Mokka mit Schlag

September 1996-September 2009
We will miss you.

It really is time to switch to a more reliable host. Last night as I was at the vet with my cat (sadly, for the last time) Pair Networks turned off The Cafes with little to no notice. They sent a form e-mail with no useful information:

Due to problems it was causing on the server, we were forced to disable the
following script located in your account:

/usr/www/users/elharo/cafe

For future reference, please take a look at our script usage policies:

http://www.pair.com/pair/policies/resource.html
http://www.pair.com/pair/policies/cgiresource.html

Please take a few moments to look over your script for any obvious problems
before using “chmod 755” (via ssh) or using your FTP client to reenable
the executable permissions of the script.

If you have any questions about this script, please contact our friendly
support specialists at support@pair.com or 412-381-7247 (option 2).

The message is inaccurate. /usr/www/users/elharo/cafe isn’t a script. It’s the complete web site.

I’ve turned the site back on, but since they didn’t tell me what the problem actually was, I have no way of knowing if the problem is still there or not. I posted a new article on Friday, and it hit Hacker News yesterday, so there’s been a spike in traffic but still in the 10,000 hits a day range, nothing serious.
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I just noticed this in my logs:

9/13/09 8:12:01 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[4485] (com.epson.epw.agent[6796]) posix_spawn(“/Library/Printers/EPSON/InkjetPrinter/EPW/IJEPWAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/IJEPWAgent”, …): No such file or directory

What’s really annoying is that it happens every 10 seconds. Anyone know how to turn off whatever is trying to do this? I don’t have any Epson equipment.
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Snow Leopard’s broken some of my AppleScripts in some weird way I don’t yet understand. After some debugging the problem seems to lie in files. Specifically files treated as strings. This no longer works:

set libraryFile to file "Macintosh HD:Users:elharo:Cafe Au Lait:support:CafeLib.scpt"

Nor does this:

set libraryFile to alias "Macintosh HD:Users:elharo:Cafe Au Lait:support:CafeLib.scpt"

They both die with

error “File alias Macintosh HD:Users:elharo:Cafe Au Lait:support:CafeLib.scpt of «script» wasn’t found.” number -43

Any ideas?
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I’ve been seeing some interesting day flying moths in the parks here in New York, especially in grassy areas. However I haven’t yet unpacked my camera gear from the move, much less taken it out in the field so it’s lucky I still have a bunch of California moths in the queue, like this beautiful Monopis crocicapitella from Mason Park:

Monopis crocicapitella, Hodges#415
William R. Mason Regional Park, Irvine, California, USA; August 26, 2009
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Before I left Irvine, I was starting to get in the habit of walking around Mason Park after dark, something I’d be a little more nervous about doing in Prospect Park, especially with a couple of thousand dollars worth of camera equipment around my neck. However the few lights in the park really did attract some beautiful insects you’d be hard-pressed to find in the daytime including this Diamondback Moth I found on my very last nightly foray:

Plutella xylostella, Hodges #2366
William R. Mason Regional Park
2009-08-26
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