Well, as some of you might have noticed, this site (and all the sites it hosts) were down again on Monday. The computer goods demanded another blood sacrifice to allow the computer to start up again. So after sacrificing some blood (removed via a sharp metal edge in the computer case), and moving the hard drive into Namtar, I learned that this was the second Western Digital 120GB drive which mysteriously changed from LBA to CHS on me. Cylinder/Head/Sector is an older method of specificing disk geometry. Logical Block Addressing (LBA) is used on all drives over 528MB. It is a form of hard disk addressing that abstracts the actual Cylinders Heads and Sectors from older OSes. I’m guessing some component in the drive got cooked. In any case, Eris (formerly known as Namtar) is running fine in its ultra-expensive-meant-for-video-recording new home.

Tocsic sent me an interesting article from der Spiegel. The Hamburg police have put smart cars into the police force. These vehicles are designed for use by traffic police, investigators, and senior officers. They are not equipped to replace regular patrol vehicles, nor was that the intent. The smarts are basically a vehicle to get officers from point A to point B as cheaply as possible. (Though the article does mention that they expect them to come in handy for manhunts within traffic.)

On Binary Bonsai, I ran across an interesting tale entitled: OS X Ate My Files!

… What do you think will happen?

I’ll tell what’ll happen, and what just happened. In OS X, the new wp-content folder will replace the old wp-content folder completely, throwing out everything inside of it, replacing it with the content of the new folder, keeping nothing from the old folder. And while you can undo the action, moving the new folder back where it came from, that won’t undo the deletion of the old folder!

…

This has got to be the most fucked up braindead ‘look at me, I’m a moron’ way of doing things I have ever come across. User data is sacred you fat fuck of an OS! …

Events of this weekend have provided IE users with another reason to switch to Firefox. According to TechNewsWorld, Crackers compromised a load balancing server owned by Falk eSolutions in Germany, causing the Bofra worm to be delivered along with their ad banners to as many as 150 of the company’s clients. One of those clients, The Register, distributed the worm to 11660 unique visitors runnings IE. The hack took advantage of a recently discovered IFRAME exploit in Internet Explorer that has yet to be patched. Windows XP SP2 users were immune. What is the result of Microsoft’s failure to address this flaw?

Users should consider using an alternate browser to Internet Explorer (such as Opera or Firefox) or upgrading their Microsoft operating system [to Windows XP SP2]
— Falk eSolution’s Press Release

We also urge readers using IE on Windows to switch browsers, at least until the iFrame exploit is patched properly.
— The Register’s Press Release

[T]here are other browsers that are safer and better than IE … IE has great possibilities, but it’s just not safe at this time … I wholly recommend using another browser for general Internet browsing and saving IE to use only for the things it’s required for.”
— Matt Jonkman, senior security consultant with Infotex

The interesting part here is the usage of the new IFRAME vulnerability, for which Microsoft still has no patch out. We urge users either to go with Windows XP with SP2 or to upgrade their Internet Explorer to any other browser.
— Mikko Hyppönen, director of anti-virus research at F-Secure

I ran across an interesting short story today entitled “The Empire of Ice Cream.” It centres around a character who suffers from synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is an intriguing affliction, and leads to an intriguing story…

Are you familiar with the scent of extinguished birthday candles? For me, their aroma is superceded by a sound like the drawing of a bow across the bass string of a violin. This note carries all of the melancholic joy I have been told the scent engenders—the loss of another year, the promise of accrued wisdom. Likewise, the notes of an acoustic guitar appear before my eyes as a golden rain, falling from a height just above my head only to vanish at the level of my solar plexus.

Now go read the story, like I did when I should’ve been working…

I just got off the phone with Delg. Apparently Megadeth is playing at Doris Knight Hall on November 22nd, here in Regina. It is apparently one of the last stops on Megadeth’s goodbye tour.

Indeed. This is a cause for much celebration.
— Teal’c, SG-1

Via Slashdot, Gateworld, and SciFi Wire, SG-1 & Atlantis have been renewed for another season.

It will mark an amazing ninth season for SG-1, which has been a ratings powerhouse — both in new episodes and daily reruns — for SCI FI since moving to the network in 2002. The series will also tie The X-Files for bragging rights to the longest-running science fiction series in U.S. television history.

Atlantis gets its second season, for which it was a shoe-in based on its highly-rated first season. The July series premiere drew 4.2 million viewers to SCI FI, an original series record for the network. Atlantis continued its performance throughout the summer, making it the highest-rated show on SCI FI.

… Speculation has also flown that star Richard Dean Anderson (”Jack O’Neill”) could ask for his shooting schedule to be reduced even further, perhaps even so far as to make him a recurring character instead of a regular.

We’re hearing more and more about how talking on cell phones while driving causes accidents, and how cell phones should be banned while driving, and so forth. The objections raised often annoy me, because I really don’t see how talking on a cell phone is any more distracting than talking to passengers in car. Personally, I think talking to passengers can be more distracting, because they’re right there, and therefore harder to tune out if the traffic situation necessitates it… not to mention the drivers who turn around to make a point to somebody in the back seat!

Well, in a newsletter I recently received from the Co-operators, I ran across some interesting statistics (attributed to the Canadian Safety Council). It says that “driver distractions contribute to an estimated 20 to 30% of all collisions” (emphasis mine), and then goes on to break down those distractions:

• Adjusting a radio of CD player — 11.4%
• Dealing with children, and conversation with passengers — 10.9%
• Eating and drinking — 1.7%
• Using a cell phone — 1.5%

Hmm. Look at that.