entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

<venividi> hooray for emacs and jdee.  *much* easier, faster, and more resource friendly than eclipse.
<venividi> (that's *right* folks, i've found something where emacs is *more* resource friendly than the competitor...)

After removing the suspect drive and suffering more crashes, all while i was trying to transfer files to and from drives, i determined that the culprit was the goddamned primary 80-wire UDMA cable.

I ended up moving some files instead of copying them from drive to drive, so in returning to my original drive, i was missing some stuff, most importantly some log files; syslogd (the program that writes system logs) is still stupid in that if it tries to log to a file and realizes that it's not there, it will fail with a whine instead of creating the file.  This is indisputably broken behavior and i don't know why we put up with it this way.

The worst of all this was that i blew away my mail server configuration.  Not a big deal, though, just a moment of panic.  There's also some brokenness in my news spool, but i think that'll sort itself out after tonight's expiration run.

Or, in layman's terms, the so-called "rootkit" found in some of their recent music "CDs" (which i just read somewhere on my friends list that they aren't technically CDs because they're so badly botched that Philips won't let Sony use the term).  Anyway, Bruce Schneier writes about it in Wired.

Go to Google Translate and translate "For your information" into any language other than Japanese or Chinese.  You'll see the same results on Babelfish.  I find this a rather baffling error.

Since Apple seems to be wholly unable these days to go two weeks without putting out another dot version of iTunes, would it absolutely kill them to issue an upgrade installer as well as a full installer?

I received warnings about iTunes 5.x, so i avoided upgrading.  Now 6.0 is out and i read nothing.  I suppose i'll have to take the bullet, eh?  Don't tell me i never did you any favors.

<nutrino> well as soon as i ran it, windows spyware finder said there was spyware so it removed ieframe.dll and now ie7 wont run so i gotta uninstall/reinstall

Somehow, Firefox has decided to handle Flash files with the QuickTime plugin.  If there's one thing about Firefox that really ticks me off, it's that there's no obvious way to tell it to handle a particular file type with the plug-in (or, if it normally does, to not do so).  It also seems to mishandle file extensions and file types, but i can't tell if that's its fault or Windows's fault (if a Web server sends a .mp4 file as "text/plain", should the browser figure out it's a binary file and send it to the right place, or accept the file type as authoritative?  is the solution to have the browser run "file" on the download to determine its type?  what if the magic number file is poor?).  I hate computers.  I hate the Web.

acronym reminded me about Audioscrobbler, a plug-in that tabulates the mp3s you listen to and gives you recommendations. The site is well-done; check it out.

Those of your poor, unfortunate, stubborn souls who still primarily use IE as your browser should definitely install Ad-Aware or Spybot S&D to get all the crap-ass adware and malware off your machine.

Randy Johnson, all of 40 years old, pitched a perfect game against the Braves (who yesterday had already gotten whupped by Ben Sheets and 18 strikeouts).  Jason Schmidt had a nearly perfect game, allowing only one hit and one walk against the Cubs, but throwing 144 pitches in the process.  Add that to 123 and 122 pitches in his previous two outings, and coming into the season with nagging questions about injuries, and it is unlikely he'll make it through the season unscathed.

This is one big-ass lemon from our tree.