Eric S notapenguin's blog: "Varied tech babbles"

While this birthday present has been mostly a source of great joy :) right now I'm preoccupied because it's acting up again. So it goes.

Looked for, couldn't find, looked for, thought I found, ... hrm, what's this?... nope, it wasn't... looked for, found something else, used it... erm... anyway, I ran "Disk Utility" on my Mac to see if things were working right because I started having trouble installing the newest version of a program. Disk Utility does a verification of my hard drive and found several problems, of which the most serious was "Invalid volume free block count (It should be 36413940 instead of 36235151)" Now to repair one's boot drive on a recent Mac (with operating system "earlier than 10.5"), one needs to get out the boot CD the computer comes with, put it in, restart it with the button C held down... and run Disk Utility again, this time from the copy of Disk Utility that's on the CD, not on your computer, basically. (So that it can repair your your hard drive without having any programs - including itself - on the hard drive running and changing things on it, I think...) ... Then I found I'd misplaced the boot CD. Seriously misplaced it. ... search, turn over room, look at underside of room, toss, bake room, toss room, search room again... oie... find "TechTool disk"... run TechTool, do another test... (same result, but at least... no more problems found besides that!)... - then today (ok, a day or two later than all this started) I find the boot CD stuck to one of my regular CDs in the shelf up near the top left of my CD case... around where I thought I put it. Figures. Repaired my drive, checked my external drive ForTheHeckOfIt, removed some damaged files from iTunes, replaced them, all seems fine now for the moment, and that.

"No music" but just as full as it was when I left. Hrm. That's not happy news. Had a look at the support pages on the Apple site, tried resetting it. No joy. A restoring we shall go... after backing some stuff up.

Putting a salute together- this one may actually work. Also detaching myself from Yahoo groups that have public or member-accessible (as opposed to admin-only accessible) membership lists (and checking to see if the one I co-admin does.) That just invites spamming. And of course voting before 9 this eve.

Only just learned that this computer I've had for awhile now comes with a microphone and camera. ... Ah :) May be able to create and upload a salute with fewer troubles than I thought (as in, I think I have a webcam I didn't know about)

SETI@home (part of the BOINC project now... ... oy vey's mir ;^) ) has now fixed their connection troubles so I will shut off my browser for awhile, get some chores done, let it process more quickly. (Apparently the new version of SETI@Home multitasks. Same neat graphics as ever, too, but a bit 3-dimensional even. I like this...)

Used to run SETI@Home alot on my computer as a way of having it be busy while I was sleeping :) - that, and Folding@Home too (protein 3-dimensional structure calculation while-you-work...) and GIMPS (the Great International Mersenne Prime project - something like that - prove large numbers are prime while you nap ;^) - it's produced among the largest known primes, truly, which has applications outside pure math in producing rather difficult-to-break codes)... - computers' downtime is very useful for participation in other peoples' mathematics projects: they send raw data, your computer processes it and sends them the results. So long as you're working with someone reputable- oy, a catch. (I gather some other people with distributed computation projects to hawk were not.) So... The latest software for SETI@Home (extraterrestial intelligence, anyone? the possibility seems more and more unlikely but interests) requires, for Macintosh, OS 10.4. So, my new computer can use it, my last one couldn't. Just installed it, and today the status page at UC Berkeley says that some of their machines and/or software are down- they can't send units out right now. Ah, I'll wait :) (apparently, I started in June of 2000, and have worked on 323 "units" amounting to 7,146 hours of processing time between then and now.)

I used to be able to use Adblockplus on Seamonkey (Mozilla, sort of) and on Firefox to destroy embedded objects that were dangerous to my browser's health *g* I am having more trouble doing that now. Either the latest version of Adblockplus works differently, or I'm forgetting something important that I installed in the filter set last time, or there's a virus of sorts- or a virus fullstopthat'sallfolks- that's landed, or... eh. Here, if I find the address of the embedding (the page it's on, not the exact address) I can add the address to the filters and stop such embeddings from appearing in future by treating them as advertisements. However, in the past, Adblock - while not blocking them - would count them as _blockable_ and if I hit command-shift-F (apple-shift-F) would block all blockable "objects". I found this very useful. No longer, apparently- and that is the main point I'm digressing around, by the way. (I wonder if it's a new version of Adblock that's doing this, or something else...) In Camino (a Mac-only Mozilla-like browser, on which I don't think Adblock in any form would install- which does make this relevant) once in awhile Cherrytap pages would load - and the embeddings (videos, for example) would interfere with the page in such a fashion that I could no longer see the comment box, everything would jigsaw left-up right-center dupnownd and - when I left the page- the interference would stay, requiring leaving and restarting the browser. (By the way- plans for today... exercise still and soon, also- learn some about the new version of Lilypond (lilypond.org) (version 2.6, not 2.0.1 which I was using) and practice. I had a lot of fun using that, and it might still become a part-time job someday... it's what the music score images are produced by.)

Trying to copy some CDs to use on iPod; the CDs may have problems and iTunes may be misreporting them as problems writing to the external hard drive (where i chose to locate the iTunes folder. Which I'm moving, btw, for now? ...) - so I get this error that the external drive cannot be read from, written to... ow. (Finder has no such trouble, which is good... so ... I reboot... and copy everything back over from the external to the new machine's main drive (sort it out later, though soon)... and will move default app folders away from the external drive until I've done a hardware test, etc. ... but the pleasant has outweighed the negative, and included - for instance- that copying that 42gb (billion characters) of stuff of the external drive took one hour, not the 17 or so hours it took to get it on there in the first place. Yay for faster machines.

FUBarring other trouble I don't know about, I do believe the number of people I have listed as a friend is wrong (it says 400-odd on my home page and profile page, but my myfriends.php stops giving me a "next page" link somewhat before 900... ah well, who knows. Maybe it's accurate now; the "myfriends.php" list seems to duplicate a lot of people- though it also seems to miss people.) I've now copied all but about 5% of my computer's hard drive to the external drive, or will have in about 10 minutes. I think at this point I will eject the external, set up the new iMac... eventually plug in the external and load material in that used to be on this one, but set up the new one first... and put this one to the side - format it and give it to a friend, after I'm a bit more sure I don't need what's on it.