Reading (For Dummies): March 2008 Archives

March 16, 2008

Marathoning

I packed on some pounds over the last year, somehow, and am in serious need of shaking it off. I'm only thankful that our snow base has melted away. For most of the winter, the ground was covered with a few feet of hard-packed icy slushy mess. In that vain, I've been exercising like a madman for the last two weeks: biking and running on alternating days, with no excuses -- even if I'm feeling like crap, or the weather is pelting ice with 20mph winds, I'm going.

I have a goal for my exercise, as well: I'm doing a leg of the WSU 100k relay. I signed up for leg 4, a 7.7 mile flat road run in the absolutely gorgeous Snake River canyon.

I was never much of a runner. Biking has always been more my thang. So I'm up to riding 1.5-2 hours per riding day (Saturday I did a 45 miler in 2:15, w00t). Running is sluggish but coming along, though...I'm doing 40 minutes to an hour on my running days (tonight: 4.5 miles in 41 minutes on the flat), and shaking a newly purchased heart rate monitor all the while. It's like this thing my dad said to me growing up: "Son, when you turn 55 you can either get a new knee, or a new heart." I'd rather go with arthroscopic knee surgery myself...

Posted by reid at 08:42 PM | Comments (0)

Time Warner is Breaking DNS

Time Warner, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to go down the path of Verisign. This morning, I accidentally punched in an invalid domain name and was greeted with a Time Warner page saying "lslakjdflskjdflsdjf.com is invalid." Below are some screenshots.

Figure 1: nslookup from the command prompt

Figure 2: the url redirects to Time Warner's page, giving them an opportunity to register the name/make money from advertising

Many people's programs and scripts rely upon ISPs and registrars not doing things like this. Obviously Time-Warner is not a registrar so their redirect doesn't affect as many people as Verisign's did, but I still find it ludicrous. Thoughts?

Update: Apparently someone else has done a thorough analysis on this already. It looks like TW did a bad programming job here. Something that I'm going to play with in my spare time ;-).

Posted by reid at 08:07 AM | Comments (1)

March 04, 2008

Time Capsule Meltdown

Apple has a rather glaring bug in Time Machine, and it's going to give their Time Capsule owners a bit of a headache, starting soon.

I ran into a problem with OS X Server wherein Time Machine doesn't 'free' disk space from backups more than a day old (after making a backup an hour for the last 24 hours, time machine is supposed to zap the earlier backups and only keep one a day or so). A good thread on the subject can be read here.

I did file an Apple Bug Report, # 5696862, on 20-January, which appears to have not even been acknowledged yet. Anyone want to prod the Apple Developer folk for a fix?

Posted by reid at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)