I hate Facebook. Or I want to. I think it’s cluttered, it’s somewhat bland-looking, and uses tiny fonts. (No, my eyes haven’t gotten old yet, but still I like a nice comfy reading size when the screen is 2′ away from me.) But, I’ve stared to log on several times a day now. And it’s all Scrabulous’ fault. Seriously. I love Scrabble and Scrabulous has their Facebook app that makes it so simple to play against everyone. And they finally just opened up the multiplayer feature. Oy, I’m going to be wasting so much time now.
Weird. While driving around yesterday the iPhone decided to discharge all of its battery power in a little over an hour. It was sitting in my car’s cupholder in locked mode, and every time I checked it the battery level was rapidly draining. I took it out of its case and it was actually running really hot too. I’m going to take a guess that it’s not the battery that has a problem but that something went awry on the iPhone (like a process was maxing the CPU) but it is only temporary. Let’s hope it’s temporary.
The audiobook of I Am America (And So Can You!) is great. One of my fave passages of this book is now:
“… while you’re beating the bushes for a mate, the answer might be to just shake the family tree. An attractive cousin might just fall out. … My own family tree is not so much a tree as it is a (pause) circle. It kinda looks like a tree eating itself…”
I’m feeling icky. I’ve been working on a project late into the night with another friend who lives in a time zone far far away. But I’ll be on her time zone soon enough, if only for a week! Yay! I’m so psyched about this project because if we can pull this off it will pave the way for future projects of its ilk.
But I think I overexerted myself. I’m just feeling like crap today. I have tea and yummy Indian leftovers to keep me company as I work from home today. Thank goodness I work in the tech industry…
In other news I just signed up to do a little volunteering in the community. I’ve been kicking myself to do a lot of things, but this is one of them that I don’t really have an excuse not to do. I hope, though, that I can get involved with other projects which are closer to my skills base. I like being an extra helping hand with a broom and a dustpan, but if I can help someone with their website, be a site photographer, or do videography, then I can definitely increase my volunteering impact.
Oy, this is so annoying. I’ve lost about two days worth of working. I finally made it down to the Apple Store and they confirmed a couple of things:
1) my battery was not giving adequate power output, and
2) my filesystem was pretty corrupt
The general consensus is that FileVault is bad. The guy at the Genius Bar basically said that since the property files need to be read from the system and decrypted (perhaps even partially), the files sit in a weird state. So when complete crashes occur FileVault cannot write the encrypted files back to disk thereby corrupting them. What exacerbated this problem was that my faulty battery would cause the computer to shut down spontaneously without allowing FileVault to clean up. So the advice was to remove FileVault. There’s only one problem: I have a huge amount of data in my user directory.
The solution to this was not a pretty one: copy the entire user directory out to an external hard disk, Erase And Install the Mac OS back onto the drive, and reinstall all settings from there. This has caused a whole ripple effect. I spent probably 3 hours backing up my data, 1.5 hours reinstalling Mac OS, and 45 minutes patching it back up. Now comes the really painful part: copying all of the data I backed up back to the proper places. Oh, and I still have to reinstall everything.
OK, I’m getting really tired of this. I was typing along with my Macbook with it running on battery power when at 50% battery life it just went POP and then shut off. Blank screen. Stopped hard drive. Complete crash. And when I started up again all my settings were GONE. AGAIN. All of my iPhoto photos, all of my iTunes tunes, all my Thunderbird mail settings, all of my directory and OS X settings GONE. I’m so f’in tired of this.
Do you remember the Ellen Feiss video? You must:
And I was like “nnnnmmmm???”. Yeah, I hear you. I was like “oh no not again”. This is the SECOND time I have had my Macbook just quit on me and destroy my settings. See, it’s horrible. iPhoto keeps your modified and originals in two separate folders, and if the file that links them together is corrupt then forget it. Your settings are just GONE. Observe these wonderful pictures after my computer came back to life:
I mean seriously. When Windows XP crashed it was bad but at least the settings files were there. When my Mac crashes it takes out data. And I might add that my WinXP didn’t crash that often.
UGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!
In a way this is almost worse than a Windows registry crash. With the registry you can back that up periodically. With the Mac all the config files are all over the place. And, for example, the iPhoto config files are inside the iPhoto directory which is impossible to navigate using Finder. You have to open up a Unix shell to get at the files. It’s horrible.
Apparently, the Passion Pictures animation studio ripped off kozyndan’s after requesting samples of their work and never called them back. Dan just wrote me an email about it to confirm that this is pretty much the story, at least from their side.
iPod Touch Dev Team has discovered the old malformed TIFF exploit in iPhone 1.0.2 and 1.1.1 to crash. This also applies to iPod Touch 1.1 and 1.1.1. It’s all about crafted TIFF file which will cause buffer overflow. (User summary, not actual text.)
I mean really. It’s 2007 and we’re still having buffer overflows. You would think at this point that even if a file was malformed that the only thing that would happen is that the file would be corrupt. But no, we still have a way to do code injection. I don’t get it. I really don’t. Can’t things be sandboxed properly so that buffer overflows are nonexistant?
