Darkoshi

One thing that seems not to have been brought over during the times when I imported entries to my DW account from my LJ account, are the "memorable entries" or "memories". Ie., an indication of which entries I had flagged as memorable. On LJ, I had 5 posts tagged as memorable, but my DW profile shows 0 memories. So for anyone who is doing imports, I suggest you double-check that afterwards.

Last weekend, I deleted all my old entries from LJ using LJ-Sec. I wasn't able to delete them all at once - when I first tried, it gave an error about exceeding the posting limit for the hour. Then I used a work-around to do the deletes in smaller chunks. Even that way had issues, which I now realize may have been due to the LJ servers being overloaded, from all the other people who were using DW's importer at the same time.

(Or maybe LJ-SEC is just glitchy. While in the process of deleting my entries, I noticed that many protected posts were still there, even though I *thought* I had successfully deleted them all last month. That is similar to the issues I had last week - even when LJ-SEC didn't give errors, it wasn't deleting all of the selected entries. I had to delete LJ-SEC's User Data folder and refresh the entries, and try again multiple times until everything was finally gone.)

Based on the DW Stats page, there have been (holey-moley!) over 250,000 new DW accounts created between 2017-04-04 and 2017-04-14 (look at the "newbyday" values). There are now over 3 million DW accounts (look at the "size" values), although only about 1 in 20 of them (154,000) have been "active" in the last month (ergo, simply creating a new account isn't enough for it to be considered active).

Update, 2017/04/16: (See more info in comments.) It turns out those account numbers include OpenID ones automatically created when importing comments, so the actually number of personal accounts is much less. This other DW stats page lists the total number of personal accounts now at 726,000, of which 164,000 have been active in the last month. I didn't find anything showing how many new personal accounts have been created in the last 2 weeks.

..

After doing the deletes, my LJ profile still showed 5 memories, along with broken links. I had to do a separate step to delete the broken links. It didn't occur to me to take notes on which entries those had been. But I do still have a clue, based on what I had tagged them by, as that is one thing I had saved to my notes. So I can probably find them again if I want to.

Edited to Add:
I just realized why memories may not be automatically brought over as part of an import. I see now that you can also mark other people's posts as memorable, not only your own. Obviously, an import deals with your own posts, not other people's posts, so even if there was functionality for copying memories, it would need to be limited to your own posts. Or it would need to support pointing to external URLs, which could be a problem.

I got my taxes done.

I made a pie with a chocolate filling. It's somewhat gooey, not what I was expecting from the photo on the box. But it's actually good, even though it also tastes oddly like it contains grape syrup mixed in with the chocolate. Based on the ingredients list, I can't imagine why. It contains alkalized cocoa, and the link I posted before indicates that the non-alkalized sort is the kind that's more likely to taste "fruity".

I also made some Waldmeister Goetterspeise which is a German jello with a unique flavor not found in the U.S. My aunt used to make it for me as a kid (with vanilla sauce on top!), and I still like it. The flavor isn't as intense as I remembered though.

I trimmed my hair a bit. It was tickling the back of my neck too much a few days ago. My torso gets itchy sometimes. When I scratch, the skin gets pinkish red, and small itchy bumps, widely scattered, appear. When I stop scratching, it goes away. I haven't figured out a cause. It's been happening for a few years now. (Of course, having written "torso" there, now a few spots on my arms and legs started itching.)

I'm over my cold, but still have a lot of phlegm. That always used to be the one of the worst parts of a cold, the weeks and weeks of snot that would only slowly diminish back to normal levels. So I did neti today for the first time in possibly 5 years. I stopped using neti around then, after reading warnings against doing neti with unsterile tap water. Well, I used tap water today, like I used to. Anything else is too much trouble. But after reading the warnings again, I may forgo the whole thing for another 5 years.

I used LJSec to delete my old protected posts from LJ, as that was something that had been on my to-do list for a while. There may not be much point in having done it, but at least it is off my list now. First, I did another import of all entries & comments from LJ over to DW, as well as a few backups of both my LJ and DW (with LJArchive), to make sure I wouldn't lose anything. The only problem with LJArchive is that imported comments don't show up with the user's LJ name like it does on the Dreamwidth pages, but rather with a generic ext_#### ID. If I have time someday, I'd like to see if I can update the utility to fix that.

A few weeks ago, I cancelled my Netflix subscription, as I was using it so rarely. Qiao has another Netflix account anyway, which I can use when I want to. He also has an Amazon Prime account for watching videos.

Last week at work, I was able to find the cause of another problem, and fix it. Well, I probably fixed more than one problem, but the last one is the one I remember. It gives me such a rush, a good feeling, being able to discover what obscure thing is making the code not work right and how to fix it, when I still don't even understand what half of the rest of the code is meant to do. I was thinking, I've been working on this same general code base, though it has undergone many transfigurations, for the past 22 years. I could spend my whole *life* working on it, and I still wouldn't understand it all, especially because it is constantly being changed. That made me think for a moment that maybe I should leave this job, just so that *whole life* part wouldn't come true. Eh. But whatever, this code or some other code, what difference. Hmm. Coming up on the end of the quarter. Wonder if they will have layoffs.

Well, now I can't even read comments on my own cross-posted LJ entries while logged in. If I log out, I can read the comments on my public entries, but obviously not the comments on protected entries.

I had switched my journal to another style as a test, to see if that would fix the problem reading other pages. But doing that just broke it for my own pages too. And now I can't find a style that works.

Another thing I noticed is that when logged out, journals don't display the most recent changes. Ie. logged in, I may see 2 newer (public) entries that someone has posted on their LJ page, compared to when I'm logged out. And even though I just changed my journal style again, when I'm logged out, it still displays the prior style.

My recent "robot discrimination" cross-post on LiveJournal just got an anonymous spam comment. It is in the exact same style as all the past spam comments I had been getting before I enabled the option to "Show CAPTCHA to anonymous commenters" back in mid-October. I haven't gotten a single spam comment since then until now.

I just checked, and the CAPTCHA is still enabled and working (oddly, the CAPTCHA text shown is the normal English/Latin alphabet, but the instruction text within the text box is Russian).

So what this means is that there are people who post spam like that manually, or this spam bot is able to pass the simple LJ text CAPTCHA (which wouldn't be surprising as that is why many sites have changed to other image-based CAPTCHAs). In other words, Amazon's robot test, which is also simple text-based), would fail against this bot.

Isn't it a funny coincidence that the spam comment was posted, on this particular post? It almost makes me want to unscreen the comment rather than deleting it.

This is the LJ link for editing entries:
http://www.livejournal.com/editjournal.bml

I need to use that page occasionally, as edit links no longer show up for me by my LJ entries on the regular pages. It's probably due to my journal style being old or no longer supported, but it doesn't bother me enough to make me want to change the style because of it. Dreamwidth, where I post and edit most of my entries, doesn't have the problem. But due to spambots posting a lot of spam on some of the older entries on LiveJournal, I've been having to edit them to lock or disable the comments.

I'm not sure what to make of this account: noamziko. They subscribed to me in March 2014, and at the time I thought was a spam account and ignored it. The posts are all in Hebrew.

At first I thought the account had only 3 posts total, but now I see that it has 34 visible posts going back to May 2013, even though it only shows 3 posts per page. When I translate the posts, they sound real, and not like spam.

But the account has only 3 subscriptions, no subscribers, and no comments that I can see. Why would someone from Israel who writes in Hebrew and has never commented on my journal, have subscribed to me?

What would any of you make of it?

Noamziko, if you are really reading this, hello and feel free to post a comment in any language.

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In other news, I used the Import Journal function to import my LJ comments to my DW entries. It appears to have worked fine. Now I will use LJArchive again, to save a copy of my journal including both the DW and LJ comments.

Note to Self:

When embedding content (such as a YouTube video) in a post, remember to also include the direct URL to the content (such as the video URL) in the post.

Otherwise, when I save or export my entries, the direct URL does not get saved; only an embed id gets saved.

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In the past, I've had problems where the embeds got messed up - old posts were showing the wrong videos. That may have happened when I copied my entries from LJ to DW, or maybe it was later on. I went back and fixed them all. Having the direct URLs in the posts would have made the process easier.

Today I have another problem with the embeds. I back up my journal in a few different ways. One way is with LJArchive - LJArchive doesn't display anything for embeds. Another way is by simply saving the HTML pages every once in a while. Today when opening those previously-saved HTML pages, I found that they no longer display right. Instead of displaying the entries with the embeds included, they show nothing but a single embed, in giant size, so that I can't even easily tell which post it is from.

If I edit the HTML to change all "iframe" to "iframex", then I can at least see the other posts correctly again.

In Dreamwidth, when I click to edit a post, it still shows the direct URL to the embedded content. I wish that part would be included when saving the HTML page, and when doing an export via LJArchive.

I suppose rather than using the "HTML only" option when saving the pages, I should start using the "Web page, complete" option. That will hopefully avoid the problem in the future even if Dreamwidth changes how their embeds are handled again.

Testing a new Crosspost footer.
This is only a test. You may continue with your regular activities.

I got an LJ Notice that "grevvlad" added me as a friend. So I looked at their profile. It doesn't show me on their friends list, so I suppose they added me and then removed me. I couldn't figure out if it was a real account/person, or something spammy/nefarious.

Their LJ seems to only have videos posted. If you click on some of their interests... say "moontale"... it shows several communities where this person is the only, or nearly the only poster. And the things posted on those communities are again mostly videos - music videos. Dark/industrial/metal type music. As well as videos of an anti-German(?) slant.

Certainly suspicious. But if it is something spammy, it is more complex than usual. And what is the purpose?

Ah! As I was browsing a few of those LJ pages, I got a popup that my MalwareBytes blocked something... so the purpose must be to install malware on people's computers, or something nefarious indeed.

Yay! for MalwareBytes Anti-Malware PRO. I installed it with the real-time protection module this weekend, after buying a license (4 licenses actually... one for my friend's computer, one for my mom's, one for Qiao, and one for me).

Today's log:
08:31:29 *** MESSAGE Protection started successfully
08:31:34 *** MESSAGE IP Protection started successfully
21:26:59 *** IP-BLOCK 82.146.59.111 (Type: outgoing, Port: 49523, Process: firefox.exe)
21:50:49 *** IP-BLOCK 82.146.59.111 (Type: outgoing, Port: 49799, Process: firefox.exe)

I'm planning to switch over to using Dreamwidth as my main journal. I'll still be crossposting entries to LiveJournal. Entry comments can be left on either site. If you have a Dreamwidth account, feel free to add me.

I'll see how it goes.