June 13, 2007
Safari, Beta 3.
Having experienced some crashes with Firefox lately, I thought I'd give Safari for windows a try. I didn't like it much on the Macintosh, it tended to have a great many issues rendering pages.
This is a picture of the first time it ran after installing.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 02:21 PM
May 10, 2006
Spam, spam, bacon and spam, spam.
Read not books alone, but men, and amongst them chiefly thyself. If thou find anything questionable there, use the commentary of a severe friend rather than the gloss of a sweet lipped flatterer; there is more profit in a distasteful truth than in deceitful sweetness. Francis Quarles (1592 - 1644)
Once more the little electric trolls have begun inundating this site with comment spam. Their purpose is not to gain my attentions with their tepid, canned flattery, or have the few that read here click on their links, but instead to drive up their google rankings by sowing URLs in as many sites as possible (the more pages link to you, the better you fare in a google search).
Comments on this site are moderated, and so such spam is never published, however, the numbers to be excorcised has been climbing steadily recently, which has prompted me to look for solutions. Movable Type 3.16 doesn't have the advanced filters that 3.2 does, so my options are a little more restricted. Here are my first thoughts.
The comment scripts are tweaked, my fingers are crossed. If you have a better solution (or think this one abysmal), leave a comment. Just dont forget to post afer previewing.
I'll let you know how successful it is.
Not overly. It appears to have slowed them down a little. I suspect the mt-comments script is being hit directly, bypassing the post buttons.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 10:12 AM
March 15, 2006
Attack of the killer comments.
No one is fond of spammers, they are an annoyance. They are especially evil when combined with the GreyMatter blogging system.
From the GreyMatter forums:
Over the past couple of months, several of my GM accounts have experience persistant and serious spam attacks on gm-comments.cgi forcing me to spend a lot of time removing the spam comments, collecting malicious IP addresses and banning them from my servers. On a couple of occaisions, the attacks were so ferocious that they left the comment.cgi programs open, causing all sorts of resource overload on the server.
gm-comments.cgi does not play well with others. Admittedly, it takes someone to abuse it to cause problems. Which, of course, happened.
This has even caused problems with other processes unable to write to disk for a substantial period of time, DNS resolution and not a little hair pulling.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 11:23 AM
November 07, 2005
Frustrations and a product review.
For the last week or so, the screen on my Mac laptop (yes, I have one and I like it), has been misbehaving in such a way as to eliminate the display on the bottom third. Over the weekend, I took the thing apart (not an easy task as Apple thinks both that form is more important that ease of service and that you shouldn't be poking about inside anyway). It appears a contact behind the LCD panel had worked its way loose, and after fixing that, it all seems much better.
Restarting the work desktop this morning offered me another surprise.
Boot... Bluescreen... Automatic reboot. Of course, the blue screen is displayed for less than a second, making it incredibly difficult to see whats in the error readout. I'm currently in the fourth hour of trying to resurrect it, into the umpteenth chkdsk /r. If you're wondering where I am, I can surf the net, but nothing else is working (telnet, IM). Fingers crossed that I'll have it working shortly.
On to the product review. One of the purchases I made after a home HDD failure was Norton Ghost 10. One of the things that I was issued at work recently was Norton Ghost 9.
The diffeerence is far larger than one version number. 10 is easy, painless and simply works (and works well). 9 just doesn't work. The irony is that with 10, I would have been able to back up and restore my PC without much fuss. However, 9 didn't work out of the box and todays project was meant to be to get that working.
Ghost 10: Truly excellent software.
Ghost 9: Should be burned at the stake.
It looks like a HDD replacement and a reinstall. Some days, you just can't win.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 01:49 PM
September 14, 2005
Want to speak to a human?
Telephone prompt systems. Everyone hates them.
There is now a page dedicated to getting you to the operator right away.
Enjoy.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 12:53 PM
August 30, 2005
NeoOffice is looking quite good at the moment
The entirity of yesterday evening was spent writing a commentary on a long, dull proposal for submission today. It was not an experience I would care to repeat, so I was careful to save the document every 10 minutes or so.
However, it's when there's a deadline that the foibles of software become less of a tolerable peccadillo and escalate into something that bodes poorly for the health of the hardware. Microsoft Word (for the Macintosh), which crashes on a semi-regular basis, has one other fault I have just discovered. It gives no indication and issues absolutely no warnings when it fails to save a document to a shared (SMB) drive. It appears, to all intents and purposes, that the document is saved. Until you close Word and look for it.
NeoOffice is the Macified version of OpenOffice, which I intend to download and install today.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 09:22 AM
August 05, 2005
Rejoyce, for the technology gods are benevolent this day.
Please back your data up. This has not been fun.
Earlier in the week, they were wrathful, smiting my hard drive, consigning it to the demons of head crashes.
Knowing of Orpheus and equipped with a USB drive cradle, I made several attempts to see if anything at all could be read from it.
Every now and then it would actually spin up without (too much) crunching, which was slightly promising. The partitions are NTFS, and attaching it to a Windows PC proved useless. As soon as it mounted, Windows would try and write something to it - not helpful with a sick drive - crashing it again almost instantly.
Mounting it on the Mac laptop (yes, I do have a Mac and I do like it. It's IDE (Xcode) is very neat and excellent for MUD coding), proved more of a success, as it mounts NTFS partitions as read only. It would last anywhere between five seconds to two minutes before starting to grind again. Two documents were recovered.
But, by disconnecting it for 24 hours as soon as it started grinding, the following day, it would work a little longer.
I can only surmise the moisture inside that was causing the stiction and head crashes was slowly dissapating. Today, I was able to retrieve almost five hundred megabytes of data. Looking at this, which must have been the equivilant of gazing on the face of Eurydice, the demons returned, squealing for the data that was escaping the abyss. Or it may have been the heads scraping the platters for the last time. Whichever the case may be, any further hopes are abandoned.
Still missing is some experimental bitflag code, a few other test libraries that I wrote, and a substantial collection of PDFs and references, but I am well satisfied. All the important documents that were there are retrieved, all the email and most of the photographs (yes, and that one) are recovered.
It's time to look at home backup solutions. Burning a set of 15-20 backup CDs is not a workable solution, as something that is so inherently time consuming will not be done often enough. Knowing myself, it would be backed up every four weeks for the first three months, and three years hence when it crashes, I'll have 34 month old backups. A DVD burner is an option, but again, backups would run to several discs.
The currently favoured solution is Norton Ghost 9 (not the buggy 2003) and an external HDD. However, any suggestions are welcome, as it'll be a while before I can actually buy it.
For now, I'm going to go burn what I have recovered to CD.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 11:14 AM
August 02, 2005
The computer gods are angry. At me.
Hardware, n.: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.Henri Karrenbeld
One of the more unpleasant ways for your computer to remind you that nothing is forever is by generating crunching and grinding noises from the hard drive. This, to me, has always been an explicit proof that demons do inhabit computers, and they are glutting the maw of the abyss with my data.
We all know things wear out, though the computer is only three years old, I had expected a little more longevity from a modern drive.
I thought I'd take the drive out, buy a new one and reinstall everything and mourn the data that Apollyon is now enjoying.
On removal, I discovered something I had not seen on a hard drive before, a breathing hole, labelled "Do not cover". If, like me, you were under the impression these things were hermetically sealed in order to keep everything bad away from the microscopic-tolerence workings of the drive, you were wrong too. Upon further research, I find:
Hard disk drives are not airtight. They have a permeable filter (a breather filter) between the top cover and inside of the drive, to allow the pressure inside and outside the drive to equalize while keeping out dust and dirt. The filter also allows moisture in the air to enter the drive. Very high humidity year-round will cause accelerated wear of the drive's heads (by increasing stiction, or the tendency for the heads to stick to the disk surface, which causes physical damage to the disk and spindle motor).
So... You're filtering out particles of everything except water. Thank you. New York, over the last two months, has been consistantly incredibly humid. So, at the very least, I have a steaming gun.
Finding a replacement drive is proving slightly problematic. The drive bay doesn't get a lot of airflow, so the drive gets quite warm. The old drive was 4200rpm and most of the replacement ones I've seen run considerably faster, and consequently, hotter.
Hunt for replacement hard drive, or bite the bullet and just get a new laptop?
The jury is out.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 10:53 AM