the corner office

Via jwz: glow in the dark pigs.

I saw a BBC article saying that Bush is to visit New Orleans (first time in three months), to see what's been done since Hurrican Katrina. That reminded me of something I'd forgotten to post last week. The Rude Pundit had a fairly depressing, but well-worth-reading series of blog posts and photos from a recent visit to New Orleans, showing just what a mess the city still is: (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5). The 'Possible Body' photo in post 5 brings it all home.

The (not) rebuilding effort isn't without its controversy and accusations of non-delivery, obviously, but one of the problems boils down to the economics of cities: people live in cities because they have jobs, facilities, and opportunity. If people don't come back because they no longer have jobs and/or won't have much luck finding new ones, and if the businesses and industry that provide those jobs aren't sure whether they should return because they're not sure if they'll have customers around, then it's a horrible Catch-22. You can't just send out a message 'hey everyone, come back!' and have things go back to the way they were. Particularly so in what was an incredibly poverty-stricken city to begin with.

Government investment might help to instil more confidence, undoubtedly, but that ties into the other part of the problem, the thing that most people probably aren't comfortable talking about - is it worth rebuilding? New Orleans was a culturally rich and vibrant place, and the world would be a duller place without it, no doubt, but having a city below sea level was and will continue to be a disaster waiting to happen, and re-happen, and re-happen.

Having said that, being the most profligate government in the history of America, I don't think the current US administration has much grounds to whinge about not wanting to spend money on something like this, and any non-delivery can probably be ascribed to incompetence and disinterest, more than anything else.

As an aside, I learned over the holiday that my aunt's sister and her hubby were living in New Orleans when Katrina struck, and went through the ordeal of evacuating to Houston, only to be evacuated again when Rita struck. Their home wasn't destroyed, but they're not planning to move back to the city, and so they're in the same boat as everyone else, trying to pick up the pieces and make new lives elsewhere. While I don't know my aunt's-sister-and-her-hubby very well, it does add a more personal angle to things.

The big news this week is the fact that Apple will be flogging their new Intel-powered laptops, rather unfetchingly (imho) named MacBooks, in the next month or two.

The excitement is two-fold, I imagine. The first is that Intel CPUs will make Macs a lot faster (well, Apple's own site says '4 times faster'). I'm sure that G4 owners are really chuffed knowing that.

The other (more important) thing, I think, is that people believe that this will make Macs a lot cheaper and more accessible. Is this a fair assumption? I'm sceptical, but it would be awesome if I was wrong.

I took a look at the apple.co.za site, and they don't mention any prices (yet), and the online store doesn't have any MacBooks listed (yet). The US site says 'starting from' $1999, which equates to about 14+ grand here. Now, looking at the specs and blurb at the Apple site, these really are beautiful pieces of equipment, but as always, the question is going to be whether it's worth the premium?

For posterity and Google.

I wanted to listen to a CD on my Gentoo box, and ran into some issues. Goes to show when last I listened to a CD, instead of mp3s.

First-up, gnome-cd (the Gnome CD Player), gave me the useful message "Drive Error". First stop was drive permissions, which is a common problem according to Google. The symlink /dev/cdrom had full read/write/execute permissions, but the underlying drive my CD is attached to, /dev/hdb, did not. Fixed that with chmod a+rwx /dev/hdb. The x and w seem redundant, but that's what the symlink had, so I did the same.

That solved part 1. After that, gnome-cd just crashed whenever I tried to open it. Trick whenever things go wrong is to run from the command line, so you get the stderr output. I was getting this:

colin@mirkwood ~ $ gnome-cd

** (gnome-cd:2368): WARNING **: No GConf default audio sink key and osssink doesn't work

** ERROR **: file gst-cdparanoia-cdrom.c: line 291 (build_pipeline): assertion failed: (priv->audio_sink != 0)
aborting...

Found this post on the Gentoo forums, all I needed to do was go to Preferences > MultiMedia Systems Selector, and change the default sink from 'osssink' to 'alsasink'.

After changing that, voila.

Advanced Networking. Not a bad paper, but looong. It was an open-book exam, which as always, was a blessing and a curse. It was nice not having to memorise the minutae of various network protocols, but the flipside was that the paper was just that much tougher and longer to compensate.

I have to say that our textbook, Douglas E. Comer's Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol I was an excellent textbook. Concise and clear, but meaty enough to not feel like yet another kiddie's introduction to the subject. Unfortunately, after one of 2004's most famous Bushisms, Comer's continuous reference to the heretofore perfectly-valid term 'internets' is perhaps going to suffer rather severely from Gresham's Law in the years to come.

As Farrel Lifson says, the ANC's latest proposed constitutional amendments are not in the country's best interests. They are, very certainly, in the ANC government's best interests.

You can bet your bottom dollar that every constitutional protection that's taken away from us, will NEVER be given back.

What better way to get well psyched up for the start of the Great Exam Stretch of 2006, than have a power failure the night before your first exam. Resorting to studying by candlelight, just like our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents did it.

Thankfully the power came back on after an hour or so. I'd hate to think what tomorrow would've been like if it hadn't.

Ken Porter at vowe.net explains the cause of the current Microsoft WMF vulnerability, and it's a doozie:

The problem exists with Microsoft Windows and the way it displays a certain type of graphics file called a WMF file. A WMF file can contain two types of data, data about the graphic itself, and data which contains a computer program. The idea behind putting a computer program in a graphic file is if Microsoft Windows encounters a problem displaying a particular graphic, it can run the computer program in the file to figure out how to handle the error condition.

...it has now become a problem because some people have discovered they can use these WMF files to install virus code on a Windows machine. What they do is create a WMF file with an intentional error in the graphic part of the file, and then write a computer program in the second part of the WMF file which installs a computer virus of their choice.

In other words, what started out as an attempt to be user-friendly, ended up being very user-unfriendly.

What's more, as Julian Robichaux points out:

I also noticed that some of the advisories mentioned that even if a WMF file has another image extension (like .JPG), it can still cause problems because the graphics rendering programs can auto-detect that it's really a WMF file.

More user-friendliness. Gnome's Nautilus, I've noticed, won't allow you to double-click-open certain media files if it notices that the file extension and the underlying format differ. Instead, it warns you and forces you to explicitly choose an application to open the file with. I'm not sure how all-encompassing or bullet-proof it is, but in the past I considered a nuisance - not anymore.

I learned a few months back that Royal Instant Pudding, 2 months past its expiry date, still Tastes Just Fine.

Chocolate Royal Instant Pudding, 9 months past its expiry date, is unfortunately not. It's edible, but the taste and texture were a little disconcert^Wdisappointing.

Two part (part 1, part 2) comparison of Tomcat running on Windows and Linux, (via TSS).

The lowdown:

• under normal loads the performance was similar, with Linux very slightly ahead.
• Linux was able to handle greater concurrent throughput at very high loads.
• Linux dealt with high load by slowing down, but still accepting inbound connections. Windows dealt with high load by refusing new connections.
• VM memory usage tweaking can make a big difference to the application's performance at higher loads.