This is not a political post. It’s just the latest amusing spam to show up in my mailbox. Content: typical 419 scam. Twist: be a good Muslim, receive several million dollars from this dying, devout man, and use all of it to bring the message of Islam back on target, reclaiming it from the terrorists and their allies. Nice touch: it was sent as a base64-encoded text/plain attachment, to evade many spam filters. Gratuitous silliness: his hospital ward prohibits phone conversations “due to the presence of some medical equipment which reacts to telephone waves”, so he has to use email.

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My recently-serviced G5 was doing well. This morning it was locked up again. Fans running at full speed, screen wouldn’t wake up, couldn’t get in via SSH.

The problem: last night before I left, I went into System Preferences and checked the little box for “Put the display to sleep when the computer is inactive for…”. This was also enabled the last time it failed to wake, and based on half-remembered forum postings, I had turned it off. I feel no need to repeat the experiment again…

Looks like some problems in the power-management firmware. Which makes sense, since the problem that sent it in for service was that it went to sleep and never came back, and the amount of stuff they replaced suggested thermal issues.

Update: No, it’s just hosed. Even without the power-saving, leaving it on for a few days killed it.

Update: Ah, turning off all power-saving, including the Automatic setting for processor performance, seems to keep it alive. So, if I don’t let it sleep, don’t let it turn off the display, and don’t let it slow down or shut off any of the cores, it seems to work. I’ve been stressing the CPU on and off with a multi-threaded Sudoku generator (not because I need 200,000 Sudoku puzzles per day; it’s just a convenient way of pounding on the CPUs).

This is not acceptable in a new machine, of course, but if it does turn out to be a firmware issue, and they release a patch soon, I can at least use it in the interim.

Apple sent me email last night at 6pm saying that my quad-core G5 was fixed and ready for pickup at their nearby store. Today at 1:30pm, I discovered that their system sends out email when the tech logs the work as complete, before the machine is burned-in. In other words, “come back in a few hours when we call you.”

At 4pm, they called, and I walked back to the store, Kart-A-Bag Tri-Kart 800 in tow. Got it back to the office, hooked it up, turned it on, and not only did the fans kick into high gear and stay there, neither the keyboard nor the mouse worked.

Power down, unplug, reseat, plug, power up, everything’s fine. I think I’ll do my own burn-in at the office for a few days, though, just to make sure…

Amusing note: the purchase price for the complete system was $3,278 after my 10% developer discount. The alleged Parts and Services cost for the repair (fully covered by warranty, of course) was $4,830.13. This included a new logic board, new quad-core CPU unit, and four new DIMMs, plus $135 in service.

Today’s lesson is “buy the AppleCare policy, or throw it away if it breaks after the standard warranty runs out.”

Update: after about 18 hours of burn-in at my office, it was looking good. Then I went to lunch. When I got back, the fans were running at full speed and the screen wouldn’t wake up. Power-cycling brought up the dark-gray-screen-of-death. Second try worked. I’m going to reset the PRAM and try again, and if it doesn’t make it to the end of the week without a problem, it goes back to the shop.

By the way, the service tech did something that walks that fine line between amusing and disturbing. I took the machine in on December 27th; World of Warcraft patch 1.9 was released on January 3rd. When I got the machine back yesterday, it had already been patched.

A while back I bought a Mac Mini to be the house server. Since it wasn’t going to be stressed too much, I just got the base configuration, and planned to leave it that way.

Well, the 512MB of memory was adequate, but the pathetically slow hard drive was not. Fortunately, the nice folks at Other World Computing were offering an attractive deal: for $99, they send you a box, pay for overnight shipping both ways, and install any combination of memory, hard drive, and optical drive purchased from them. To make it even more attractive, they give you cash back for the old parts.

I kept the optical drive, doubled the RAM, and upgraded to a larger, faster, quieter hard drive, and they gave me $80 for the old parts. I had my upgraded machine back in 72 hours, and it’s now happily running Tiger Server.

On that note: “Dear Apple, please write some decent documentation for your server product, and fix the layout of your management GUI. Love, J”. For instance, it would be nice to know how many characters are permitted in the shared secret and user passwords when you’re setting up an IPsec VPN. It’s not fun to guess why you can’t authenticate…

I needed to restock the pantry, so I made a late-night run to the local Safeway last night. I was passing through the canned-fruit section when something peculiar caught my eye:

These California peaches, canned by Kikkoman for a Japanese audience, somehow ended up on the shelves of a California grocery store that serves a largely Hispanic community.

Subject line:

First-level designers available for you

Personally, I want designers with more hit points.

And here’s the pitch, straight from “Doug” (Joerg Wempe of Bad Hersfeld)

Corporate image can say a lot of things about your company. Contemporary rhythm of life is too dynamic. Sometimes it takes only several seconds for your company to be remembered or to be Iost among competitors. Get your loqo, business stationery or website done right now!

I think anyone who buys a loqo from this man is crazy…

The jokes just write themselves when it comes to this support garment that I spotted a poster for in Vegas:

Woofers, tweeters, knobs, volume control, remote control, playlists, etc, etc. More fun, though, was finding out who else is using the name “ibra”:

• International Bible Reading Association
• International Barrel Racing Association
• International Bee Research Association
• and many more...

…how about this video that mixes equal parts Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, and nekomimi chibi joshigakusei.

For offline viewing, there’s a torrent available.

Update: Google video may be short on dancing chibis, but at least they’ve got Morning Musume making cat noises.