Confessions of a G33k

25 Years Ago, Catastrophe Loomed on Three Mile Island

By Sam Kennedy, The Allentown (PA) Morning Call

Word first reached the public by radio at 8:25 a.m. Wednesday, March 28, 1979 — 25 years ago today.

''There is a general emergency at Metropolitan Edison Co.'s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant,'' announced a local station, which was tipped off by an unusual amount of activity on the CB scanner.

The problem had started 41/2 hours earlier at the plant's Unit 2 reactor when a pump stopped working and a relief valve failed to close, allowing cooling water to drain from the nuclear core, which in turn overheated.

Gosh, I can't believe it was 25 years ago.

Movable Type hosting

If you are looking for a Movable Type hosting package, the Web/Mail host I use, AQHost, is now offering a Blog Hosting & Free Movable Type Installation Service.

Just to let you know, I've been using my Web host for nearly two years and I can't say enough good things about him. :-D

Windows XP Service Pack 2 beta?

According to Robert Scoble's link to Betanews, there is supposed to be a public beta release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 today. The only problem is that the page for the SP2 release that was publicized isn't working and when one does a search for "windows xp service pack 2 beta" on their site, there are no results.

Delaware Supreme Court Oral Arguments Now Online

This is a really, really cool idea....The Delaware Supreme Court is now putting oral arguments online.

Pointer from Larry over at Delaware Law Office

In an IBM Village, Fears of Air and Water Pollution

By Samme Chittum/The New York Times

ENDICOTT, N.Y. - This village, best known as the birthplace of I.B.M., has an unusual look these days. Venting systems, with white plastic tubing that runs from basements to roofs, sprout from 377 houses and businesses.

Many houses are for sale, but there are few buyers.

"This area is taboo now," said Tim Davis, who lives on Monroe Avenue. "And it's going to stay that way."

Mr. Davis lives in what residents call "the plume" - 320 acres encompassing the downtown and stretching across the village, all of which were polluted by industrial toxic substances. The chemicals contaminated soil and leached into groundwater. And they continue to produce vapors that waft into hundreds of basements.

Occurring over decades, the pollution is traceable at least in part to I.B.M., which used common solvents in its circuit board assembly.

The venting systems were all paid for by I.B.M., which two decades ago employed 12,000 workers in Endicott, just west of Binghamton. Now 1,700 collect I.B.M. paychecks here. Still, residents say they feel trapped in virtually unsalable homes, where they fear the prolonged effects of the vapors on the health of their families.

Boy, this makes one think twice about purchasing a house near a manufacturing facility.

Charting SCO's answers to IBM

Here's the latest and greatest from the SCO v. IBM suit. Someone at Groklaw had the good idea of comparing IBM Amended Counterclaims to SCO's Amended Answers.

In a nutshell, for the legal layperson, this is basically a chart illustrating what each side is arguing in court. Although this appears indecipherable, I'm currently studying much of what is in the pleadings and the nature of the pleadings themselves in my Civil Procedure class.

Nice Job, Microsoft!

With the news going around about Microsoft's involvement in the BayStar-SCO financing deal, it appears that we're starting to see some repercussions.

From Don, over at the Misanthropyst...

I've been a Microsoft user and general supporter, an Access Database programmer and evangelist, and a Visual Basic programmer for years. My personal experience goes back to DOS 5 and Windows for Workgroups 3.1. I mostly use Linux for my server and desktop needs these days, but I've kept an up-to-date Windows XP box on my home network, mostly for database work and for video editing.

Well, tomorrow I am going to go look at an Apple. If the open source community could help me with the video editing, I wouldn't even bother with that. But my goal is to banish Redmond from my life forever...

Don's story was picked up by Robert Scoble, and the comment thread quickly devolved downward.

What I did tonight...

I got sucked into some housecleaning, and I was organizing a catch-all box that I use to keep odd and ends in -- you know, like crossover cables, token ring network adapters, ps/2 adapters, a miniature screwdriver set, old cue:cats, various hardware drivers, AOL discs encompassing versions 5 through 8, various linux boot disks (a 2.4.6 kernel recompile in fact!) and about 8 inches worth of floppy disks...

I have the disks in a pile on my bookshelf right now. Even though I know they've gone bad, I just don't have the heart to throw them out.

Windows XP SP2 to break some existing apps

Courtesy of PC WORLD...

Changes to Windows XP made by SP2 fall into four main areas: network protection, memory protection, e-mail security, and browsing security. The most affected parts of Windows are RPCs (Remote Procedure Calls), DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model), Windows Firewall, and memory execution protection, according to Microsoft.

...

Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net is one of the applications affected by Windows XP SP2. The developer tool's remote debugging feature won't work because of the improved Windows Firewall, previously called Internet Connection Firewall, which will be turned on by default and will close all ports, Goodhew says.

Another product that Microsoft needs to update is the .Net Framework. The new memory protection features in SP2 require developers of certain applications to mark their code with memory execution permissions. If they don't, the protection features could interfere with the application, according to Microsoft.

Also, on a kinda sorta related note, I have my Mother's Windows XP machine configured to automatically download patches from Windows Update and my Mom has noted that during this past week, she's had something to install from Windows Update almost every day. Has anyone else seen this?

Finder question

Ok, here it goes. Is there any way to show the path of where you are at in Finder other than OPTION + CLICK or adding the path button to the toolbar? In other words, is there a way to simulate the "address bar" that is found in Windows Explorer/My Computer?

And yes, I've already gotten haranged about how "hideous" that seems.

Free font link fest

Over at resurrectionsong.

Via Bryan at Arguing with Signposts

Javascript and Mac browsers

Lately, it seems that I'm having problems with Web sites that use Javascript. At first, I attributed the problem to merely crappy Web programming, but I've even had problems on sites like this one, so I don't know if it is something endemic to the browsers I'm using -- Safari mostly, but I've had Firefox and Camino crash on me too.

Thoughts?

Halloween X

An allegedly damaging memo detailing Microsoft's investment in SCO.

Good lord, what if this is not a hoax?

Yahoo v. Google

I found this nifty page which directly compares Yahoo and Google search results in a graphical format.

SCO loses 2.25 million in 1Q revenue, decides to distract shareholders

by suing Autozone and DaimlerChrysler... From InfoWorld

In an announcement made late Wednesday morning, Lindon, Utah-based SCO said it would file suit later in the day against DaimlerChrysler in Oakland County Circuit Court in Michigan.

That lawsuit alleges that DaimlerChrysler violated its software licensing agreement with SCO by refusing to provide a requested "certification of compliance" as part of a software audit. The suit asks the court to permanently bar the automaker from further violations of the software agreement and seeks an injunction requiring it to "remedy the effects of its past violations" of the agreement.

The suit seeks undetermined damages. SCO officials were slated to discuss the legal action during a conference call at which they also planned to talk about the company's latest earnings report.

Earlier, in a separate announcement Wednesday, SCO said its suit against AutoZone alleges the retailer violated SCO's Unix copyrights through its use of Linux. That suit charges that AutoZone is "running versions of the Linux operating system that contain code, structure, sequence and/or organization from SCO's proprietary Unix System V code in violation of SCO's copyrights."

The already filed Autozone suit is from all appearances a contract dispute rather than pure IP infringement. Autozone had apparently been a customer of SCO, and during the course of their relationship, Autozone made the decision to stop using SCO and to migrate their systems to Linux. The SCO suit alleges that Autozone must have used SCO UNIX programming libraries to make the changeover to Linux. As has been widely quoted, Jim Greer, the former Autozone employee who was in charge of the Linux migration, hotly disputed this assertion weeks ago.

Update: Upon reviewing the Groklaw thread about the DaimlerChrysler suit, someone pointed out an interesting fact. There's an article on Netcraft about the irony of SCO filing suit in Federal Court in Nevada against AutoZone (and not to forget the suits going on in Federal Court in Delaware and Utah). Apparently, (I did not know this) the U.S. Federal Court system not only uses Linux for their websites, but they also are migrating to an Linux based case management system. HEE HEE.

And an interesting law geek kind of thought....I wonder why SCO chose to sue Autozone in Federal Court in Nevada (state of Autozone's incorporation) rather than in Memphis (state of principal operations). Also, the DaimlerChrysler suit in Michigan trial court is interesting because it's a suit against a multinational company. AFAIK about diversity of citizenship, I would have thought that it would easily be a Federal suit. However, even more interesting about the DaimlerChrysler case is that SCO has been fined by the German government for Linux IP claims, so I wonder if SCO is going to merely claim that they are only suing the U.S. division, thusly the reason for going to state court.

Oh and Slashdot legal analysis makes me cry. It's really, really, really untrustworthy.

Bandwidth stealers are teh l0s3r5!!1!!!1!!

The other day, I noticed someone had hotlinked to some of my pictures on my blog. It figures that it was a Xanga blogger, but I digress. I was just a tad bit not pleased by this turn of events, since the blogger in question was not only leaching my bandwidth but also violating that little copyright notice on the bottom of the right hand side menu. I thusly distributed a little net justice by editing .htaccess to redirect requests for images only a grossly large and definitely unartistic statement of Baby Jeebus' view of the subject. Baby Jeebus cries, you know, when you steal bandwidth.

Bonus links: HTML BASIX automatic .htaccess generator (of course adult webmasters would be worried about hotlinking) and Altlab's Hotlink Checker.

Update: Baby Jeebus broke the Bloglines feed, thusly, I have to save it for particular offenders.

HOT STOCK TIP : STARBUCKS A SELL

Whilst on my shopping adventure this afternoon, I scored a Krups Bravo Espresso Maker at Bed, Bath and Beyond. I figure as a poor law student* that an espresso maker costing approximately 13.69 Caramel Macchiatos would be a smart investment. Since I have made this investment, I would suggest to you that Starbucks stock will be plummeting in the weeks ahead, since, you know, I may just be able to cut down on my Starbucks habit once I figure out how to make myself some Starbucks drinks**.

I just made myself a double latte. mmmmmm double latte.

*When the law school semester started this year, I had to sit through the Financial Aid office's "How many lattes a day are you wasting your money on?" PowerPoint presentation. Let me just say that in a few years I do not wish to be a lawyer living like a poor student.

**I am using Starbucks Espresso Roast Beans. There are some things that one cannot skimp on.

Spring and Time

Well, I'm allegedly on vacation this week and it seems like I'm busier this week than my weeks in school. Highlights so far have included my daughter's invite to a classmates party for tomorrow that was made, oh Monday evening, devising a costume for my daughter in celebration of Read Across America (she was the American Girl character Samantha) and a mini shopping adventure. Next up for Thursday or so...a trip to the DMV.

Oh, but I must must note that it's so so nice to be enjoying temps in the 60s. I know in a few months I will be complaining about how hot it is, but I am just very happy that we have a break from this nasty winter.