snowdeal.org > ex machina

Saturday, December 14, 2002

speaking of tunes, "Homemade Dot Mac: Home Web Radio" would a lot more fun if i had my ibook. sniff.

posted by e3 10:38:38 AM

Friday, December 13, 2002

Why you can't get that tune out of your head:

The many thousands of tunes most of us know, from arias to singles and jingles, are locked in a shifting pattern of neural circuits in a region just behind our foreheads, scientists say.

This part of the brain - the rostromedial prefrontal cortex - has complex functions relating to the link between data and the emotions, and, say the scientists, it may be the reason why melodies evoke memories."

posted by e3 9:26:07 PM

Thursday, December 12, 2002

given the current state of affairs at aol, it's unsurprising and yet still unfortunate to hear that the recent round of layoffs will affect netscape - and quite possibly mozilla:

"Daniel Glazman has confirmed this FuckedCompany report and notes that "Netscape is badly impacted". Netscape developer Andrew Wooldridge also notes that "today has been a really bad day" but doesn't elaborate.

Even though Mozilla is a seperate company, the majority of its developers work at Netscape."

from headlines-that-predict-the-future-department: "New 'Communicator' Threatens Netscape's Future".

posted by e3 10:34:44 PM

john robb wonders, "what is social-software.com?"

whois says it's owned by a Corbin de Rubertis who google says says is/was a vp at novell.

interesting. obviously could be a different Corbin de Rubertis, but what are the odds of that?

posted by e3 8:44:42 PM

well, the good news is that all the dns funniness should be resolved. the bad news is that the ibook is hosed beyond belief. according to the local mac tech - "well, i don't know. i've never seen this many things go this badly all at once. it looks like you just got a bunch of shoddy components."

great. if i'm lucky i'll get it back before christmas. meanwhile i'm back to a using a bevy of linux and windows boxen which have reliable served me for a median of 4 years. it's nice to see apple ensuring quality products from its outsourced manufacturing partners.

posted by e3 8:30:17 PM

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

no word back on the the prognosis for the ibook. i beginning to have brand new emotion associated with apple and i don't think it's the one that tim o'reilly was writing about in reference to apple's emotional brand.

maybe it's a fluke, but a friend had to return his ibook after a week due to a similar "sleep of death" problem. and i'm not sure i'm feeling any better after the local mac tech dryly and knowingly recommended that he thought it would be in my best interest to get the three year support service rather than take my chances after the standard one year warranty runs out.

i really hope it's all 1 and 1 adding up to 3. the irony is that i'm sure i could dust off lisa, my nearly decade-old mac color classic and be rest assured that she'd come to life. sigh.

posted by e3 8:59:34 PM

ev says "I think Mozilla will become the preferred browser for Blogger once we release this new version.". and for all the right reasons.

posted by e3 8:44:32 PM

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

if nobody can hear you does that mean...whistle, whistle while patiently waiting for the dns system to do it's thing.

i can access the site usually, but i hear it's sporadically unavailable. and i'm still not getting any e.mail which makes me wonder if i've set up the mx record correctly. hi. hi. you'd think i'd learn my lesson about setting up secondary dns. after 3 years of faultless - and free - service, it looks like mydomain was brought down by a DoS attack . curiously another vendor i deal with, servepath was also brought down the night before by an "unprecedented" denial of service attack. hmmm.

so, the verisign story. in the fiasco yesterday i was nearly caught in a very ugly catch-22. i needed to change the name servers. but i'd long ago forgotten and lost the username and password associated with my account. and my contact and e.mail info had long since gone defunct. yes, friends. i had just dramatically reduced the number of ways that i could prove that i am i.

i've known this for quiet some time and was pleasantly surprised when i discovered that i could renew the domain without having the usename and password handy. i also dreaded the day that i'd need to somehow prove to verisign that i am indeed, eric snowdeal. and not my dad who is also eric snowdeal. or even more improbably my grandfather who, although deceased, was also eric snowdeal. you get the picture. well, the day of reckoning had arrived. i was going to call verisign ! i made sure i got good and irritated by scouring the house one more time for any evidence that i was the owner of the domain. and i found one. back in august, we received one of the last pieces of e.mail that was forwarded from our old address that has a new password to my account. for security reasons, they were sending the username separately. i never received the usename. nonetheless, password in hand i dialed the support number. astonishingly, in ten minutes i was talking to a real person and explained the situation. she asked for the password and then gave me the username. just like that.

so a crisis was averted, but i shudder to think of what could have happened if the person who received the username in the mail decided to call verisign and get the password. yikes.

just to keep the universe perfectly in balance, while verisign was being so helpful my six-month old ibook decided to suddenly and unexpectedly fail. it just started going into a sleep of death. initial attempts at recussitation by resetting the power management unit , seemed promising but ultimately ended in failure.

so that sucks.

and i'm fighting off a nasty flu. while my wifes violently expells fluids every hour, i sit in a constant, low-grade state of nausea in perpetua.

praise murphy.

posted by e3 7:38:34 PM

Monday, December 09, 2002

wow. thanks to a meltdown at mydomain i was suddenly and quiet unexpectedly sans dns service for almost all of today. i ended up switching to ultradns, and things seem to be blinking on and off. i expect more bumps in over the nightime hours. and would you believe that i had a relatively straighforward if ultimately scary interaction with verisign today?

more tommorrow. right now, i'm drained coming close to seeing just how tenuous this connection to the aether really is.

posted by e3 11:39:23 PM

Sunday, December 08, 2002

nervemail - delivering rich web-based applications with mozilla.

posted by e3 9:33:58 PM

Hep Message Server:

"Hep Message Server is software that transfers bits of information between different messaging sytems on the Internet. When it's done, you'll be able to use Hep to transparently route messages between e-mail, weblogs, and instant messaging."

[ via afroginthevalley ]

posted by e3 9:03:33 PM