I’m doing some maintenance on the HurricaneScreamer blog. Please ignore this post.
// Return the argument type from a locator structure
char l_ptype(Locator *loc, long *apistatus)
{
Value val;
*apistatus = _Load(loc, &val);
return (*apistatus != 0 ? ‘E’ : p_ptype(&val));
}
Most of the time I let an alert like this go by, but with the outpouring of grief at the senseless overdose death of Michael Jackson, I wanted this to be out there so at least a few people can protect themselves.
It has come to my attention via Sans.Org that MJ related spam with an attachment is being sent out, offering to show the recipient a news report regarding his death yesterday. This attachment contains a screen saver trojan that will infect your system (an .SCR file).
Please be safe and review your security procedures. That’s true in the best of times, but there will be an absolute flood of dangerous e-mail as malicious people exploit this event.
I will be offline for one day, either Thursday or Friday, as I plan on performing the yearly upgrade and migration of one of my three hard drives. This is a policy that I began many years ago, not because the drives were beginning to fail, but because my need for hard drive space increased so much. As it happens, this policy is a good idea anyway, because hard drives do fail eventually, and I put a great deal of stress on them, and on my computer.
This computer is up and operating for an almost constant 24-hour cycle. I can’t remember the last time I turned it off at night, but I know it must not be more than a dozen times since the start of the year.
I call this policy drive rotation. This year I will rotate out Drive E:, which was initially formatted June 15th, 2005. I have the replacement on order, and it should arrive Thursday afternoon. If it arrives early enough, I will begin the replacement immediately. If not, it will occur Friday morning.
After the rotation, my system configuration will look like this:
Drive C: 200 GB (split into two partitions)
Drive D: 500 GB
Drive E: 500 GB
This means that I will have a terabyte+ of HDD space on my system! Fantastic! I’m also planning on moving D to E temporarily and re-formatting it. I’ve had some misgivings about D for a while, as some operations I did on it last year ended up in failure.
For this reason, I will likely be offline for at least 12-hours, perhaps more.
I’ve uploaded four directories of new photos, from adoption fairs and some photos I took of a broken water pipe next to the condo. In one sequence, the shot shows how much the ground has been washed away, and how hard the roots are working to keep it together.
The reason that one week is missing is because I was sick that weekend. It was 55 degrees with a 15 MPH wind, and I wanted to avoid that, lest I become more sick.
I’ve heard of two more pet food and treat products in the last few days that are being recalled. And I have also heard that the company that I cited as responsible for the production of the contaminated wheat gluten is not taking responsibility for what happened.
This is a big mess, getting bigger all the time. Even this morning, Kathleen reported a rash of suspected kidney failure cases at a local vet’s office. At 8 AM the total was seven cases and they were still coming in!
But the Chinese government, realizing that it must protect trade ties to the west, has stepped in and will try to get to the bottom of this.
From Xinhua Net comes this report:
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) — China is carrying out a nationwide inspection on the quality of its wheat gluten after the United States claimed that the pet food at the origin of a number of cat and dog deaths used tainted wheat imported from China. The probing targets melamine, a chemical used to make plastic and discovered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the pet food recalled by Ontario-based pet food maker Menu Foods following a rash of animal sickness and deaths.
U.S. citizens are taking this very seriously. Over the last twenty years, pets have become increasingly important to family life. And manufactures and pet stores have taken a huge business hit.
I hope that the Chinese authorities find out what happened, and if there was criminal intent, prosecute. Even if it was a simple accident, having that revealed would go a very long way to restore credibility and trust in these products.
Here’s an image test post. I’ll choose one from Kat’s wedding to Mike, a view of her in the wedding dress.
Kathleen has just sent me this link to a streaming video of a watering hole in South Africa. Honest to G-d it looks like the real thing.
I’m testing whether I can add a javascript tag into a wordpress post – it’s more difficult than I thought. It’s the src tag that gets stripped out. Update: still no luck – I’ll have to research this a lot more. I wonder what this means to things like YouTube videos.
I wanted to take this time to offer everyone a blessed New Year, filled encouragement in your endeavors. May love and laughter fill your hearts and homes.