Ktn

This weekend I destroyed 3 ATA/IDE hard drives from around 9 to 11 years old. They were of 10.1, 30 and 120 GB in capacity. The 10.1 GB seemed to be working but had no partition, I remember I never removed the partition so in some way it got screwed up. The 30 GB one was working correctly but had no good use for it so I just copied the information it had and destroyed the disk. Finally, the 120 GB drive had several days making noises and a few times didn’t show up at the O.S. level, so I copied things off to another drive and got rid of it too.

I only hope the 80 GB hard drive of the ThinkCentre lasts longer, for sure it’s newer but is used a lot more. Will have to plan a replacement of that drive moving the important stuff out of it and re-imaging a bigger IDE hard drive. The PC still works fine so no plans to buy a new one for some years.

Don’t know why but Liferea 1.6.5 started crashing a week ago whenever I try to see any entry from the Slashdot RSS feed, it happens after a few seconds. I’m in Fedora 13 x86_64 and when I launch Liferea from the command line it shows the following:
(liferea:6499): libsoup-CRITICAL **: soup_cookie_domain_matches: assertion `host != NULL' failed

Liferea did receive signal 11 (Segmentation fault).

I just added a comment on Bug 621031 (”liferea crashes on certain pages”) in the Red Hat Bugzilla system. Hope there’s a fix without the need to update to Fedora 14.

I have been using Fedora 12 x86_64 for a few months in a ThinkPad T61p that may be a couple of years old, so obviously the battery has degraded over time (as happens with all of them) and there’s a message that started appearing some weeks back. It says “Battery may be broken” and I’m sure the threshold that Gnome (I believe) uses is that if the battery’s current capacity is lower than the 50% of the design (or original) capacity then the message is shown every time I log in.

The message’s not precisely annoying but I would really like to modify the threshold to something like 30%, instead of the suggested steps in the Fedora forums and blog posts about installing gconf-editor (if not already installed), then from it navigate to apps -> gnome-power-manager -> notify and uncheck the low_capacity option.

I mean, the battery is not broken, I know what happens with all of them over time, so I thought that since I’m on Linux I will be able to modify this threshold easily somewhere, but I searched in Google for different terms and phrases and nothing comes up. Anyone knows if the threshold can be modified and how?

A few hours ago I got my TOEIC results in a ceremony where only the people with the best results were invited. We were told all of us were above the 850 points mark.

Hope the certificate effectively comes in Gold color (as stated in this Wikipedia page) because my result was 960 out of 990. Feels good, when I have a chance I’ll add it into my CV and perhaps to my LinkedIn account.

I could have done better but I got distracted in one or two of the listening comprehension pieces that were related with 3 or 4 actual questions.

I was driving back home from the office and at around 6:20 PM I noticed that the Steering Wheel Malfunction indicator of the Mazda 3S illuminated. I was in one of the few highways that Guadalajara (México) has, the one we call “Periférico”, I was just passing López Mateos going West. More or less it’s here. I verified quickly the other indicators and all were fine, so I decided to move the steering wheel a bit to see if everything was right but noticed that it was hard. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I wanted to make a quick turn.

I thought, what if it blocks and I can’t turn in a curve? Should I move to the side and park the car to turn it off and then on to see if it fixes itself? Was this just limiting the hydraulic help (driving assistant or whatever it’s called in english) so it was just hard to make real turns?

Was thinking in advance of every curve, fortunately none were sharp, and by the time I was about to cross the “5 de Mayo” Av. or street (right here), there was a red light and I had time to turn the car off and then on. The indicators went on and off as normal, without the Steering Wheel Malfunction indicator staying illuminated, so everything was okay. Tried some movements of the steering wheel and now it was back again.

Searched the Web and I found a post in a forum where it looks to me like there was a secret recall that Mazda had for 3’s and 6’s but, obviously they (Mazda) didn’t inform anyone. That’s bad. I will have to call my dealership and see what they say about the issue. I think it is dangerous, just imagine you’re almost taking a curve and suddenly this issue appears, it’ll be a miracle if you react quickly enough to avoid an accident. Oh, I read the user’s manual and it suggested what I did, but sooner. Bummer.

I would have loved to show a map with a couple of pin markers but I don’t have time to read about that (if someone knows how to do that and it’s easy let me know!). Perhaps later I’ll just take note of the kilometers/miles I drove having this issue.

It’s more and more common that the things we buy or are given come without manuals, documentation, drivers, etc. At least when you receive something as a gift from a company there’s no wonder the product is cheap and comes from we-know-where.

It’s a shame that (I’m generalizing here) the entire population is in favor of cheap but crappy products. Products made by companies that do not care about the final customer. They do not pursue quality at all, don’t even study a little bit of english or send a little piece of text to be translated properly.

Here I have a “USER’s Install Manual (For vendor preference only)” for a nice looking pen that also is a “USB DISK”. Look at all what it pretends to say and you’ll see that it’s bad big time.

QUICKLY MANUAL
Windows 98/ME/XP
Version 1.20/2.O
Install Driver
Turn on your computer power, and plug the USB DISK into the USB port.
For more in formation, please look out the install note.
1.Install driver for Windows 98/ME
At first, you must install “USB storage device”
1 ) Boot the computer, and plug the USB DISK info the USB port.
2) Windows will detect the new hardware, and inform you for “a new USB storage device” .Please click the  ”next” button.
3 ) Then Windows will question where the driver is.You must click the “browse” button and locate the driver. After doing it, please click the  ”next” button to continue.
5) For WIN2000/XP, the product is driverless, plug and play.

Suddenly we don’t have step 4, but with this explanation, who cares?!
We have more:

2.Operation
1 ) Format
Run command “Mangager.exe” .for first,please choose “Full Format” and click the right “format” button.  (fullformat will take offa few minutes.) After the format is finished, the USB DISK will be useable.
2) Boot set
The option will only for WIN98.Run command “Mangager.exe” and select the  ”boot disk”  option,the format the USB DISK. (NOTE:YOU MUST FORMAT THE USB DISK)  Reboot the computer,and set the BIS’s Boot Device to  ”USB-ZIP” ,the boot will enable. ( NOTE:IF YOU SELECT THE BOOT DISK, THE “ENCRYPT DISK” OPTION WILL DISABLE.)
3) Set password and operation
( 1 ) After format the USB DISK, Run command “Mangager.Exe” again
(2) Please select the “user password” option.quit and re-plug the USB DISK.
(3) Click “My Computer”  icon,entering the movable disk. Run command “Pass Man .exe” ,the default password is.
(4) After login,the  ”PassMan” windows will close in a second, then you can use the USB DISK.
4) Change password
Run “Change password” .and enter the same password in the “new password”  and “confirm password” ,then click the “OK” button. Re-plug the USB DISK,the Encrypt will be enable.

GUARANTEE ITEM
1.At normal, electric moveable hard-drive Will be change in three moth and guaranteed in a year. (It is count from the buy date. )
2.If you buy the products in three months and in troubles, please send the product to dealer.
3.The card must be marked by the sales. IF NO, please to return it to the dealer.

Got it? Finally:

GUARANTEE ITEM
Der user:
Thank you to use our products. Please seriously read the item and carefully keep of the guarantee card.

Er, yes, of course.

I just saw a blog post that Joydipto created about cscope. It made me remember of those days when I used it for my Domino for IBM i development on AIX + ClearCase. I really liked cscope, the only problem is that the machine where it was running wasn’t fast.

Well, you should know that still in January 2009 I was still doing development for Domino on IBM i as the Team Leader and Technical Leader of the team in Guadalajara, but then in February I changed gears.

For several months now I’ve seen that when going to most of the IBM developerWorks articles, the main home page itself, and some other IBM sites like PartnerWorld, the CSS files don’t load and I end seeing plain Web pages without good navigation nor design (for obvious reasons).

I didn’t care too much for a while, but a month ago I decided to take a look and while seeing the Web page source code noticed that most of the CSS and .js files were being loaded from akamai.net. I remembered that there was a filter in Adblock Plus for Akamai content, went to check the Adblock Plus preferences and there it was, a filter blocking the files that some IBM sites need.

Want to say first that it surprised me that IBM was also using Akamai services in order to allow for faster load times of pages. You know, I think the service includes caching those static files to improve performance, etc.

I took a look to the Adblock Plus documentation and found the page that talks about filters, added the following exception rule and I’m now in business:
@@//a248.e.akamai.net/*/www.ibm.com/*

It was the easiest and quickest rule for what I wanted. Still I think it can be narrowed down even more for security purposes. If someone has any suggestion I’m all ears.

Man! It’s been a while since I last posted on this blog… Lots of changes happened at the end of last year and beginning of this one. Hope to have time later to create a post with that.

I was reading an article about HTML and XHTML and wondered whether or not developers who prefer dynamic or loosely typed programming languages also prefer HTML versus XHTML, since XHTML is stricter than HTML.

I know we can’t compare apples with oranges, but this thought just make me think that I like strongly typed programming languages and appreciate XHTML more than HTML. So maybe those who like dynamically or loosely typed programming languages prefer HTML over XHTML.

In the end it probably doesn’t matter since we know we should use whatever is best suited for the task at hand (and not use the hammer for everything). Perhaps someone already researched or created a study about this and I haven’t seen it, you know, there are tons of useless studies out there, hehe.

This week I noticed that the Starbucks near my house changed the design and names of the list of items they sell, and the prices also changed. At first it gave me the impression that the prices had gone down a bit, but after seeing the prices on purchases I made on previous days, I clearly saw that they actually increased the prices on everything.

Good trick. I wonder who they paid for the Christmas-like design that gives the impression that everything’s cheaper when in fact everything costs more now. They’re now prepared for the coldest season of the year when people consume more coffee (I think) so, at least I’m sure Starbucks won’t go out of business. Right?