Category: misc

Mark Russinovich not only discovered that Sony CDs install some malware on your PC, he is also doing an excellent job in chasing the half assed Sony responses.

The EFF has posted a list of ‘infected’ CDs and how you can identify them.

Bill Gates sent this email to his peeps at Microsoft I suppose.

It is interesting that he thinks that all his coders in their cubicle could even touch was has been brewing in so many heads.

So far nothing came close. Bill misses the point that what is happening on the internet is not building “the next Microsoft”.

It is replacing big entities with thousands and thousands of smaller ones and one point five behemoths: G & Y.

wired writes about bugs.

Interesting that the word for programming errors is trying to put the blame to ‘something else’. I must be an insect trapped in the circuit that causes the system to malfunction. And, yes its small too.

this NYT editorial sums nice coherently in what dismal state the Bush presidency is in.

The administration has been one of the worst of all times starting from their first election. If it would not have been for the patriot dust cloud that emerged from the collapsed World Trade Center this would have been visible to most reasonable observers all along.

Back in the day (10 years ago) Silicon Graphics made their own unix version called Irix. It was ok. But we have come a long way. Not only is it obsolete now, it only gets worse.
When you change a configuration in unix you often can just killall -HUP processname to let configurations take effect. If that does not work a /etc/init.d/servicename restart might do the trick. The next level of stupid would require a /etc/init.d/servicename stop ; /etc/init.d/servicename start.
It turns out that not even that works on irix:
( /etc/init.d/network stop ; /etc/init.d/network start ) will turn of the network.

Silly really, I am pretty sure this used to work. Or I just got spoiled by linux.

It’s only fair that SGI stock trades at 40 cents, and that they lost their stock symbol “SGI”

I has been two years since I was the last time in NYC. I remember having to consider the (stupid) Starbucks / T-Online offering back in the day in order to get wifi.

That certainly has changed. I am writing this, standing on the sidewalk on the Lower East Side. There are ample open Wifi’s.
I never had to look longer than two minutes for way to get on the net.

World of Warcraft seems to collect all the “firsts”

Installed 10.4.3. Took me six hours. Make sure your HD is in good shape: I had some issues, and the install bailed after 70%.
Just that I already had messed with the ATI drivers, but not with the WindowServer. So that one then crashed on start. Nice blue screen without a cursor. Actually not so nice. Target mode rocks! I copied all ATI* files in /Library/Extensions (or something like that 😉 to the machine, and et voila it booted again. Since I did fsck the drive like 13 times during those six desperate hours (and removed countless preferences and caches of course) the following install was fine. So if you like to avoid this then fsck before the 10.4.3 install. Probably before any bigger install.

Just booked a hotel in NY. For next Friday. A little bit late, of course.
I had a couple of Hotels to start with. Finding their phone numbers was not easy. Nor was it to reach somebody. Google is NOT your friend when you try to locate some service like a hotel. Nor are the Hotels themselves: loading flash for 90 seconds, just to get to a phone number is ridicolous. And they just opened last year.