve gone into Proxmox and cloned a WordPress machine to a new machine. I configured DNS and DHCP to assign a new host name for the machine; now I need to get WordPress to understand that too.

Because WordPress stores the site URL inside the database, this means running a MySQL query.

The problem is that the old WordPress site (because that is what is in the new machine’s database) keeps telling Apache to serve up the pages from the old machine. So everything on the new machine will need to resolve at https://tratest.example.com but because WordPress is going to its database to find out where everything is, as soon as the page loads, it tries to go to https://aawp.example.com

That machine is powered off in Proxmox, so obviously nothing works.

Can’t really use any tools inside WordPress to do the search-and-replace, so I need something outside of WordPress. I generally do not install phpMyAdmin, because 1) it is extra work to configure Apache to serve up a different website just for this one function, and 2) that becomes just one more place a bored 14 year old might try to break in. If I don’t need it, why put it out there?

So let’s try some MySQL queries from the command line.

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'https://aawp.example.com', 'https://tratest.example.com') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';

Nice! I did a restart of Apache, and now the new machine at the new domain name serves up the content from the cloned machine. I know that this worked because the old machine in Proxmox is still powered off.

There are also several other changes I made:

  • hostnamectl set-hostname tratest.example.com
  • edited /etc/hosts and copied the 127.0.1.1 entry to 127.0.2.1 and added the new host name, per Change host name and domain
  • edited the Apache .conf file in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ and replaced the ServerName entry

WordPress sucks, issue <whatevs>

Out of nowhere, every time I clicked on a Gutenberg block on a draft post (my Quarterly Inventory post) I’m getting “This block has encountered an error and cannot be previewed.”

The solution is (apparently) to disable every plugin – oh hey looky there: the error went away – and re-enable them one-by-one.

Yay.

I’d so rather being doing this than making progress on how to update a WordPress site URL after cloning in Proxmox. Not.

AND OF COURSE, NOTHING WAS WRONG

Grrr. I’ve now re-enabled every plugin, and Gutenberg is fine.

Apparently, the code base on WordPress is so good that one just needs to disable every plugin and re-enable them once in a while.

Quarterly inventory – 2024 Q3

Dear FutureMe,

Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.

How is your personal life going?

How is your work life going?

How is your Volunteer Service life going?

Future me

Personal Life

Not really a whole lot going on. I have flat feet, and so when I recently got to be Master of Ceremonies at a volunteer service event, I wore my nicest shoes, but all that time in them injured my left foot something fierce. Here a week later, my foot still hurts.

I’d injured my foot several weeks back. My son had told me about Hoka shoes, and indeed they are like walking on marshmallows. Between them and keeping my foot elevated while sitting, I’d recovered. But then I felt the need to dress as sharp as I could for the event, and I re-injured my foot.

Yesterday I was rather depressed. That shows up rarely, maybe two times in a quarter, but it was present yesterday.

I had a ton of fun about a month ago, migrating one of my volunteer service websites to a new host. I moved from Amazon Lightsail to Linode. I was thrilled that the move went so smoothly, so I did it again, this time to my internal Proxmox server, documenting the whole thing for that blog post.

Oh – and I gave up on OpenSuSE and moved my main machine to Manjaro.  Manjaro has been pretty good.  I wish the KDE tilling window manager script worked on it; although I can keep hitting meta+arrow to tile windows, it is kind of dumb that I have to.  This is a KDE problem, not a Manjaro problem – but because I did migrate, I also got the KDE “upgrade”.  That would have happened had I stayed on OpenSuSE too.

Work Life

If $34,000 dropped into my lap today, I would retire tomorrow. I did finally clear my retirement service credit buy-back. I talked about that in Quarterly Inventory 2023 Q2. It is done. Magically, I gained 6.1 years of service credit overnight. The better part is that it frees up $300 per month, which I need because of inflation.

We added a new product, Kiteworks, to replace a service that Proofpoint exited. So far, the Kiteworks company and support are terrible. Because Proofpoint has been going down in quality because of the sell-out to Thoma Bravo, I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason they (Proofpoint) recommended Kiteworks is that they got a kickback. I have zero evidence of that, but it seems to me like the kind of thing Thoma Bravo would do. Anyway, Kiteworks sucks: would not recommend. I’ll probably do a blog post about it later; but there are four problems:

  • The interface is somewhat opaque, and difficult to figure out where particular things are, when I need to change them.
  • There is no documentation. What documentation there is, is from three years ago when the service was vastly different: it in no way applies to the product today.
  • The implementation engineer didn’t explain to us what the effects of the choices were, so we deployed badly to 2,200 of 5,000 users. 5,000 users would have been blindsided with a surprise “what the hell?” situation, except that we caught it some 1,800 users in.
  • So … we’ve had a stable environment for several years now, we’ve deployed Kiteworks, and 1% of machines the Outlook Plugin is deployed to are now crashing randomly and silently, losing all work, … and your technical support is blaming Outlook? Repair Outlook and the problem will go away? Re-image the machine to a fresh image and the problem will go away? Y’all are clowns. How many sets of log files do I have to upload before y’all will start looking at the problem? The problem is Kiteworks Outlook Plugin. We did not have this problem prior to installing your program. If there were a virtual clue-by-4 I could deploy over the Internet, you’d be badly bruised right now.

I’m not really enjoying work right now. I’m thankful I have a good boss, though. He’s great.

Volunteer Service Life

I very much enjoyed being Master of Ceremonies at our Fall event. The speaker was wonderful. It didn’t hurt that he grew up and joined our fellowship 45 miles north of here. The whole event was great.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that this year I get to be President of the Board on our little 501(c)(3) here. That job title, plus $5, will get you a fancy coffee at Starschmucks.1

Anyway, it weighs on me that our finances are not sound. We previously had a member who contributed $1,200 per month to our Central Office, and he died three years ago. We’d gotten a $6,000 refund on taxes due to Covid-19 and keeping our employee on the payroll, so it looked like we had money. During Covid-19 a meeting started up in a shack, off-the-record, to avoid government interference. Well, last August, they hooked up a second air conditioning unit in serial (electrically) and then overnight the shack burned to the ground. People showed up for the 7:00 AM meeting to find smoke and embers. No injuries, thankfully. Well, that meeting contributed $300 per month, and poof, that’s gone. Between this and inflation putting the hurt on everyone, our Central Office contributions are not meeting our expenses. We’re going to have to fire or reduce the hours of our single part-time employee. It is depressing.

I’ve got another website, which hosts recordings of speaker meetings. Something in WordPress 6.6 caused it trouble, so I downgraded to WordPress 6.5. But now the login screen takes two minutes to complete. That box is on Ubuntu, and I’d like to migrate to Debian instead. So I need to do a migration again (mentioned above), but I also need to schedule that with the guy who does most of the uploads to it. I don’t have analytics running on it, either, so I don’t have a good feel for what days / times of day it is least used.

  1. I first read that joke in 1981 or 1982, in the Garfield comic, where Jim Davis was commenting on inflation. A cup of coffee went from 25 cents to a dollar at restaurants. Jon made some inane observation and Garfield replied with “that, and a buck will get you a cup of coffee.” When Starbucks became popular in the mid 1990’s I revived the joke with the Starbucks attribution. I still see it being used once in a while on Slashdot or Reddit. ↩︎