Spinning Yarns

As you might have noticed, this web site has moved from its original location at Dartmouth College to a new domain. The transfer was performed by the most direct means possible—in other words, I dumped the contents of the old database to an SQL file, compressed the bugger, and copied it over to the new server. After recreating the database itself, I imported the SQL to repopulate the database. In theory, that should be fine, but by now you must know the difference between theory and practise.¹

What that means, in short, is that you might find a broken link here and there. If you do find such a beast, please do not hesitate to let me know about it. Obviously, I’d love to fix them all up front, but that would be difficult to automate. Thus, I’m using a simpler strategy, whereby I fixed all the things I could think of off the top of my head, and the rest I will fix as they turn up broken. So, please do tell me, if you find problems.

¹ “The difference between theory and practise is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practise—whereas, in practise, there is.” I have this courtesy of David Nicol, formerly the Chairman of the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth.

Update

One thing that definitely does not work is the LatexRender plugin. It appears that TeX is not installed on the host system at all, a matter I will take up with their technical support folks when I have a chance. Meanwhile, postings that have imbedded LaTeX figures (of which there are only a few) may suffer from broken images.

Update

Another thing I have not gotten working yet is the photo gallery. The hosting service we are using does support the Gallery software I used on the old site, but transferring photo albums from one to the other turns out to be somewhat tricky. So, for the time being, I have disabled the Pictures link, and I will put that back when I have time to figure out the new setup. I suspect I will have to re-enter most of the photographs by hand.

Filed by Michael at 03:16 under Personal
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Before I get started, a disclaimer: What follows is likely to be of interest only to alumni of Dartmouth College.

For some reason, it seems like every punk who can tap a keyboard thinks he can stick my e-mail address on his mailing list. My spam filters catch almost all the commercial advertisements, but they don’t work as well when the list in question belongs to groups I’m nominally a part of, such as my College graduating class. Unlike true spam, the traffic on these mailing lists is not very high—maybe a handful of messages per week at most—but it’s all the more annoying to me because it comes from “within the family,” so to speak. The Office of Alumni Relations gives out our addresses like cheap candy the day after St. Valentine’s Day, and it seems like there’s nothing you can do about it.

There are two obvious solutions to this problem. One would be to train my filters to recognize these things as spam. Another would be to close down the e-mail address they’re using to send me this crap. Neither of these suits me philosophically—what I really want is not to be included in the lists at all. What to do?

Well, if you feel as I do about these messages, I’m here to tell you that there is something you can do about it, and it doesn’t require selling your soul—or your real phone number—to the dinnertime-calling guilt pedlars from the Capital Campaign. Here’s how you can remove yourself from those lists without completely disassociating yourself from your alma mater:

1. Crank up your favourite web browser and visit the Dartmouth LISTSERV Archives. This will show you a long list of e-mail lists maintained by the College.
2. Follow the link that says Get Password. You will be asked to enter your e-mail address and to create a password. For the address, use your Vox Alumni address, e.g., Firstname.I.Lastname.YY@Alum.Dartmouth.ORG.
3. Once you invoke the Register Password button, the system will e-mail you a confirmation link, probably within ten or fifteen minutes. Visit this link in your web browser to establish your bona fides as someone who can receive mail sent to that address.
4. Return to the Subscribers’ Corner page and select the Log In link. You will need to enter your e-mail address again, along with the password you chose in Step 2.

Once you have logged in, you will be presented with a list of the mailing lists you are currently subscribed to on their system. In all probability, the number of these will surprise you, since you probably didn’t actually ask to be on any of them. Fortunately, removal is simple and automatic: Select the check-box next to each list you want to unsubscribe from, choose Unsubscribe from the pop-up menu below, and click the Submit button. Poof! No more lists.

Now, I cannot guarantee you won’t be added to more of these things in the future; however, once you have gotten your password set up, you can save it in your mailbox against the day when you start receiving unwanted e-mail from the College again, whereupon you can go back and repeat the removal exercise as needed, till you are satisfied.

Filed by Michael at 20:25 under Dartmouth, Tutorial
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