The village of Tenkawa generates 1,500 tons of human waste a year. They used to use a tanker to carry that waste to the sea and dump it, but can’t do that any more. They needed to come up with a new method of treating human waste, so decided to treat effluent biotechnologically and to turn it into drinking water — via Die Puny Humans
Three Engineering students from Simon Fraser University have developed a laptop alarm complete with remote pager that detects if your laptop is being moved and sounds an alarm
An interesting, elegant and extremely simple method of circumventing the annoying Symantec attempt to extort money from you repeatedly for the same piece of software you’ve already purchased.
Removing all instances of
norton,antivirus,symantec, andliveupdateis a bit overkill, especially if you have other Norton/Symantec products installed, as I do. It’s really a lot simpler than that. All you have to do is uninstall LiveUpdate, delete the file Catalog.LiveSubscribe, which is found in \Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\LiveSubscribe in NT-based operating systems. It’s pretty primitive.
Symantec is generally a cool software company, relatively speaking, but this is one thing that really gets on my nerves. Once you install an antivirus package, it should continue working, with virus updates, for as long as the company you bought it from exists. Its function is too critical for it to just stop working and start wheedling you for more money. So, I don’t mind sharing this information.
MySQL has been installed at last. Hit a few bugs along the way, but managed to figure out what was creating the errors that crashed the Berkeley DB to MySQL conversion.
The first problem was a typo in the EntryList plugin. Fixed that and tried again.
It then hit a warning caused by MT-Blacklist, solved that by temporarily removing MT-Blacklist and reinstalling it after the conversion. Even though I got the warning, the conversion happily ran until it stalled on the comments.
This time it turned out to be MTThreadedComments causing the error, it was installed but never used so the new fields never made it into the database. I never would have found it if I used the patch instead of manually adding the plugin additions to MT myself.
Some helpful advice from the MovableType Support Forum was to temporarily remove any offending plugins and turn off auto-discovery before running the conversion script.
The last problem the template files not having the proper permissions (no idea how they magically swapped permissions in the first place, sneaky files) chmodded them to 777 and we had a successful build.
Worth noting that when mt-db2sql.cgi fails, the tables that were partially generated need to be dropped from the database before it can be run again. Fortunately I have a very helpful ISP (thank you, Paul) who loaded the appropriate perl modules I needed before the conversion and killed the tables for me every time I hit a block.
So now we’re in the land of the far more stable and robust MySQL database, which will hopefully prove more Red Wolf-proof than Berkeley DB. But if it does get corrupted, at least there are tools to fix MySQL. Guess I’ll see how it goes.
A biologist has confirmed the sighting of a real Michigan wolverine, about 200 years after the species was last seen in the state that uses the small but ferocious animal as its unofficial nickname
A Labrador Retriever has been found alive on an isolated cove of a Southeast Alaska island more than a month after its owner was given up for dead when his boat sank in rough seas
Xor’Arch at the CaseJunkies forums has made a case mod of a Borg Cube based on a Via EPIA-M platform. The project took nine months and used about 60m of steel wire, and 1.5m² cardboard
Britain faced deep international embarrassment last night after the former cabinet minister Clare Short claimed that its security services spied on Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, in the run-up to last year’s Iraq war
Microsoft’s Tokyo office was raided by Japan’s Fair Trade Commission, which is investigating whether the world’s largest software maker violated the country’s anti-monopoly law
Twenty-one gay couples exchanged wedding vows on the steps of village hall Friday in a spirited ceremony that opened another front on the growing national debate over gay marriage. Mayor Jason West, 26, elected on the Green Party ticket last year in this village north of New York City, joined Gavin Newsom of San Francisco as the country’s only mayors to marry same-sex couples
Cunningham MP Michael Organ has released an exposure draft of a Bill of Rights [PDF] which will be introduced as a Private Member’s Bill in the Federal Parliament this year. The Bill aims to confer certain rights and responsibilities on the people and Parliament of Australia. It entrenches within the law the basic rights and freedoms we all hold dear; rights including freedom of speech, public assembly, freedom of religion and legal rights such as the presumption of innocence and equality under the law
An elderly Illinois couple, saying they are unable to pay as much as $1,000 each month for prescriptions, plans to venture into the war over drug imports today by filing a lawsuit against the government, arguing it is unconstitutional to prevent them from purchasing life-saving drugs at a lower price in Canada
Disney and Microsoft are joining an industry group in Japan to help decide which next-generation DVD format should be used in the home video market. DVD Forum, said that Disney and Microsoft would join 18 other members on its steering committee. Membership, now dominated by Sony and other companies that support the Blu-ray Disc format, gives the companies a vote on how data should be stored on the new discs, thus enabling them to set a standard for the industry
Oral sex can lead to oral cancers. Researchers have shown that the human papilloma virus, an extremely common sexually transmitted infection long been known to cause cervical cancers, can also cause mouth cancers. Fortunately, the risk of developing oral cancer is tiny. Only around 1 in 10,000 people develop tumours each year, and most cases are probably caused by smoking and drinking. The findings could help improve treatments of oral cancers, and vaccines that protect against HPV are already being developed
Modern-day slavery is alive and well in Florida, the Centre for the Advancement of Human Rights at Florida State University said as it released a report on people forced to work as prostitutes, farm workers and maids across the state
The Australian consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, has issued Telstra with an advisory notice over concerns that the communications giant has breached competition laws by dropping broadband retail prices below their wholesale charges
An Anti-Felon Identification system is used so criminal use of the Advanced Taser can be traced from evidence dispersed by the device itself to provide the exact identification of the Air Cartridge purchaser. No other self-protection device in the world — guns, chemical and pepper sprays, touch-stun devices or batons — can be traced from evidence at the scene of the crime directly to the registration of the user
Lucky me, I missed the LiveJournal comment spamming campaign to promote Mel Gibson’s dodgy vanity pic. The poorly thought out spamming campaign pissed off a lot of LiveJournal users, including reddragdiva, who has posted a googlebomb countermeasure using the same wording as the original spam:
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/"> The Passion of The Christ </a>. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/"> Trailers </a>. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/"> Good Website </a>. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/"> Protesting Gibson's Passion Lacks Moral Legitimacy </a>.
The Passion of The Christ. Trailers. Good Website. Protesting Gibson’s Passion Lacks Moral Legitimacy.
Enjoy — via Pagan Prattle
Found a pair of wacky Harry Potter flash animations. Bothering Snape and Trouble At Hogwarts. Most amusing.
There’s a LiveJournal Community for updates to the series and info on the t-shirts.
RSS – Posts