Technology

In a sign that the wireless Internet is coming of age, Nokia, Vodafone, Microsoft and six other technology and telecommunications companies joined to propose a new top level domain name to identify web sites designed specifically for use on mobile devices, such as .mobile Internet address

The four largest US internet firms, AOL, EarthLink, Microsoft and Yahoo, have jointly announced a series of lawsuits under a new federal anti-spam law seeking to shut down the biggest and baddest email marketers

Hitachi is set to announce a 400GB drive to be used in the corporate market and in digital video recorders, a fast-growing arena for hard drives

US-Australia price disparity stirs debate

Hmmm… yes macs are expensive especially if you’re in Australia. Here’s a quote from one of the readers:

Is Apple obliged to cut prices so it cannot benefit from currency movements? If the Aussie was weakening, Apple would not necessarily raise pricing, but prefer to take a hit so it could maintain sales

Apple Australia actually did raise raise pricing due to a, at one stage, very weak Aussie dollar. I know, because I was just about to purchase a top of the range iBook, only to realise that this was no longer financially possible about 2 weeks later when I had all the money together. The year would’ve been 1999 or 2000-ish, so yes, not necessarily being the operative phrase here, and I don’t recall them dropping them back yet now that our dollar is a bit stronger.

On another note, the Apple’s WorldWide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) is happening in San Francisco in June. Apple are offering scholarships to students of Australian unis to attend. Which is nice.

Of course with a WWDC looming soon-ish one can’t help but wonder what next big slickly designed consumable beasties are awaiting to be unveiled.

A disposable paperboard computer has been developed and is already in use in Sweden. Developed by Cypak AB, the paperboard computer can collect, process, and exchange several pages of encrypted data. Impressive, given that they say it has a mere 32K of memory

Some ZDnet mac articles I found interesting:

Apple silences beeps, hissing

Some dual 1.8GHz G5’s have been beeping and hissing when used with some external audio gear. Certainly not something creative pros want to hear after spending thousands of hard earned bucks on one. Good news is Apple have fixed this in the production process now, so new machines rolling off the production lines are spiffy.

Will Apple bite on Motorola’s PowerPC chip?

What with Apple using IBM chips in G5s these days, you gotta wonder 2 things:

1. Where this leaves Motorola? Will Apple eventually phase out Motorola chips in favour of IBM ones?

2. Where the hell are the G5 laptops!?

The article suggests the G5 laptops aren’t far off. As for Motorola and it’s new speedier than previous Motorola chips, who knows, I mean 1.42 GHz isn’t that much faster than 1.33 GHz, even for laptops. You do the math, that’s 0.9 GHz. Big fucking whoop.

US forces in Iraq have a new non-lethal, but really annoying, weapon in their arsenal. According to American Technology Corporation‘s press release, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) is a hailing and warning, directed acoustic device that is designed to determine intent, change behaviour, and support various rules of engagement. With LRAD, a sentry can issue a focused verbal challenge with instructions in excess of 300 hundred yards, and follow up with a warning tone to cause behaviour change

Telstra has defended its decision not to automatically upgrade existing customers on unlimited download cable Internet plans to newly-released cheaper prices, claiming the option exists for them to migrate to the new deal if they ask

In an analysis of junk e-mails received over two days in mid-February, Sophos created a list of the dirty dozen spam-producing countries. Taking the undisputed helm on its list of spam-producing countries is the United States, which accounted for more than half of the world’s unsolicited e-mail at 56.7% during the period of study. Canada accounted for 6.8%; China, 6.2%; South Korea, 5.8%; and the Netherlands, 2.1%. The other top 12 countries were Brazil, German, France, United Kingdom, Australia, Mexico and Spain. However, those seven countries in total accounted for just more than 10% of all spam. All other countries in the world created an additional 12.2% of the globe’s spam

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, and liveupdate is 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.