Keith Graham

I bought three packages of bees to replace hives that died over the winter. When you get a package, the queen comes in a little mesh covered box with sugar plugging one end and then a cork. After you dump the bees into the hive you have to take the cork out and hope that the bees eat the sugar plug and release the queen bee. It is done this way so the bees get used to their new queen and won’t kill her.
I installed the three packages last Friday afternoon. Now it has been three days so I have to check to see if the queens have been released. One hive had released their queen and one had not. The other looked like they had gnawed mostly through the sugar, but the queen bee was still inside the cage. I released the trapped queens and put the lids back on the boxes.
I am being careful about this because last year I was not feeling well, and I did not release the bees properly. By the time I got around to checking the queens were dead in two boxes. This is a waste of $150 per box, plus the gas to get up to Kingston, NY and back. This year I am feeling much better and I think that I did a good job.
There is no guarantee that the queens will flourish in the hives.
The queens should start laying eggs almost immediately. The eggs will hatch in 21 days. I should see the new bees at the entrances to the hives on May 18th. Sometime in the next couple of weeks I will open the hives and look for “brood” which is immature bees. If I don’t see any then I will have to hurry up and find a queen. A hive without a queen is often cranky and will sting anyone who comes near it. If one of the three hives is behaving different than the others, I will open it as soon as I get a good day to see what is going on.
Beekeeping is much more technical than you would think. That’s why so many programmers seem to keep bees if they can.

Back when I wasn’t feeling well I became very frustrated when I tried to update my plugins. I just couldn’t trust my logic. Today I was able to get around these frustrations and update the plugins to show that they work with the latest versions of WordPress. This, at least, is a start.
I want to make some changes to the plugins other than version numbers. I am not sure that I should be wasting my time. I am making about $20 a year off them and it seems to be that it is not worth the effort.
I get requests and complaints from users which I largely ignore. I can’t debug minor issues related to conflicts with other plugins.
The “No Right Click” plugin will probably never work on every website with every browser. Browsers do not want you messing with the context menu. I tried running JavaScript that prevented right clicks altogether, but even that didn’t work. The “No Right Click” plugin has 5000 users which I don’t understand. It must be working for some people.
I don’t understand why “The Astounding Spam” plugin is not more popular. I am going to update some of the tables and see if it helps.

I sat down with the laptop this morning and tried to access www.kpgraham.com. It timed out and I figured that I still had some work to do.
It turns out that I had been experimenting with my hosts file trying to force access to the domain and I had done it wrong. I cleared out the hosts file and reset the dns cache. It worked just fine.
One of the things that concerns me is that Cloudflare “flattens” my “CNAME” dns entry to point directly to the IP address of my server. I worry what is going to happen when Optimum changes my IP address. It does that after power outages, or when the network resets things in the computer room in West Nyack. I don’t know if Cloudflare will re-flatten the dns entry.
For the time being www.kpgraham.com and www.cthreepo.com are working well and I will sit tight. I found a bunch of broken links in cthreepo.com and I am writing a program to validate my links. It will use the apache access control to report the bad links and requires some fancy programming. We’ll see if I am up to it.

I discovered, after 4 days of trying to fix things, that Optimum blocks the web port 80, so I could not access my home computer from the internet. I was running WAMP and I have moved kpgraham.com to my office computer. I was upset when I found out that my cable company did this.
I had an inspiration and searched for the cure. Of course I found it on some obscure discussion board and I’ll be damned, but it worked.
Now I have to do some more configuring and I am done with this site.
It goes from my browser to cloudflare to noip.com to my box. Very cool. I will have to see how stable it is.
www.cthreepo.com is next.

Wamp is a way of running the Apache web server with PHP and MySQL on your own machine. Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP.
I have been using Wamp for many years to test things. Now I am going to use it to make sites that the world can see that run right here.
I am using a website called NOIP.COM to provide the internet address of my home network and you should be able to see https://www.kpgraham.com on the computer in my home office.
Why? I can eventually run all of my websites for free. The only down side is that when the power goes out I may have to click a few things to get it started again.

I have been fooling with github,com and netlify.com and have been able to turn some of my hosted sites into static pages. It seemed very difficult, but it turned out to be possible. I think this site -kpgraham.com- might be the next site to work on.

The advantage is that I can write a web page, in this case a blog entry, and then “commit” it to github and magically it appears on the internet.

Github gives you 2GB of space and believe it or not, that is not enough to put all my websites out as static sites. CThreePO.com is about 1GB and HarpAmps.com is about 3GB. Some people create multiple user ids on github, but I want a better alternative.

I have a local webserver called WAMP running on this machine (the desktop in my “office”) and I can run everything that I need here. What I am having trouble with is connecting my local machine to the outside world. My router will not allow me to connect to NO-IP.com and I can’t afford a static IP address. (If this confuses you, don’t worry. It means that my network address keeps changing every time there is a power outage or my router resets, and I have no way of announcing to the real world that my web server is here.)

I am going to spend some money on a fancy router sooner or later and get this working.

https://www.cthreepo.com is my oldest domain. The content is even older so this is a record of my blogging writings going back at least 25 years.
I felt a little sharper this week, so I revived a static version of the site. In so doing I lost a hundred or so program pages, but they are no great loss.
It is fascinating to read how I wrote and thought back then. I was pretty smart back in those days.