Cottleston Pie

I'm afraid my laptop has gone down for the count: the hard-drive has failed. I was creating backups in preparation for my upgrade to MacOS X Panther. One backup failed with an I/O error. I restarted it and about 80% through, my IBM-branded OEM hard-drive started clicking constantly and loudly. I believe that it will never serve data again. Fortunately, I was making multiple backups and have one complete full-image backup from earlier that day and two others (incremental, maybe a week out-of-date; partial full image when failure occurred) which are not complete but include all the really important data.

I have six months left on my AppleCare extended warranty, so the failure should be covered under warranty. Much better that it happened now than six months from now.

A long time ago I read a maxim to the effect, "Your hard-drive has either just failed or is about to fail." Hard drives don't fail often in my experience, but now that it has happened to me, I'm very glad that I have backups.

Unfortunately, this means I will be without a laptop for a little while, which will definitely crimp my style.

Update [06 Dec 2003]

Apple did a great job turning around this fix!

12/04/2003 Thu 22:08:33 PT  Closed
12/04/2003 Thu 10:24:00 PT  Unit Shipped/Completed
12/04/2003 Thu 09:43:00 PT  Begin Testing
12/04/2003 Thu 03:09:00 PT  Begin Repair
12/04/2003 Thu 02:51:00 PT  Unit Received
12/01/2003 Mon 11:48:43 PT  Repair Requested
12/01/2003 Mon 07:55:00 PT  Request Acknowledged

Apple shipped a packing container to me. There was some confusion with the shipping company such that I didn't get the container until Wed. That same day, I shipped my laptop to Apple just over in Houston (Apple paid for all shipping). Apple received it, fixed everything, and sent it back to me all in one day!

So, now I've a working 30 Gb hard drive (another IBM model). They asked if there was anything else they could look at it while it was in, so I mentioned that the DVD drive which didn't spin up correctly occasionally (since the day I got it; but I use DVDs and CDs seldom enough that it hasn't been too much of an issue). I also mentioned a little paint chipping on the back corners and hinges of the display. I didn't expect that to be fixed, I just wanted it on-the-record just in case it were to come back with significantly more chipping.

Well, according to the parts list, it looks like they replaced the DVD drive. They also replaced a bunch of case parts including a new display housing! That really was not strictly necessary, but definitely appreciated, so here I am making that appreciation public. The titanium top is just like new.

Finally, I got a new cord for my power adapter, so now I have two. My Apple cord started sparking about a year ago (blue sparks inside the cord; it was rather pretty really, like lightning). I didn't want to deal with AppleCare at the time because I needed a replacement quick (in hindsight, AppleCare probably would have been quick), so I bought a new power adapter from MadsonLine. Power adapters are pricey (from anywhere)! The MadsonLine one is as nice and small as I've ever seen and I'm happy to have two adapters. Now I can leave one at work and one at home and that's one fewer thing to shuttle back and forth.

No. I've stopped listening to his speeches. He himself appears to find his own speeches of little consequence when he decides upon an action. But I still get asked with some frequency if I've heard this or that other thing that he has said. So, I've put together a short collection of NY Times editorials that summarize the wild inconsistency between what he says and what he does.

Since he says so little that is interesting and even less that can be trusted, I let his actions speak for him. They say plenty.

Missed the Texas Renaissance Festival this year. Not entirely happy about that. Especially as I've a friend in particular need of a mead-horn.

What I really need at work sometimes is a filesystem where I can create copy-on-write links. The motivation in this particular instance was a large job where I needed to copy a directory of almost ten thousand files from another user's run because when I invoked a long run of my own, the program might want to tweak one or two of the files in a minor way. It probably wouldn't need to touch any of them. But if it did, the file had to be such that it could write the modification.

So, I'm thinking the filesystem should be smart about it, like memory, and not actually copy the file data but just create new directory records that reference the original records. This would be similar to a hard link and would have the same limitations. The difference would be that the file would have its own permissions (meta-data) and the first change (write) to the file's data content would cause the data to be copied prior to modification.

Operating systems have been doing this with memory for years, so this isn't a new idea, just a different context.

PostgreSQL 7.4 was released. I'm a big fan, because PostgreSQL is great for my purposes and in my experience:

• license is (BSD-style) free so I can use it in all my projects -- work, academic, and personal!
• easy to deploy (clean, portable code). Building 7.4 on Linux, AIX, and MacOS X was simplicity. At work, I deploy the database on an older Linux box and then access from clients on various versions of Linux, AIX, and MacOS X.
• easy administration
• full-function, bug-free (I haven't found any) JDBC jar distributed under that same BSD license. This has "just worked" for me and is the easiest method of client development and deployment: just copy my jar and the JDBC jar anywhere that has a suitable JVM.
• reliable. I've not yet had any project that demonstrated any compromise. There are lots of projects that stress it harder than I'm likely too as well in the near future and they keep improving it, so I'm hoping that this will continue for a long time.
• full featured. And many of those features are standard and portable.

Apple release a new iMac with a 20" LCD screen! It's great to see big LCD screens entering the consumer environment. It's still not inexpensive, but its the value proposition in which I'm most interested.

Speaking of good news for the Mac, the first super-computer made from Macs for an astounding low price of $5.2 million by Virginia Tech secured #3 on the Top500 list of the world's fastest computers.

A while ago, I mentioned that a friend would be starting a blog. Let the games begin.

A friend got an unusual message and asked that I help dissect it. We both have thrown away the original message, but here are some parts of it along with my analysis why it is spam. The key thing to notice is that I do not think there is any way to positively identify this as spam. The email was sent as text (not an HTML message) in a very simple style that is indistinguishable from a genuine message from a stranger.

The original recipient's email address was altered to be emailaddr@yahoo.com

X-Apparently-To: emailaddr@yahoo.com via 216.136.129.39; Wed, 12 Nov 2003 00:28:53 -0800
X-YahooFilteredBulk: 64.191.40.250

Hmm, don't know what X-YahooFilteredBulk indicates Yahoo is doing, but it obviously didn't catch this as junk.

Return-Path: <markthompsoni@fresco-mail.com>
Received: from 64.191.40.250 (EHLO localhost.localdomain) (64.191.40.250) by mta121.mail.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; Wed, 12 Nov 2003 00:28:53 -0800

This is the first indicator that this message is Spam. The Received headers should trace the message from sender to recipient through each server en-route. This message only had one such header. Yahoo got the message directly from a machine with IP address 64.191.40.250. If I lookup the domain name associated with that IP address, I get server2.technicaldepot.com. So, the mail was sent from technicaldepot.com with a return-address at fresco-mail.com. This isn't always a problem (e.g. I may want to send mail from my work account with my personal address as the From/return-address), but it is a definite warning flag. It could be that technicaldepot.com had a compromised server that allowed a spammer to sent mail from there.

I visited http://technicaldepot.com/ . The page reports "We DO NOT send unsolicited e-mail (spam)! Recently, we have become a target/victim of a malicious spammer, ... "

It goes on to call itself " We are an 'innocent bystander', or rather an 'innocent victim' of the spam, much the same as you ... " however this may not be completely true. Everyone does have a practical responsibility to try and ensure that their systems do not become compromised and thus allow spammers to send untraceable spam.

I am new to this area and looking for new friends. I just moved near Fort from Colorado about a ...

"Fort" -- generic identifier. Lots of people, if they don't have a town named "Fort" nearby will just assume he meant to say the closest known place with Fort in the name, e.g.
Texans might think "Fort Hood" or "Fort Worth",
Mainers might think "Fort Kent",
Indianans might think "Fort Wayne".

My roomate James thinks I should email you and he showed me how to send it but now I can't figure out how to attach my picture here.

Generic paraphrase: "I couldn't attach my picture here, so come visit some website."

I've gotten email like this (without the unique identifier I mention next; this spam appears a bit more sophisticated) where I could visit the website "for my friends only" with reasonable anonymity, so I did, and there are a few pictures of this "new to the area school teacher" in provocative poses wearing a tight tee-shirt and underwear and an invitation to sign on with a credit card "just for age verification" to see the more private collection "just for her friends." Needless to say, I didn't follow up.

He put it at (friendlymatch)com where he's at. You can locate my number 2912282.

Ah, by looking up a unique identifier, they can tell that the email to emailaddr was successfully read by a sympathetic person who may be responsive to the types of things spam offer -- if not this offer, they know to try the address for future offers.

If it interests you, you can call me on my cell phone tomorrow at 61258468 I am fairly ...

Incomplete phone number. You can't use it. Guess you'll have to visit the website, which is what they really want.

I don't know if we'll be using this email address anymore so call me and let's see where it goes. Did you get my last email?

Of course you didn't get a last email. So maybe you'll think this is mis-addressed. You can't call, so you'll visit the website looking for an email address to let this person know of his or her mistake --- and then they've gotcha: they know a sympathetic person reads the email who they might be able to manipulate out of some cash.

I'm not generally fond of arcades. But last week I found myself in one for some time during a social outing with work folks. We had "unlimited play" tickets for most games and ten free tokens for "redemption" games (where you get tickets to redeem for baubles).

Fortunately, they had air hockey which I think is great fun, so I played many games of that -- mostly against Gopi. And I rather like classic Skee-ball too, which was the only redemption game that was any good, so I spent all my tokens there. Amongst other things, I redeemed my tickets for some Pop Rocks -- entertaining in themselves and to share with people who've never had them before.

I find most electronic arcade games really lousy. I think one primary problem is because of the lousy user-control. When I do something, I want something to happen. Immediately. Not after some noticeable sub-second delay to give the computer time to catch up with me. (Note how other games I like, air hockey and skee-ball, don't have this problem.) There are numerous other problems too which I could detail, but I won't now, because I really just want to note the exception!

Midway's "Cruisin' The World" game is great. It was a two-player setup with seats, three perspectives that could be switched on-the-fly, great interaction between the live player's cars and also between live and computer cars. The user control was great. Gopi and I pretty much exhausted all the race venues around the world -- which really is my only gripe -- I want more! So, thanks Midway for a great game.

Apparently, Google thinks very highly of my friends. As a few of them noticed, when they type their own name into Google, the top choice is the page on my website devoted to them.

I've had a hankering to try a batting cage since at least mid-summer. The last time I remember being in a batting cage was probably at least eleven years ago, maybe much more. The last time I got to swing at a pitched ball was at the first "Engineering Softball Classic" softball game my senior year at university. It was the four engineering depts at odds: Civil (red), Mechanical (green), Electrical (yellow), and Biomedical (blue). How crazy that I remember the jersey colors. I was a bit worried about being so out of practice, as I'm sure other people were as well. It was a social game, and the pressure was lessened by twisting the rules to enhance the fun: no strike-outs or walks, so for every at bat, the batter eventually got some sort of hit and the fielders got a little action. The worry was for naught as I got solid hits when I was up to the plate.

I actually think very little of baseball as a game in general. It's a great non-participatory sport. There's a huge amount of time wasted just standing or sitting around. It's a pretty boring activity much of the time. For five years as a youth, I played tee-ball up to little league. I remember lots of time just standing in the field or impatiently waiting in the dugout for a turn at bat. It's really a horrible game for kids.

On Tuesday, I finally got my chance in a batting cage. It was great. Just what I wanted. No waiting, just bat after bat. For a few bucks, I took 120 swings in sets of 20. My first 20 was embarrassing. The "medium" speed baseball pitches whizzed by. Fortunately, I found a groove and managed some satisfying hits. The challenge was to hit it in just the right manner to avoid all the nets (even many non-foul balls would hit the nets) and see how far I could hit it into the back field. Overall, it was exactly what I wanted. At the end, not only was I getting fatigued, but I was getting painful blisters on my hands -- probably exacerbated by the cheap tape on the aluminum bat.