Name: Scrambled Text?
Member since: 2005-01-14 23:43:36
Last Login: 2009-07-03 18:59:09
Notes: This bit didn't come back when I recreated my account after the Advogato glitch.
I am a Yoorpean currently working for a medium-small biotech company in the San Francisco Bay area. After getting my Ph.D. in Yoorp I was a fellow at the National Cancer Institute, a postdoc at UCSF and an investigator at a health science company in the Chicago area. I don't know where life will lead me next.
I am not a computer professional but have been hooked on them since exposure to the school's Commodore PET (1979). I prefer UNIX-like OSs and have used Linux in some shape or form since Slackware 2.0 in June 1994 (kernel 1.0.9). In addition to Intel boxes at home and work I also have a Sun Ultra 5. All run Debian.
The trigger this time was experiencing some strange behaviour in my Advogato diary. Maybe I'm seeing the result of code designed to stop spam. Basically most of the hyperlinks in my old diary entries are served artificially so as to point back to my diary. The text of the affected diary entries is unchanged as if I open the entry in [Edit] mode the original links are there. This starts about 32 entries ago. It is not caused by bad links (most of them still work) and they are a mix of random .org, .com and even some .gov sites. I don't see anything about this in the FAQ. Feature or bug?
A fair portion of my older entries describes activities intended to keep old boxen functioning well past their compulsory retirement age. Since my last entry I moved (to a house!) which meant a cycle of packing and unpacking, which meant testing to see that everything survived (although the journey was short). Nearly everything works fine but I've been spurred into shopping for CMOS batteries - maybe I ought to have a regular replacement schedule the way that some do for smoke detectors. One hard drive (a problem-era Western Digital) refuses to spin up and some boxes required component jiggling to reseat memory and expansion cards. The other failure unrelated to the move was the LCD for my IBM T23 laptop. This had been a little flakey (a row of pixels would occasionally turn black) and was caused by me abusing it, often lifting it up by the open lid, and possibly due to my habit of running it without the battery (a state which might have reduced structural itegrity - as it did for my TP500). I grabbed it one too many times and the whole panel darkened and died (not just the backlight). Unlike the person in the Slarshdawt thread I decided to fix it and managed to find a local supplier of refurbished (ex-RMA machine) panels - Alan Computech in Union City. It arrived by UPS. It works. They also gave me a crazy (40%) Mothers' Day week discount. So far so good. This also gives me a better appreciation of the fragility of laptops so, for the meantime at least, I am being a little more gentle with my 8-year old ThinkPad.
1 Dec 2007 (updated 1 Dec 2007 at 17:44 UTC) »
But what if I was working on a project on primate flatulence? How would I find the information I need?
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