Browser statistics

I loves me consulting some StatCounter statistics, hoo boy, yes I do. Maybe if I post from time to time, I'll even get some visitors!

Anyway, I couldn't help noticing that a vast majority of you are here using what StatCounter thinks is Safari 1.2. A quick Google hunt informs me that the number that Safari advertises in its UA is not the same as the one that one sees under Safari > About, but I can't be bothered to check to what actual version 1.2 corresponds, and so I shall simply hope that it is something close to the latest release.

For the Firefox users, though: Hi! I notice most of you are on 3.0.x, but nobody seems to be using 3.0.11. Come on in, the water's fine! As for the 14 hearty folks using 3.5b4, why not give 3.5rc2 3.5rc3 3.5 a try? That, together with Safari 4 (or 1.2 or whatever), is nowadays my browser of choice.

News will come one of these days (though I realise that I've promised that before). There's a lot of it, too ….

iTunes ToS update

I just downloaded something from iTunes today after a couple of weeks away from it, and noticed that they'd updated their ToS. Big surprise, right? (I don't download from them very often—I've become an eMusic junkie (although their recent we'll-give-you-music-you-don't-want-for-more deal has me reconsidering), with amazon.com for the tracks that aren't on eMusic (Drag City, we miss you!)—but it seems that, every time I do, there's a new ToS to accept.) What really did surprise me was that, up at the top and ahead of the actual ToS, there was a summary, describing the changes made in plain language. I would have liked to have had a literal delta, too, but, still, this seems to me to be a huge step forward. I can't help thinking that this must be a response to ToSback—so, today as ever, hurrah for the EFF!

Deep thought

GIYF is a 2-step quine.

No telecom amnesty (for now)!

I am joyous, over the roof, ecstatic about the recent house vote against providing telecom immunity. As Glenn Greenwald at Salon writes, opponents of immunity have long, and reasonably, believed that defeat was inevitable; so, although this is not yet a victory, at least it's a step forward rather than a step backward, and that, in the current environment, is something to cheer.

So, happy, happy, joy, joy -- but then there's this sentence from Jonathan Weisman's Washington Post article:

Congress then defiantly left Washington for a two-week spring break.

Oh yeah. Stick it to the man! Take your spring break!

Oh, and, hi. How are you doing? I am fine. Plenty of news. (I intended to wait until I could post thoroughly about the news before posting anything, but this news deserves comment from such a world-famous blog.) Wait a bit, and all, or at least some, will be told.

UPDATE 17 March 2008. I originally incorrectly described the article as appearing in the Washington Times, not the Washington Post.

Hurrah!

Gonzales is gone-zales! (OK, it's no Gonzo is gonzo, but it's something.)

Misplaced outrage

Hey, how about that! Three posts in a row with no blogger-created content! It's OK, though: A (err, self-, sorry) link at MacOSXHints has sent my traffic through the roof, which makes me feel quite the blogger, or would, anyway, if more than two of the people who came for my X.4.10 entry had stayed around to see anything else. Anyway, here's the first sentence of an eMusic review of Pecker's 2 y las Nadadoras:

If you don’t know Spanish, it’s going to be mighty hard to tell exactly what Barcelona’s indie-pop sensation Pecker is talking about in his songs.

Gosh golly gee, ya think? Maybe now we should go back and make sure every review of an American band starts with "If you don't know English, ..." (and then, I suppose, with a further disclaimer: "If, on the other hand, you do know English, then please ignore the fact that the songwriter doesn't.")

Irony

The BBC has an article up today, in which they report on the National Archive's worry that data stored in old proprietary formats are being, and will continue to be, lost as the programmes that could read them cease to be available. Here's the article, and here's a screen capture: Setting aside the facts that this seems to be an awfully belated reaction (did some popular programme just cease to run? Did they never try to look at the old data before?); that the archivists seem breathlessly excited about a solution which, after all, seems to be little more than virtualising the OS's needed to run these old programmes (about which even Mr Frazer above seems to look slightly apologetic); and that the story touts OOXML as a way out of the woods (albeit with a grudging mention that Microsoft might have considered using ODF instead); doesn't it seem that the BBC might feel slightly sheepish about hosting a video attached to such a story in a proprietary Windows-only format?

Free shipping

I'm shopping for stereo systems right now on amazon.com (despite my co-author's, I think farcical, assurance that "stereos are déclassé"); and, stereos being heavy, am keeping out a keen eye for shipping costs. It seems, however, that amazon.com is having some sort of free shipping promotion (I can't find the details anywhere), so now's a good time to buy. All that being said, I'm not sure what to make of this deal on a Sony stereo:

Tribute

By the way, there was mentioned in the comments to my post I Am a Terrible, Terrible Person a note from naper271 to the effect that she had put up an homage on her own blog. I thought I acknowledged this but don't seem actually to have done, so I thought I'd put it here in a post rather than in the comments to a post from four months ago: I can think of little that would be more flattering than this comparison (note I do say the comparison is flattering, not the picture). Thank you! -- and I got the corresponding magnet, too, even if, as is usual for me, I never wrote to acknowledge it.

Incidentally, I am a little curious about the (so-far lone) comment to this post; but neither Babelfish nor I can translate it entirely into English, so I do not know how to resolve this curiosity.

UPDATE 8:50 PM 20 June 2007. Wow, seven visitors today, an increase of infinity per cent! It's almost as if more people come to the blog when I post than when I don't. Hmm, I think I'm on to something here .... Oooh, oooh, what if one were to serve ads to visitors to one's blog ¹? I'll bet there's a potential to make money here!

¹ Don't worry.

Mac OS X.4.10 and USB drives

UPDATE. I now believe that the procedure described here wasn't actually what solved my problem. Sorry. See the detailed update below.

(I refuse, here and elsewhere, to use the term 'Mac OS X 10.4.10', so I switch occasionally between Mac OS 10.4.10, which grates because it omits the familiar X, and Mac OS X.4.10, which grates because it's hideous and internally inconsistent.) Well, as has been pointed out elsewhere, it's unexpected -- 'unprecedented', I suppose, is strictly true but a bit overdramatic -- to get an update to X.4.10 in place of the release of X.5.0 (or does it start at X.5.1?), but that's not about what I wish to post.

I have long had a problem formatting USB drives on Macs -- I filed Bug #4670521 about it on bugreport.apple.com (I'm not sure how, or whether it's possible, to link to bug reports) -- and so, when I saw that X.4.10 was supposed to offer improved reliability for USB drives, I got excited ¹ -- so excited that I decided to upgrade immediately, rather than waiting the week or so I usually do to see what consequences shake out ². What do you know! -- immediately upon applying the update, even before rebooting, my USB thumb drive, which had previously worked like a dream ⁴, immediately ceased working. I normally don't reboot immediately after an update, because I'm running a Subversion server on my computer for a few papers I'm writing and don't like to have unannounced downtime; but, in this case, I really needed the files on that thumb drive (for example, it contains my Firefox profile), so I rebooted (sorry to any of JA, CC, JG, and JL who were affected by it) -- twice, because the updater wants to rereboot -- and hoped for the best. I inserted the drive and -- the suspense is so thick that you can cut it with a knife ⁵ -- nothing. I removed it, tried it in another USB slot, and -- nothing. In fact, now the little power indicator on the drive wasn't even illuminating.

Yee-ha! Taste the improved reliability!

I have no idea what was causing the trouble, but, by deleting my kernel extensions caches (see Common workarounds for when things go wrong post-update in the linked article), I seem to have recovered my beloved thumb drive.

UPDATE 1 July 2007. Sorry to any folks who are coming here to try to find out what to do about USB drive issues -- that MacFixIt article appears to have gone behind the subscriber wall. The fix that worked for me was to delete the following:

• com.apple.kernelcaches (a folder in /System/Library/Caches)
• Extensions.kextcache (a file in /System/Library)
• Extensions.mkext (a file in /System/Library/)

and then restart.

UPDATE 3 July 2007. It seems from the comments on this MacOSXHints story that I just got lucky with deleting the kernel extensions caches. Some commenters there guessed that the Mac OS X.4.10, v 1.1 update will fix this problem, but I can't tell: Despite instructions on the download page telling me it's recommended for all PowerPC and Intel users, I can only find the download page for the Intel version. Oh, well. Any other suggestions in the comments?

By the way, according to DeepApple (or at least to Google's automated translation of it), the problem a lot of people are having is that the drive is showing up in Disk Utility, but refusing to mount. My drive wasn't even showing up in Disk Utility, so it may be a separate problem entirely.

UPDATE 14 March 2008. I've noticed in the course of later updates that any thumb drive which is connected to the computer when it boots will not be mounted (or, at least, I can't figure out how to make it mount); but another reboot (with the drive removed) seems to solve the problem. I incidentally applied such a reboot in the course of the efforts described here, I now suspect that that, not deleting the kernel extensions, was what solved my problem.

UPDATE 17 July 2007. Wow, a lot a lot of people are still interested in this issue. Hey, folks! Sit and stay a spell!

¹ Yes, I am a geek to get excited about the potential to format external USB hard drives. Even worse, the bug is still listed as open, so I don't think I was even properly geekily excited. (The workaround I had involved borrowing extra equipment from several people, and testing it only to find out it's not resolved would entail borrowing all that equipment again, so I'm not going to do so.)
² For example, I found out in this way about the bizarre ³ Eject key behaviour introduced in X.4.9, which was enough to keep me from applying the update for a while. (I caved eventually, because I figured being up-to-date on security updates trumped having to press the Eject key for slightly longer; and, though I am still bothered by the delay, the world has not, contrary to all expectations, ended.)
³ Bizarre because it's not customisable, not because no-one would ever want it.
⁴ Actually, this is a simile so in-apt that one might almost think I worked at making it so; for, in fact, the drive worked perfectly except if I inserted it while the computer was asleep and then woke it, in which case it wouldn't be recognised and I'd have to insert it again.
⁵ This is another disappointing simile, though this time, I think, the fault is not mine. Why is it supposed to be a measure of thickness that something can be cut with a knife? Indeed, knowing that something can be so cut places an upper, not a lower, bound on its thickness: "The model was so thin I could cut him/her with a knife" (but, err, maybe that's not such a great sentence).