18th October, 2007, we lost a dear old friend, a (mostly) Siamese cat yclept "Gwai-loh." Gwai was quite vocal, as are many Siamese; he also had some strange characteristics, for instance you could hold him upside-down on the ceiling and he would walk around - inverted - for as long as you were willing to hold him up there. For years, we kept him around the office, and he had a habit of coming up for affection when whoever he was approaching was on the phone. So he'd come up to you, get right up to your face (and the phone) and let loose with a really loud meow. Which you would then have to explain to the customer. One time I was on the phone with a rather famous Hollywood special effects dude when Gwai let loose with this, we had a good laugh over it. Eventually, we put up a web page on our site with a .wav of Gwai's signature meow, and a picture of him staring at a screensaver on a ginormous (for the time) monitor. A surprising amount of the code in WinImages was written with Gwai warm and settled either in my lap or across my arms.

Well, eventually, the old boy's liver failed, and I put out a rather startling amount of money to see if we could get around that, and amazingly enough, it worked. We got two more years of Gwai, all of it of quite high quality, before he finally laid down for the last time. His last couple of days were spent purring and head bumping while all the while refusing to eat or drink... finally, he just didn't wake up.

I miss him terribly. Sometimes it hits me right between the eyes and I can't even think straight. I can't dig over a decade and a half of unconditional love and affection out of my system with any amount of rationalization or any other flavor of self-bullshittery. Here's to my grizzled old friend. I only hope he knew how much I loved him in return.

Is anyone else as annoyed as I am by words and phrases in web articles that pop up boxes because my mouse pointer happened to cross them, temporarily hiding the content I was reading in the first place? I didn't click on anything, and consequently, I don't want a context change. I find these annoying to the point of noting what the site is and not going back. Anyone else feel the same? Anyone have a defense of the practice?

I went to this article today to read it in response to a slashdot posting, and managed to accidentally activate the wireless mouseover / popup as I was reading. Bam. Content hidden, thought stream interrupted. Isn't this essentially popups, revisited?

So I wake up this morning, and Putin has dissolved his government.

Then, same morning, Russia announces a bomb with nuclear-level destructive capability. But they say they're not escalating.

Then, later the same day, the US announces they have a matter-antimatter (proton/positron) annihilation laser, which, they say, is to normal lasers as nuclear weapons are to normal bombs.

At the same time, Bush, old "We'll never pull 'em out", is about to announce a troop pullback in Iraq.

Oil's hovering around $80 a barrel. The dollar is in the outhouse, and we've basically had many of our civil rights eliminated or made irrelevant.

Did I miss something here?

What a week....

First of all I discover a week after the event that mirror.ac.uk is out of action after Jisc withdrew funding back in March.

I use this occassionally as my main CPAN mirror and other stuff and rarely visit the home page so didn't pick up from the message on the mirror.ac.uk either. Mind you just everyone I've asked about this in the .ac.uk sysadmin community and wider we're aware of it either, so I don't feel so bad. Alot of the time I tended to Mirror Service run but the the guys at Computer Labs Kent Uni as they has a fuller mirror list and used to run mirror.ac.uk before Eduserve at Bath got the contract. At least now CPAN is listing MirrorService as a valid mirror.

Another this that's happening in the UK this week is the fact the VirginMedias (was NTL/Telewest) Cable TV/broadband network has been suffering massive outages since around 1600 Monday 6th August. Again no one in the press seems to have picked up on this, esp as they are currently involved in being sold to a private equity firm (used to called "asset stipper" ;-) or someone else.

As always, there are rumbles of discontent from the scientific community with regard to global warming. This article (vile email registration required) from R. Timothy Patterson, professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University, lays the overriding mechanism of climate change squarely at the feet of the various solar cycles. In the article, he explains that solar energy impacting the earth is part of the mechanism, while the sun's solar wind drives cloud formation in a complementary cycle that enhances the effect of the actual heat input. But that's not the kicker. The interesting part is he is predicting global cooling, rather than warming.

But wait; there's more. This months Discover Magazine (print version also) has a lengthy article about this same mechanism, that is, cloud formation driving the climate and the sun driving cloud formation by way of modulating the effect cosmic rays have, by Henrik Svensmark, the 49-year-old director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen.

Svensmark says that we are in a warming trend, so his conclusions are at odds with those of Patterson; but they both agree that CO2 isn't nearly the looming threat that it has been made out to be with regard to climate change.

Recently, Montana legislators made news when they passed legislation outlawing Real-ID, calling it a threat to privacy and liberty. Now, legislation making the taking of property by eminent domain for the purposes of increasing tax revenues illegal has been passed and signed into law by Montana's governor. For more on why this is a serious issue, check out the Supreme Court's "Kelo" decision, named after a Connecticut woman who (unsuccessfully) fought to keep her home from city plans to arbitrarily take it and subsequently turn it over to private developers with the objective of collecting higher tax revenues from the property.

Montana has a 2% unemployment rate at present, and maintains a balanced budget, something the feds might want to give some consideration to. I have to say that although I am typically very cynical about government, and although Montana has made some very serious mis-steps in terms of liberties in the last few decades, the state seems more interested in doing the right thing than the wrong thing at this point in time, and I am feeling very pleased with my representatives right now as a long-time resident.

With the recent news about cellphone activity allegedly being the underlying cause for the sudden loss of large numbers of bees, an insect that forges an absolutely critical and irreplaceable part of the food chain, is Apple's iPhone doomed to enter the market just as cell phones face severe clampdowns, or even wholesale replacement?

Cell phones operate at microwave frequencies for a pretty good reason; basically, microwaves enable small equipment. They also do a decent job of penetrating many types of structures, if not through the walls, then at least through the windows. However, there are other frequencies available, lower frequencies that have been busy for many decades without any significant observed effect on bees or other life. People already understand how useful cell phones are, and there are manufacturers with significant experience in VHF radio, to name one technically possible replacement band — so an interesting market shake-up is certainly feasible. Excellent VHF transceivers are marketed by amateur radio manufacturers, for example.

Normally, we would assume that an established, profitable market similar to the cellphone market would be stable and have a long, healthy life expectancy based on the functionality offered to the market. However, if the bees go, we will too - and that, ladies and gentleman, is an outcome that not even Steve Job's legendary reality distortion field can deal with.

Perhaps Apple should get back to working on OSX, and forget the iPhone. I have this nagging feeling that the iPhone is going to be this year's "politically incorrect" device. I know I've stopped using my cellphone for anything but emergency calls; how about you? Seen any bees lately?

It seems that UK's Channel 4 "Great Global Warming Swindle", which the anti-global warming crowd, including Janet Daley of the Telegraph (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/03/12/do1201.xml) has run into a bit of a problem; mainly that the only swindle going on was the program.

According to the RealClimate blog (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled/), the program was in fact a collection of defunct claims, half-truths, and in the case of Carl Wunsch's contribution, misrepresenting his views. This sort of deceit and dishonesty shouldn't be a surprise, but what is sad is that fiction suddenly gets trumpeted as a legitimate scientific critique of Global Warming.

I bought my daily-driver Mac, a mini, pretty much when the PowerPC mini was released. I was tempted beyond belief by that form factor, and the price. I loaded it; a gig of ram, bluetooth, wifi, modem, big drive (for the day), the superdrive, and so forth. I bought every option because the more that was jammed into the box, the more I liked the form factor. I know it's a little weird, but there you have it.

Since then, I've used the little box daily, for just about everything. It's been powered up since I bought it (thanks to a UPS.) This year, a couple of months ago, I bought a Mac laptop - a top of the line 17" Mac Pro - but I still use the mini every day. I've rebooted the mini many times, almost always in response to an Apple upgrade or security modification, once when I went from 10.3 to 10.4, never as an attempt to fix a problem. I've never had any problems of that kind, frankly.

Today, without any particular warning, my Mac dimmed the screen, locked my mouse and keyboard, popped a black rectangle up which informed me in no uncertain terms that I needed to reboot. Now. I lost a long post I had been writing for Kuro5hin.org, and I failed to even reach the level of being annoyed about that because it was just so astonishing to me that the mini had actually - gulp - crashed.

I just want to say that I hadn't even realized that my expectations had been silently and sneakily leveraged to be so astonishingly high. After years of being screwed with, and over, by Microsoft operating systems, I no longer expect that an OS should, or will, crash. Massive kudos to Apple.

...and my little PPC mini came right back up, and yes, I'm using it right now, and I still don't expect it to crash. :) I was using a beta version of a web browser and my guess is it was just a little too beta.

So, I've installed MacOS 10.4.8 on my PC. It's your run of the mill PC board from Gigabyte with an Opteron 165 (Dual core overclocker, cheap, check it out!) and 3GB RAM. I've got a lot of drive space, like 1.8T, on this box.

Anyways, I wanted to see if I could run MacOS on my PC. Well, after a little work, it runs. It runs well. In fact, I've been using it as my primary OS at home for about two weeks and it's been running stable. I have full CI/QE operating on my BFG 6800GT and dual monitors. Sound, net, it all works.

I downloads craploads of software. FCS (complete, 30GB,) the iLife DVD, Office:mac, Parallels, and I installed a copy of fink and MacPorts to play with.

It's certainly better then Windows. It's more enjoyable to use, and although MacOS isn't without bugs (you find strange little things here and there) it certainly hasn't had any serious problems. I mean, Windows is stable on this machine, and I wouldn't reboot XP for weeks at a time, but it still had dumb problems like Explorer hanging and such things.

All has not been wonderful in the land of MacOS, however. There's no good music players. Well, scratch that. iTunes is good. But it's certainly not great. It won't play WMA's. This is a problem for someone with over 4000 WMA's in addition to the 14,000 MP3's. You can convert them to MP3 with iTunes I believe, but I'd rather not convert already 192kbit WMA's to another lossy compression. It's not worth it.

There's Songbird, which shows promise, but it chokes if you have a music library large enough. I hope they fix it soon. It plays anything.

WinAMP won't run under crossover, and it seems silly to run an XP VM just to run WinAMP. It works, though, since Parallels Desktop is so good. It really blows the door off of VMWare (mac and PC) with video performance and sound quality. It's considerably slower on the backend then VMware workstation though - the CPU gets tied up easily and there's no obvious way to limit CPU usage for a virtual machine.

VLC is nicer on the Mac then the PC, just because of the way the menu bar has controls and the player can float like most apps. On Windows it's a little awkward if you use a skin, so you have to use the boring default Windows skin with VLC. VLC plays anything but has no media library.

Quicktime is pretty much the same as VLC as far as interface goes but plays less things.

I'm relegated to compiling and running Amarok, the KDE media player, installed with fink. This will be my second attempt at getting it compiled - I hope it works this time.

I hate the way applications are sorted. One giant bucket. I created a new sub-folder called "User Applications" and I dump new apps there into sub-folders. I found that if I moved out the default apple-installed stuff, when a new user logs on the dock will show all questionmarks because the links get broken. There's probably a way to fix it.

I had to install a utility called SteerMouse to adjust the mouse acceleration settings. The default MacOS mouse handling is like pushing your mouse through mud. The "slow" speed is always way too slow, and the acceletation too high. There's no good middle ground. SteerMouse fixes this. Apparently you can also install an MS Mouse driver but I didn't even go there.

I still don't like the menu bar, and it's a pain when you have multiple monitors. Lots of mouse rolling if you're working with an app off the primary screen. Maybe the new MacOS with it's "spaces" will help. You should have the option of putting a title bar on every screen, and have the last active window on that screen have the menu bar.

PowerPC apps do run slow, although it's not THAT bad. Office:mac runs okay. It's just an office suite, so it's fine. UB versions of most big name apps are available as updates or full packages already. But that leads me to the next thing:

Software. While Safari is a good browser, Firefox is much nicer. fink has allowed me to run many "Linux" apps that are better replacements for Windows apps then native OSX ones. Azureus is a great Bittorrent client (and not under Rosetta like the "official" BT client.) OSS rules.

The problem is that if you do more with your computer then media and Office, like play games, you're really buggered. I've witnessed first hand that you can play games on OS X. AOE3 runs fine, almost as fast as the Windows version. But there's just no titles, and the ones that do exist don't often play multiplayer with PC versions. It's a problem if you like games. Like a Mac with BootCamp, it sucks to boot into Windows just to play a game. This isn't really the fault of the MacOS, but it's a problem none-the-less.

But if you do like media stuff, there's a lot of it. Apple has been buying up a lot of software and releasing it for less money. Take Shake for instance - it used to cost $12K a seat from what I hear. Apple bought it, and released it for $400. Final Cut seems solid and is quickly gaining momentum in the pro-sumer videographer market. This is no doubt partly because Adobe has their heads up their ass with Premiere - Not only is a Premiere Pro not forthcoming on OSX, it's dog-slow on Windows. Really, it's slow. VERY DAMNED SLOW. I put together a small HDV video and it was like going old school with a Pentium 233Mhz and DV video. Avid Xpress and FCP have a lot less trouble working with HD content.

Spotlight is crap. It forever indexes everything, and eats up gobs of resources when it does so. I've tried the various work-arounds but it's unavoidable. And it's the only way to search.

File Systems. Yea, it's Microsoft's fault. NTFS is read-only on the Mac, but hopefully ntfs-3g will be ported or something. There's no good file system you can use that's accessible on both operating systems. I couldn't get the ext2fs to work on OSX (a lot of people have trouble with it) but the ext IFS for windows worked fine. MacDrive works fine on Windows, but won't mount read-write if Mac wasn't shut down properly and has no tool to check HFS disks. And it's slow. So, what are we left with? FAT32. Yea, wonderful. It works but it's scary on 500GB disks and you can't store files bigger then 4GB. (if anyone has a suggestion here, I'm all ears.)

Overall, this Hackintosh has been a lot of fun to play with. Really, it wasn't hard to get running. With so many things being USB, IEEE1394, and more "standard" in communication, Apple could make a few calls to some major vendors, get a little more driver support for MacOS, and release MacOS for general use. Or, they could stop outright trying to prevent it from running on a standard PC but offer it up as "unsupported."

I realize Apple makes shit loads of money on their hardware, but they've got a good product here and it's a shame they don't sell it.

I've used Vista and it's unimpressive. It's ugly, too. The black taskbar isn't bad, but the default powder blue window framing is nauseating and there's no way to change it. C'mon Microsoft, grow up a little.

I won't ever buy a Mac computer though, because they're TOO EXPENSIVE. I'd buy MacOS and Mac Apps, but not an Apple computer. --expecially now that they're REALLY just PC's. Before, they were "special" PC's because they used PowerPC chips. It would be one thing if they were a little bit more expensive then an HP or Dell but holy shit are the Mac's expensive. They're nice, yes, but they're sucky expensive.

---

I still dislike the Mac community. Wait, that's unfair. There's a lot of great developers writing things for OSX. Fink and MacPorts are really great, and there's tons of little utilities to overcome the shortcomings of the default OS. But I really can't stand the whiny bitches I see all over digg and around the internet. All these lame ass "switchers" stories. Come on people, it's a computer. Use what works for you. I can firmly say now that I DO in fact like MacOS, but you guys gotta drop the 'tude. It's old and it only hurts your cause.

- you can't drag cells to create multiple formula cells or repetitive entries

- no syntax highlighting

- no scripting

- Text insertation block is larger than the cell size, covering the cell below, so it obfuscates nearby data which you might be referencing

Well I had real computer bug yesterday.

Well I say bug, it was actually a spider!

A Mac Mini was complaining about a RAM error on boot (3 beeps). So we cracked open the thing (no easy task in itself) and found a dead spider spread over the RAM module. Replaced the RAM module and the Mac was a happy Mac again.

Looks like the spider had managed to short out the RAM module somehow and died along with the RAM module.

On Tuesday, March 22nd, George W Bush made the following comment re: the Wiretapping controversy:

"I did notice that nobody from the Democrat Party has actually stood up and called for getting rid of the terrorist surveillance program. You know, if that's what they believe, if people in the party believe that, then they ought to stand up and say it."

Pure gold. For all the fussing and bullshit that has been made over this whole ordeal no one has actually done anything about stopping the program. The only things that have been done are mudslinging against Bush and attempts at gaining rank (Russ Feingold ... although it seems to have backfired).

I just spent most of the afternoon dealing with a spyware "infection" on a coworker's home PC. Ironically, this particular program claimed to be "antimalware". The only malware on this guy's PC was this very program, which continuously popped up an annoying balloon warning how his PC is infected with malware. Well duh. Malware pretending to be "antimalware". How clever. Well, I guess this ruse works on a lot of people who have better things to do than be computer experts, but it's a lowdown, dirty trick.

Unfortunately, Norton Antivirus 2003 with the latest virus pattern saw nothing wrong with the computer. I'm thinking that spyware protection became a feature in newer releases, but it's still disappointing that this wasn't even detected as a trojan. Then again, the malware may have escaped detection because it was probably just a collection of registry settings designed to download and activate its buddy SpyAxe, which is the real trojan. A .reg file from F-Secure fixed the problem when I imported it into the Windows registry. (Thanks, F-Secure!) Anyways, the first thing I had to do when I arrived was to delete a 101 GB junk file from the user's temp directory, which was sized just right to completely fill up his hard disk, so that Norton Antivirus could not run. Cute.

Purveyors of spyware are almost as low as spammers in my reckoning. They cause innumerable man-hours to be wasted in clean-up and prevention, and ruin the computing experiences of countless victims. They are scum, like spammers and terrorists. I suppose that they are profiteers, benefiting through click-fraud, identity theft, and unethical information gathering. I believe that in general, these spyware and spam people exact a far greater toll on society than do the "hackers" (who are often just script kiddies) that we are so often warned about. Admittedly, there must be some overlap between the groups, but these spyware-slinging con artists especially irritate me. They take advantage of user gullability and the woeful design flaws that are Windows' legacy, for malicious ends. Fie on you, Spyware!

Oh noes!

Despite the fact that my last "going away" JE never had anything to do with me going away (uh, go reread it fellers), a lot of people took it as such.

Alas, however, I waste far too much time with the morons on this site, so I must bid you adieu. My password has been blindly changed to random gibberish, and the email address changed to one I no longer have access to.

To those of you with at least half a brain, thanks for the laughs. To the rest of you?

Go sit on a unicorn's face and spin. Don't forget to think fondly of me in your last moments you pathetic, bloody morons.