Sho Fukamachi Online

I’ve had trouble with HDs in the past, had data corrupted and lost, and spent more than one all-night emergency recovery session trying to save Princess MP3 from the Corruption Monster. Usually, the first warning I’ve had is when I try to open a file or do something else on the affected volume, to be suddenly met with a series of blood-curdling errors, all of which basically mean you’re already fucked. And just for kicks, I’ve then gone to look at the drive status in Disk Utility (or, on windows, Everest or something) and lo and behold, the S.M.A.R.T. report thing is “tests failed, drive failure imminent, backup data now” or somesuch.

Well, what’s the fricking point of having all these imminent-failure tests when at the point where you need them, at the point where failure is, actually, imminent, the damn thing doesn’t tell you? On both Mac and Windows, as far as I know, you have to explicitly check this in one of the disk tools I mentioned above. There’s no automatic check. There should be but there is not.

Well, I was not happy with that so I did some searching and found the excellent SMARTReporter, a small menubar app which sits there with a tiny picture of a disk and does absolutely nothing except poll the SMART status of all your drives every x minutes (I set x to 60) and then, hopefully, tell you if there’s something wrong. It’s free, it’s unobtrusive, and if it even saves me once – ie, gives me a crucial few hour’s warning before irreversible corruption begins ruining my day – then it’s worth the negligible resources cost of running it.

I admit, technorati is amazing. Blogs are mostly useless, but technorati is demonstrating incredible ingenuity in squeezing more information out of them that anyone could have imagined.

By themselves, they’re useless – but as a realtime source for statistical analysis of trends, they’re fantastic and technorati is the undisputed leader. For an example of the jaw-dropping degree to which they have already taken their analytical capabiltiies, check out this real-time chart of blog activity relating to my favourite band, globe, on all technorati-monitored blogs in japan:

Of course I don’t work for them, but I’d like to own them! This kind of information capability must be worth millions.

God I hate companies who do not configure their web sites to accept requests lacking the outdated, totally unnecessary leading “www.” prefix. OK, maybe it’s forgivable in some tiny outfit like www.budgerigar-supplies-online.com but fricking airbus? The worst thing is they’ve configured the DNS to point to the web server, then haven’t configured the web server to accept the requests. Morons!

I consider the www. to be totally unneeded these days, if ever. Sure, subdomains are great, if for nothing else than dividing up server loads and responsibilities. But we do not need a subdomain to identify the protocol – that is taken care of by standardised ports. Especially these days, the only thing forcing people to use “www.” achieves is billions upon billions of wasted keystrokes every single day. And the only other internet service used by 99% of the population is email, which uses a different system anyway!

Maybe when some alternative technology comes along, however, it will be useful. Perhaps some kind of VR system will propogate, using a completely different protocol to HTTP, and it will then be necessary to differentiate this from that. But for now, just drop the www, people.

UPDATE: It has been confirmed that this issue differs country by country. In Japan, anyone accessing airbus.com receives “Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)” without a redirect, whereas in Europe and America it would seem the redirect is successful. Still a grievous configuration error on their part to be sure, but not quite the unforgivable crime against humanity in retribution for which I was fully prepared to authorise the Airbus CIO’s immediate execution.