East of the Sun, West of the Moon

2006/4/7

WikiMeme

Filed under: Meme — Erwin @ 8:36 pm

Picked up from Cartazon:

Goto Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.

Let’s see…

  • Facts:
    • 800 – Coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor, in Rome.
    • 1776 – George Washington and his army cross the Delaware River to attack Britain’s Hessian mercenaries in Trenton, New Jersey.
    • 1991 – Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as president of the Soviet Union (the union itself is dissolved the next day).
  • Born::
    • 1642 (O.S.) – Sir Isaac Newton, English physicist and mathematician (d. 1727)
    • 1899 – Humphrey Bogart, American actor (d. 1957)
  • Died::
    • 1977 – Charlie Chaplin, English actor (b. 1889)

I wasn’t aware that Charlie Chaplin was English, you think the lack of accent helped? ;-)

That sucked

Filed under: Projects,Technology — Erwin @ 7:45 pm

The harddisk on which we store(d) our MythTV recordings plus some that pre-date our use of MythTV died this morning. Big oops!

Sure, it had been on my longer-term TODO list to put a RAID-1 in place so that it would better resist hardware failure of this sort, but I have been running low on Round Tuits ™ so that had not happened yet. Ahem.

Thankfully it keeps its program/recording information in a MySQL database that lives on a different harddisk, so after redirecting the appropriate folders to a different location (temporarily, honest) where I have a little diskspace available, and manually marking all the AWOL recordings as gone, it cheerfully resumed picking up shows again.

I do maintain backups, mind you, of the home-directories, work-stations, website contents, and a few other things, but these recordings involve a lot of data and didn’t fit into the existing backup system.

Partially related is that earlier this week M pointed out that the Lost episodes of the past two weeks were actually new, not re-runs, so on Wednesday evening we sat down and caught up, then last night we watched the most recent episode from the previous evening. Lucky us, obviously!

Consider this a friendly reminder to keep good backups around. ;-)

Update: Replacement HDs have been ordered and are on their way. The failing HD will be RMA’d.

2006/4/6

!&$*#! comments (2)

Filed under: Site,Software — Erwin @ 12:17 pm

It looks like installing Spam Karma is paying off, given that in two weeks it has blocked over 150 spam comments and back-track attempts and I didn’t have to do anything for it, while regular commenters were, as far as I’m aware, not scared off by it in any way. :)

2006/4/5

Linkage (39)

Filed under: Linkage,News,OS X,Software,Technology — Erwin @ 4:03 pm

The NY Times isn’t doing itself any favours (The Register):

To be fair, the W3.org markup validator found only 338 errors on the NYT home page, which is not that bad, compared to technology news outfit c|net’s 449 errors.

Apple now officially supports the idea of multi-booting its Intel machines, at least as far as WinXP is concerned:

Word to the Wise

Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.

My space, your space (3)

Filed under: Humo(u)r — Erwin @ 3:40 pm

I bet this comic did more for parent/kid awareness of privacy issues on MySpace and various blogging sites than many a radio, tv, or paper article. ;-)

[Stonesoup 20060403]

Clocks

Filed under: Family,Software,Technology — Erwin @ 1:59 am

Last weekend, after I had already moved most of the clocks forward, there was a fun thunderstorm and a (1.5 hour or so) power-outage in this neighbourhood. This made me sit down and think about how many clocks we have around the house:

  • Kitchen [2]: Stove (mechanical, no battery), microwave (no battery).
  • Diningroom [1]: Digital alarm-clock (no battery).
  • Livingroom [2]: VCR (with battery).
  • Master bedroom [2]: Alarm clock (no battery), DVD/radio alarm (with short-term battery).
  • A‘s bedroom [1]: Alarm clock (no battery).
  • N‘s bedroom [1]: Alarm clock (no battery).
  • Bathroom [1]: Alarm clock (no battery).
  • Home office [5]: Coffee machine (no battery), mini-microwave (no battery), a 3-in-1 set of clocks (with battery).
  • Wrist watches [2]: Two for the boys, us adults have started to rely on our cellphones for this.
  • Cell phones [2]: Right. These have the option to sync with the cell-tower but those towers don’t always sync very nicely themselves, there can be several minutes from one tower to another. As a result I typically turn that feature off in mine.
  • PDAs [2]: These sync with the PCs, see below.

Observations:

  • Modern technology comes with a lot of fun, but it’s also a pain to adjust 19-20 clocks for daylightsaving twice a year.
  • One word: Power-outage (ok, maybe 2-ish words)
  • The kids have the nerve to complain that not all clocks are showing the same time at the same time!

Of course all of the (Linux and OS X running) servers and workstations are set up to sync using NTP and of course automatically do The Right Thing ™ every spring and fall so I can always rely on them.

I’m looking forward to the day that all these clocks automatically sync with a time-server. It doesn’t have to be some atomic clock in Colorado, since that doesn’t scale very well if you take your clocks to another continent, but I suppose it’s cheaper to implement than putting 802.11-something in them. ;-)

What’s the damage in your house if the power goes out?

2006/4/4

Geek stuff

Filed under: Technology — Erwin @ 10:02 pm

I blame Ciani for me now pondering these purchases:

Remote Dimmer

LED Lighted Slippers

Thanks… I think. ;)

2006/4/3

My space, your space (2)

Filed under: General — Erwin @ 6:37 pm
  • Not so good is that every other profile page has music embedded and initially I couldn’t seem to convince the myspace account settings that I really don’t want those to automatically play. Ugh!
  • Not so good is that the profile pages are a throw-back to webpages of 5-10 years ago, but with double the (browser lagging) content.
  • Good is that MySpace appears to make an effort to prevent spamming. I can’t write in (group) forums yet for instance, because my account is less than a week old.
  • Not so good (from my perspective) is that it encourages ugly hacks to get customized CSS in place, instead of just giving in and providing a single look’n'feel entry for the experts to play with. What happens now is that you can enter HTML/DHTML/CSS bits in other fields and users dump it there so it’s loaded halfway the page instead of at the beginning. Ugh.
  • Good is that MySpace has a private profile option for the younger kids.

My space, your space

Filed under: General — Erwin @ 5:28 am

I’m currently vaguely looking around MySpace; You know, where all the cool kids hang out these days, or something. ;-)

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone reading here is out there too and wouldn’t mind extending their network some more?

Foolishness (2)

Filed under: Humo(u)r,Technology — Erwin @ 5:21 am

Here are some more:

  • Wireless Extension Cords at ThinkGeek.
  • The introduction of a new TLD for Fryslân, a province in the Netherlands that actually has its own (official) language. Unfortunately I can’t see the entire joke because (I’m guessing) only customers of the participating Dutch ISPs can currently see the otherwise non-existent .fy TLD.
  • MS blogger Robert Scoble would be going to Google.
  • Wikipedia (of course) has a list of this year’s hoaxes.
  • Similarly, Wired has a top 10 of internet hoaxes/spoofs over the years, courtesy of Drew Curtis of Fark.com fame.

Have fun reading through all that. :-)

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