Today AOL must have pushed some new code or spammers have their way at the only service that AOL has to offer that people use. IM stands for Instant Messenger. Today it’s not so instant anymore. Hitting enter and watching the little cloud that is showing me typing for another 4 seconds is just plain lame.
Tricky thing for AOL: They provide the service for millions of people. And nobody knows it is them. Only time they make news is when things break.
Since over a year I have my machine at a data center with pihost. Today I thought I use fact that it’s Thanksgiving to run some defragmentation on the xfs file system. Which can be a really bad idea if you happen to have a ‘icky’ filesystem: I seem to have painted my machine into a corner. The filesystem is corrupt, and when I try to defragment it it dissapears. When it hits the root partition then the machine still runs, but you have no commands left. The good thing is that I could get the server rebooted within a couple of minutes. It does help tremendously to real support 24/7/365.
Sony and Ericsson embark on getting us the TV watch again. That’s right, now that the PS3 obviously exists I have to find something else to hit over Sonys wide head. I think that the recent Nielsen Study makes allot os sense. There is just not much content that you want to watch on a tiny little device like an iPod or Zune for that matter. Microsoft hopes that the later one, being much better equiped for video, will benefit from a new usage pattern. I doubt it will be huge. I could see sports fans wanting to watch certain highlights when they actually happen. Or just around that time. But it needs to be easy and cheap.
Yet, I am hardly the average target group: this watch is not geeky to me. My geek watch would read 1164342294 right now. That’s the number of seconds since January first 1970. And yes being a real geek watch it would roll over when 32 bits are exhausted to express this in January 19, 2038.
The Washington post had a look at the Wii and the PS3. Makes allot of sense what they are writing. PS3 is pretty, but Wii has the better ‘fun factor’ for non hard core gamers it seems. I really wonder if people will get fitter, now that they will play standing. Will we see xbox and ps3 with Wii like controllers? technically that should be feasible. Guitar hero on PS2 was hugely sucessful and came with a guitar. Maybe there will be games for Xbox 360 that include it’s own set of Wii like controllers? Maybe Nokia comes out with a cellphone that does use the motion sensor not to write stupid message. Or, wait, can’t I use the motion sensor in my laptop? That’s actually a game I did not get around to write: The virtual Brio Labyrinth. try to get that ball around the parcour by juggling your laptop.
2 people could compete. It’s not that we not having ideas …
Everybody could see that Yahoo! is in trouble since years.
Now they come to realize it.
The ‘peanut butter memo’ could mark the end of Yahoo!. Or the beginning of it’s second coming. They have a chance if they cut the staff by 50%.
Running a postfix server with virtual mailboxes. It’s all pretty nice. Vacation however was sketchy. So say the least. One thing that breaks “Virtual Vacation” (implemented via virtual.pl in /var/spool/vacation, and, yes, googlebot, I am writing this for you) are < > brackets around the recpients email address. Entourage does that for instance. I do not think that there is anything wrong with that. Postfix does not deliver the ‘out of office’ reply in those cases though the mysql table called vacation gets the name of the sender added. Tricky and odd bug. My fix was to add:
if($from =~/< ([^\s]+\@[^\s]+)>/){$from = $1 ;}
right after the line:
if ($from =~/([\w\-.%]+\@[\w.-]+)/){$from = $1;}
which was already in there.
Free and open software is great. Just sometimes it’s the odd things that get you.
Some things are so odd, weird, strange and yet predictable, you simply can not make them up:
Microsoft launches two products right now. “Vista” and “Zune”.
they migh have trouble working together
In case you don’t trust a site called “appleinsider” to break news about Microsoft products, here it is from the the horses mouth
OJ can stand for the juice of oranges or for a strange man, that had an even stranger run in with the legal system.
Youtube has now attorneys. And apparently they are bored.
top 10 spammers are supposed to create
80% of all spam.
I guess that each dollar a spammer makes costs around 10,000 US$ in damages. It might be good for the world, if these individuals would be prevented to use computers. Maybe a few companies get together and make sure that the top 10 spammers are always being caught?
When I saw the headline in BlogsNow I had hoped for Apple picking up the much beloved Connexion system. Just because I want somebody to. Not that it would make any sense for Apple or the airlines. Wishful thinking. Purely egoistical. Free WiFi everywhere. It’s just a matter of time. What I love-love-love is the fact that my ssh sessions which is more or less 35 year old technology applied with safety work on my mac laptop together with it. Apple+ssh+free wife -> Dream come true. I really can work from everywhere. Not just answer email. The blackberry proud can do that. I mean real work, like making things. It is pretty awesome.
I sat in the Yahoo! office complex in LA this morning, free WiFi from Tully Coffee. Some Starbuck’s clone that ‘gets it’: they have free Wifi, as it should be. It was great to have both laptops going, sitting outside, have a Bagel and a coffee. Biggest treat was to see the Yahoo! and HBO worker bees congregating at the water hole during their morning routine and not being one of them.
Apparently Tully coffee makes you ramble incoherently. Sorry.
Just got an email back that I had send. Or should we say that I supposedly sent. No, I have not switched to Windows and are victim of the usual malware. No I don’t think that just because somebody has put in my email address in the “From:” field that I have sent it. What just happened is much much scarier:
Only the tail of my email was what I sent. The start was spam. I send this email with gmail to somebody that uses SBC or pacbell and is pretty sure on a mac as well. If my email get mixed up with spam then they certainly have a hard time getting delivered.
Which is the scariest part of the whole story: I still assume that email works. I send something once, and if I don’t hear back then I do not bother people again. Which is a good way of communicating, as long god damn email works.
Stu Maschwitz writes about data management for digital still photography
It is so very true. We can generate lots of data, some of it might be of potential value for us in the future. The filesystem keeps the it for us. But that’s about it. There is almost no help from the computer to really manage data. Yet that’s one of these things that computers could be really really good at: organising data. Spotlight was a nice attempt. But Apple of all companies messed up the interface. The underlying search technology seems to be working, but the interface is pretty much useless.
In order to find the ‘spacehogs’ on my drives I had to write a perl script that shows me which data is stored in which folders (including it’s sub folders). Should be simple for the OS to just show me where those GBs have been going. Yet I had to gapher tape my own solution, which is never a good sign.