Thought about linking to a story on the War on Terror today? Winds of Change got 'em. Got 'em all.

A good read as always, but...antitrust! Antitrust!

(We know Boardwalk, of course: he's the guy who digs Malamute smoothies. You know - when the GIs say "chow," he's not thinking about MREs.)

Three thousand dead in France from a heat wave with an average that barely crawled above 100 degrees Fahrenheit? In a country of only 60 million, those sound like Third World numbers. Compared to the 1995 Chicago heat wave, which killed nearly 500 inside the urban sprawl, France's death toll percentage is twice that. Stories written about a "race for the last fan" don't help the overwhelming impression of desperation and chaos over there:

Some restaurants and offices have central air-conditioning, known to Parisians as clim (pronounced cleem), short for climatisation. But a surprising number do not. The French will tell you that wild temperature swings are bad for you. Air-conditioners, they say, cause sore throats and cultivate germs.

Temperature heights this summer have been reasonable, so I've managed to keep air conditioning off; even so, I have it in reserve should the humidity and heat decide to play for keeps.

UPDATE: Two-thirds of those killed by the heat died in Paris alone. It's not like a Third World disaster: this is a Third World disaster.

UPDATE II: Third World, 1; France, 0. Last year, a heat wave killed less than 1,000 Indians - out of a billion countrywide. Could the French have been completely unprepared for a twenty-degree rise in average temperatures? ...Er, that's rhetorical.

Busy as anything in the office yesterday, a few of us took time to find the rumored patch that would inoculate our computer system from the up-and-coming "Blaster" worm. Logically, we went straight to Windows Update - no luck. It was when we followed the general link distributed by news reports that we realized we were never in any danger: the patch has been available for all major Microsoft operating systems for nearly a month, and the entire office updated within two days of its release. Bless that pesky "New Updates" system tray icon.

I understand that large organizations contend with hundreds or thousands of computers - many in different locations and at use across numerous work shifts - but to the last one, each giant is supported by a paid tech staff. Given that the worm is beginning to garner headlines that include words like "havoc" and "mayhem," you've got to ask: what have those paid service personnel been doing up until now?

The virus also seems to have targeted individual users, whereas Melissa and ILoveYou tended to go straight for the big fish. That's a shame, especially with the internet becoming a place not at all appropriate for the unprepared. All in all, it's good news for Norton, I'm sure.

My silicon-and-telecommunications-wire tales of woe don't worry me nearly as much knowing that even the most knowledgable and self-sufficient run into stubborn problems.

I know my limits when it comes to computers. Two years ago I was lucky enough to be forced into gutting and overhauling three computers; since that trial-by-fire I've become familiar enough with interior components and corresponding manufacturer quality to build units from scratch. My tasks at work include application and operating system maintenance, and one of my occasionally paying hobbies at home - audio engineering - involves a good deal of tweaking for performance purposes, so I hold valuable non-coding troubleshooting expertise among laymen (e.g., most of the people I know).

Networking and personally dedicated servers are, to me, as fire was to primitive man: I fear it. Simple tasks I can handle, like uploading and downloading, installing Movable Type, changing preferences or permissions at the office, finagling our intranet data server and bumbling through a home network (which is still not quite complete at my apartment). I even managed to set up my MT database in MySQL after abandoning the inevitably disk-limitation-corrupted Berkeley DB; I believe I was following explicit directions for the database but it's still a fuzzy memory of unnatural achievement, not unlike that of a parent who lifts a '70 Chevy Caprice to save his trapped child.

My proficiency ends there. Coding? "Linux Box"? Leave that to the CS graduates - the guys in college whose practical jokes on acquaintances apparently included installing an active-desktop background consisting of a JPEG screenshot of the desktop, with functional shortcuts surreptitiously rearranged. When I install hardware or update drivers, I prefer to let the little man inside flip switches and communicate to me through exchanges that require responses no more complicated than "Back" and "Next," and the occasional "Finish." Not to say I can't doggy-paddle: between third and eighth grade, I taught myself some GW-Basic for a handful of graphic sequences and unfinished text adventures (some relatively impressive results with a random-number combat system, as a matter of fact). And, just last month, I rigged a moldy AT machine with obsolete PCI slots to play the soundtrack from an equally venerable program out through an ancient 8-bit Soundblaster and into my recording equipment. But as I've said before, I know enough to be dangerous and precious little else. I try to stay abreast of new technology and how in the world to use it correctly. It's a fun and unpredictable relationship.

Hats off and best wishes to those of you in a do-si-do with mankind's own silicon embodiment of the 80/20 Rule. "I think I know what I'm doing, therefore I am."

Contrast the time index of this post and the post below - that's how long "server load" has been keeping the poor thing in weblog Purgatory.

Technology updates from Winds of Change. Next they'll be telling us about "high-intensity shafts of radiative energy controlled by on/off operation, composite metal-and-plastic hilts":

Water is critical. People can fast for several weeks without permanent damage, but a week without water will kill you - and drinking contaminated water can be just as deadly. As Jay notes, however, an astonishing new technology is available that could solve these problems as quickly as a few planeloads of the product - a small "magic" bag with gatorade-like powder in it - could get from here to there. It's called a HydroPack (Hat Tip: Joe Maller), has no moving parts, and combines nano-scale membrane technology with the simple principle of forward osmosis. Just throw it into the dirtiest water you can find, let it fill, then sip from the straw. This is a great technology that should be rushed into the military and disaster-relief procurement system post-haste.

Incredible. Integrate them into full-body suits, hire an adept fashion designer, notify the appropriate legal authorities to manufacture them to look like this, and you'll snag the life savings of every last Sci-Fi fan/military gear-wonk. Hand-held, 300MHz+ computers aside, Hydropack is probably the most mind-boggling, straight-from-fiction scientific victory since Fluosol (which doubtlessly inspired The Abyss, bringing us back to the art-life imitation cycle).

The "problem" occurred again - the one that, by virtue of its dogged recurrence, has drawn my typewriting fingers' attention not once but twice before. It goes like this: I try to so much as edit an old entry, save a new one, access my templates, export posts or rebuild my weblog and a famous MySQL error - "Statement has no result columns to bind" - pops up, denying me further usage of uBlog. Sometimes one or more of these symptoms is not present, for instance the error message not appearing, or the template list functional. But by one component failing, the process itself is otherwise hobbled.

This began in February, as soon as I started placing Movable Type's database into MySQL format as opposed to Berkeley Database (and no, I can hardly tell you the internal differences between the two; I know where to put operative folders and little more). It happened off and on, usually once a week or less. But it was irritating, nonetheless: how long could a spell last? Usually, a few hours or a morning. Over the past month, however, outages have lasted entire days.

I've got plenty of reasons not to blog at a given point in time but waiting for some obscure, obstinate wrench in the cogs is not on the list of excuses.

Movable Type's help forum was of only modest help; Benjamin Trott and others have done more than enough with providing every miniature Twain or Fitzgerald an easy, global interface that's just as easily customized as it is instantly recognizable in format - so it's not surprising that they offered only a few thoughts before shrugging their shoulders and advising me to pick up the trail.

So I did. I called my provider, Core Comm, around July 4th: big mistake. The tech was probably already penning in his holiday weekend and gave me a vague promise of either a solution or a report; I let him go without a due time. Another big mistake. I never heard back from him.

The heels of this lapse in customer service coincided with a mysterious absence of the scourge (which now makes a bit of sense, explained below) so I let the matter blow in the wind for the better part of three weeks.

Last Saturday, I was hit with my first all-day-no-blogging experience. I wasn't exactly about to post an epistle, but there was Movable Type, bugging out, and being conscious of the loss was extremely annoying. Something akin to stubbing a toe or waking up with a sore throat; once it's done and you're thoroughly convinced of your less-than-optimal physical state, you compulsively put weight on the gammy foot or swallow hard just to check if the condition may have healed over the past, oh, four minutes or so from any given point in time. So part of the day involved my succumbing to a strange vacuum that lodged itself in my computer room, sucking me inside every time I walked past, followed by my repeated, somewhat arduous clicking of certain execution-function keyboard buttons, followed by consternation and cartoon steam piling out from both my ears. Followed by vain Google searches for that Holy Grail of case history accounts, followed by more consternation, followed by my storming out of the room, in spite of the vacuum. Before the vacuum pulled me back inside again.

Sunday morning, all was well. But for how long? Well, this morning, while getting ready, I was trying to accomplish something extremely innocuous - Movable Type conked out again.

That was enough. I called Core Comm, spoke to a girl named Natalie, and - thankfully - did not need to extract a promise of investigation and diagnosis in a timely fashion. I hung up, satisfied, and waited while I worked.

Within two hours she called back, with a report not unlike what Benjamin Trott surmised: the problem was not caused by Movable Type or the MySQL database themselves. "Server load," she explained, caused by either throughput or disk space limitations, was overwhelming at certain usage periods and subsequently incapacitated communication actions - in this case, my software's communication with the database. That would explain, I thought, the inconsistent nature of the malfunction itself; not to mention the inexplicable, random restoration of operation. Moreover, the week following the Fourth of July appeared to be a popular week for vacations, and I can only assume the liquidity on asphalt roads was matched by smooth conduction through broadband wires.

There was a pleasant, if not exactly cut-and-dried, end to the story. Core Comm was "in the process of making more room for the servers" to handle these excessive usage hours, said Natalie, "and it's an ongoing thing." I tried to pin her down on benchmarks for the project, but she held firm with the "ongoing" aspect of it. Not my favorite scale of measurement, but both "on" and "going" are tonic to the schedule-minded.

When I left for lunch, the outage remained. But now - surprise! - you're reading this. A round of applause, please. My Movable Type installation is okay, my database is intact: Core Comm intends to fix the server problem. Fair enough.

Last night I began considering an alternate layout that will break up the somewhat severe look of the new banner - I'll finish the day's work and get to it at some point today or tomorrow.

Local boy makes good (use of sky photographs he's been compiling over the past three months).

From my browser, downloading is slightly longer - but not by much. Anyone experiencing problems? As much as I'd hate to, I can always downsize the graphics. Or you can always find yourself a good broadband connection - kidding!

UPDATE: Yes, it's far too big on 600 x 800.

UPDATE: Much better.

This story is begging to be found in Drudge's right-hand column. You've got to admit, it'd be one hell of a maintenance call:

However strange the idea may sound, TransOrbital of La Jolla, California is taking [installing data servers on the moon] and other proposals for marrying high-tech and the Earth's only natural satellite seriously. The company is getting ready to send a commercial mission to the moon and intends to send servers, data, handheld computers, and digital cameras along for the ride.

[...]

So is there any point in storing data on a server on the moon? TransOrbital has had companies that want to back up critical data somewhere other than on earth express interest, and is working on ways to make the idea attractive. "We're trying to develop some wider bandwidth laser communications going beyond the communication protocols developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that exist for use in space," Laurie says. "It is feasible to have electronic data on the moon, and to receive it from earth, although delays are implied."

[...]

Laurie is most excited about servers storing data on the moon, though. "The moon is a pretty safe place to store your data," he says.

We'll see how the green lobby handles the prospect of old Luna's beautiful, tranquil, pockmarked, dusty, star-sky, airless and lifeless horizon marred by those unwieldy, dense alloys of human commercial enterprise. If intrusive, stuff them in craters; plenty of craters. With increased traffic, will someone stumble on an old site - might we find out whether or not Alan Shepherd's ball stayed on the fairway? Until then, revel in the possibilities (and piquant asides) provided by spaceflight's customers finally numbering more than the federal government.