DoomBook

Usually when you’re looking to upgrade your software and you can’t get the update patch it’s due to outdated hardware of some sort. We accept this and move on.

But today from a Wired article I found the first instance in recent memory of an upgrade being denied for a phone because it was too functional.

From the article, “However, the phone is being ruled out because it has five buttons rather than the three buttons mandated for all Windows Phone 7 Series devices.” And that’s direct from MS’s PR flac department.

Read more on why you don’t want to pick up a Windows Mobile phone right here.

Because I really hate posting files in the WP format I’m tossing Villa-Straylight back online for it’s original purpose of posting literature. It should work nicely alongside Doombook.

You can find the first few posts over at http://villa-straylight.net.

Really. I was mildly surprised.

While looking over the latest release low-end laptops I kept running across “Celeron 900″ laptops. Apparently the Celeron 900 is a model designation and not simply a 900mhz Celeron.

Which is a more confusing distinction than one might at first assume. The 900mhz Celerons are still loitering around the marketplace in spots.

So check to make sure that what you’re looking at is this Celeron 900 and not the 900mhz Celeron.

Alright, so I was reading up on the news this evening and looked over an article claiming that Yahoo and Google have roughly equal market share. Which seemed ludicrous on the face of it.

I mean, Google makes oodles more money than Yahoo, a fact that the article in question freely admits. yet they claimed that the sites shared equal visitor metrics.

And that’s weird. It really is. Then I thought about it. And figured I had the solution. So, I needed an independent third party that does some kind of arbitrary web metrics that involve both Yahoo and Google.

Sure enough, there’s a quick little toolbar monitor that doesn’t do too good a job outside what Windows users are visiting, but for generic non-OS centric numbers works just fine (although take them with a grain of salt). Alexa.com.

So I looked up the comparison over at Alexa. And you’ll notice some weird things that won’t seem weird unless you’re putting your critical thinking hat on.

For instance, the numbers look pretty parallel. Yahoo scores down 10% on most of the metrics (which is a lot, Alexa-wise) aside from time on page which is absurdly high for both engines, relatively speaking, when you consider what it is they do… but it’s about the same for that, which doesn’t jive at all with the article. However, it does make perfect sense with the way my thoughts were going.

Okay, so you’ve got similar statistics for both pages, Yahoo trailing by a good bit. They did sell their search out to Microsoft, after all, which means they don’t think they can cut it as an entity. Remember Netscape? Starting to get a little hazy as to what they did?

AOL sacrificed them in much the same way as Yahoo did their search engine.. and I’m sure they’re patting themselves on the back over what a great idea that was.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Here’s the relevant page over at Alexa. Click on Search % there on the nav bar. Yahoo and Google are the one type of page that doesn’t really want a high number on that score.

Why, you might ask? It means they’re getting a high percentage of their traffic from search results. Given that most of those results come from Google, that means most of their traffic is coming from.. er.. googling.

So yes, they might have acceptable numbers over at Yahoo as far as inbound is concerned. But that’s only, by my estimation (from a little bit of digging), because Google is getting that traffic first. And getting the chance to sell you an ad with the search, if what you’re really looking for is a purchase.

Which means that Yahoo gets the dregs. Kinda explains why their ad revenue sucks, seeing as how they’re only getting a shot if it didn’t work out for the admittedly more accurate Google ad machine. Puts it into perspective why they see a 7th the revenue of the big G.

Seems that if the author of the article I was reading did a little critical thinking or cross-referenced those numbers with something they might’ve realized it rings a bit hollow. Yahoo doesn’t do that much worse a job with ad-revenue than Google, certainly not 1/7th as well anyway, so something had to be wrong.

Wow, so I get an e-mail from Webster Bank (local bank up here in Connecticut). They’re a larger outfit as local banks go. And the e-mail contains the following header: “We’ve got the hotest new look of teh summer.”

First I thought to myself, “self, this is a fishing e-mail with the ph the kids are so fond of”. But no, it’s legit. The e-mail and URL addresses check out.

The only way that they can redeem this is if someone typed it out on a blackberry.. but I’m assuming even that’s got a sane spellcheck these days.

So yea, customer e-mail to the entire client list without so much as a read for spelling. I hope anyway. Either that or hottest is now less a t and “teh” has entered the lexicon.

Having just purchased a OBDPro USB scantool I’ve been getting it kicking to start troubleshooting the new-old Saab that I’m working on. The two programs that come up on Freshmeat are obdgpslogger and obdgui as a single project and FreeDiag.

Freediag wouldn’t compile out of the box on my 64 bit Debian machine, so I moved on to the first package obdgpslogger/obdgui.

OBDgpslogger compiled up in a snap and appears to work well. It’s got a nice GUI component that’s about the equal of the quickie software that came with the device. For reference, here’s the list of libraries the two programs use.

OBDGui:
linux-vdso.so.1
libfltk_images.so.1.1
libfltk.so.1.1
libfltk_gl.so.1.1
libfltk_forms.so.1.1
libSM.so.6
libICE.so.6
libX11.so.6
libXext.so.6
libpthread.so.0
libdl.so.2
libstdc++.so.6
libm.so.6
libgcc_s.so.1
libc.so.6
libpng12.so.0
libjpeg.so.62
libXft.so.2
libfontconfig.so.1
libXinerama.so.1
libGL.so.1
libxcb-xlib.so.0
libxcb.so.1
libXau.so.6
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0×00007f99dea9a000)
libz.so.1
libfreetype.so.6
libXrender.so.1
libexpat.so.1
libGLcore.so.1
libnvidia-tls.so.1
libXdmcp.so.6

OBDGPSLogger:
linux-vdso.so.1
libpthread.so.0
libdl.so.2
libgps.so.18
libc.so.6
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
libnsl.so.1
libstdc++.so.6
libm.so.6
libgcc_s.so.1

Oddball stuff I didn’t have installed already included gpsd devel packages, FLTK devel (for the gui), and “fluid” (fltk add-on?) (also for the gui).

It seems like it’s going to work well. The sensor hooks up fine on the included software package (through WINE) so long as I symlink /dev/ttyUSB0 to /dev/com1, set it to 9600bps, and make sure /dev/ttyUSB0 is permmisioned so that my user has access to it.

obdgdmlogger hooked in just fine short the GPS sensor (not installed yet) and gui output (just compiled).

So in short it all “just worked” for me. Which is nice. Occasionally the 64 bit nature of this machine makes installing things a pain.

An interesting thing happened on the way to backing up the VM server this weekend. And by interesting I mean mindbendingly horrible.

So I’m pulling down the array for a backup. Not that odd in and of itself. And then I start getting spurious IRQ requests (it’s spamming the crap out of the line) that crash out one of the HDDs on the array and render the machine frozen.

OKAY. That’s why we have a RAID-5 array in the first place.

When I bring the machine back up it chokes with some errors on the RAID initiation. Apparently it doesn’t think there are enough drives in the array anymore to bring up the primary /dev/md1 array that holds all our precious data. Excellent, I love spending a weekend de-mucking dead servers :/.

Naturally I don’t want to compound issues, so I pull a backup of each of the bloody 300+ GB drives to a recently verified good (off it’s third RMA.. hardware incompatibility rather than mechanical flaws) 640GB backup drive. This takes roughly a day.. but it’s worth it if the drives die in the middle of a recovery effort.

I’ve got everything pretty straight data-wise, no real fear of doing worse damage at this point. Cracking open mdadm to do a examine on the arrays reveals something a bit weird though. The drives, two of them anyway, show that they’re still okay…

Turns out that the system hit the third drive in the array first, saw that it reported a failure of the entire array, and went no further. The other two drives in the array report as working fine.. and do. I did a –assemble sans funky drive and the array came right up for me to pull a quick backup.

Now I’ll just re-add the “dead” drive to the array and have it re-build once the backup is finished.

So, if you’re staring at an array that won’t come up take a closer look at the mdadm output to make sure it isn’t just hanging on a single debilitated drive. Although I’ve never seen this happen before, restoring a single drive sure beats restoring off backup medium.

Temple Shearith Israel hosted Harry Manx as part of the Acoustic Celebration in Ridgefield and we were fortunate enough to get over to Ridgefield and catch the show.

First off, Harry’s down from Canada doing a bit of touring stateside after coming back from playing shows in Australia. It really was a good catch by Jay to find him playing a small show over in western Connecticut tonight before heading back home for a spell.

Musically, his repertoire is a combination of Blues and Indian music, both in their own and blended together into an original strain of picked music. Quite a few of the songs are played on the Mohan veena which Jay accurately described as coming across like a combination of a sitar and a dobro.

In any case the venue was great for a small show with a 40 or so person audience and the technician did an excellent job tuning the audio setup in a tight enclosed environment. It was quite a show.

Brian Wood (DMZ, DEMO) writes about something he knows pretty intimately, NYC. Add in accurate to life art from Ryan Kelly to the witty writing style and you’ve got a good novel.

Although I’m not sure Minx will survive as an imprint. Hopefully it does well with it’s target, I’m guessing, young(ish) female audience. Or someone! It looks like there’s a few gems in there that could work up to classics like La Perdida or Love & Rockets.

In any case our store follows along our protagonist through the foibles of starting up college at NYU on an true to life New York City -scape (although they don’t mention Dumpling Man on St. Marks. For shame.) and making new friends.

It’s a fairly clever and entertaining slice of life story, hopefully to be followed by more. Check it out.

Looks like DC Comics has another non-spandex related imprint. It almost seems like a softer side of Vertigo, without the over-the-top-ness that line tends to engender. Focused more on drama and interesting social stories it’s line-up so far features quite a few top-rate authors.

Think Love & Rockets and you’ve got the right idea.

Needless to say, I approve. You can catch their current issues at your local bookstore and check out what they’ve got to offer at the website.