Yes, it has been over a year since my last post. I've been reading Advogato regularly in the interim but haven't felt moved to write anything.

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.

Weird! It seems that a reasonably high proportion of the time I visit Central Computers (San Francisco or Santa Clara) Don Marti is there. Clone? Mistaken identity? Eerie coincidence?

Zoiks! Is it just me (Firefox 2.0.0.11) or did someone (<cough> adulau <cough>) forget to close a [bold] tag in their RSS feed?

While using truly Free software allows totally unrestrained joy when passing on tips and tricks to others, there's still some happiness to be gained when the software is proprietary but the recipients of the tip are people with whom you work. Here in the Real World[TM] I have to deal with (non computer) hardware manufacturers who sell overpriced computers running horrible equipment control software and who refuse to give you the "administrator" password, presumably because they believe you'd immediately copy the kludgey software to a more affordable box. Argh! Mercifully there's also equipment specific software written by Real Programmers and they've embedded macro languages that allow you to express yourself and get the job done. Thank you, Oh Sensible Ones! Today I managed to use such a a TIMTOWTDI rich macro language in a strange way and it was clearly The Right Way. It was so beautiful. My co-workers immediately appreciated the extra stability and efficiency, if not the beauty of the code. That was reward enough.

GAR! Google GAR!
I wanted to demonstrate to a colleague the prevalence of typos out in the interweb and so asked The Google to return hits containing "Gusty Gibbon" (one of my favourites). Alas the big G assumes that this is just a typo and returns many hits for the more boring correct title.

But what if I was working on a project on primate flatulence? How would I find the information I need?