Phooey
Around 5:08pm today, I walked out of my downtown office to catch the bus home. Around 5:22pm, just around the time I walked in my front door, pell decided that this was just the time to play the fun game known as "Controlled Flight into Terrain", thus converting my mail and weblog machine into a small pile of smoldering rubble.
Fortunately I keep nightly backups, so I could move the weblog over to a different machine until I can get back into my colocation facilty and reset the damned machine.
Unfortunately, there were a couple of spiffy features with the backup machine that make the emergency relocated TSFR a little less than totally useful. The first was that my pell backup was located at home, so that if the colo burned down the backups would be safe. "At home" is located on the other side of a cable modem, which has a 128kb upstream link. And the backup is 560 megabytes, which has to creep slowly back across the wire to the other machine I've got in the colo. But that's not the worst problem. No, the worst problem is that once I copied tsfr over to the backup machine, I ended up with the files on a FreeBSD machine that runs the swiss army battleship of webservers (apache, in case you're wondering.) This means that I end up with the weblog on a machine where annotations doesn't work quite right, and where I have to fight to the death with the goddamn web server to get it to do _anything_ without a fight. So, even if annotations did work properly, I still couldn't post to tsfr because the STUPID STUPID STUPID webserver will not read .htaccess files and authenticate users. (and when annotations spits back a 401 or 500 webpage, the STUPID STUPID STUPID webserver swallows the error page and spits out one of its own that contains not one single piece of useful information. Thttpd sucks in its own little annoying way, but it's so small that I can actually track down the mystical "hi, I'm not working and I'm not going to tell you why" message and replace it with one that says something useful.
Yes, I know. All hardware sucks, all software sucks. Tomorrow I suspect I'll be doing some debugging with a bulk tape eraser and a 5 pound sledgehammer.