PowerBook woes

My 15″ Powerbook G4 died in various interesting ways yesterday.

It’s been making a scary buzzing noise for months, but yesterday the hard drive gave up the ghost. While doing some diagnostics in its death throes, I also noticed that I seem to be suffering from the logic board failure that causes half your memory to go AWOL. Not sure which of those was responsible for the buzzing noise (if either)– will find out when I replace the disk in the next day or two, I guess.

Of course, Apple being Apple, they’ll only admit that the logic board was faulty on a certain range of PB G4s, with serial numbers from W8503xxxxxx to W8518xxxxxx… and three guesses whose is a W8502. So no free repair for me.

I guess that leaves me three possibilities (four if you count “do nothing and hope it doesn’t get any worse”)… sell my 2x512Mb memory sticks and replace them with a 1xGb stick in the ‘good’ slot (and hope none of the more serious symptoms of the failure appear); purchase AppleCare now for €450, even though I’ll only get a year out of it now rather than three, and have it repaired under that; or pay the somewhat ludicrous €690+ that my local Apple authorised repair shop quoted me. Hrmm.

Edit: D’oh, just realised you can only buy AppleCare within a year of purchase, of course. Just have to cross my fingers for a while then, I think :)

Out and about

Been a reasonably busy couple of weeks on the gig front, here’s the potted summary:

  • Colin Murphy: Nor’n Irn comedian, a weel-kent face on the telly over here, but first time we’d seen him do stand-up (as opposed to sitting at his desk on The Panel, of which we’ve been to a couple of recordings). I remember enjoying it at the time, but I couldn’t actually recount any of his routine now… I suppose that means I’m more likely to enjoy it next time we go and see him though :)
  • Deacon Blue: reformed Scottish earnest 80’s popsters (half of whom are better known for their television roles on Sportscene and River City these days)… bounced their way through all our favourites (Dignity, Fergus Sings the Blues, Real Gone Kid et al.), although Julie thought the intervening years hadn’t been too kind to Ricky Ross!
  • The Feeling: a lively and listenable bunch on stage, even managed to pull off a passable cover of Video Killed the Radio Star… suspect when I get around to listening to the rest of their album, though, it might seem a bit low-key in comparison.

Themely reminder

Hacked up a quick script today to help me pinpoint which icons were missing from the accessibility themes. As a sideshow, I had it point out which .desktop and .directory files (as installed by Solaris nv_53) had hard-coded pathnames and/or icon filename suffixes, both of which can break themeing.

It found 61 with hard-coded suffixes, and 6 with hard-coded pathnames (although the only non-Sun ones in the latter category came from gksu)… so, if you maintain a .desktop file, please remember to have its Icon line look something like:

Icon=gksu-root-terminal

rather than

Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/gksu-root-terminal.png

to ensure maximium themability. (And preferably install generic icons in the hicolor theme rather than the deprecated /usr/share/pixmaps anyway.)

Anyway, back to the real work generated by the script– the 70+ missing High Contrast icons it spotted (not to mention the 120 Low Contrast icons). Oh for the day when this proposal is adopted…

Shaun of the Slightly Dreadful

Got around to watching Shaun of the Dead this Hallowe’en… had the DVD kicking around since this time last year. Turned out to be a bit of an over-hyped duffer, really… but should have expected that, I’ve yet to see anything with Simon Pegg in it that’s particularly amusing. (He seems to be one of those people whose coolness reputation has been built more on appearing in cult TV shows than from actually being hugely funny.)

In the bleak mid-Autumn

Is it just me, or does anyone else in the northern hemisphere find it bizarre that here in Ireland, November 1st is considered to be the first day of winter, rather than December 1st? (Likewise, spring is considered to be February-April rather than March-May, etc.) Or is it just in the UK that summer includes August…?

Lost in translation

Spotted this slightly depressing IRC snippet tucked away on the GNOME marketing-list yesterday:

(03:42:26 PM) danilo: qgil: as a matter of fact, other approaches bring
results we had with documentation for the past 4 years: no documentation
has been translated to any language except for Sun contributed
translations, and they were too hard to update because we only had
docbook source on them

(03:42:48 PM) danilo: so, basically, we had to dump almost all of sun contributed translations

Could Sun have done more to avoid this? Were we made aware of the problem at the time? We still do sucky things occasionally, especially in the corners of the company (including L10N) who don’t yet live and breathe open source in the way most of us do now, but I certainly hope we can learn from any mistakes we made here.

Phishing ingenuity

Have seen it all now… got this phishing email today that actually includes a snail mail address to send your money to, just in case you’re too “clever” to click on the link.

 

Account On-hold: Please pay
your eBay fees today

Dear member:

You are late in paying your eBay fees of $718.28 and
your account for user kahlocjd is past due. These
fees result from listing items on eBay or using
related services (ID verify, Stores, etc).

This account has been
restricted and you will not be able to bid or list on eBay. To avoid further collections please pay your fees today by
following these steps:

1. Log on to [dodgy phishing link deleted]
2. Click ‘Site Map’ at the
top of the page
3. In the ‘My Selling Account’ section, click ‘Make a Single
Payment’. Sign in if requested
4. Select a
method to pay your eBay fees and follow the online instructions on page

If you do not have
access to your account or prefer not to pay online, please mail your payment
with your payment coupon and clearly state your account ID E286455801001 on the
check with a copy of this notice to:

eBay, Inc.
P.O. Box 2179
Carol Stream, IL 60132-2179
United
States

If we do not receive your payment, your account may be suspended and
additional collections remedies may be used to bring this account to current.
All current listings will be ended and you will no longer be part of the eBay
community.

If this past due balance is the only reason for restricting your account, it
will be reopened for bidding and listing when your full payment is received.
Your account will continue to be charged a late payment finance charge of up to
1.5% of your past due amount.

Thank you,
eBay Global Collections