Those nice people at Ubuntu Linux who keep sending me lots of CDs to distribute to students, have just announced a server edition of thier distribution.
John Hunt atttains Guru Status – without a beard.
John Hunt used to work around here – he was a lecturer in the department, and taught Java to many of us. Somewhere at home I still have a my copy of “Java for Practitioners” printed out on A4 paper that I proofread before publication – I wonder what that would fetch on eBay? He has just had an article published on that mine of information The Register about the Hibernate tool for Object Relational Mapping, and I look forward to the second part of the article. But seriously John, guru status still requires a beard – maybe someone at El Reg should be informed.
When I looked at The Register’s main page, John’s article wasn’t listed – it had appeared on the RSS feed, which is where I picked it up from – odd that it didn’t appear on the front page. It’s still not on the front page, an hour after the publication time.
iPod Nano upgrade?
Looks like someone is playing silly games with reality again – it’s a very funny article, but don’t take it too seriously 😉
Or if you’re more into movies, how about adding more storage to a
Video iPod Nano
Reminds me a little of the Wood iPod from a few months back
MPW C Compiler errors
The following is something that I remember for a long time ago, and am reproducing it here for the entertainment of students and others that read my blog.
These are some of the error messages produced by Apple’s MPW C compiler. These are all real. (If you must know I was bored one afternoon and decompiled the String resources for the compiler.) The compiler is 324k in size so these are just an excerpt I hope. I’m not sure where I stand on the copyright issue. Tony Cunningham
“String literal too long (I let you have 512 characters, that’s 3 more than ANSI said I should)”
“…And the lord said, ‘lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement'”
“a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program”
“‘Volatile’ and ‘Register’ are not miscible”
“You can’t modify a constant, float upstream, win an argument with the IRS, or satisfy this compiler”
“This struct already has a perfectly good definition”
“type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you don’t care, I’m just trying to annoy you)”
“Can’t cast a void type to type void (because the ANSI spec. says so, that’s why)”
“Huh ?”
“can’t go mucking with a ‘void *'”
“we already did this function”
“This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn’t wide enough to read this whole error message”
“Call me paranoid but finding ‘/*’ inside this comment makes me suspicious”
“Too many errors on one line (make fewer)”
“Symbol table full – fatal heap error; please go buy a RAM upgrade from your local Apple dealer”
Sony sued over copy protection root kit.
Sony has been under fire for using “root kit” techniques in copy protecting some of their CDs.
Sony’s digital business division boss “Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”
Now there are class actions being filed.
BBC news
This one’s gonna run for a while.
Googlebot and phpiCalendar
I installed php iCalendar a few weeks ago, it was really nice being able to publish some of my iCal files from Sunbird on the web, and students could see whan I was free without me having to print out a paper calendar every week and stick it on my door.
I got a message today though, for some reason the system network usage had shot up, and my web server was consuming something like 6.4MB/s.
It was traced to Googlebot indexing my calendar file, as there are so many links, and technically the calendar can keep going forever, the bot had got a little out of control.
I have now put a robots.txt file in the correct place, but I’m still not sure that it’s going to solve the problem – it’s still generating a request every second or so, and eating bandwidth.
Microsoft – “We share your Pain”
A nice article on Ars Technica on a new bug reporting system called WE-SYP called “We Share Your Pain”. There is a very amusing video linked from the story too.
Yes it is a joke, but it would be so nice.
Painless transfer
Migrate users on the mac is just so easy – all my documents and applications have now been copied across to the tiny box that is the Mac mini.
If you thought that the shuttle was small – take a look at the two together.
Mac mini arrived :-D
The Mac mini arrived this afternoon, this is the first post I am making from it – from home, as it’s not in the mac address tables at work yet, and I have taken it home to open up the iBook to remove the hard disk to put in an external caddy, and migrate all my old data and settings across.
I know it’s going to be a somewhat painful experience, but I can’t think of a better way to get everything off the old iBook.
A number of people have also mentioned that their iBooks have also died recently – I guess Apple are building time bombs into them ;-/
Sub $100 laptop design unveiled
OK so it’s not going to run 3D apps, but BBC News has an interesting article on it on their site.