I run my own mail server, including an IMAP server. I use SSL, but I was not about to pay Verisign (or anyone else) for a signed certificate. I had been putting up with the “trust this certificate?” messages every time I started the Apple Mail.app, until I came across this Apple support article.
It describes how to import your self-signed certificate into your key chain, so Mail doesn’t bother you any more.
Two weeks ago, I was sitting at the table eating breakfast and browsing the news on my Powerbook, as I am want to do. In front of me was my bowl of cereal, and to my right, the carton of milk. And just beyond that, my two year old daughter.
You can probably guess what happened next.
The milk went over the front half of the Powerbook, luckily missing the keyboard and speakers. It still seemed to work ok, so I mopped up, packed up and went to work.
When I got there, I noticed the lid catch was a little sticky, but it opened ok and still worked. At the end of the day, I shut the lid and came home.
This was when things turned bad. That evening, I opened up the Powerbook to check my email, and was more than a little disturbed to find the bottom two thirds of my screen didn’t work. Like, it was black. And then, it wasn’t black, but wasn’t being refreshed. weep
I found that by moving the screen back and forth, I could usually get it to come good, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. It seemed get better the longer it was on… probably heat related. But it was pretty much unusable when first fired up.
The service guys at my local AppleCentre had a look, and were suitably impressed. They thought it might just be a loose connection, since the screen cable runs down to the front to connect to the logic board. Or it could be a fried logic board, which would only cost about AUD2,500 to replace. Sigh
Anyway, they booked it in, and called me on Wednesday to say they had time to look at it. So I took it in yesterday. I spent a nervous day working on my linux box, and hardly ever checking the Apple site to review the specs of the newly announced upgraded Powerbooks…
That afternoon, they called with the good news… There was nothing obvious wrong with the hardware, so they just stripped it down, cleaned everything up, re-seated the connectors and put it back together. And that seemed to do the trick. :-D
So now I have my baby back, and it seems as good as new. A happy ending to a potentially disastrous story. And now I make sure there is a good distance between open milk cartons and children.
I’ve finished it. At last. The Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson’s three volume mega novel, sort of a prequel to Cryptonomicon. Roughly 3,000 pages, and when you get as much time as I do to read fiction (i.e. very very little), that can take a while.
It was certainly an enjoyable read, but my rather disjointed reading style did not lend itself to absorbing the complex interrelationships between all the characters and plot threads. I think I spent almost as much time flipping back and forth trying to reestablish the context as I did just reading.
Oh well, maybe when the kids have left home and I’ve retired I’ll read it all again in a single sitting. :) And then I’ll also follow all the historical references and read them too. Right.
Note to self: next time you have occasion to commit a Word document to CVS (dog forbid), make sure you tell it that it’s a binary file, not text.
I foolishly let Eclipse decide for me… and it picked text. Sigh. So a week after I had left the project, I get a call from my ex-manager complaining that certain documents could not be opened. Since one of the last things I did before leaving the job was to wipe my PC’s hard drive, I was a little concerned.
But a quick inspection of the “corrupt” Word document confirmed my suspicion. Every newline (0x0a) character was indeed preceed by a carriage return (0x0d). DOS line breaks! Thanks for that one, Bill!
Anyway, this small piece of Perl hackery later, and the document opened fine (in OpenOffice anyway).