jc

After spending a wonderful night talking to earenwe, in which I had multiple aspects of Kemetic Orthodoxy explained to me while I tried (and succeeded, yay) in getting Microsoft Office working on this computer, I went to bed at around seven. I can't remember my train of thought once my head hit the pillow, but I do remember alerting myself to the fact that both my .net domains were due to expire soon and that I should think about renewing them.

I woke up this morning to see - lo and behold - two near-identical letters that mentioned "domain name" in the envelope window. Aha, I thought; this'll be my agent sending me renewal forms. Sadly, upon opening one of the envelopes I found a scam letter from that ol' UK favourite, Domain Registry Services.

The Register, as ever, has the full scoop on the scam from July, and more recently Nominet - the UK's stole licensed registrar for the .uk TLD among other things - issued a warning about this company. Interestingly, Nominet had previously been granted an interim injunction against DRS, but unfortunately the law is against Nominet as, sadly, nothing DRS is doing by way of these letters is illegal under the letter of the law. More details on the scam, along with a sample of the letter, can be found over at some site called Enigma Log. Gotta love Google.

I'm wondering what to do next about this. I've already contacted my current agent to find out when I should dash him the £20 cheque that covers both domains for a year (as opposed to the £120 DRS would have me pay to have both covered for two years). I know I should report it to the authorities that at least I've been targeted by this scam, but I'd be wasting police time if I reported it to my local constabulary and Nominet's offices are shut until Monday Tuesday, as Monday is a bank holiday. Does the Office of Fair Trading even have a procedure in place to deal with these scams? Ehh. Five hours sleep leaves me wanting for brain processing power.

So, at 11:55:43am, it finally happened. The computer froze, and I left it for a full ten minutes before finally resigning myself to the task of rebooting.

Good innings, though.



The silver lining in all of this is that I verified that the big 25-metre Ethernet cable running along the hall to the kitchen still works now the new floor's been put in (as I tried to remotely access my computer from the old computer), and that I'm now all up to date on the latest OS, software and security updates that I'd been putting off because they required restarts.

Fun stuff.

jc runs Windows Update to download the latest round of patches, including the essential one to protect against the pesky Sasser worm.

jc watches as all eight updates are downloaded and installed.

jc sees a prompt to restart the computer now for the patches to take effect.

jc clicks OK, and waits for the PC to restart.

jc sees the black "starting up" progress bar, then the graphical "starting up" progress bar.

jc sees a brief blue screen, then the black "starting up" progress bar again. This continues in a loop.

jc sighs, and force restarts the PC.

jc stares blankly at a message that reads "OS not found. Install an OS on this hard drive."

jc sighs, and runs the W2K installer from scratch once again.

...

jc hides the Virtual PC window, and switches to Safari to update his LiveJournal.

jc's mouth develops the slightest sign of a smile, as he looks down at his uptime monitor to see 92 days, 11 hours, 5 minutes and counting.

I've encountered two separate networking problems in the course of configuring stuff today. The short version is, I've had my fill and everything's OK now, barring a minor software conflict that can't be avoided. The long version, well...

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In other news, I have a ticket to see tomorrow's initial 2pm showing of The Matrix: Revolutions, and I intend to use it. I hope to share the (spiritual?) experience with others who'll be watching it at the same time as me; I know asciident is dragging supersat out to the 6am showing somewhere in Seattle. Anybody else planning an early or late start to see this first synchronous showing?

The curse of the dreaded Wonky Power Connector Of Doom has returned to haunt my aging laptop.

Since I first bought my G3 PowerBook almost five years ago, I've been wholly dissatisfied with the connector that supplies main power to my computer. About a centimetre and a half of wire connects the main connector to a similar-shaped cylinder, which I can only figure acts as some sort of capacitor. This second section isn't that heavy, but is heavy enough to stress and weigh down the 1.5cm section of wire connecting the two. As a result, the power cord has to be threaded back about two inches to attach to the main connector, to prop up this secondary cylinder.

Added to this, the computer's socket progressively starts to loosen and wobble inside the enclosure. If the power connector sags too much, the computer loses the connection and mains power with it. This wasn't much of a problem in the early days, because I had a battery to fall back on, but I eventually had to take steps to keep the connector propped up at the back. Predictably, this would worsen the socket's wobbliness and eventually the connection would be lost altogether, prompting an urgent servicing.

Twice now, this has resulted in the fraying of that pesky 1.5cm of wire. There's only so much room for it to maneouvre, and eventually cracks begin to appear in the insulating wire and sparks are let off. Because the thinner wire is moulded onto the power "brick" adapter that sits in between the computer and the electrical socket, every time the thin wire breaks I have to replace the whole section, brick and all. This is A Bad Costly Thing, and means that I'm now on my third damned brick. Worse, the battery has since died the death.

In the past few days, my PowerBook has been spontaneously dying on me. I'll be typing an e-mail or chatting in IRC, and suddenly the screen will flicker between full brightness and slightly dimmed for about three or four seconds before the power manager forces a shutdown, accompanied by the power light blinking on for about a second. I could restart as normal, but I'd lose any unsaved work as expected. After about the third or fourth occurrence, I decided to investigate.

I eliminated all possible sources of hardware intervention first. I reset the power manager twice, and then I reset my parameter RAM. I thought the first measure and not the second would solve the problem, to no avail. I even dismantled the thing, taking out the HD and daughtercard and blowing out any dust that might cause a problem; no effect. Finally, my attention turned to the power connector. Despite it being a bit wobbly, I couldn't induce a forced shutdown by manipulating its position. I eventually decided to try propping the connector up with a folded sock, being careful not to push the connector up so much that it stressed the socket. Damn thing's been on all night without incident.

I really, really am lost to a solution that will not leave me hundreds of pounds out of pocket. (Way to go, Apple.) I am convinced that this problem lies in the PowerBook's power socket not being firmly attached to the logic board. If I even knew what my logic board looked like, and if I knew it was simply a matter of using the screwdriver to firmly reaffix the socket, I could easily get at the secluded logic board if I had the required tools to prize open the casing. I really cannot afford to support this computer financially any longer, if all I'll be doing is paying for repairs to what I consider to be a design flaw.

Considering my current situation, thoughts of purchasing a new 17" AlBook become more urgent. It's going to be a massive loan...

I've had it. Once I find the receipt, I'm taking my new 256MB RAM chip and the computer into the AppleCentre tomorrow.

You'll remember just two journal entries ago that I had my system all up to date and functional? Well, as soon as I put the top 256MB RAM chip back in everything went haywire again. I can now break the computer without fail by using Disk Utility to Verify Disk Permissions, so I'll show that to them tomorrow and see what they have to say about it.

I had to check once and for all whether my poorly Wallstreet can even cope with a maximum of 384MB RAM, and EveryMac happily confirms it. This means that either the types of RAM in my computer are mismatched, although I have no way to accurately tell, or the additional 256MB chip (the second replacement) is faulty.

Either way, I doubt the AppleCentre guys will let me hang around for half an hour or so while I demonstrate the chip's faultiness.

Thankful I get Monday and Tuesday off next week. Fed up of university. Distracting myself from work that needs done in the next two hours.

When I get home, I'll either sleep until Saturday or try and bring OS X back up to date without all hell breaking loose. Again. Aiming for 10.2.6 with DevTools. the_demiurge had no problems installing the DevTools over 10.2.5, so might try that route. Fearful of downloading latest Safari release version, although might use Safari Enhancer to disable its cache so it doesn't screw my HD over again.

Forgot to mention MTV is hosting its Europe Music Awards here in November. Gettin' my blag on as you read this, although they might laugh in my face over what I have to propose...

Yesterday was the worst day yet, by far.

I woke up to find the computer had crashed, and upon restarting I couldn't get back into OS X for about ten minutes. In my infinite stupidity I hadn't created a new user, and when I tried to access the Accounts System PrefPane System Preferences would unexpectedly quit on me. So, I decided to try the 10.2.6 update.

Naturally I took the top 256MB RAM chip out first, as that always causes problems in system installs etc. The update went very well, so I decided to update the rest of the software on the next restart. This also went well.

Restarting again brought me all kinds of problems. At first I couldn't get the login screen to appear, and having X recreate my Library folder brought it back. However, the Finder was now as flaky as a brittle chocolate bar, quitting and restarting whenever I tried the simplest things. fsck reported yet more directory damage, and eventually found problems it yet again couldn't fix. Right, I thought, I'll just restart back into OS 9 again.

No go. System bomb at startup: "file system map inconsistent". That's one I've never encountered before... and I got the same thing trying to start up from the OS 9 CD. Well, colour me manically depressed.

I eventually resorted to something I haven't done for four years... used PowerBook SCSI Disk Mode, to mount my 'Book's HD on the 7100, from where this journal entry comes. The OS 9 partition is hosed, the OS X partition is seriously flaky, but the other two major partitions are thankfully OK.

Now begins the painfully long backup process. I can't chain the CD writer and 'Book to the 7100, as I don't have another big-to-small connector for the writer, so I'll have to try and find a workaround. I really don't like the prospect of unmounting and remounting my 'Book's HD, as I don't know how long it'll last.

Once the drive is reinitialised and I can hopefully boot from CD again, I'll experiment with installing 10.2, installing the DevTools, then updating to 10.2.6 and installing only the necessary add-ons.

Why the hell must things be so difficult?

I know, I'm stupid.

Meteo forecast a thunderstorm, and the rain was getting really heavy outside, so I decided to put the PowerBook to sleep and unplug. This was against my usually better judgement, as I stopped trusting my battery after it started to spontaneously discharge on me at random a year or two ago.

Sure enough, by the time I returned to the computer an hour or two later it wouldn't wake up. When I started up, I was booted back into OS 9 again. (This happens far too often for my liking.) DiskWarrior reports a minor directory error, but it was obviously serious enough to prevent the computer from booting into OS X.

That X can be this susceptible to directory damage is seriously galling. Maybe I'm just jinxed, but there must be a better way for X to deal with sudden loss of power that doesn't involve massive overheads, such as its extremely hidden journalling feature. There must be...

This time I'm 95% sure it's Safari's fault.

I'm browsing as usual, when suddenly Safari disappears, my Dock disappears, my clock freezes and I have to force restart. The computer won't start up. Argh.

Every so often my hard drive just disappears after a serious, serious crash for about ten minutes. Nothing, even Disk Utility, can see it. When it did show up again, I managed to boot up into OS 9. I decided to run DiskWarrior on my X partition despite past failures, and it spent about six or seven hours repairing the directory during which time it finds three hundred overlapped files. I save the report for later perusal, and reboot into OS X.

So many little things in OS X were broken and the Console spewed out so many error messages that I decided to re-install. Looking at the report, half the overlapped files were Safari Cache files. Grr. I'm now re-compiling all the little things I had before I erased the broken partition.

Sod it, from now on I refuse to use Safari until its post-beta release. So much for dumping Camino.