Dented Reality Notes

Why I Hate Macs

Their keyboard navigation sucks. I mean certain programs have great keyboard shortcuts and all, but I'm talking standard stuff, like tab between buttons in a window and hit enter/space to do something. Launch a file from Finder. There are some basic things that they're missing here, and it's killing me.

Having said that, I did just buy my second Mac laptop (15" PowerBook G4), which I totally love; except for this horrendous shortcoming. And if it's possible, it actually got worse between my iBook and this PowerBook. A bunch of the programs which got updates have now stopped offering the alternative default outlined buttons in dialogs which I could hit space to activate - which was pretty much the only thing that was better than Windows' keyboard nav.

Maybe I'm missing something.

UPDATE 2005-12-13: So I figured out how to 'launch' an item that's highlighted in Finder, and it's almost worse knowing than it was not. Apple-down-arrow. WTF???

Today, Fuck You Apple

WARNING: Explicit language ahead!

I'd like to officially put out a big "fuck you" to Apple today, and here's why...

Imported some photos into iPhoto this morning, and deleted them from my camera when I was done (never had a problem with that before). I rotated a few of them because they were around the wrong way, and then iPhoto decided that it would lose track of a bunch of them, and corrupt the originals. I have 8,415 photos in my library, and now it looks like new imports are going to be a problem. Fuck you iPhoto.
iTunes said it needed to be updated, so I went ahead and updated it. Re-opened iTunes, and it decided my library file wasn't valid, so it created a new one, and lost track of all of my playlists. Fuck you too iTunes.
I emptied my Trash yesterday. I don't know how much stuff was in there, but there was a lot. Next time I tried to shut down, FileVault wanted to reclaim a bunch of space. No problem, does that every time I shut down. It tried for over an hour, before I turned off my PowerBook and gave up. I can't turn FileVault off either, because it claims that I need a spare 4,088 GIGABYTES (!) of space to create an unencrypted copy of my home folder. Now every time I try to restart/shut down, same thing happens, and it sits there for a long time - so I can't shut down cleanly. Also, a big "fuck you" to FileVault.
And now, for the grand finale. Mac OS X 10.4.3 System Update. Wow. Complete the update "successfully". Restart. No Keychain. No Dock. No Accounts in Mail. No application preferences in pretty much anything. In short - fucked. Overall - a MASSIVE FUCK YOU to the Apple Mac OS X 10.4.3 System Update.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go waste half my day reconfiguring everything because Apple decided my settings weren't important.

Safari Sucks

Safari is the Netscape 4.7 of 2005.

Settling In At DreamHost

Well, things aren't going too badly with DreamHost, I'm sorting out all my domains and CGI, databases, PHP etc and things are looking good. When I get dentedreality.com.au across, then I will know things are good :)

UPDATE: Things are looking very good - .com.au is transferred properly and appears to have propagated pretty much everywhere, judging by the traffic on my old account. I'll leave it there for a couple days longer and make sure I've mograted everything properly, then close my account at phpwebhosting.com.

New Web Host Soon

Well, I think I've finally outgrown phpwebhosting.com as my host, so I've started the process of setting up my new account with DreamHost.com.

The reasons that I have decided on DreamHost are along these lines:

UNIX Servers (personal requirement)
SSH/Shell Access (crucial)
.htaccess Editing (crucial)
CGI/PHP (crucial)
Ability to host multiple domains/subdomains (can only have 1 domain on phpwebhosting)
IMAP Mail server - good benefit, since I am switching to web-based mail
Good price - for me to host 10 domains there (6 properly + 4 mirroring) is $14.95 per month
Good reputation - checked around and only heard good things. The usual criticism of their support, but hopefully I won't be using it much, so it won't matter :)
FTP - I can add users who will have FTP access to certain areas on my servers, which will be good for sharing some space with friends
crontabs - can edit them and set them when I want

So please bear with me over the next few days as things might get a little messy on this site (and related ones) while I am moving things around between this host and my new one.

Installing and Formatting a Hitachi Travelstar 5K80

So I wasted around 6 hours trying to get a Hitachi Travelstar 5K80 to work in my external USB-driven hard drive enclosure the other night... and I wasn't a happy camper.

I did the normal things, put it in the case, plugged it in, restarted Windows a couple times to try and pick it up, stuff like that. I had no luck getting it to show up in My Computer to start with, so I checked in the Adminitrative Tools (in Control Panel) launched the Computer Management MMC. In there, I checked the Disk Manager and found that the drive was there, but marked as Online, Unallocated.

According to everything I could find on the 'net (and believe me, I looked) all I had to do was right-click the drive, select 'Write Signature' and then I could format it and off I go. The problem with this was that when I did that, it would start doing something with the disk, then just sit there with its access light on, but not do anything - still couldn't access it, still couldn't format it.

To cut a long story short, I noticed that it was making a similar noise to what my old drive made when it woke up after being asleep for a while. All I had to do was unplug the drive (from the USB), then plug it in with Disk Manager open, constantly clicking 'Re-Scan Disks'. As soon as the new drive appeared on the listing, I did the right-click signature trick and it worked straight away. Then I kicked it into an immediate, complete format and everyone's happy!

Now all I need to do is clone my current drive onto this one, switch them over and I've got an upgraded drive and a spare external one :)

Secure Hard Drive Format

In case you didn't know, when you 'format' a computer's hard drive (or delete a file for that matter), it doesn't necessarily remove the data properly, it just marks those sectors as being available to write over in the future. If you don't actually write anything over them, then there is a distinct chance that someone can recover that data, using an excellent program such as R-STUDIO (which I bought a copy of, to recover data off my broken laptop, as described in this post).

So anyway, there are a number of ways that you can go about deleting something permanently, but I figured that the best approach was a physical one. I had an old drive that I was retiring (well, it retired itself on account of a hardware failure), so I decided that now was the chance to test my procedure, here's how it all went down;

Remove drive from host machine
Remove PCB board from the bottom of the drive (you can just lever it off with a screwdriver if you don't have the right type of screwdriver for the screws... you won't be needing it again :)
Place the drive so that the side where the PCB board was is *down*, and one end is supported on a small ledge (a doorstep works nicely)
Place pressure (i.e. stand) in the middle of the drive, angling your foot to ensure that the blade of your foot is applying the pressure to the drive
Continue standing/jumping on the drive until you hear a snapping sound, and then hopefully a pleasant little 'tinkle'
Review the situation: you should have broken the aluminium framing of the drive, which in turn allowed you to shatter the disk platters, which will now be on the ground and inside the drive.

You can now clean up the pieces of drive platter, and if you're really paranoid, dispose of them separately. Otherwise, throw them all in the bin and you can be pretty confident that your drive is very permanently erased.

NOTE: I take no responsibility whatsoever for the damage of your drives, their proceeding uselessness, or any potential recovery of the data that may or may not have been on the drive!

Why MP3s Are A Good Thing

I have (had) a relatively small collection of CDs, to be honest, I'm more likely to obtain copies of CDs from friends than I am to buy them. This is not because I'm a cheapskate or because I'm a pirate (mateys), it's mostly because I don't like most music enough to warrant buying it, but I like a lot of music enough to listen to it.

There are times (like when I get gift certificates) that I do purchase CDs though, and through these times, and just along the way, I'd collected about 30-40 CDs that I would call "worth listening to regularly" -- so I did, in a CD stacker and a CD wallet which were in my car.

My car got broken into.

My CD stacker got stolen.

My CD wallet got stolen.

Therefore, all of my CDs got stolen in one foul swoop, anhd I was tuneless... without tunes. MP3s saved the day. Since I always left those CDs in my stacker and wallet in my car, I never got a chance to listen to them anywhere else. Since I almost exclusively listen to MP3s on my laptop and Nomad, somewhere along the line I had luckily gotten around to ripping most of those CDs to MP3 and saving them to my hard drive, which now lives in an external, portable USB drive enclosure. Thanks to the ability to back up my music to MP3, I now can retain copies (and even burn a new CD if I want) of the music that I legitimately purchased, where otherwise I'd have to go and buy it again (which would be difficult because some of the disks were quite obscure). Yey MP3s!

I Got a PGP Encryption Key

Following is my new public key for PGP encryption. You can use this to encrypt messages you wish to send me. I will also link it from the 'About' section of this site.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.8 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com>

mQGiBD9tD4ARBADM7uwtfDMuF+EJeL9DEmVUltKFivX2igbPhSWdoQAqvOoEUKhg
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bnMgPGJlYXVAZGVudGVkcmVhbGl0eS5jb20uYXU+iQBOBBARAgAOBQI/bQ+ABAsD
AgECGQEACgkQaKrL508kt3X3eACg7C6Ky9nh+5thwVxzpekl/tCd+OsAoLyOe6RJ
EYM0X0rvpNGpJCMWAotOuQINBD9tD4AQCAD2Qle3CH8IF3KiutapQvMF6PlTETlP
tvFuuUs4INoBp1ajFOmPQFXz0AfGy0OplK33TGSGSfgMg71l6RfUodNQ+PVZX9x2
Uk89PY3bzpnhV5JZzf24rnRPxfx2vIPFRzBhznzJZv8V+bv9kV7HAarTW56NoKVy
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Byl6ypUM2Zafq9AKUJsCRtMIPWakXUGfnHy9iUsiGSa6q6Jew1XpMgs7AAICCACq
bo+NCj2hkLZoZKTHGud1MkGi8LFy3om2l52wVae38+8xdXYpBSZ9xYOl1P2sFnay
tEa7TkSMDuJtJEp/1FOScc7daTESqBxtTQt03As1aVc1HNLGYcyUgwR0k9rEKYiq
AIrREr4KYnPZKQ8TSaZ6c/seD6AcsNcIyTyQHb9z7mj13EUcL4wtZLIXbLvVF4oa
OSg/ep6rfs898I7ZcWkKyX93tCFl4lHXLE1syE40m44UIHIgEwfVyrLAVlUEuL+c
sPBNLrG3TLN1mkWiIAg4Q3L3UutQNr8/WDKPxanUPKpwXMhW4XofHt7nopaowKvz
iAr6FC22dklkLjazwHmdiQBGBBgRAgAGBQI/bQ+AAAoJEGiqy+dPJLd1knkAoNCL
uGP7UWPbkh0VjosY4hd3+F8TAJ9nlgBNkybz+AqG/Aj7elyj1D9LzA==
=bM4j
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

A Cool New Word

Rael Dornfest (editor of the Google Hacks book, amongst other things!) mentioned a word on the blosxom mailing list which I have heard a times now, and which I think will become more popular;

mindwidth: A human's capacity for thought and or mental processes such as attention. The amount of available mental "processing power" to perform a variety of tasks at any one time.

I like it :) - Just for fun, ask Google who else is using 'mindwidth'?