October 2003 Archives

Ooops.

Mac users are roaring in rage because of a nasty installment glitch that erases data on external hard drives.

After upgrading to Mac OS X 10.3, better known as Panther, they are finding external FireWire drives are no longer recognized by the host machine. In many cases, all the data the drives stores are also gone.

The problem appears to be widespread, judging by dozens of posts on forums and websites like MacFixit and Macintouch. Apple's own discussion forums had more than 274 postings on the issue by Thursday afternoon, far more than any other issue.

"It's not a fluke or an isolated incident," said Ben Wilson, senior editor of Macfixit, a respected Macintosh troubleshooting site. "Based on reports we've seen, I'd say it was pretty serious."

The glitch is particularly troubling because many Mac users backed up their files to an external FireWire drive before installing the Panther upgrade. In some cases, the glitch erased files on the main machine and the external backup.

Bye-Bye Data: Glitch in Panther

You know you live in Arizona when people start acting like we live in the North Pole as soon as the temperature drops below 80°.

Someone in my office yesterday asked "when are they going to turn the heat on?". This was followed last on the news last night by a reporter "reporting live in downtown Phoenix". He was wearing a jacket that wouldn't have looked out of place on someone climbing Everest. It was 71°.

A few of us from the office went out for breakfast this morning at a cool place called 'Le Peep'. Had a good laugh but the downside is that I'm still *so* full I can hardly keep my eyes open. You can forget about lunch, I'll be lucky if I can manage to eat dinner when I get home tonight :-)

According to my activity log mt-blacklist is working like a charm. In two weeks, 27 comments have been denied based on the following regex rule alone[0]:

[\w\-_.]*phentermine[\w\-_.]*.[a-z]+

Six Apart are hiring, perhaps they should hire Jay Allen.

[0] And I don't even have many visitors to this site, can you imagine the number of spam comments *popular* bloggers receive :-)

The local Arizona TV news is reporting that the smoke from the California wildfires will be reaching Phoenix tomorrow. Apparently the winds have changed and will be blowing the smoke our way.

Smoke from the southern California fires has drifted into Arizona, prompting a statewide smoke advisory that will continue until at least until the weekend.

Until mid-week, smoke from the California fires had been pushed to the west over the Pacific Ocean by the Santa Ana winds. Those wind patterns have now changed, bringing the smoke inland.

Smoke from S. Calif. wildfires drifting into Ariz.

Woo-hoo, the first Rugby World Cup tape arrived from blighty yesterday. So, for the past two days, as soon as I get home from work it's all Rugby all the time :-)

As you can imagine, Rugger isn't exactly popular over here in the US so when I get a Rugby tape it's like Christmas has come early. Even Sally said "ok Kev, you can stop grinning now". It's the little things in life that make me smile :-)

The California wildfires from NASA's viewpoint.

Link via ziggy.

I can sleep easy again tonight knowing that the winner of the annual Rock-Paper-Scissors competition has been decided :-)

TORONTO - The cavernous club was filled with hundreds of fierce competitors. Striped-shirted referees kept order during the grueling hand-to-hand combat. In the end, it came down to two men and three "weapons" — rock, paper and scissors.

Rob Krueger, 31, of Toronto, was the winner — hands down — of the second International World Rock Paper Scissors Championship on Saturday night, taking home the $3,750 first prize.

Toronto Man Is Rock-Paper-Scissors Champ

Yesterday we took the dogs up to Sedona for a little walk. A four hour round trip to take the dogs for a walk might seem a little excessive but a good time was had by all :-) As always, the scenery was nothing short of breathtaking and we had an excellent meal before driving home. I took my camera but forgot to actually take any photos - doh :-)

Watched 28 Days Later. Not bad but wasn't anywhere near as good as everyone made it out to be. Then as luck would have it, HBO were playing Pulp Fiction so we watched that. Damn good movie, why don't I have that on DVD?

I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank Dave & Tara (house across the street) for making sure none of us overslept this morning. In fact I think that waking the street up at 6:15am on a Saturday is quite reasonable actually. I'd also like to say a big thanks to the workmen for making sure they parked their trucks & diggers outside my house and for making as much noise as they possibly could. It's not like anyone was trying to sleep or anything silly like that :-)

I know they must have been excited at getting that new swimming pool but they could have made sure the workmen didn't show up until at least 9:00am or something. Is that too much to ask?

Fred Kaplan does a good job summarizing Rumsfeld's 'leaked' Iraq memo.

Another question might be added to this list: Have you ever read a more pathetic federal document in your life? What is being stated here can be summed up as follows: We'll probably win the battle for Afghanistan and Iraq (or, more precisely, it's "pretty clear" we "can win" it, "in one way or another" after "a long, hard slog"), but we're losing the struggle for hearts and minds in the broader war against terrorism. Not only that, we don't know how to measure winning or losing, we don't have a plan for winning it, we don't know how to fashion a plan, and the bureaucratic agencies put in charge of waging this war and drawing up these plans may be inherently incapable of doing so.

Rumsfeld's Pentagon Papers

Hmm, my laptop is being awfully naughty today. I had just booted into Linux and had Evolution & XMMS running. Suddenly the whole thing froze. Nothing worked. Couldn't power cycle the damn thing either because the power button didn't respond. Nice. Ended up taking the battery out and pulling the power cord out. Not the best way of rebooting your laptop but I didn't have any other choice. Got the nice "you suck, your filesystems were not cleanly unmounted" message upon reboot and all kinds of disk errors were found. They were supposedly fixed and I was about 3 minutes into a nice clean boot when the same bloody thing happened again, everything was frozen solid.

Bugger.

So now I'm about 10 minutes into *another* boot and I'm crossing my fingers because all is working well. This is one of those WTF moments :-)

The pilot on the last flight of the Concorde:

"We're going to take you to the edge of space, where the sky gets darker, where you can see the curvature of the earth.

"We're going to travel across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound, faster than a rifle bullet, 23 miles every minute. We're going to travel so fast, we are moving faster than the earth's rotation -- and the world will be watching us."

Sad Day to Sip Champagne for Concorde Celebrities

I would have *loved* to have flown on the Concorde. Such a shame it's retiring.

Instead of searching by author or title, amazon.com now has the ability to search *every* word on *every* page of over 120,000 books to find what you're after. Love 'em or hate 'em, you've got to admit that the new search is quite impressive.

Bruce Schneier on why terror profiles by computers are ineffective.

I have an idea. Timothy McVeigh and John Allen Muhammad - one of the accused D.C. snipers - both served in the military. I think we need to put all U.S. ex-servicemen on a special watch list, because they obviously could be terrorists. I think we should flag them for "special screening" when they fly and think twice before allowing them to take scuba-diving lessons.

What do you think of my idea? I hope you're appalled, incensed and angry that I question the honesty and integrity of our military personnel based on the actions of just two people. That's exactly the right reaction. It's no different whether I suspect people based on military service, race, ethnicity, reading choices, scuba-diving ability or whether they're flying one way or round trip. It's profiling. It doesn't catch the few bad guys, and it causes undue hardship on the many good guys who are erroneously and repeatedly singled out. Security is always a trade-off, and in this case of "data mining" the trade-off is a lousy one.

Terror Profiles By Computers Are Ineffective

Link via Ned Batchelder.

The restaurant food was *excellent*. I had Thresher Shark and Sally had Rainbow Trout. Some of the best seafood I've ever had I think.

To say I'm full would be the understatement of the year :-)

It's my 7th wedding anniversary today. I've got the day off as well which is super nice. We're going out to dinner tonight at the rather spiffy Fish Market. Can't wait - yum :-)

As I was driving to work this morning the new No Doubt song came on the radio. They've covered the Talk Talk classic 'It's My Life'. They did quite a good job actually. Hearing that song (even a cover version) has got me all interested in Talk Talk again. I'm going to dig out my old Talk Talk records (yes records, not CDs) later tonight I think.

Ah yes, the 80s :-)

Next to Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and its sequels are probably the most anticipated DVD releases, one fans have been clamoring for almost since DVD's 1997 launch.

The Indy set is already at No. 1 on Amazon.com's sales chart, despite its hefty price tag. And at Tower Records and Video, a national chain of 98 music and movie stores, video merchandising director Rick Timmermans says advance orders are neck-and-neck with TheLord of The Rings: The Two Towers. "It's one of the largest purchases we've done in our history," he says. "It's like the Holy Grail to some of these people."

Indy prepares to raid stores

I've spent the better part of my day trying to reverse engineer some Javascript from hell and I've had quite enough of that thanks very much. I'm using WWW::Mechanize to automatically submit some forms - easy enough. Some of the webpages I'm working with have between 1000 and 1300 lines of Javascript doing all kinds of annoying things prior to submitting the form though.

I'm not a big fan of Javascript :-)

Think the car crash that killed Princess Diana back in 1997 was a little fishy? You might have been right all along :-)

Princess Diana warned of a plot to kill her in a car crash 10 months before her death, it was claimed today.

In a letter that her former butler, Paul Burrell, says she told him to keep "just in case", she writes that a crash was being planned so Prince Charles could remarry.

Diana 'told of plot to kill her'

Link via Dave.

What is it about bookshops? They lure you in and you get stuck in some form of timewarp. Before you know what's going on, hours of your life are lost.

We went out to eat last night and (wouldn't you know) there was a Barnes & Noble across the street from the restaurant. So obviously we got sucked into it's tractor beam and wandered like zombies into the shop :-)

Actually I really don't know what happens to me when I get in a book shop, I do spend *ages* just browsing around. I look at this book, flick through that book, read interesting magazines (you know, because I'm a bit of a scrooge and wouldn't want to actually *buy* them).

About an hour and $60 later (well, I said a *bit* of a scrooge, not a total scrooge), we left the shop to go home :-)

Gather round for Uncle Kev will give you the following public service announcement. This week's DVD to avoid like the plague: Hollywood Homicide. Don't quite know why I sat through the whole thing to be honest. When *was* the last time Harrison Ford made a good movie anyway? At least next week I'll forget he made this stinker because it will be all Indiana Jones, all the time.

To make up for watching that utter drivel we watched a couple of classics. For perhaps the hundreth time (lost count to be honest) we watched War Games - the movie (along with Tron) that is probably responsible for getting me interested in computers in the first place [0].

Then we watched The Thing, which is really quite good. I'm a fan of John Carpenter's earlier work: Halloween, The Fog, Escape From New York. Then, I think, he got a bit crap and didn't make anything decent until 1998's Vampires.

[0] - At the ripe old age of, er, 10.

When your ratings are slipping, just go back to telling fibs so you can scare the American public into supporting you again. Sigh.

Along with his $87 billion request to Congress for Iraq spending, his admitting the lack of a Saddam-9/11 connection caused Bush's ABC News approval rating to plummet from 58 percent in September to 47 percent in October. The truth didn't play well. Therefore, relying on H.L. Mencken's observation that no one ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the American public, Bush has returned to the same old lies he has already admitted.

On Oct. 10, without offering a smidgen of new evidence, Dick Cheney again asserted a connection between 9/11 and Operation Iraqi Fiefdom. "Iraq has become the central front in the war on terror. Our mission in Iraq is a great undertaking and part of a larger mission that the United States accepted now more than two years ago. September 11, 2001 changed everything for this country."

Although no evidence of weapons of mass destruction has been found in Iraq, Cheney also reverted to the White House's pre-war argument for preemptive invasion: "We could not accept the grave danger of Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies turning weapons of mass destruction against us or our friends or allies." Saddam = terrorism = 9/11 but even worse.

ANATOMY OF A LIE

Tim Bray made me chuckle on his latest blog post. He's trying out BitTorrent and made one of the worst excuses I've ever heard justifying why he's downloading porn.

there was Debbie Does Dallas and what do you know, it was almost exactly one gig in size, which not only appealed to the quantitative geek here, but I seem dimly to remember actually having seen it at a stag party in 1979 or thereabouts, which is more than I can say for the rest of the loot out there in BitTorrent-land.

Debbie Does BitTorrent

Ah, so you're downloading it just because it's a 1 gig file. Ok sure, whatever, I believe you Tim :-) I dunno, joke or not, admitting in your blog that you download porn over the internet seems a little, er, brave.

Yeah I'll admit it, I actually like Duran Duran. I bought all their albums when I was a youngster. To be honest, I'd much rather listen to their albums than some of the utter wank that record companies are pushing lately. Have you looked at the US top 10 singles chart recently? If you don't like rap or R&B then you're shit out of luck there my friend.

Anyway, it seems that Duran Duran are still quite popular if ticket sales for their new tour is anything to go by.

The London show is the first in Britain with the original line-up for 18 years and follows a series of concerts in Japan and the United States.

Their publicist said all 2,000 tickets had sold out within 20 minutes of going on sale and were changing hands on the Internet for 200 pounds ($330) each.

Duran Duran to Play Sell-Out London Show

After all the "yeah but what if" conversations have ended, sit back and only worry about the things you *need* to implement instead of over engineering. Chances are you aren't gonna need it anyway.

Now, back to coding :-)

I don't remember the last time we were this busy at work. For the past couple of weeks it's been all go. If I wasn't bound by the beast that is the NDA I would tell you about a new project we're going live with next week. Damn it's cool. Oh well.

I found myself grinning at a couple of discussions that have recently appeared on Perlmonks concerning Very::Long::Module::Names. I've been guilty of that myself just lately. As part of $NEW_PROJECT I've written a basic OO framework for processing mbox type type mailboxes & 'doing stuff' with email attachments (with, er, a little help from the lovely goodness that is the CPAN of course). One of my classes is named PHX::MailProc::Handler::Audit and another PHX::MailProc::Handler::Decrypt. Long module names? Who, me?

If you have a Movable Type blog then run, don't walk, over to Mr Jay Allen's site and download his *awesome* mt-blacklist plugin.

I just installed & tested it and it is SCHWEET :-)

I first started getting comment spam back in May and up until last week I'd been getting about 2-3 a week. Now I get about 5 a day and it's bloody annoying. I'm annoyed enough about having to delete them that I might try out MT-Blacklist this week.

Grr.

Lucas is *finally* putting out the Indiana Jones series on DVD. Yes, I kid you not. We watched The Italian Job tonight (not a bad movie in fact) and one of the trailers was an advertisement for a 4 DVD Indiana Jones extravaganza. The 3 movies take up the first 3 DVDs and there are some extra "goodies" on the fourth one.

I can't wait :-)

Now this is scary, I honestly couldn't believe what I was reading. The Vatican are actually telling people in countries with AIDS epidemics to *not* wear condoms. What the hell are they thinking?

The Catholic Church is telling people in countries stricken by Aids not to use condoms because they have tiny holes in them through which the HIV virus can pass - potentially exposing thousands of people to risk.

The church is making the claims across four continents despite a widespread scientific consensus that condoms are impermeable to the HIV virus.

The WHO has condemned the Vatican's views, saying: "These incorrect statements about condoms and HIV are dangerous when we are facing a global pandemic which has already killed more than 20 million people, and currently affects at least 42 million."

Vatican: condoms don't stop Aids

I just read that the SETI@home client & backend are having a major overhaul by moving over to BOINC. Don't know how this impacts SETI::WebStats yet.

Had a day off today so I took a few mins to finish up version 1.03 of SETI::WebStats.

The uploaded file

No action is required on your part
Request entered by: KSPENCER (Kevin Spencer)
Request entered on: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 02:31:09 GMT
Request completed: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 02:32:06 GMT

Remember in 'Back To The Future' when the Doc was emptying all kinds of waste/trash/rubbish into the tube on the back of the Delorean so that it had fuel for time travel? Remember thinking how cool that would be if (one day) you could empty all kinds of crap into your car for fuel instead of visiting the petrol station?

In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil.

Really.

"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming."

Anything into Oil

Blimey, Ben & Mena Trott (of er, Movable Type fame) were on CNN last night talking about MT & TypePad. That's quite cool. How many other pieces of Perl software have been mentioned on CNN (or any national TV channel for that matter) I wonder? Probably not many.

• Chocolate fudge ice cream might actually be the best food on the planet
• Speaker phone is very handy for those 2.5 hour conference calls
• Studying for a Statistics exam sucks
• Condi Rice is going to be in charge of the restructured Iraq rebuild effort - scary
• California recall election today
• I really hope Arnold doesn't win
• Why are Apple powerbooks so expensive?
• What the hell was that dream supposed to mean last night?
• How annoying is Jessica Simpson anyway?

As soon as this weeks studying is complete I must remember to install VICE. Apparently it's a rather spiffy Commodore 64 emulator. I can't wait to play some of my old favourite games again. Blimey, now that I think about it, how many hours did I spend as a lad playing games on my C-64? Considering it was all I did between the ages of 10-15, that should give you some indication :-)

From age 15-21 I largely ignored video games. Sure there were a brief moments with the Amiga and SuperNES but they cannot in any way compare to my C-64 days. Then thanks to my wife being a big video game fan, I seem to have got (some) of the old interest back. Ever since the Nintendo 64 & Sony Playstation came out I've been what you would call an 'avid gamer'. I've now got a PS2 and a Gamecube and play the occasional PC game.

Anyway, it will be good to go down memory lane again with some of those old C-64 games.

I love Eddie Izzard - bloody funny man. Izzard as the new Dr Who though? I dunno he might fit in rather well.

Cross-dressing comedian Eddie Izzard is to be the new Dr Who, according to a former star of the sci-fi series.

Tom Baker, the fourth man to play the Time Lord, told BBC Radio Five Live that the "mysterious and strange" Izzard had landed the part.

Comic Izzard tipped as new Dr Who

I highly recommend this little bugger as it helped me out no end at work today. Andy Lester's rather spiffy WWW::Mechanize. It absolutely rocks!

Sally and I were watching the news last night and in some parts of the country they are sending out the salt trucks to combat the icy roads. Icy roads eh? Yesterday Phoenix tied the record temperature for the 30th of September with a rather chilly 107°. Today doesn't look any better, it's currently around 102°.

It's October fer crissakes, it *has* to start getting cooler soon surely :-)

Tim Bray made me chuckle with his latest blog entry regarding how we communicate with each other nowadays.

Then I looked at the screen and saw the dozens of folders full of thousands of emails, the Web browser parked at a Wiki, the chat icons, and the RSS aggregator. Feeling a little overwhelmed, I looked around the room and saw the newspapers, the magazines, the TV, and a pile of unanswered (physical) mail, as well as Lauren’s and my cellphones charging and the land-line on the sideboard. All these are about moving messages around. So I ask: which is the right one to use?

The Input Spectrum