iPod badness

As anybody who reads my blog obsessively would know, I have a love/hate relationship with my iPod. It’s a wonderful device, and it keeps me from getting all stabby with my cow orkers, but I don’t have good luck keeping them working.

For the past couple of days, when I’ve started it up in the morning for the drive in to work, played one song, got about 20-30 seconds into the second one, and frozen. Or it’s just skipped one song before freezing on the second. Each time, doing a reboot (hold down the menu and play buttons, curse yourself for not removing your earbuds first because it makes a really loud click, wait for the menu to reappear) has fixed it. Until this morning, when the first attempt to play made a lot of those drive chuckling sounds, and I could feel the drive head moving, which is unusual. It of course immediately froze up, and I rebooted, but it wouldn’t come up. I got an Apple icon and then nothing else. Thank goodness it didn’t show the bad disk or the sad iPod icons. I rebooted a second time, and this time it came up.

Last time I hooked it up to my laptop (last week some time, I think), it updated the firmware to version 1.5. I think it’s time to re-lookup how to reflash the firmware again. I wonder if I can go back to the previous version?

Sure, I’d use it more often, if…

…it weren’t a soul and productivity destroying piece of shit.

My boss is always nagging the developers to do more documentation, and to put them into the “documenation blog” (which actually has some blog-like features, but it’s mostly a web front-end to a CVS repository). Oh, and you can’t just attach to the CVS server and use good old command line tools – no, you have to use the web front-end, because otherwise it screws up the permssions for everybody else who uses the web tool.

Ok, I’m a team player. I’ll be nice.
Continue reading “Sure, I’d use it more often, if…”

Hit me, spammers

I switched from MovableType to WordPress so that I could take advantage of all the fancy new spam fighting features in WordPress – and because I was stuck on MT 2.661 and development in the MT world was passing me by. Initially I was reluctant because WP is written in PHP and I don’t know if it’s the language or the people who use the language, but PHP web sites tend to be great gaping holes with a big welcome mat for spammers, trojans, script kiddies and every other anti-social reject on the net.

So now I’m sitting here checking my SpamKarma page several times a day to see how well it’s working, but the spammers are still attempting to hit my old blog – I see the hits in my httpd logs for “GET /movabletype/custom-comments.cgi over and over again.

Sad but true – I can’t wait for the spammers to find my new blog.