I woke up Monday morning and found my iMac completely frozen. Reseting the power resulted in a gray screen. Continuously gray, never moving on to display an Apple logo. Shit.

Popping in system DVD I am again staring a blank gray screen. Uh oh.

When I get home from work I pull the extra memory I added. No dice. Damn, this is pretty bad.

I try some of the Apple startup hotkeys to reset the pram, do an optional startup disk, and target the system as a firewire drive. Everything ultimately pointed a problem with the hard drive. What was most frustrating though was a hard drive problem really shouldn’t prevent OS X DVDs from booting.

My iMac is now out of warranty and I’m pretty certain the only thing I need to do is get to the hard drive to either reformat/reinstall the OS or replace the drive altogether.

So do I take it in to the Genius Bar, wait a few days for the repair or do I take the plunge and do the dirty work myself. I’m a former certified Apple technician. I can do this!

I take the plunge and crack it open. Not an easy feat but after 30 minutes I’ve extracted the hard drive and reformatted it on my trusty MacBook. Putting the iMac back together I power it on and low-and-behold I’m now able to boot off the OS X DVDs, run hardware diagnostics, and am back in business.

My triumph doesn’t end there though. I don’t even need to reinstall the OS. I just boot off the install DVD, select Restore from backup and in three hours my system is perfectly restored to where it was an hour before I awoke to find it dead on Monday morning.

Glorious day!

Anyone on Twitter? If so, can you explain why one needs something like that when you already have Facebook, MySpace, a blog, and a full time job? I don’t get it.

Glad I’m not the only one…

Nothing about the CNN “hologram” made sense. Part of the value of sending reporters to different areas to cover what’s going on is to allow viewers to look beyond the onscreen reporter, and see the raucous environment. And it also affords the reporter the opportunity to walk around and show viewers some of the visual highlights at the event.

But with the help of its “hologram,” CNN destroyed the value in sending a reporter, and instead made it, in the paraphrased words of Wolf Blitzer, “a more intimate setting” for the interview that eliminated all the noisy people that would have been standing behind her. – CNET 11.06.08

Nice work, Banksy.

From the WTF did you expect them to say? department:

The Pentagon said Monday it has a “high degree of confidence” that the missile fired at a dead U.S. spy satellite in space destroyed the satellite’s fuel tank as planned.

In its most definitive statement yet on the outcome of last Wednesday’s shootdown over the Pacific, the Pentagon said that based on debris analysis it is clear that the Navy missile destroyed the fuel tank, “reducing, if not eliminating, the risk to people on Earth from the hazardous chemical.” – MSNBC 2008.02.25

As if the big brass is going to risk their superiority complex by touting they missed. They would never do that.

WASHINGTON — Just hours after a Navy missile interceptor struck a dying spy satellite orbiting 130 miles over the Pacific Ocean, a senior military officer expressed high confidence early Thursday that a tank filled with toxic rocket fuel had been breached.

Video of the unusual operation showed the missile leaving a bright trail as it streaked toward the satellite, and then a flash, a fireball, a plume and a cloud as the interceptor, at a minimum, appeared to have found its target, a satellite that went dead shortly after being launched in 2006.

“We’re very confident that we hit the satellite,” said Gen. James E. Cartwright of the Marines, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We also have a high degree of confidence that we got the tank.”

General Cartwright cautioned that despite visual and spectral evidence that the hydrazine rocket fuel had been dispersed, it could take 24 to 48 hours before the Pentagon could announce with full confidence that the mission was a success. Even so, he said the military had 80 to 90 percent confidence the fuel tank was breached.

A big dog and pony show to pitch our might to the world. Oh, and in the process, possibly pissing off a few folks…

The first international reaction came from China, where the government objected on Thursday to the American missile strike, warning that the United States Navy’s action could threaten security in outer space.

Liu Jianchao, the Chinese foreign ministry’s spokesman, said at a news conference in Beijing that the United States should also share data promptly about what will become of the remaining pieces of the satellite, which are expected to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and mostly burn up in the next two days.

“China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries,” Mr. Liu said, according to the Associated Press. “China requests the U.S. to fulfill its international obligations in real earnest and provide to the international community necessary information and relevant data in a timely and prompt way so that relevant countries can take precautions.”

Give it a few months and I bet someone comes up with the idea that there are people on the moon that need liberty and democracy.

Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.

The case was brought by a Swiss bank after “several hundred” documents were posted about its offshore activities.

Other versions of the pages, hosted in countries such as Belgium and India, can still be accessed.
However, the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site’s domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers. – BBC 02.18.08

But if you know the site’s IP, you can still get it.

All the traffic managed to crush my Wordpress installation. Nice work readers!

After a quick Wordpress upgrade and a new wp-cache plugin, we’re back to serving content.

A few months back I began trying out the latest version of ecto3, the tool I use daily to write these entries. It’s been plagued with issues but hey, that’s what betas are for. Still, it’s been too much of a headache and time consumer fixing little things here and there to get entries out to the site. So… here I am back in ecto2 and hoping to get back some of my time…

This is going to have a pretty big impact on my job…

Business software maker BEA Systems has agreed to be acquired by Oracle for $8.5 billion, the companies said on Wednesday.

Oracle will pay $19.375 per share, a premium to its offer last year of $17 per share, which BEA had rejected as too low. At the time, BEA said it was worth $21 a share and said it was willing to talk to potential buyers, though none emerged.

Oracle said the deal, valued at $7.2 billion net of cash on hand of $1.3 billion, would increase its adjusted earnings per share by at least 1 cent to 2 cents in the first full year after closing.” – ZDNET 01.16.2008

My company is a BEA shop. One of the projects I’m currently leading is to determine whether the new J2EE server we implement at the end of the year will be an upgraded version of our existing BEA servers or will we switch to another? I admit openly I have a BEA bias. Oracle (both the company and their products) have produced a lot of headache in my life of application support. Now that Oracle has acquired BEA these evaluations change drastically.