The Blog of Harald

I’m a beer drinker, and I love bocks. So when I received this in an e-mail message, I loved it, and I have to share:

bq. Monks in Germany began brewing bock beers back in the 1500s’. They used the full-bodied libations to fortify themselves while fasting during Lent. But along with calories… bock beers contain a lot of alcohol.

bq. One abbot was concerned that the merriment caused by the potent brew might be sacrilegious, and sent a barrel to Rome, asking for guidance.

bq. The cardinals – wine drinkers all—found the bitter brew unappealing. They not only decided the monks could continue to make their beer… they commended them for being willing to drink such awful stuff as a way to pay for their sins.

(forwards lost to antiquity, sadly).

Late on Thursday afternoon I strolled off to Maxtor’s warranty website, entered the particulars of the failed drive, and requested that they send me a replacement right away. I did it this way so that they would ship me the new drive in an “official” drive box so that I can return the failed on the same way.

On Friday, the RMA tracking website claimed that my new drive would ship within the next two business days. “Pretty good”, though I, as I was expecting a longer turnaround.

Well, the new drive arrived this morning. I’m impressed…

Mmm. Maps of the Internet. I still have my collection of old NSFnet maps lying around on disks somewhere…

ThinkGeek :: Internet Map

Short Words to Explain Relativity

bq. So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.

The entire article uses words of four letters or less (including names; Mr. Newton gets shortened to “Izzy” :-). It’s harder than it sounds, but the article manages it quite well, in my layman’s opinion…

My RSS feed aggregator had two similarly themed articles side by side today. The first was “Economist NewSpeak”:http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2003/11/02.html#a502 from “Dave Pollard”:http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/, in which he says:

bq. The newspapers were full of ‘joyous’ and ‘encouraging’ news about the economy this past week, and there was little mention of the fact that, on the heels of this ‘good news’, several businesses announced another round of layoffs.

Followed by an interesting “What they said / what they meant” analysis that boils down to a simple truth: the current economic good news is only good news for _businesses_, not _people_ (at least, not North American people :-). Go read it, it’s short but sweet.

This was followed by “Halley Suitt”:http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/’s “Neutron Bomb Economy”:http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/archives/2003_11_02_halleyscomment_archive.html#106776771491216947 which says (in part):

bq. This is a the neutron bomb economy — easy to look profitable when your building is still standing but you’ve nuked your entire workforce. Soon we’ll be forced to hail the new worker-less enterprise, it’s sure to be the Next Big Thing.

This reminded me of a certain CEO’s response to an outsourcing question. So far Canada is a net _receiver_ of outsourcing jobs. I wonder how long that is going to last, especially now that our dollar has skyrocketed (compared to the US dollar)…

I’m not really sure what to think or say or do about the whole situation. Both of us make our living in highly skilled positions, so in theory we’ll be able to ride out the continuing global restructuring. We all know the difference between theory and practice, though.

It was a gorgeous night on Hallowe’en in Toronto. We had kids show up in groups of 10-20, with long pauses between them (up to 15 minutes), so during one of the pauses I dragged the camera and tripod outside to play. After my wife got home she had play too; I think we filled up the memory card on the camera…

The cfrq.net Photo Gallery :: Hallowe’en 2003

At about 8:30 AM on Thursday October 30th, the hard drive failed. It was reporting itself on the bus, but with a garbage manufacturer string and a size of 0; not terribly useful.

Fortunately, I had a backup; I use rsync to keep a copy of the server filesystems on a machine at home. I even had to restart the backup by hand on Wednesday morning, so we only lost about 24 hours worth of stuff (the Thursday morning backup was still in its early stages when the disk crashed).

Unfortunately, I lost all of my MySQL databases. Most of them are replaceable, but it’s still annoying. It seems that @mysqlhotcopy@ “knows” that a list of tables fetched from the database is not quoted, so it does quoting itself. Unfortunately, a newer version of MySQL (or @DBD::mysql@) appears to be quoting table names. Net result:

bq. DBD::mysql::db do failed: You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘` READ, `apachelogs`.“access_blog_org“ READ, `apachelogs`.“access_fywss_com“’ at line 1 at /usr/bin/mysqlhotcopy line 438

So, no MySQL backups… *sigh.

Anyway, 40Gb drives were on sale at ICCT, so I ran out last night and picked one up, restored the backup, and replaced it in the server this morning. The old drive is about 15 months old and is still under warranty; Maxtor is sending me a replacement even as we speak, so I’ll end up with a spare drive at the end of this whole mess.

Moral: keep good backups :-)

*Update*: There’s some evidence that the last complete backup was actually on the 26th of October. I’ll have to investigate, because I know it’s been _running_ every day since then…

I’ve messed up my shoulder a bit, probably by “sweeping”:http://www.leasidecurling.ca/ improperly. So I’ve been cutting down on the computer use a bit to give the shoulder and arm a rest. Unanswered e-mails are building up on schedule…

A pair of time-lapse photography movies from “[daily dose of imagery]:http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/; one looking west and the other looking southwest from (near) Bay and Gerrard in downtown Toronto. (They’re probably from the condo towers in College Park, but I can’t tell for sure.)

* “toronto western sky timelapsed”:http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/archives/photos_cityscape/030930_227.shtml
* “CN Tower timelapsed”:http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/archives/photos_cityscape/030924_216.shtml

Cool. Now I want to go make one of the view from my office building, either looking south down York street towards the lake and the island, or looking down into the TD Centre courtyard. I’ll need a webcam or an external power supply for my camera, though…

[ via “GTA bloggers”:http://www.gtabloggers.com/archives/000559.html ]

<drool>

Amazon.com: Books: The Complete Far Side: 1980-1994 (or “Chapters.ca”:http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/item.asp?Catalog=Books&Item=978074072113).

19 pounds. 2 hardcover books, in a box set. 1250 pages. Over 4000 cartoons.

I suppose it would be less appealing if you already had all of the Far Side books. Which I don’t…

So I patched my MovableType and set up the cron job to use “mt-publish-on”:http://www.mplode.com/tima/archives/000324.html. It runs, and switches the state on my articles from “Future” to “Publish”, but never actually publishes them (the content pages remain unchanged). I haven’t done much debugging yet, other than to figure out that mt-publish-on really does call the same MovableType functions that are used internally to publish new pages… *sigh.

Well, it’s happened. According to a CBC news article, a Montreal driver has been convicted of dangerous driving. While there were no witnesses, the car computer recorded his speed at 131 km/h at the time of the crash.

The problem I see is simple: these computers are not designed to record evidence; they’re designed to operate the car airbag system. They’re connected to the vehicle’s sensor network, which can return false or misleading data, and I’m sure the computer is trivial to tamper with, before or after an incident. (In fact, the /. crowd is already discussing the challenge :-). Will the positive uses balance out the potential abuse?

In _this_ case, the blackbox was only used to settle a “he said, she said” type of case. The defendant claimed that the _other_ car was speeding; there were no witnesses and no skid marks on the road. It’s interesting to note that he was cleared of the more serious charge of “criminal negligence causing death”; hopefully the courts/jury decided that computer testimony wasn’t enough for the more serious charge?

The OPP has been using blackbox evidence for a while now, apparently, as have insurance companies. Something to keep on the radar…

Wired News: It Came From Beneath the Sea

Apparently blocks of sold methane can break off the bottom of the ocean floor, turn into large gas bubbles as they rise, and can sink ships that happen to be above them.

Of course, nobody has ever _seen_ one. Sinister…

New Scientist

bq. Minutes of a meeting held at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on 10 September, obtained by the The Washington Post, reveal that two NASA medical experts refused to sign flight certificates authorising the current mission to the ISS.

How much of this was due to a genuine safety concern, and how much was paranoia over lawsuits and the current blame culture surrounding NASA? For example:

bq. Cintron and Langdoc were especially concerned that sensors used to monitor the space station’s air supply for dangerous trace elements is currently broken.

As opposed to the normal, everyday air on earth, which is chock full of “dangerous trace elements”? This strikes _me_ as CYA activity…

“SCOTTeVEST”:http://www.scottevest.com/” now has version 3.0 of their jacket/vest. It has 42 pockets (many hidden) to stash all of your gear, including pens, PDAs, earbuds, and so on. The pockets and jacket are designed to allow routing of cables (e.g. headphones) as needed. The ultimate geektech accessory?

Plastic: The Tragedy Of Common Cod

It’s nice to see that the Europeans have finally figured out that over-fishing cod tends to destroy the population. They’ve been ignoring Canada’s desire to protect our cod stocks, and have kept fishing (just outside our territorial limit) even after we asked them to stop, contributing to the destruction of our cod.

To be fair, the _fisherman_ apparently still don’t believe it. Fools.

Scientists are beginning to thing that the population will _never_ recover, even with a complete moratorium on fishing; the remaining population is simply too small…

bq. It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious. (Roger Berg)

Mark made me laugh again today. From Foolproof [dive into mark]:

bq. [using the timer] is generally beyond my capabilities, since it involves doing math in my head, but I cheated and used my wireless-Internet-enabled laptop to do the calculation in the Google calculator, thus utilizing over $3000 dollars worth of hardware and software locally and God-only-knows how much hardware remotely in order to compensate for my inability to count to 8 without wandering off and logging on to IRC.

I found a comment on Train of thought [dive into mark] that struck me (no, I didn’t strike it back):

bq. You may not have a normal night’s sleep, maybe for the next 5 years, by which time, you may not remember how to sleep for 8 hours in a row.

How true! Well, ok, I usually manage uninterrupted sleep, but I’ve forgotten how to sleep _in_. Left to my own devices, I’m up by 8:30 at the latest on most weekends. (Of course, now that winter has returned we’re back to 7AM breakfast for 8AM hockey games :-)

I have vague memories of sleeping in past noon on Saturdays and Sundays, but I’m beginning to wonder if they’re real…

Ok, this is _cool_.

Mark-Steffen Göwecke has taken a series of polaroid pictures separated in space and time (he started in France in 1996). Each photograph contains the previously shot polaroid image.

Fascinating!

If you can read this, It means two things. First, that my Movable Type setup can cut ‘n’ paste UTF-8 strings, and second that your reader works with my UTF-8 blog.

# Ħäřáŀđ Ķòċĥ (eight-bit, upper code page)
# Наяаλδ Κόςн (multi-byte)

Inspired by “Ned Batchelder”:http://www.nedbatchelder.com/blog/200310.html#e20031017T081251.