[conspire] Serving ads on a Mediawiki site

[rogerchrisman at gmail.com]

> would you happen to be on the West Coast, and would the clock be off by 7 hours in the summer, and 8 hours in the winter?

Yes I would.

Thank you for the interesting bits on time. The Conspire archive will
divulge my past more accurately than my memory does. We have talked
about this story before here I remember now.

I'm a *bad* guy. I do *bad* confusing computing things. Today's
confesion in other email--I tried to boot my computer
several-times-over with the screen turned OFF.

Here's another *bad* thing I did regarding serving ads on my wiki: I
left a head script for AdSense live on my wiki for over a year after I
had, I though, turned OFF AdSense. Well, the wizards at Google
invented auto ads and started serving ads automatically into my miki
via that live head script. Confusion and delay! I didn't figure it out
and thought bad bad bad eZoic was putting those ads in there where I
had told it not to. Indeed eZoic has implemented auto ads, too.
Although I think I have those turned off. Auto ads are where the ad
aggregator, AdSense or eZoic or what have you, automatically choose a
likely spot to place an ad in you website and places it there,
automagically.  So yesterday I swabbed the decks! I commented out the
HeadScript Extension[1] config for the AdSense head scripts in my
Mediawiki's LocalSettings.php. And now *bad* computing compounded by
*bad* computing, this took a while to change what Firefox brought home
from the cloud when I refreshed my wiki view in Firefox, because eZoic
actually has DNS level access to my domain name. That's how they DO
it. They point my domain name at Cloudflair servers, which mirror my
wiki off droplets of h2o or something magical and reflect ads into it
on the edge of the prism. I'd use technical terms but don't know any.
So I think rainbow colors. More *bad*. *Bad* is a superpower not to
brag about on the internet highway. SOmething might happen out there.

Also, regarding eZoic wanting to charge me a $88 annual Premium
contract cancellation fee. I think I remember the guy who talked me
into using eZoic telling me that I could get the annual discount rate
if I chose the blue pill. Donk. I guess $88 is the difference between
the "discounted" annual rate the monthly rate. eZoic has this scummy
structure where you get "access" to supposedly higher paying ads if
you are a Premium member, but you have to pay to be a premium member.
I decided to do their business their way and revisit it later. Also,
Premium membership is by "invitation only" and the cancellation
window, the same one that reminded me that I would be changed $88
annual contract cancellation fee if I cancelled, warned me that
Premium might not be able to let me back in if I cancelled, because
the Premium slots are limited and they would offer my slot to someone
else if I leave. Avast!

So much fun!

Sea sick. But I'm getting a *discount* and $88 is only the difference
I am saving by staying! And paying $22 a month. Not terrifying, just
$22 a month. That I agreed to now that I rake through the coals to
find that memory.

Not Disneyland.

My son was terrified, 15 years ago, when the real gunpowder cannon on
the Disneyland pirate ship went off with all it's theatrical
intention! As I type this in our living room my wife is working from
home on one side of me and my son is talking to his highschool
classmates over Zoom.

Confessions of the *bad*

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:HeadScript

Roger                             "by reading this email you concent
to... something"

On Sat, Oct 10, 2020 at 1:33 AM Nick Moffitt <nick at zork.net> wrote:
>
> On 09Oct2020 01:55pm (-0700), rogerchrisman at gmail.com wrote:
> > For some reason, when I startup Windows 10 after a session running my
> > desktop in Xubutu, the time of day is off by several hours and needs
> > to be re-synched. Any idea why that is? I may have asked this question
> > right here years ago. Time flys. I might have only imagined that.
> > Thoughts fly, too. Little fly, been somewhere interesting? (Pence's
> > head? Oh.)
>
> Just off the top of my head, would you happen to be on the West Coast, and would the clock be off by 7 hours in the summer, and 8 hours in the winter?
>
> If so, this is almost certainly because Windows uses local wall-clock time for the system clock, and actually updates the hardware clock when local time zones change (such as in the transition between Pacific Standard Time and Pacific Daylight Time during the "daylight savings" switchovers).
>
> By contrast, Linux systems prefer to keep the hardware clock in UTC.  This allows people to ssh in from all over the world, and their $TZ environment variables will provide the offset from this reference time to produce local wall-clock time in their environment.  For example, if I were to ssh into your Xubuntu system from London, my $TZ value of "Europe/London" would set me to +0100 (British Summer Time), while your $TZ of "PST8PDT" or "America/Los_Angeles" would set it to -0700 for Pacific Daylight Time.
>
> This is more about convention than technology.  It's perfectly possible to set up Linux systems so that the hardware clock uses wall-clock time, but it's been deprecated in favour of the UTC-plus-timezone-offset system.  Linux and its Unix forbears were always multi-user systems, while Windows got its start as a single-user desktop system.
>
> Incidentally, the use of local wall-clock time for hardware used to have a preposterous side-effect during DST transitions: Windows systems left running at 2AM during the "fall back" change would automatically set their clocks back to 1AM, and then they'd do it again the NEXT time they reached "2AM".  And so on, to infinity...
>
> I'm not sure how they sorted this out, but I'd imagine a simple "Did we last spring forward or fall back?" bit would be a reasonable workaround to this.  Personally I'd prefer not to introduce something as silly as legislated clock-fiddling to the lowest layer of my system, and keep it in a compatibility layer like the time zone system where it can be cheaply adjusted if the world ever comes to its senses about this nonsense.
>
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