Last week my two mailservers collected these silly Sober.P/Q thingies by the hundreds. Not that I need to care much: I don't do Microsoft crap.

Now, however, the bloody thing has started its operation on all those subverted wankstations and blasts the world with bad German Nazi propaganda. With addresses belonging to me as sender. Gee, thanks for all those bounces!

Death is too good for both Nazis and virus spreaders. And, of course, for the idiots responsible for the lousy vulnerable software in the first place...

Picture me drinking tea. Lots of tea.
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The recent troubles I had with my tape robot fall into the category magic: weird resets/lockups/recycles of the device in the Sun 411 case, which took out heffalump a few times as reported earlier. So I switched it to a spare scsi bus (always mount a scratch monkey...), same behaviour but sans lockup of the box. Next thing was to test it on a different system: I dug out my trusty AHA-1460 PCMCIA scsi controller and blasted the robot with data. Same lousy behaviour. Finally I decided that the only thing that I had changed recently was the case. So I moved the robot back into the (noisy) lynx case, without having much hope for the thing, and....it works.

The only lame explanation that I have is that the 411's PSU is rated at 1.7A on the primary side (dunno secondary), while the tape robot wants 0.7A for the tape and up to 2.0A for the robot. (Not that the problems were in any way associated with the robot moving; that worked fine and lockups were never experienced with the robot moving. Still I have no better "explanation". It works, that's currently good enough for me.)

Less magic but still good news is that the debian MyMess -> Sarge upgrades I did today on the lapdog and the work desktop were mostly harmless and a good excuse for cleaning up unused software on the go. I suppose after Sarge is now frozen it's time to eat my own dogfood. This dogfood tastes good.

Not good news is the weather recently: it all sucks, big time. Rarely a day in the last couple of weeks when it doesn't either drizzle or rain or blow gale-force winds. I WANT TO FLY. I NEED TO FLY. bugger.

Related to lack of flying, my problems re licence levels and flying in .at are also confirmed. We'll see if I manage to get the required Oz license in time but I'm not very optimistic. Ah well, I'll go hiking with Cornelia then.

The next semester starts on Monday. I'm so thrilled.

Spent the last few days fixing up years of gut-wrenchingly bad HTML excrements spattered across the website for the Canungra Cup competition (as usual I didn't say "no" fast enough and am now hosting/caring for/maintaining the thing...geeks are suckers). That hurt so bad, even after various runs through tidy and friends...quite some curses and beer later (my homebrew batch has worked out and is starting to get drinkable) most of the pages are standards-compliant and looking at the source doesn't immediately introduce projective vomiting anymore (like the MS shite "let's make a gratuitous table here to produce some indentation, and let's put all the font settings everywhere" did).

Subject: Re: a sad host
From: Brian Kantor
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 05:28:34 +0000 (UTC)
Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery

Garrett Wollman ... wrote:
>Yeah, it is kind of sad when machines have to be rebooted weekly.
> 4:15PM  up 409 days, 22:02, 1 user, load averages: 12.34, 9.87, 8.01
>-GAWollman

Or yearly, even:

>Last login: Wed Apr 20 15:56:09 2005 from karoshi.ucsd.edu
>10:26PM  up 1453 days, 18:20, 3 users, load averages: 0.35, 0.17, 0.15
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>[brian] 1 : 

hehe

MS UK, transatlantic offspring of the Evil Empire is sponsoring a short film competition, titled "Thought Thieves".

"The theme of your film should be about how intellectual property theft affects both individuals and society."

The entry form clearly shows its origins:

"...Should I be selected as a finalist in this competition, I confirm the following: 7. I will formally license on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so..."

Pot. Kettle. Black. Assholes.

Link to the boingboing article

snort! The quote is from a newspaper article on some fellows taking a bus for a joyride (after the driver had gone for a pee and forgot the keys in the ignition).

Australians seem to like public transportation only if they can drive themselves, as evidenced by the final paragraph of said article:

"The trio resisted picking up passengers during their short trip, say police, unlike in Melbourne a month ago, when a 15-year-old boy was caught after picking up passengers in a tram he had taken."

Seems like the recent problems with my DAT changer are SCSI related; it's taken out heffalump three times in the last two days.

There goes my hope of making a SCSI chain work which consists of a wide controller, two SCA drives internally, a Sun 68-to-50 cable followed by the narrow changer+tape unit and a narrow terminator at the end of the mess. (I don't have any wide cables, sockets etc. to fix up the narrow tape changer...)

Of course this is -as SCSI goes- not a big surprise; everybody knows that termination issues can only be resolved with judicious application of candles, knives and goats. The fact that my setup has worked fine for a few weeks only reaffirms the Magic SCSI Properties.

...which presently sucks big time.
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Bolero Large Yellow/Red/White, DHV 1, 90-110kg. 3 years old, 63 hours. No beach, in perfect condition, just inspected: 130+ seconds on the porosity meter. Comes with glider bag and stirrup. $1400 ONO.
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