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September 26, 2007

Back already

Sometimes I wonder if I do forget that I'm back in the United States. Proof that I know I am, though:

  1. The first reason is that I visted Stanford University.
  2. I also visited Tempe, Arizona, which is incidentally one of Lower Hutt's sister cities. So here's a random photograph from Tempe.

I'll put up some more photographs soon, and hopefully I'm allowed to make some announcements on what I'm doing next for my book scanning work.

Hugs!

April 30, 2007

Another patch in the works

Oh, brilliant. I'll need to load up another blasted time zone patch, so my computers back in NZ don't get too confused. That's in addition to the one I already had to install for dealing with the US changes, too.

Now, will all the major operating system vendors issue patches in time for the 4,182,612 people that will be directly affected by this, I have no idea.

Sigh.

February 21, 2007

Hackers fake Howard heart attack

I just got a rather large stack of spammy e-mail messages saying that the John Howard we all know as the prime minister of Australia just 'survived' a 'heard attack (sic)'. Another says a 'hear attack (sic)'. Yeah, whatever. I'm not the only one to get the spammy/phishy e-mail messages, though. There's other variations of the e-mail message, and it's been happening for a while.

Sigh.

January 7, 2007

Dialup!

Well, dialup works. Photographs might take a while longer to put online. Oh well. Hopefully in-room Ethernet will be up soon, but it looks like that soon will be some time after the middle of the month. Sigh. At least dialup will do for now! :)

December 25, 2006

Safety

Here's a good reason to RTFM with those presents these holidays: setting those WPA passphrases to stop hackers (and possibly neighbours, depending on circumstances) can be a rather useful thing to get done.

December 8, 2006

Celebrate '06 maps

Almost everything's sorted -- I'm leaving for this (and next) month's Celebrate conference in New Orleans just after Christmas. There's one other thing I'll be doing while in the USA which I'll write about later when that's sorted as well.

I don't know if I'll get any book scanning done while I'm away, but I've had a couple suggestions from other Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders users to consider visiting to help with book sorting or scanning. I hope I do have time to make that happen, and I hope last week's uploads aren't the last for while I'm away. We'll see.

And, to, uh, celebrate going... I've made some simple maps of CESCM "Celebrate! At the River" 2006 conference venue -- and nearby airport. Take a poke via Windows Live Local, Google Maps or Google Earth. (I've also added the addresses of two of the groups mentioned in the conference schedule: the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra -- mmm, jazz -- and Shades of Praise, an interfaith gospel choir, though I've no idea where the actual venue for their events will be. Both look quite exciting, so can't wait to hear them both, especially the former, when I seem to waste a lot of my DSL traffic quota each month listening to ABC Australia's dig Jazz station.)

It might be worth noting that when putting up Google Earth folders for other Google Earth client users to download, file types might need to be added in some cases to make life easier. On Apache 2, it most likely will be as easy as two AddType lines in one's .htaccess: AddType application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml .kml and AddType application/vnd.google-earth.kmz .kmz ought to do the recommended file type trick. Useful to prevent browser questions, if anything, at least for IE7.

October 21, 2006

It's the telly -- no wait, it's the programmes they watch... no wait, it's...

Whoever said New Zealand's biggest threat was a moral decline? Maybe even a moral decline thanks to dodgy television programmes and dodgy films? (And with that, dodgy by whose standards?) Anyone thought of all those screens of varying descriptions wasting childhoods? Sometimes it isn't totally the blame of the media or the programmes carried on the media -- it's the use of the media, too, to some extent.

The NZH also run an intergenerational comparison on the abovementioned topic.

Of course it's dangerous to get blinded by one factor, so I won't venture more in to this particular debate.

Other things -- I'm planning a study trip at the moment. For those that don't already know what, I'll mention it if (and once) all the details fall in to place. And Klaatu's Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft is currently playing on my Pandora.com station. Hmmm. I liked the Due South version that they did; it just seems to sound different now.

New on hydro.electric.gen.nz is my take on the 'new' tabbed browsing feature in IE7. It's all right, but tabbed browsing did take a while to get added as a feature (for those our there not having been pestered or nagged by Windows yet to install IE7 yet -- if you're using the operating system at all, I've left the original message window available). Loading third-party solutions (OK, so one was engineered in the form of Microsoft's own Windows Live Toolbar) just isn't my cup of tea for tabbed browsing.

It's a pity that I find Firefox's memory leaks in its current releases on some of my systems at home a little bit too much.

October 6, 2006

RealPlayer 10.5 fiddling with Google Toolbar 4 without permission

At least I don't recall knowingly giving permission while updating my RealPlayer 10.5 installation. Noone should dare tell me that they just mysteriously appeared in an unrelated phenomenon.

Right now my Google Toolbar 4 installation in Internet Explorer is sitting shiny with a Rolling Stone dropdown button that wasn't there previously and a similar RealMedia icon that wasn't there previously either.

And here are the two offending icons. Clicking on the dropdown bit with one comes up with headlines, as if they were headline feeds, the other with tracks to listen to.

Poking around, these are 'custom buttons', so had I added them myself or added them with explicit permission, that'd have been my fault. Fine. But these weren't added as such. (That said, they seem rather innocent at first. Some technical information from Google Toolbar's options menu window: the Rolling Stone button says 'Sends your query to www.rollingstone.com when clicked' and 'Receives information from www.rollingstone.com periodically' and the Rhapsody.com one says 'Receives information from feeds.rhapsody.com periodically'. It still does not excuse what Real has done, though.)

This is damned immoral. It's wrong. It's as bad as spyware/badware, malware and home page hijacking. Losers. Anyone else had this?

September 9, 2006

ibiblio moving servers

As if I hadn't said it already, here's the public announcement of ibiblio's server move. From the browsing perspective, collections will be available on an intermittent basis from 10 o'clock this morning until the same time on Sunday. And an e-mail-free day for me... hehe! I will actually get some study done... :-P

Continue reading "ibiblio moving servers" »

September 8, 2006

Now, if only...

...Google Maps had street level coverage of my street. (Now, if you don't want my mini-essay which I wrote for my own amusement, you may want to skip straight to the thoughts I have on my latest batch of scanning for S27(1)'s scanned books collection. Hehe!)

They do do street maps -- it's just got no satellite imagery at street level for my suburb and then some: a good chunk of Lower Hutt is missing from the coverage (at time of writing).

With the new address to location translation on offer, it would be nice if the, uh, hole (no pun intended) in coverage were fixed. (Incidentally, the Windows version of the Google Earth client isn't much better when looking at Lower Hutt [see also below]; it appears to currently use the same data set as Google Earth for Lower Hutt -- you could also try these same coordinates in Google Maps if you can be bothered.) If it were, maybe I could put together some nice mapping stuff.

But then, there's a million other mapping websites with New Zealand coverage around, with at least one with apparently better street level aerial coverage (as in no holes in coverage, actual image quality being another matter -- hey, at least it's consistent!), and most that I use for every day purposes are developed in and for the local market here. That's not to mention the city council's property information database has really good images of individual properties. Some, though, concentrate on street maps as opposed to aerial maps or satellite imagery, but make up with their trip planning features (two, Metlink and Yellow Pages, claim they do walking directions, too).

I wonder if I should re-learn some programming to get myself away from all the stuff I'm doing for graduate school for a nice little bit of recreation and perhaps do a localised mapping thing (Jabber map stuff sounds like an idea here) for amusement.

Anyway, here's what Google Maps currently looks like to me with its gap in street level satellite imagery coverage when I search for Lower Hutt. Here's a closeup of what Google Earth sees of Lower Hutt at the moment -- note the change in detail. Now, here's the extent of the gaps in street level coverage of Lower Hutt in Google Earth at the moment; it's currently the same as Google Maps.

And, another book scanned

On other matters, I scanned another book today. Yay for high speed multifunction photocopiers that e-mail on stuff in PDF! Which while I'm on that subject, I've done the same for a few other books that will be released on to Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders on September 20 as birthday texts for proofing.

I'll announce what those ones are closer to the day, but in the meantime, I've scanned A Plea for the Criminal (1905). It's a response (and on first skim through while scanning it, a critical response) by an ordained minister to a book I got through PG earlier that sounded to me like something on eugenics, and that went by the name of The Fertility of the Unfit (1903).

I'm debating if I want to have images up as I've done so previously, or just have the PDF (that the photocopier spat out at me) available -- or both. Feedback would certainly be appreciated on this. (Thanks in advance!) If someone wants A Plea for the Criminal before I get around to properly posting it online, let me know and I'll either email it through somehow, or actually get around to posting it. I blame grad school for my lack of alacrity. Heh.

It doesn't mean that my attempts to find additional sources for material to scan (legally, of course) that is Section 27(1) compliant is bearing some success, necessarily, or even at all -- I do hope it does -- but I have found some stuff that should keep me occupied while I do look for things more relevant to my grad school study and research -- though today's scanned book is very much related in some aspects (say, related to the eugenics stuff someone found in a text I'd also scanned and put through PG).

ibiblio server move

The wonderful folks (ibiblio) that host Section 27(1), the dr-fun-changes mailing list, this diary you're reading right now, the SCM e-book editions, and even some teddy bear satire (which I must admit is not really being updated at the moment, partly due to worries over chewing up ibiblio's precious disc space), are having some stuff happening from Saturday, 9 September at 10am (NZST) until Sunday, 10 September at 10am (NZST). Apparently there may be some interruption in service; mail will be down for a wee bit and I won't be able to post, but the site should stay up.

One more time, thanks people for the hosting! Trying to host lots of scans of books to show the publisher's original intent (something I don't think a formatted e-text like what Project Gutenberg do) is rather (though methinks for the value of the intent, not unreasonable or overly onerous) disc intensive (not to mention slightly more demanding on bandwidth and traffic if you get the Slashdot effect or even a comparatively minor 'Public Address effect'), so everything's appreciated. :)

August 5, 2006

'Free', again

One thing that pleased me about Movable Type 3.3 was that licensing terms were reverting back to free for personal use without any blog or user restrictions. Hmmm. Cool. Oddly, I still remember previously when it had a similar personal licence.

July 30, 2006

New EndNote link resolver settings

Mutter. VUW Library are migrating their link resolver service from LinkFinderPlus to Journal Finder (which is already being used for holdings information for journals, and also known as Article Linker), so I spent some time working out some settings to replace my current EndNote setup. Basically: if you're game (I accept no responsibility for problems!), set your OpenURL path to
http://helicon.vuw.ac.nz:2081/
or http://gx4ej7nu5f.search.serialssolutions.com/ (choose either depending on whether you want to authenticate to the library's EZproxy server first or not), and set the path to ?rft.spage=SPAGE&rfr_id=info%3asid%2fsersol%3aRefinerQuery&sid=sersol%3aRefinerQuery&citationsubmit=LookUp&rft.aulast=AULAST&SS_doi=&rft.title=TITLE&url_ver=Z39.88-2004&SS_referer=http%3a%2f%2fgx4ej7nu5f.search.serialssolutions.com%2f%3fSS_Page%3drefiner%26SS_RefinerEditable%3dyes&rft_val_fmt=info%3aofi%2ffmt%3akev%3amtx%3ajournal&rft.date=DATE&rft.atitle=ATITLE&SS_ReferentFormat=JournalFormat&rft.volume=VOLUME&SS_LibHash=GX4EJ7NU5F&rft.issn=ISSN&rft.genre=article&rft.issue=ISSUE&rft.au=&SS_styleselector=0&rft.aufirst=AUFIRST. (That's quite a long query string, so you may want to make sure that it's all pasted in there before complaining -- if you want to check, the last part of it should be 'AUFIRST'.)

[Update, 21 August: another set of, possibly better, recommended EndNote settings!]

So far, my wrangled code only works for journal articles, which in any case is good enough for me. Books are easily done on an ISBN search directly on the library catalogue, and journal titles can be had with just the title or ISSN on Journal Finder directly, whereas journal articles have to get quite a few things entered in to Journal Finder -- that is, unless one already has a DOI number such as 10.1046/j.1365-2648.1993.18030416.x.

If anyone still looks for my related Mozilla Firefox 1.0 extension for Google Scholar, if it's still working at all (and I haven't updated it for the last several Firefox releases), it probably won't work by whenever VUW Library finally switch off LinkFinderPlus. I'm not actively maintaining it now, either, as it was just a slightly customised version of someone else's Firefox extension. Though that (as at time of writing) five people downloaded the extension this week seems odd. Oh well. If I need use of it some time, I might take another look at it, but it's not high on the priority list at the moment.

July 20, 2006

Fun with Movable Type and Google Analytics

Postgraduate school is fairly busy, and I haven't been posting any new women's studies-related articles at womensstudies.info for some time, alas. But at least my sanity was still intact enough to run an upgrade to MT. Mmmm.

So far the upgrade to Movable Type 3.31 seems to have been rather painless. The only off-putting thing was the (apparent) move from a web page-based manual to a PDF one.

Against my better judgement, I've decided to also use Google Analytics for gathering some data on the tph diary and the SCMA website. While I have some misgivings about the privacy implications, after being largely satisfied over Google's privacy policies at least in the area of informed consent, I'm already for the SCMA site finding out some useful implications for the geographical audience, which is very much Aotearoa/NZ-centred at the moment. There's more bits and pieces such as screen resolutions, too, and this solution seems more seamless than others I've seen previously. Meh. For the possible privacy paranoia out there, my only real use for using it on either site is to use the aggregate statistics that it provides to tailor for the small audience I and SCMA respectively have.

Time will tell though if it's actually any bit useful, of course. :)

March 23, 2006

When using multiple secure shell windows...

...make sure you know which window you're using when trying to use su or sudo...

Oops. :-S

November 23, 2005

Upcoming new site

After a bit of discussion back and forth about my honours research project, I've decided to do part of it as a student-run website on women's studies. I've sorted out a domain name and at the moment I'm sorting out hosting. If you're interested in contributing links and short thoughts of women's, sexuality and gender issues now and again diary/blog style, drop me a line and I'll keep you in the loop. (I reserve the right to edit contributions for grammatical clarity and for markup validation purposes, but I won't edit the substance of contributions, unless a sane law court threatens me with jail or something like that. Which I'd imagine would be rather unlikely.)

Thanks!

November 19, 2005

It works!

Well, the link resolver function in EndNote 9.0.1, once again. EndNote 8.0.2 managed to break it quite spectacularly. Sigh. At least I can use it again, but now I'm wondering if using VUW's Journal Finder service would be much easier. But I have set up the link resolver stuff already, so I may as well use it.

November 2, 2005

greta.electric.gen.nz crash

Just when I'd nearly finished migrating content from greta.electric.gen.nz to ibiblio, greta needs a complete rebuild. Which is probably just as well, anyway. Most of the web content that fits ibiblio's collection policy has already been moved, such as the teddy bear satire and humour websites and the dr-fun-changes mailing list.

And in the process, some new content has been added to what was migrated from greta, such as some photographs related to women's studies topics.

I hope they're of use to some people. Enjoy!

Meanwhile, for old times, of the content that's probably gone from her that (most likely) won't be migrated to the rebuilt greta is an entry in a previous incarnation of this diary, tph, from 12 October, 2003:

A quote on Maurice Sendak’s supposedly wild ‘stance against literacy’…

Spotted on an English lecturer’s door at WCE:

What is the significance of Max standing on the books on the first page of Where the Wild Things Are? Is this a stance against literacy by the author? — Signed two satisfied SCKEL 102 graduates.

On another related topic, check out the English Exemplar sheet I Was Sad When My Cat Died. Hrm.

With some luck, the rebuild of greta will be completed by mid-December.

Hopefully sooner, though, of course. :)

October 16, 2005

027 versus 021 voice quality

Is it me or is the voice quality on my 021 GPRS/GSM handset better than the 027 CDMA handset I have been checking out for a couple of days now?

Either way, both of them are working, which is what matters. I hope both of them will, at least until number portability finally comes about -- which I'll believe when I see it happening.

September 30, 2005

Hallucinations

NZH: Vodafone glitch clears accounts.

Thousands of Vodafone customers have paid a price for a service the mobile phone company advertises as being free.

Customers using the Vodafone Live service this week had all the credit in their prepay accounts cleared out after a technical hitch on the company's network.

Right...

However, those who lost the most money were reimbursed on Wednesday night, and Vodafone said it hoped to have repaid everyone by last night.

Sending a text message with the credit, Vodafone apologised for the mistake and any inconvenience.

What, I wasn't hallucinating? Damn...

At least I got a refund for what the text said was 'GPRS overcharging', whatever they meant by that...

September 29, 2005

Nikster moves home

Sorry, no new photo shoot, as it only involved a pile of tarballs transferred over SSH and the usuall tinkering with a text editor. But to cut the story short, after poking through ibiblio's collection policy, Nikster's pile of humorous photo shoots have moved from greta.electric.gen.nz to www.ibiblio.org.

(At least I wouldn't consider it a vanity site, anyway. It's mostly a pile of satirical cuisine and travel reviews. When I remember to put in captions.)

The main collections, though, are the Section 27(1)-related materials. I haven't had much time this term to scan and upload any new books, but with my plans to start honours next year studying the books, things should get rather interesting.

September 16, 2005

Gallery on the Section 27(1) site upgraded

To avoid the nasty issues I had with Gallery 1.4 disagreeing with ibiblio's web server proxy (which was a bearable but slightly icky problem to work around), I've upgraded the Gallery software powering the Section 27(1) site to 2.0. It seems to be working so far, and the only major thing that's broken appears to be the feed. Apparently there's no feed support in the current release. In the meantime, I'm getting the feed to 307 to the old version's feed.

Apart from that, at least the caching issues are gone for those that log in to view/do stuff. And the old links should redirect fine. Apparently.

More later.

September 6, 2005

Movable Type 3.2

I installed Movable Type 3.2 tonight. Not much to mention, though the Style Library concept seems useful. There's possibly more on this as I update the templates for this diary.

I haven't decided on a new theme for this diary yet. The selection seems much wider this time around, which looks fun.

August 20, 2005

Peering in

Now, Radio New Zealand, bless their souls, are running a live National Radio stream especially for coverage of the David Lange memorial service (and bless him, too). Now, this setup is the prime example of the effects of peering -- the primary server hosting the full rate stream is pretty much firewalled to anyone off a Telecom- or TelstraClear-sourced Internet feed. I'm getting the United States-based feed that's a vastly lower rate on both Xtra and Paradise.

The ironic thing about this setup -- and Computerworld has suggested that this is it -- is that Xtra license some Radio New Zealand content on their streaming media page. Perhaps they'll be nice to their customers and host a mirror of the live feed. Unmetered too, if we're lucky, maybe?

There's so many potentially political issues I'll just leave it there. But it'd be nice to get a universally accepted access arrangement.

August 19, 2005

Zotob

I don't know why people don't patch their machines so regularly, but it seems my, uh, paperwall is picking up a lot of port 445 attempts, as well as the usual naughty behaviours on port 138.

Come on, the bloody outbreak is happening, people. Really, it is. There's even a rival infection going around, too.

Oh well. Back to the idle monotony of homework.

July 23, 2005

Book changes

To prevent pesky scripting resizing your page, and to keep some layout within the SCMA design, the WSCF-AP electronic books' Flash-enabled menus now 307 to a WSCF-AP publications page at scm.org.nz. The content is the same -- it's just easier to manage for us at SCMA -- and though the layout fits the current SCMA style guide, the content is clearly marked as being hosted at ibiblio.

I'll be likely to start scanning a circa 1937 select committee inquiry on abortion next month, time permitting.

June 26, 2005

Google Sitemaps

For the power house, I'm now using a variation of templates from Anders Jacobsen and Cameron Bulock.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<url>
<loc><$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<priority>1.0</priority>
<MTEntries lastn="1">
<lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></lastmod>
</MTEntries>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>

<MTEntries lastn="10">
<url>
<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<lastmod><MTIfNonZero tag="MTEntryCommentCount"><MTComments lastn="1"><$MTCommentDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></MTComments><MTElse><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></MTElse></MTIfNonZero>
</lastmod>
<priority>0.9</priority>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
</MTEntries>

<MTEntries lastn="10" offset="10">
<url>
<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<lastmod><MTIfNonZero tag="MTEntryCommentCount"><MTComments lastn="1"><$MTCommentDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></MTComments><MTElse><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></MTElse></MTIfNonZero>
</lastmod>
<priority>0.8</priority>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
</MTEntries>

<MTEntries lastn="1000" offset="20">
<url>
<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<lastmod><MTIfNonZero tag="MTEntryCommentCount"><MTComments lastn="1"><$MTCommentDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></MTComments><MTElse><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></MTElse></MTIfNonZero>
</lastmod>
<priority>0.5</priority>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
</MTEntries>

<MTArchiveList archive_type="Category">
<url>
<loc><$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.7</priority>
</url>
</MTArchiveList>

<MTArchiveList archive_type="Monthly">
<url>
<loc><$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</MTArchiveList>

</urlset>

Niall Kennedy (as featured by Six Apart) also published his own template.

Also of related interest might be Movable Type's Microsoft Word template.

June 25, 2005

Rats! Lines Companies! Rodents! Telecom!

So, it was a rat, after all, and lines company contractors. And now it's time for Telecom to talk compensation for themselves. This will be fun for them.

And there's little demand for business DSL upstream speeds faster than 128? Someone tell me that Telecom are joking. Really. They must be.

June 21, 2005

Rat blamed

Um, a rat isn't exactly a road contractor, though a (possible) rat and a electricity contractor hitting a cable probably is. I don't even want to know the cost of the fibre cut. Things were a bit crazy around town, after all.

June 20, 2005

Sliced fibre, anyone?

All right, who smells that Xtra's and Telecom's problems today are thanks to someone (last time I remember something similar, it was a road contractor, but of course it doesn't mean it was them this time) slicing a little bit of Telecom fibre optic cable?

If it was just one cable, perhaps having a backup route might actually be a good idea...

I'm typing this over dialup. Helps having backup connectivity off a provider that avoids the telco that provides your usual network access. :)

May 19, 2005

Telecom wireless access

Well, another try of Telecom's hotspot service worked this time, in the bar on the ground floor of the railway station in Wellington -- unlike my last attempt at Starbucks in Willis Street.

May 16, 2005

College Libraries Set Aside Books in a Digital Age

From the New York Times: College Libraries Set Aside Books in a Digital Age. Some shades of Cambridge High School anyone, but perhaps at least in a more positive (and, well, American, geographically, as opposed to New Zealand) setting? And to imagine if VUW tried this... and to think of the digital rights management costs, especially with those non-one-off licence payments! Still, the basic principle shows much promise. Interesting, this all -- will be equally interesting to see how it turns out. Outside the world of education, I do wonder what uses there may be.

Time will tell.

On another note potentially stupid note, I managed to coax my DVD-ROM drive here to play the Brooke Fraser DVD, though not using my preferred software video player. But in any case, I'm playing it a few times now in case I don't get a chance to do it again on this computer. It's an improvement on the results of my last attempt to play the disc, anyway.

[Listening to: Saving The World, Lifeline, Arithmetic and Better -- Brooke Fraser -- What To Do With Daylight: Special Edition (Disc Two: DVD) (18:51/19:09)]

May 14, 2005

Brothels in Kent

According to the venerable site that is The Register, a search for brothels near postal code TN12 7EA shows a police station. Also mentioned is a pointer to Dutch academic research material archives, and a new way to use Skype for the classic scam. Yes, the 419. In other possibly equally venerable (or otherwise; I'm not intentionally judging them) spots:

On a different tack, I ended up buying the 'special edition' of Brooke Fraser's album. Unfortunately, the bonus DVD suffered pretty much the same fate that Centre Stage (which I can't seem to find right now) suffered on my computer -- it wouldn't play. Odd. It did when put into the television, so I'm still happy. Just someone don't tell me I need to send the computer in again for warranty service. The lack of a local authorised warranty centre gave me quite a shock in courier charges. The transportation charge was peanuts, but once the postal worker got to the compulsory insurance bit... apparently whole computers are quite a risk.

More books will be scanned from about Monday week. Watch the bookshelf. As for the quick table, it wasn't much of a success, but I might keep it anyway.

May 7, 2005

Parthenon

It's odd what has the most views in the greta.electric.gen.nz album: a picture of what I presume is a replica Parthenon that a friend uploaded. Maybe it has something to do with the rather odd comments the photograph received over the course of a couple of months. (Some other photographs suffered from a similar fate; I tried to get rid of the comments with obscene language or porn or other unwanted comment spam links. I don't like doing that. I feel like a censor. Yuck.)

Anyway, I imagine that Kari photographed the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee.

April 20, 2005

Starbucks today

I was down at the Willis Street Starbucks in Wellington today, deciding to try and get their shiny new-ish Telecom Wireless Hotspot Service running on my computer.

Put it this way, the competition did much better. It actually worked, as opposed to obtaining an IP address and not doing much more (directing me to a login page would have been nice).

A nice touch though was when upon telling the cheery staff that their hotspot didn't seem to get me anywhere (such as a login page in a web browser), they smiled and gave me a CD. It was titled Telecom Wireless Internet Access: A Guide to Getting Started, with the friendly suggestion that I Call 0800 952 695 for Telecom Wireless Hotspot Help. I might have done that, if I weren't actually busy talking to someone at the same time about school-related stuff (and sending off an e-mail message he suggested). Oh, and running a Jabber client, of course.

The Windows instructions on the Flash-littered disc were basically what the instructions on Telecom's hotspot site. Still no luck.

My conclusion is that a system reboot may have helped, but unless one wants to be rude to the person one is talking to about school-related matters, it's not really an option.

Still, it was an interesting experience, not least the discussions I had on my Section 27(1) project. I now have an official Starbucks coaster, Xtra and Starbucks logo on it, too.

March 14, 2005

Restored, but not from a backup!

There are days when you wished you'd kept more recent tarballs. Today was one of them, after being alerted by someone (thanks!) that Safe Marriage had disappeared from the Section 27 and Public Domain Books Gallery. Oops. At first I thought someone must have tried to put on a copyright infringement claim, but of course the book was a pre-1923 book, so was definitely covered under the expiry provisions of US copyright legislation as I understand it. It is also way out of copyright in the NZ legislation, so I should have been covered both ways. Anyway, it's been so good to have some cool people from DP helping me fix this.

But, whatever the case, I now have a tarball copy of a new known good copy of all the books, so we can all rest easily. For now.

Well, you too can now, once again, enjoy Safe Marriage: A Return to Sanity! Or, if you'd prefer, just one page at a time.

At this point, I should probably suggest some discretion is advised reading the book, as it talks about sexual issues. But, that said, it was a best seller in England, and was popular in Australia, even if the New Zealand authorities banned a book by a New Zealander...

In any case, there's no lurid interest in putting these books online. It's all good academic interest, and I hope other people can find some use for these books, such as the person above (who e-mailed me about the missing book problem) appears to possibly have.

Which, by the way, if anyone needs a tarball or other archive of some or all of the books, please tell me. Attribution would be useful, by the way, thanks. :)

Back to the original topic, yes, I've learnt my lesson with backups. Naughty Jonathan!

[Listening to: We Don't Know How Lucky We Are -- Frederick Dagg -- Fred Dagg: Anthology (02:49)]