Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Worms of War
So I am away from a decent broadband connection for the first time in probably five years and the internet implodes. Or more accurately the WordPress driven parts of it. By now you know (and if you don’t, it hopefully didn’t affect you) that a big ol’ worm has been wreaking havoc with older WordPress installations. The community was abuzz and atizzy for the past few days, but the short of it is that it was no big deal and everyone is up and running as usual.
Making Lemonade
Some nice side effects of this whole affair:
- People were compelled to bring their WordPress installations up to date
- People were motivated to install back-up plugins
- Prompted me to investigate other blogging systems which led to the discovery of some quite interesting tools such as Posterous which may be the simplest blog I’ve ever seen. There is no interface. You email your posts and it sorts out all your stuff and presents it nicely. Nobody will confuse it with a feature-rich blog, but if you just want to put stuff on the internet it is fantastically easy to use.
In the end it took more time to read up on things than to apply the fixes. I guess people like to panic.
attoboy | 1:54 pm, September 9th, 2009
Categories: Chit Chat, Computer. Tags: facebook.
the world’s your Oy!-ster
I have recently been introduced to Facebook, and by introduced I mean dragged to the edge and pushed in, possibly similar to the way your least favourite uncle may have taught you to swim at the lake lo those many years ago. As I tumbled into the abyss, the last words I heard were “relax, there’s no such thing as ‘winning Facebook!’” My buddy Doug’s response to that was, “eight-thousand friends! In. Your. Face!”
My sponsor into Facebook, and she knows who she is, did not escape unscathed. An accomplished artist, she has never fully embraced Adobe Illustrator. Now that she knows how to use the brush tool with her tablet, her fate is sealed. Mwu-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha. I shall not suffer alone.
Back to Facebook. It seems very chatty. “There is a lot of trivial blather on there,” sez the little black pot. People seem pretty nice, but I wonder if there are scraps on there. Like does someone’s comment on someone else’s photo get misinterpreted and then you have a Facebook Flame War? It’s been a mere five days and nothing like that has happened yet. You never know. I think I will take it slow and see how things develop.
attoboy | 3:54 am, January 31st, 2009
Categories: Art, Chit Chat, Computer. Tags: General, Personal.
- keep me suspended in time with you, don’t let this moment end…
Xanadu is one of those movies you don’t so much plan to watch as find yourself watching. That’s what happened this weekend when my computer inexplicably froze. The culprit seemed to be VLC.app which is a video viewer for AVIs and WMVs. It had worked fine for about six months, but was recently taking several minutes to load and locking up my system while doing so. Finally I decided to delete the app and that is where my troubles began.
note to self: VLC.app does not appreciate being deleted
I dragged the app and its plist to the trash and did a Secure Empty Trash to ensure all was well and truly deleted. This caused the strangest thing in that the trashing seemed to take way too long and for some reason the Finder was totally locked up. After a forced restart I tried it again with the same results. This carried on for several frustrating hours. Frustrating because each click of the mouse took several minutes to register. It went something like this:
- Click on trash to open it… system locks up and I stare at beach ball of death for several minutes…
- Trash opens, click on Finder menu in menu bar… system frozen… BBoD for several minutes…
- Finder menu opens, move mouse down to select Secure Empty Trash… system frozen… BBoD for several minutes…
- First option (About Finder) lights up in Finder menu… system frozen… BBoD for several minutes…
- Ineffectually jiggle mouse around hoping to attract Finder’s attention (this is akin to speaking slowly to someone who doesn’t speak your language)… system frozen… BBoD for several minutes…
- Try clicking mouse on apparently non-responsive Finder menu to see if that works… system frozen… BBoD for several minutes…
- Success! It has taken over twenty minutes to click and select a menu option, but finally Secure Empty Trash lights up in the Finder menu… and then disappears. All that mouse jiggling has finally been acknowledged by the Finder which has interpreted my input as having moused away from the Finder menu and clicked in dead space on the desktop.
- Hmph. Start again. Click on Finder menu in menu bar… system frozen… BBoD for several minutes…
…and so it went. In the meantime I tried repairing my hard drive with Disk Utility, running Activity Monitor to see if something was hogging resources. Nothing. All this took several hours due to the aforementioned hangs with each mouse click.
The upside is I watched Xanadu once and Tank Girl twice while (un)patiently holding my mouse stationary and waiting for each input to be acknowledged. When the Secure Empty(ing of) Trash was finally underway, it took around eighteen hours for a 7Mb app to be deleted. Each passing hour fostered a growing certainty that I had toasted my system.
Fortunately and amazingly things returned to normal once every last bit of the app was gone. Everything works just fine. It’s like nothing ever happened.
At the end of all of it, I am still not sure what happened. I had opened VLC.app as a package sometime in the middle of things and tried to trash parts of it at a time in the hopes that I might get lucky and delete whatever was causing the slowdown. Was the system locking a result of a partially deleted app messing with things? How was that possible?
I used to know a lot about computers.
attoboy | 12:35 pm, January 12th, 2009
Categories: Computer. Tags: Personal.