Archive for February, 2004
Man, hopefully with the coming month we’ll finally not have at least one member of the family sick. February was not a fun month for anyone as we had at least one person in the family sick during the entire month, at one point 3 of us were sick.
I’m currently going through strep throat which I got from my wife who probably got it from one of the other various viruses we’ve had in the house lately. Aiden was sick twice with double ear infections, Autumn was sick twice with the flu and I’ve been sick with the flu and now strep. What a freaking mess…
Heres to a heathly March!
February 29th, 2004
Wired has a huge feature on Google this month aptly titled “Googlemania”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/google.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=. One piece focused on “Google’s PageRank feature”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/google.html?pg=7&topic=&topic_set= which is at the heart of all the comment spam abuse us bloggers have been dealing with lately.
I’m not too worried about comment spam anymore. I have over 1700 blacklisted URLs in my “MT-Blacklist plug-in”:http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist and I add more weekly on a preventive basis. And if the comment spam becomes a real problem I’ll just cause them “all kinds of grief”:http://kalsey.com/2003/11/comment_spam_manifesto/ like they do to me.
February 25th, 2004
Does this look like rain to you? If my pants are any indication, it’s a damn flood out there. While just walking to the bus both back sides of my pants were entirely soaked. By the time I got off the bus and into the office my entire pair of pants were drenched. Hell, I had to remove my wallet as to not dampen the last 2 dollars to my name.
Watching people fighting with their own umbrellas is a funny thing during a heavy rain. People continue to use those crappy $5 umbrellas sold on the street corner, confident that those scraps of vinyl will keep them dry. Shit, if my UFO sized golf umbrella can’t keep me dry no fusking umbrella will.
February 25th, 2004
Way back in November I mentioned a huge problem with Age of Mythology for Mac. This one post has been the most active thread here on snapturtle by far with a lot of user comments and I’ve seen it linked in several Mac gaming forums on the net. So four months later,you’d think that a patch would have been developed to fix this obviously horrid feature by now. Uh…. no. Macsoft, are you listening? Currently this issue isn’t even mentioned in their FAQ.
So, tell me Mr. Peter Tamte, MacSoft President, when am I, the average consumer, going to get a fix for this issue? You talk about piracy of your company’s games and patch Halo 3 times in a one month span yet nothing for AoM? This glaring issue is a serious problem. Someone like me who purchases this game with an advertised feature of online gaming expects it to work out of the box. Even through GameRanger for a majority of people it just doesn’t work. I have infact gotten it to work, yet countless others have not. What makes this so frustrating is that when attempting to play online most people have no clue the hoops they need to jump through in order to play online and others just can’t seem to get it to work no matter what they try.
I wrote the online configuration guide in hopes that it would solve the problem while waiting for an official patch. That has yet to happen. Please correct this problem so those who have spent good money ($50) on this game can enjoy the feature set that was promised to them on the box.
February 24th, 2004
I “told you”:http://www.snapturtle.com/archives/2003/10/20/nokia_ngage_bombs.php the “N-Gage would tank”:http://www.snapturtle.com/archives/2003/11/07/ngage_sells_poorly.php. Now it seems that Nokia is finally “starting to warm up”:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14313 to the fact their feeble gaming phone is nothing more than a joke or just a really “poor looking taco”:http://www.sidetalking.com/.
Do you believe me now? 
February 23rd, 2004
The latest buzz on the net is getting free iTunes Music Store codes from Pepsi bottles without having to actually purchase the Pepsi.
“MacMerc.com”:http://www.macmerc.com/news/archives/1270 first reported the “hack” which entails basically tipping over the Pepsi bottle to reveal the code.
bq. “The secret is the angle. I’ve found it to be 25 degrees, but that’s really no use when you’re out in the field. Just tilt it until it seems about that, and look up towards it (hold it above your head). With luck, you should be able to see under the cap.”
Tsk Tsk on Pepsi. At minimum they could have used those little plastic coverings over the code to make it more illegible until you removed the cap and the plastic.
I’m sure Apple isn’t pleased by all this but why should they care? Every song that is redeemed will be paid for by Pepsi regardless of how it’s “won”.
February 20th, 2004
I’ve been looking for some new wallpaper as my Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga picture had run it’s course. What I found instead may become my wallpaper for a long while.
Tux’n'tosh is just like it sounds, Linux mixed with Macintosh, Windows users need not apply. In fact, Tux feels sorry for you, according to his web site intro.
How can you resist these cute Tux wallpapers even if your a lowly Windows user? He’s just so darn cute!
February 17th, 2004
Although the Clint Eastwood “movie of the same name”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083943/ did in fact rule when I was 8 years old, I’m talking about the new version of the web browser formally named Phoenix and Firebird.
“Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ is the new name of the Mozilla based web browser that is a lean, mean, browsing machine. Are you still using Internet Explorer on Windows or god forbid on Mac? Do yourself a favor by “downloading”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/#download Firefox and start to experience features like built-in pop up blocking and tabbed browsing. You can thank me later.
February 16th, 2004
One of the down sides of having to rebuild the snapturtle server was the need to recreate all the SSL certificates used with SMTP and IMAP services.
With the release of Panther, Apple Mail has had a really annoying problem that causes Mail to prompt for the validaty of self-signed certificates and does not allow you to save your choice like in Jaguar.
I’ve tried some of the tricks listed on other blogs like trying to add them to your keychain which did not work for me.
So, when I recreated the certificates I wanted to make sure I was doing it right. I found this article on AFP548.com that describes how to not only create the SSL certificates but creating a certificate authority (CA) so Apple Mail won’t complain about self-signed certs anymore. Just follow the instructions to the letter (you can place the certs where ever you want not just /etc/certs) and you too can rid yourself of the annoying Apple Mail SSL dialog box.
February 16th, 2004
If there’s one thing I’ve learned while working with Windows for many years it’s the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. I’ve not had many moments where I needed to apply this same mentality to my Macs until last Sunday.
Lately I’ve been having some problems with Moveable Type that have become increasingly annoying and more prevalent. I’ve been attributing this mainly to an older OS on the snapturtle server (10.2.6) and something horribly wrong with my Perl 5.8 installation which I installed awhile back for something I don’t even use anymore.
There have been other issues lately as well. Mainly when trying to back up the server using Carbon Copy Cloner it would crash… handy. I have been able to get backups using Retrospect Express but it’s not the solution I want.
So, before attempting to perform the surgery that crashed snapturtle I didn’t backup the server because I really couldn’t. Big mistake.
While installing OS X 10.2.8 the server crashed. Yes, that’s correct, in the middle of the OS update it crashed, hard. Upon reboot you can imagine what happened, nothing. The Mac OS X was completely hosed. Thankfully I still had OS 9 installed on there so I booted into 9 and copied all the data I needed over to a firewire drive.
Since the server crashed I figured why not install the latest and greatest OS, Mac OS X 10.3. What happened next was enough to really piss me off.
While attempting to install Panther the installation was failing every time with “There were errors installing the software”. What kind of errors I asked? Stupid ones like it couldn’t find the AsianLanguageFonts file or some weird error code that didn’t make much sense to me. After several attempts at installing the OS, I finally turned to the Apple discussion forums to find that I am not alone.
RAM was the ultimate culprit. Once I removed the extra two 256MB DIMMs that I had added over a year ago the installation went flawlessly. And just to tempt fate I added the DIMMs back in after the install and the server froze. Apparently this is a known issue with Panther and RAM modules. For some reason Panther is extremely picky with RAM DIMMs so if your having any weird problems with your Mac and your running Panther, remove any extra DIMMs and see if the problem goes away.
February 12th, 2004
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