September 2006 Archives

It would appear that David Maynor and Johnny Cache have been at least partially vindicated. I wouldn't go so far as to say they've been fully vindicated: as the saying goes, "show us the code". If they really believe Apple have been acting irresponsibly, then maybe that would be the best thing to do, in the interests of full disclosure.

However, that's not really why I wanted to post; as the title suggests, one of the questions that their defenders (including Twitchy from pauldotcom and Andy the IT Guy, among others) have been asking is "what would they have to gain by lying?" That's a fair enough question, and rationally, the answer is nothing - as it usually is. However, that doesn't stop hordes of people from lying anyway. What did they have to gain? Notoriety, perhaps a contract or three... who knows. Maybe they never expected it to get that big and things just got out of hand, like a Coen Brothers movie. "All The Dude wanted was his rug back."

I'm not saying they're lying - I'm sure there's at least a grain of truth to their allegations - but until and unless there's Real Code That Works released, I'll stick with I'll believe it when I see it. And if Apple's recent patches really and truly vindicate them (as in, the patches fix precisely what they claimed was broken) then turn the title's question on its head - what do they have to lose by releasing the code? Nothing. What do they have to gain? Vindication.

Long time no talk, mostly because not living in Edmonton, it's hard to watch preseason games, and I don't like speculating about players I haven't seen. There hasn't been much news from an Oilers perspective, although a couple of interesting things cropped up today.

A bit of schadenfreude as the Jackets waived Ty Conklin. Poor bastard. I wanted to like him, but after last season... not a guy who does well under stress. He'll pass waivers, and this will be the last NHL contract he ever signs, I suspect.

Carolina traded Jack Johnson. They got a pretty good return, too. Oilogosphere is wondering why Lowe didn't ante up (I don't even bother checking hfboards any more, I'm sure Bryanbryoil is whingeing about Schremp not getting a real chance and how terrible MacT is at developing young offensive talent, I mean, look at how poorly Stoll and Hemsky and Horcoff are doing)... well, I think it's cos there would have been no Johnson without a blueliner going back the other way, and that defense corps is looking a bit thin as it is.

Lowetide was saying apparently the Oilers are talking to the Blues; he didn't specify about whom, but I imagine it must be Erik Johnson, first overall last draft. I don't see how that deal makes sense for either team - the Blues would obviously want a pretty hefty return, and they're rebuilding anyway, aren't they?

Anyway, yes hockey fans, I am alive, although I don't know how much I'll have to contribute - I doubt I'm getting Centre Ice again this season, so I'll be restricted to the 20 or 30 games max that nasty CBC / TSN will let me see. I'll try though.

I just spent about half an hour trying to figure out why my Ubuntu "alternate" 6.06.1 install was bombing out installing base packages. (I'm using the alternate install CD because I want RAID-1 filesystems from the get-go.)

I discovered instead of making the 1gb partition at the start of the disk /boot, I'd made it /. The 245gb partition was /home instead of /. (Just a simple desktop install, so I didn't want to partition it any more - people always bitch if /home runs out of space.)

I don't know what the best solution is for this, ie, if the installer can automatically detect if you've done something stupid with your / filesystem - obviously, Ubuntu's desktop install isn't going to fit in a partition that small, but it might if I had /usr and /bin and such on different filesystems. (An equally stupid layout, but you never know.)

Worth filing a bug report over? Dunno.

(Security, because it's spyware, but General Tech, because it's not actually all that interesting, being spyware on Windows, but I figured I'd post a bit of my notes here.)

Linda's mother asked me if I could have a look at her PC. It was giving her weird error messages when she tried to go into the Control Panel and such to remove software. She blamed it on Linda's sister, who'd been using LimeWire on the machine, but I figured it could have been anything, so I agreed to have a look. (There's some history between us regarding fixing computers, and I generally loathe looking at family PCs anyway, but I figured what the hell, I'd never seen that particular error message before.) So, mostly last night and a bit today, I had a look.

I named a particular vendor in a couple of posts here; at first, it was ok, but given that some more recent posts have been a bit negative with respect to them, I thought it might be best if I made the references a bit more generic. I can't undo what's cached in Google and such, but I figured I would at least try.

I know that this vendor is in a bit of a difficult spot with us and they're doing the best they can, but it's still causing us grief, so I don't feel too too bad about having previously named them, and if anybody were to ask how things went with them on this cluster project, I would answer honestly. ("Not as well as we'd hoped.") I'm confident that one way or another, they'll fix our problems and we'll be able to get to use the clusters, just not as soon as we'd wanted to start.

Still, I was tempted to leave their names in anyway.

Since our RT system is currently down and I'm not actually sure what I'm supposed to be doing right now, I figured I would take the opportunity to experiment.

I had a full iTunes library on my PC here at work, and was syncing my ipod from it. The problem is, I don't want to take any time at work (or stay later than usual) to do miscellaneous maintenance on my library, so it's falling a bit into disrepair. I got a bigger hard disk for my old iMac at home (hopefully to be soonish replaced with a spiff new iMac) so I decided to experiment. I borrowed a USB enclosure and a fast PATA disk, and rsynced /Users/mpatters/Music to it from my work G5 (executor). Then I took it home, and rsynced it to the iMac (reaper). I plugged my iPod in at home, and iTunes figured it could manage it no problem - didn't even warn me that it was being managed by another machine and did I want to switch it - and It Just Worked, hurray. I listened to and deleted some podcasts, just ducky.

So I brought my iPod back to work and plugged it into executor. It promptly copied all the podcasts back. So I figured I'd try to do in iTunes 7 what used to be called "update manually" in iTunes 6.

I now have an empty iPod. sigh.

Well, I can always re-sync it from reaper, but it's going to be a boring walk home.

There must be some way to do this - I like autoupdating the ipod from iTunes, so I'd like to keep the connection between it and reaper, but I also like listening to music at work. Perhaps the thing to do is to mount the iPod as a hard disk, then tell iTunes on executor that the music library lives at /Volumes/myipod - that worked once when I tried it with a Powerbook, anyway. Then I can free up a bunch of disk space on my work machine, but I'll also need to either remember to always haul my iPod USB cable around, or else purchase a second one.

.. Update: I guess I didn't see the manual sync option before, but it'll have to be Monday before I give it another try.

One question I have been asking for years (and I believe I've even asked publicly, ie on hfboards) is this: why does the fact that few players sign RFA offer sheets automatically mean those sheets have not been offered? I've never understood the assumption that players will a) automatically go with the highest bid (although if it's millions more they'd be crazy not to, unless they're married to FCP's wife), and b) if we don't hear about an RFA offer sheet, that means none has been made.

We assume that hockey players are greedy bastards just in it for a buck, and then complain when they live up to those assumptions. There's a fundamental disconnect in the branez of many fans, and that's just one example. (Another is the "life isn't EA Sports" - just because I get offered a pair of first round picks for a guy doesn't mean I'll take 'em.)

Just a couple of brief notes.

I can't say anything that somebody else hasn't already said, but is Charles Wang nuts? How does a guy get that rich while being that stupid? Didn't he learn from Yashin? (Obviously not.)

Philly offers Kesler an RFA sheet. Smart move. He'll either overpay a bit for somebody who is, by all appearances, settling down to be a fine centreman, or he'll put the screws a bit to a GM. I'm surprised he didn't try to take advantage of LL in New Jersey though - why not go for a conference rival?

By all accounts, Alexei "Traktor Boy" Mikhnov is doing well in Alberta - hopefully he can keep it up, and doesn't fade like Shremp did last season. (And speaking of Hot Dog, I'm sure he's got his sights set on the NHL this season.)

It should be an interesting season. I'm listening to Kevin Lowe's "Oilers Live" from 31 August, he said "as a fan I'm excited, as a general manager I'm scared to death" - pretty honest-sounding assessment. He says Roli's knee is better now, just fine. Linda's listening with me, Lowe talked a bit about FCP - he brought up the weather about a billion times, as she pointed out. You think that's why they moved? I wonder if that's why Lowe had trouble moving him to the East - he mentioned that a couple times too, that he'd have liked to have gotten CP away from them. Lots of eastern teams are wintery.

I thought about it, but I don't think I'm going to bother getting Centre Ice again this year - I'll be taking a class in January and that'll keep me busy, plus it's $200+ that we just don't have right now. C'est la vie, hopefully there aren't as many blackouts this year as last.

News on your desktop seems pretty clever at first blush, particularly to tech addicts like myself, but thinking about it a bit more, it seems like it's just a great way to nickle and dime yourself to death. "I'll just check this quickly while I wait for the build to finishooOO!"

I think I'll pass. Email and webpages are distracting enough in that regard.