Rubénerd Blog :)

This morning’s intermittent Rubénerd outages were brought to you by Segment Publishing. They’re still miles better than Servage was, though that isn’t saying much.

Curiously, many of the outages over the last year have been around this time of day. I wonder if they do server maintenance around 00:00-02:00 Adelaide time, or whether it’s due to increased loads given it’s daylight in the US.

UPDATE: Іt’s now 10:42 and pages are still taking many long minutes to render. Time to move web hosts again?

I’ve finally found a drive that PartedMagic can’t handle, but fortunately I still have a friend in dd. Sounds like a trailer for an episode of Dexter’s Laboratory. UPDATE: Even better, use an old Knoppix CD!

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This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.

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I tried to extract a ZIP file I was send this afternoon and got the following error with unzip…

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Ever since August 2008 when I made the switch, TweetDeck has been Twitter for me. For people following hundreds of fascinating people categorised into lists (formerly TweetDeck groups) there’s absolutely no better ways to use it, even if it does run on Adobe Air. Problem is, no matter what Mac I’m using it always "remembers" those red dotted lines denoting bad spelling.

Perhaps it’s just poking fun at the fact I make sppelling mistakes.

I didn’t have this much trouble burning FreeBSD 8.0. Its interesting it’s not afraid to burn a CD with a daemon logo, but slap a blue hat on a guy and suddenly it freaks out. I suppose though it’s an improvement that it’s not telling me to talk to myself!

Some more of SegPub’s legendary reliability from earlier this evening. I suppose it’d been a whole month since my last outage ;).

Running the ./configure script from the latest nano tarball on a virgin Snow Leopard machine (my dad’s) I keep running into a problem with UTF-8 support.

Using ncurses as the curses library
checking for use_default_colors in -lncurses… yes
configure: error:

UTF-8 support was requested, but insufficient UTF-8 support was detected in your curses and/or C libraries. Please verify that your slang was built with UTF-8 support or your curses was built with wide character support, and that your C library was built with wide character support.

I’ve built the latest ncurses and slang libraries from MacPorts and have confirmed they were built with UTF-8 support. Only thing I can think of is it’s using the outdated ncurses from the system instead of MacPorts, but other ports such as Midnight Commander are using it. Will keep digging.

For what it’s worth, it builds just fine without UTF-8, but it’s a feature I’d rather have.

Google didn’t seem to like me today. Firstly Google Reader gave me this blank page instead of my usual cheery Unread Items (100,000,000+) message, then less than an hour later I tried to view a YouTube video and was presented with this delightful error!

I never did have that green tea I promised myself a few days ago. I blame that.

I’ve had my venerable MacBook Pro since 2006 and as such I’ve gone through several batteries. Up until yesterday this three month old unit could hold several hours of charge even with the screen at a reasonable brightness and WiFi enabled, but all of a sudden I can’t get more than an hour and OS X is reporting the unit needs servicing.

Three questions: How could this have happened? Do Apple batteries have warranties you reckon? Is the Bird still The Word?