Category: Geekery

One of my cow-orkers used his new fancy GUI IDE that showed him that a variable wasn’t being used in my code, so he commented it out. Only one problem: the variable was one of a list of variables being retrieved from a SQL select statement, and like is common with these things, I was retrieving them with:


int a = rs.getInt(p++);
int b = rs.getInt(p++);
String c = rs.getString(p++);


Notice the problem there? If you comment out one of the getInts without removing the field from the select statement, you also lose the “p++”, so everything after it gets the wrong field stored. Which causes a pretty nasty little bug.

Thanks, guy. That’s a few hours of my life I’ll never get back.

In the last 24 hours, MT-Blacklist has stopped 168 comment spam attempts, and let one through.

Keep in mind that I close comments on any blog entry over 100 days old, so this is probably fewer than 100 blog entries that were the lucky recipients of those 169 comment spam attempts. Neither MT-Blacklist nor I see the attempts to comment spam the older ones unless I look for POST commands in my web log.

One thing I’ve noticed recently is that comment spammers are GET-ing pages on my web site with the referrer string set to the site they’re trying to spam for. I guess they’re hoping that people are running webalizer (which I note is enabled by default in Fedora Core 3) or some similar log analyser that puts up a log of referrer strings somewhere where Google can find it. So a warning to everybody reading this: if you’ve got a web log analyser, make sure it’s not somewhere were Google or any other search engine can find it.

After going all weekend without my new laptop, I called up MacShack for a progress report. According to them, the replacement part (the hinge/clutch) is back-ordered and Apple hasn’t gotten back to him on whether there is adjustment that they could do themselves. So before I could even suggest it he suggested that I come and claim the Powerbook until they can get the part in.

In other news, as predicted, Apple immediately came out with a new bump to the Powerbook. That’s the only reason I got a good price on it, after all. Nothing that I can’t live without – a 1.67GHz processor instead of 1.5GHz (a whole 11%) and a 100G drive instead of an 80G. I kind of like the idea of that fancy two finger track pad thing, and the acceleratometer that senses when you’re dropping the Powerbook and parks the drives sound cool. But I’d rather have a few bucks in my pocket instead.

No, not that one. My brand new Powerbook’s screen hinge is loose. If I try to prop it on my knees in bed, it flops closed. However, I read this forum post that Apple will replace the hinge under warranty. I phoned the AppleCare line, and they suggested that if I take it to my local Apple Authorized repair center that they’d be able to fix it there or send it back if they can’t. So I did, and they said they’d have to order the hinge/clutch assembly and I probably won’t get it back until Tuesday at the earliest.

Even worse is that I’d just finished wiping and restoring my old Powerbook to give it to Laura.

I guess there goes my plan to do some billable hours on it this weekend.

I was just reading an article about how AOL pulling out of Usenet will spell the end of Usenet. Well, I’m a fairly old-timer on Usenet – the first post of mine that Google Groups archives is from 1989, but I know for a fact that I was posting in 1987 or 1988 at the latest. I’d only *just* missed the Great Renaming, but the net was still full of the fall-out from it at the time. And yes, I’m such an old-timer that I say “the net” when I mean Usenet, and use terms like “the Internet” and “the web” to mean what other people mean when they say “the net”.

Usenet has been my neighbourhood for 17 years, and it’s gone downhill significantly in that time. And there is a reason why those of us from the old days refer to the current date as 4166 September 1993.

I spend most of my Usenet time these days in a small hierarchy that is only distributed to other people who agree to play by the rules, and who agree to pull the plug on anybody else who doesn’t play by the rules. It’s a small community, close knit, literate, smart. No spam, no binaries, no porn, (some erotica), just pure wonderful text written by real live people. We’re not all friends with each other – as a matter of fact, some of the participants absolutely hate each other. But that’s ok. We don’t have to all agree with each other, as long as we behave like adults. It’s like Usenet was before AOL. No, I’m not going to tell you where it is or invite you in. Sorry.

I see the departure of AOL as the most hopeful thing that has happened to Usenet in 12 years. Maybe some day those of you who aren’t old-timers will get a chance to see what Usenet was and what it could yet be again.

Think of this as the last week of the September that Never Ended.