yamahito

I don’t normally post personal stuff, but several people (mostly on facebook) have asked me what Laura looks like:

Things are complicated at the moment.

Today is the 25th birthday of the Compact Disk.

At least, today is the 25th anniversary of the first CD pressed at a pressing plant, according to The Register: it was actually invented in 1979, with the specification finalised in June 1980.

1979 was the year I was born, and the CD has turned into a technology that has dominated my lifetime, spawning the DVD and revolutionising not only music, but computing, which feeds and clothes me.

I don’t know how much longer the CD will survive. MP3s, iTunes and the rest of its children are gradually taking over, and where one 74minutes or 600MB was a huge amount of storage compared to the hard drive in your computer, it’s now trivially small. But the optical disk will be with us for a while, and the CD legacy will go on for many more years.

Sometimes the bredth and scope of the stupidity of the oversights of intelligent people can be staggering. I’m sure many of my friends will agree.

Today is the turn of Apple Software Update (ASU), a windows program that runs once a week to check for updates for quicktime, iTunes, Safari and the like.

As some of you will know, we suffer from an ongoing network issue here at work: every now and then we suffer a small amount of packet corruption. It doesn’t affect browsing the web, or email, or instant messenging much. But it frequently breaks large downloads over http: .iso images and large zipped or compressed files (such as update executables) tend to get corrupted and unopenable.

It’s a lucky thing, then, that ASU has a built-in checker to make sure that the files it downloads are the same files that they meant to download, right?

Wrong. ASU finds corrupted files fine, but then proceeds to deal with them in the worst possible way: after telling you that the file is corrupt (or more accurately, that it has an ‘invalid signature’), it gives you a chance to install the updates again. What it doesn’t do is re-download the update files; someone thought it would be a good idea to cache those. Admirable in other circumstances, all it means is that ASU continually fails verification tests on these files, and the updates are never installed. At least until newer versions are released or the downloaded files are flushed/deleted (not found out where they are yet).

Let me rephrase that: If something goes wrong when it’s downloading files, My update programs inhibits me installing updates.

Well, it wasn’t working last night, but it tells me it has worked today.

Facebook, finding new ways to make its walled garden more appealing, rather than breaking down those walls, has allowed people to import syndicated feeds into their notes (that is, import their blogs).

I decided to use the feed on my livejournal blog rather than yamahito.net - the difference being that each post cross-posted to the livejournal blog includes a link back here in the article itself. I might change my mind on that one, though: livejournal only seems to put chronologically recent blog posts on its RSS feed, so there’s none of my past posts. Maybe y’all should be grateful.
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You’ll probably need a browser with .PNG support to see this (I’m talking about IE 7 for you microsofties)

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It was only a few days ago that I was bemoaning facebook’s closed off attitude: no syndication was my biggest gripe. So now there’s some good news (and some bad:)

They’ve added some RSS, but it’s still not enough. Don’t get me wrong: I applaude the improvement. So far I’ve found RSS feeds for my friends’ status updates and my notifications. That’s great: it means I can switch off email notifications, which have been cluttering my inbox.

I’d really like to be able to syndicate my mini-feed and my news feed. I mean, they’re even called feeds, facebook: come on, finish the job