$549 for the 300GB model, $449 for 200GB. (Australian pricing.) That's $100 more than the plain external drive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:22 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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What a comforting fact that is to know.

(Via Owlish)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:58 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I'm not asking for much. All I want is:

• Unlimited blogs, forums, wikis and portals feeding from a common pool of articles and comments. That is, a post can appear on a blog and a forum and a wiki, with its comments and other details intact.


• Sub-sites with their own domains - and their own layouts


• Group-based permissions


• Semantic markup


• RSS feeds


• Page, block and template based site construction


• In-line and out-of-line editing


• A few nice clean themes to start with


• Absolutely no PHP or SQL coding required of - or indeed available to - regular users


• Plugin / module architecture


• Web services API


• Runs on Linux


• Doesn't cost more than US$2000 (Free is good. Open source is better.)


• Fully integrated and self-contained. I don't need a choice of three different blog modules, each using a different commenting system.


• An application, not a service.


• No usage restrictions. None of this "you can't run a hosting service" stuff.


• Background processing for big tasks like spam removal.


• Scales to thousands of sites.

Any ideas?

I have a list of nice-to-haves, but it's kind of long. I'll post that later.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:02 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It doesn't turn on at all, so it's probably just the fuse. Do you think they provide any indication at all of where the fuse is or how to replace it?

Yeah. Right.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:56 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Meh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:16 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:41 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Unfortunately, it's only available as Socket 775, where my machine is Socket 478. That's not too bad, I can get a Socket 775 motherboard pretty cheap.

Except that it won't run on just any Socket 775 motherboard; you have to have one based on the Intel 945 chipset. Those motherboards aren't quite so cheap, but they're not unreasonably priced.

Except that they only support DDR-II memory, so I'd have to replace all my memory. And they only support PCI Express, so I'd have to replace my video card.

So it ends up costing $1400 rather than $400. I might as well wait for the dual-core Athlon 64, which will at least use my existing memory.

Meh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:24 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The asian supermarket closest to New Pixy Central doesn't sell the strawberry Pocky that I like. It does sell two other types of strawberry Pocky; just not the one I like. I'm not sure about the asian supermarket second closest to New Pixy Central. The asian supermarket third closest to New Pixy Central does sell the strawberry Pocky that I like, but that's another four minutes walk.

The asian supermarket near the office (or rather, the new asian supermarket near the office, not the old asian supermarket near the office) also sells the strawberry Pocky that I like, but it charges ten cents more than the asian supermarket third closest to New Pixy Central.

On a side note, your Pocky has not expired. That first date is the date it was made. The second date, roughly a year later, is the use-by date. Enjoy your fresh, crunchy Pocky.

Oh yeah:

what flavor pocky are you?
[c] sugardew

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:50 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Your IQ Is 135

Your Logical Intelligence is Genius Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Exceptional [damn!]

(Swiped from Margi Lowry)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:08 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:48 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Also in the store was John Varley's latest, Mammoth. I didn't buy that one because (a) it runs foul of Pixy's 77th Law (all books titled "Mammoth" suck), and (b) his last novel, Red Thunder, was complete crap. Maybe when it comes out in paperback.

Update: SPIT! It's US$16.47 at Amazon. Here in Oz it's A$54. Will someone please round up the Australian book publishing and distribution industry and shoot them? Thanks.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:10 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Much.

And it looks like version 2 (currently in beta) will remove most of the remaining suck.

I got a nice new monitor at work today - a 17" Acer LCD, 1280x1024. It's very sharp and clear on a DVI cable on my Windows box, but on a VGA cable connected to either of my office Linux boxes the picture starts halfway across the screen and nothing I do will make it move. One of my Linux boxes has DVI output, but it doesn't actually output anything, so it's not a lot of use.

I have to have access to my Linux boxes to do my job, so I spent an hour downloading SSH clients trying to find one that didn't suck. Xshell was it.

Downside: It costs $69. Oh, and you have to bang it on the head a few times to knock some of the suck out (depending on what you consider suck), but it's configurable enough that you can get it working just the way you want with a few minutes of tweaking.

Xshell gets a silver "Doesn't suck much at all" award.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:35 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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My thanks to the soldiers who accomplished the rescue, and my best wishes to Mr Wood and his family.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:24 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Real Basic is another cross-platform Basic compiler supporting Windows, Mac and Linux, just like Blitz Max. Where Blitz is aimed at game development, though, Real Basic is designed for doing businessy-type stuff, with databases and GUIs and like that. It comes with the SQLite database built in, and the Professional (read: expensive) version can connect to other databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL and Oracle. You can write multi-threaded server applications too, like, oh, say, a blogging package, and compile it to run on any of those platforms. Again, you need the Expensive Edition to write server applications and to do cross-compilation.

However, if you want to get your feet wet, Real Software have done something real nice: The Standard Edition for Linux is free. Well, right now the Linux version is still in beta, but the beta is free and it will remain free once it's released. I think that's a very smart move for Real Software.

Naturally, I've downloaded the beta and the Windows trial version, and I'll be reporting back once I've played with it a bit. And I'll likely be buying it as soon as their Australian distributor wakes up and realises there's a new version available...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:39 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Just when I finally got everything working on Fedora Core 4 Test 3.

Well, I expect that upgrading probably won't destroy everything.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:08 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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(Yeah, most people are happy with being able to work from home, but I'm a nut for symmetry.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:38 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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You scored as Natural Causes. Your death will be by natural causes, though not by any disease, because that is another option on this test. You will probably just silently pass away in the night from old age, and people you love won't realize until the next morning, when you are all purple and cold and icky. Natural Causes 60% Poison 53% Disappear 53% Gunshot 47% Suicide 40% Bomb 40% Drowning 33% Stabbed 27% Eaten 27% Accident 27% Suffocated 27% Cut Throat 20% Disease 7% How Will You Die?? created with QuizFarm.com

And all this time I'd been planning on dying from proton decay.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:36 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The general idea is for Alberta and maybe Manitoba and Saskatchewan and who knows, British Columbia, to break away from Ontario and the Maritimes and then, um. Form their own nation? Apply to join the US?

Heck with that. Join Australia. You know it makes sense. You have the snow, we have the beaches. Both rich in mineral resources. Both sparsely populated. Both have funny accents. Both love beer. Both have mooses... No? Okay, scratch the mooses.

And in part two, what we do is - get this - sell South Australia to the Japanese. It's not like anyone's using it. It's two-and-a-half times the size of Japan, and has roughly one hundredth the population. They'll love it! Okay, they're kind of broke right now, but we'll take payment in Playstation 3s and anime. Or they could join the Commonwealth of Australia, the Good Bits of Canada, and Japan. (CoAtGBoCaJ.)

Where's the downside?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:20 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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In a final fit of desperation, I swapped my old reliable modem for a new ADSL2 unit I'm supposed to be testing. Of course, that meant I had to configure it from scratch with all my NAT rules and such.

And waddya know, it works. Not sure I'll recommend it though. The modem we currently sell has a wonderful diagnostic feature that tests everything that could possibly go wrong and gives a nice little report. It's an absolute life-saver. "Okay customer person, now click on Diagnostics and tell me what it says... Pass. Pass. Pass. Pass. Fail. Right, that means your password is wrong."

This one doesn't have anything nearly as good.

Meanwhile, somewhere along the line, some episodes of Mahoraba that I was watching last weekend managed to corrupt themselves. That makes me kind of twitchy, because the files were fine when I watched them. Things that make you go urk.

And even after I'd patched them up with Bit Torrent (which is brilliant for that - it checksums the file in 256k blocks and then only downloads the corrupted or missing parts) - even when they were all happy again, WinAmp wouldn't play them. And it did a week ago. Some digging around suggests that it's choking on malformed VBR audio, but it worked a week ago. And Media Player plays the files just fine... And a week ago, Media Player on my computer would crash on startup.

I hate computers.

Um, anyway. Cool toy of the day is Azureus, an extra-nifty Bit Torrent manager written in Java. It's just the thing for downloading your 200 hours of anime a month. It can even show you an animated diagram of all the packets going back and forth between you and the other computers in the swarm. Azureus works particularly well when you aren't suffering 90% packet loss.

And it has a little blue frog. Every computer needs a little blue frog.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:54 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Now, admittedly, I can't quite see my house:

But that doesn't mean -

- that I can't see your house:

(Click on the images to get some idea of how much detail is available.)

World Wind brings the entire planet to your desktop. Currently Windows only; I hope that will change, because everyone should have this.

Thank you, NASA. Umpteen squillion dollars and worth every penny.

(And thanks to bjornart on the mu.nu forums for pointing me to this.) more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:30 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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"Fortunately, the blogosphere is more careful", Reynolds added. Yes we are. more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:11 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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More also at Samizdata and Belmont Club.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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President Robert Mugabe's onslaught against Zimbabwe's cities has escalated to claim new targets, with white-owned factories and family homes being demolished in a campaign that has left 200,000 people homeless.

Across the country, Mr Mugabe is destroying large areas of heaving townships and prosperous industrial areas alike.

The aim of this brutal campaign is, says the official media, to depopulate urban areas and force people back to the "rural home".

Across Zimbabwe, the United Nations estimates that 200,000 people have lost their homes, with the poorest townships bearing the brunt of Mr Mugabe's onslaught. "The vast majority are homeless in the streets," said Miloon Kothari, the UN's housing representative. He added that "mass evictions" were creating a "new kind of apartheid where the rich and the poor are being segregated".

Earlier, bulldozers had begun wrecking the adjacent industrial area. Ian Lawson, the owner, was assured by a senior police officer that the site would be spared.

But at 6am last Tuesday, 10 lorries filled with police arrived and the destruction began.

"The police officer said to me 'Why are you running for help? No one can help you now. Not even God can help you. We are going to destroy this place'," said Mr Lawson, 60.

If they weren't too busy raping goats.

Virtually all the areas singled out for demolition voted for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in the last elections. The MDC says that Mr Mugabe ordered the destruction as a deliberate reprisal. But the regime is also seeking to depopulate the cities, driving people into the countryside where the MDC is virtually non-existent and the ruling Zanu-PF Party dominates.

The Herald, the official daily newspaper, urged "urbanites" to go "back to the rural home, to reconnect with one's roots and earn an honest living from the soil our government repossessed under the land reform programme".

Again.

Again.

AGAIN.

And this time, no-one can say they didn't know.

(via Tim Blair)

Update: Bob of canadiancomment reminds us that Zimbabwe is on the UN Human Rights Commission.

Burning the homes and businesses of the citizens of your country, forcing many others to leave their homes at gunpoint, and arresting journalists that are trying to cover the event, and that's just in the last week. So what would a country have to do to not be considered for a position on the Human Rights Commission, or is it even possible to be a big enough abuser of human rights that you may not even qualify? I was just wondering.

In April, Zimbabwe was re-elected to the UN Human Rights Commission for the third year running by satirically minded African states...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:27 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Little Cafe Mocha is a cocker spaniel / shih-tzu cross. He's one of a litter of five, along with brothers Oreo, Dingo, Jack Jr. and Bob. Picture courtesy of Scarlet on the mu.nu forums.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:56 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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(via Spoons)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:48 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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