Amazing! Dave’s suggestion of changing my computer’s MTU setting worked!

I had been unable to visit one particular site for a week or two (”Connection reset by peer”), but the problem existed only on one computer; the laptop could connect just fine. Clearing temp files and cookies didn’t work. Changing browser didn’t help. Obtaining a new IP didn’t work, both from my local network and from my ISP. Using tor did work, and so did ping. All other sites were functional.

Dave (I think it was Dave!) mentioned that changing the MTU size had fixed a similar problem for him, so I looked it up, found this handy explanation, and fiddled with ifconfig. It was set to 1492, so I changed it to 1500, and it worked. I’m astonished! What had suddenly changed that required me to do this?

Ask Oxford reckons the ditty about killing pigs and being happy is a 17th century English proverb, rather than a Chinese one:

If you would be happy for a week take a wife; if you would be happy for a month kill a pig; but if you would be happy all your life plant a garden.

Sounds decidedly Chinese to me, and I’ve googled up many websites which say so. None of them cite any particular source, so who knows? It’s still good advice.

To that end, I did some housekeeping on this site and rediscovered many, many hateful things about CSS, XHTML and Wordpress.

Here are some of them:

• Wordpress automatically inserts paragraph tags around anything that looks like a paragraph, and doesn’t check the result for XHTML-well-formedness.
• Wordpress is hard-coded to create XHTML, but serves all pages with Content-Type text/html, meaning browsers interpret them as tag soup. This is no improvement over HTML 4, but it’s just as well, since it’s very, very, very hard to make Wordpress generate 100% valid XHTML.
• The markup which YouTube gives you to embed their videos is not valid in any markup language.

My conclusions are that:

1. it’s not possible to produce valid web pages with Wordpress unless you forego certain standard web features, or are an expert web developer
2. this does not matter, because tag soup is the state-of-the-art in web rendering.

I thus abandon the pursuit of valid XHTML, and await the hegemony of HTML 5.

Also, the site is no longer powered by Fair Trade bandwidth; all packets are now hand-encoded by Burmese slave-children. It’s less reliable, as the weaker tykes occasionally get their fingers mangled in the frame relays, but it’s a helluva lot cheaper.

Today has been too geeky, so:

This is Lucy II. Her understanding of cause and effect is limited. She doesn’t know that tipping over an upturned glass will grant her playtime with the spider within, but she does know that meowing directly into my ear at 5am will cause the window to open.