Snail Mail — really!

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If you’re a true Internet geek, you probably know about RFC 1149, the “Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers.” Yes, you read that right — it’s a way to transmit information, via Internet protocols, by homing pigeons. It was released on April first, 1990.

Well, after eighteen years, it looks like it’s finally got some competition: Snail Mail. I’m sure you’ve heard the term used for the Postal Service (sometimes with good reason), but this one is using real snails. And it’s apparently not a hoax.

If you’re curious, there’s a BBC article with a little more information here.

Firefox 3 Download Day!

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I woke up early this morning, all ready to download the official Firefox 3 onto the five computers that are presently operational here (and help them set a Guinness world record)… only to find that there’s no sign of it.

Fortunately, the Firefox FAQ page includes a link to a Twitter page that says the official release isn’t until 10am Pacific time. In other words, I’ve got two more hours to go.

I’m ready and waiting! 🙂

First-Party and Third-Party Software

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English is a very curious language. When talking about software, for instance, you have first-party programs (programs that are written by the same company that developed the computer or operating system that they’re run on) and third-party programs (programs written by other companies). Where are the second-party programs? For that matter, who would “the second party” refer to?

I presume this has something to do with the literary terms of first-person point of view (“I”) versus the third-person (“they”). The second-person point of view (“you”) exists, but it is hardly ever used.

This just goes to show that English wasn’t designed by a software developer. A developer would always put the most-used options first, rather than sticking a seldom-used one between the two most-often-used ones. 🙂

Spam for spock.com

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A few days ago, I received three identical spam messages, one to each of three different e-mail addresses (clickable areas removed):

From: Spock Team Subject: Head Geek wants you to check out spock.com I am testing out this new people search search engine called spock.com. It seems pretty interesting and you might want to do some searches on it for yourself, your friends, or your favorite celebrities. Their homepage is www.spock.com PS – If you click here, Spock can instantly find where all your friends are on the web. Later, Head Geek – Unsubscribe: Click Here

Wow, apparently my future self is working for this group of cretins and has access to a time machine, and wanted to make sure that I knew about them. Either that, or they’ve harvested the addresses from my public GPG key, which (so far as I know) is the only place where all three of them are listed. Hm, I wonder which of those scenarios is more likely?

(According to the headers, it actually is coming from them, so it’s not some third party trying to get them into trouble. And yes, I’m quite familiar with fake e-mail headers, and this one isn’t faked at all.)

I’m extremely irked by this. Not only are they spamming, but they’re lying and claiming to be me as well. The service might well be useful, but I refuse to ever deal with spammers.

UPDATE: A few days after I posted this, Jay from spock.com wrote a comment explaining the problem, so I wrote a follow-up to this post.

Upgrade: Ubuntu Linux 8.04

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In the wee hours of last Sunday morning, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my copy of Ubuntu Linux. I’d been using the previous major release (7.10) since it came out, eight months ago. I’d wanted to wait and upgrade Mini-mEee to 8.04 first, before subjecting my main work system to it, but that didn’t work out.

There are a lot of improvements, both major and minor, in this version. Compiz, the fancy-graphic-effects system, seems a lot nicer now, as well as fixing at least one odd-looking visual bug. Scanning drives on boot (only needed on occasion) is now shown graphically instead of in text-mode. The Sudoku program is much improved as well (which is nice, since I like puzzling through it on occasion). The audio on my USB expansion bar automatically works now.

There was a major problem with it though. After the upgrade, my Project X test programs wouldn’t run. I spent most of a day trying various things to track the problem down, finally running across a post on the Ubuntu forums that said there was a bug in the closed-source Nvidia driver, and that I could work around it by switching to an older version of it. That required a simple change, and I’m happy with the result.

I’m also happy with the program that I specifically wanted to upgrade for: Avant Window Navigator (AWN). Although it appears to be pure eye-candy, it’s quite useful as well. I’ve replaced the bottom Ubuntu panel on both of my systems with it. My only real complaint about it is that you can’t reposition the bar yet — on my dual-screen system, it appears at the bottom of the upper screen, and I’d like to have it at the bottom of the lower one instead. But that’s apparently scheduled for the next major release.

All in all, a very successful (and useful) upgrade.

Dell Repair-Guy Visit

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My Dell XPS 1210 laptop has been having an occasional problem recently: random pixels have started changing to random colors when it gets warm. I bought a laptop stand with a couple fans in it, to help reduce the heat buildup, and didn’t think anything further of it — until the system started crashing when I tried playing Age of Empires III with GoddessJ.

Finally, over the weekend, I called Dell about it. After some back-and-forth with the front-line tech guy, he decided that it was the video card memory (duh!), and that since the video card was integrated into the motherboard, they’d have to change the motherboard on the system.

I’d paid a little extra for a three-year on-site-service warranty on it, and it’s still going, so they said that they’d send a guy out. This morning I got a call saying that the motherboard had come in, and would I like to schedule a time when the repair guy could come out and replace it? Sure!

The guy showed up at 11am and immediately tackled the job. I hung around to watch, since I’d never taken a laptop apart myself before. He had to strip it down pretty thoroughly — it was rather disconcerting, seeing one of my babies in pieces on the table — but he got the motherboard replaced and the whole thing put back together in about thirty minutes.

While he had it apart, I examined some of the pieces, and discovered a huge clump of dust blocking the inside of the exhaust port, right up near the fan where it couldn’t be accessed without taking the whole system apart. I’ve had this laptop on, and pretty much full-time, for nearly two years now, so it’s not altogether surprising. We discussed it while he put the system back together, and decided that that was probably the cause of the trouble — the video chip was overheating first because the heat from it had to travel the farthest along the heatsink.

In any case, I have a new motherboard in the system now, and the dust is cleaned out. I can already tell that the system is running cooler than it had been. Maybe some compressed air blown into the exhaust port on a regular basis will keep it clear of dust so this problem doesn’t happen again? It’s worth a try. GoddessJ is happy that we’ll be able to play Age of Empires III together again, and I’m just happy that the system still works after being gutted and reassembled.

There’s never a dull moment around here. 🙂

Ubuntu 8.04 for the Eee PC

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I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my main system over the weekend (I’m preparing a blog entry about it now). I’d hoped to try it out on the Eee system first, but that hadn’t been possible yet.

The Ubuntu-Eee project finally posted a Release Candidate for the 8.04 upgrade a week ago yesterday, on the second. Unfortunately, it had some kind of file error in it, so no one could use it — the install stopped at 25%. I waited patiently for someone to fix the problem, but no one had done so by last evening, so I decided to take a crack at it myself. The fact that I know absolutely nothing about the organization of it, or what had been changed, mattered little to me. 🙂

I decided to start by picking up the original Ubuntu 8.04 CD image and compare the Eee image to it, on the assumption that they’d simply made some changes to it (because that’s how I’d have done it, after all). A little research showed me that there’s a program called “diff” that will compare files and show you the differences between them, so I got started.

Sure enough, there were only a few differences: two files in the “isolinux” subdirectory and three in the “casper” subdirectory. “isolinux” sounds like it has to do with the CD image itself, so I concentrated on the other one.

The differences in the two text “manifest” files seemed to be only version numbers. initrd.gz is a GZip archive file that contains a bunch of other files; I unzipped a copy of it from both files and compared them. Oddly enough, they seemed identical, even though the archive files were different. Copying the version from the original release didn’t seem to make any difference. That only left one file to work with: “filesystem.squashfs”.

The system didn’t know what to do with it, but a little digging turned up an explanation: it’s a highly compressed file system, and the tools to use it are readily available in the Ubuntu Linux archives. I unpacked it, and the one from the original CD, and started comparing them.

There were a lot of differences, but a comment from one of the error reports suggested that it was due to a symbolic link, so I dug up a method for finding broken symbolic links and ran it over the Eee version. Oops… there were thousands of them. 🙁 But oddly enough, almost all of them were under the /proc branch. After eliminating that, I had only a handful.

On a hunch, I did the same with the original CD image too, and compared the results. Bingo — there were only five broken links in the Eee image that weren’t also in the original, and they were all in the same directory. This morning, after fixing those and re-packaging the filesystem.squashfs file, I tried to install it again.

SUCCESS!

Mini-mEee is back up and running, with the “Hardy Heron” release of Ubuntu. 😀

UPDATE: Wow, an open-source project that actually appreciates help! I got several congratulatory messages on tracking down the problem, including one from the guy in charge of the project, who posted the “gold” version of the package within hours of getting my fix. That’s a lot better than the first two I attempted to contribute to.

“New Hints Seen That Red Wine May Slow Aging”

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This New York Times article suggests that longevity drugs might be not only possible, but developed fairly soon. As I’ve heard that there are already more humans alive right now than have died in all of history combined, that suggests some interesting and disturbing things… I want to live a good long time as much as anyone, but if everyone can do that, this planet is going to get awfully crowded, and pretty darn soon.

This has been covered in a number of science fiction novels, and I have faith that our race will find solutions. But I suggest we start seriously thinking about it sooner, rather than later.