This is not your practice blog

Tiger day

Mac lovers know that today's the day: Mac OS X Tiger is out. Rather than add to the frenzy, I just have a few things to say:

1. Spotlight is very, very cool.

2. Ars Technica has an incredibly detailed technical review of Tiger.

3. Apple is posting third-party Dashboard widgets for download. There are already 42 of them available. Hmm...42...why does that sound so familiar today?

No geeks or nerds

Living on Dork Street can change your life, or maybe just supply you with an interesting story or two.

Phishing research

Here's what happened when some college students in Indiana decided to conduct research into how people respond to a phishing attack. Hint: it's not all good.

"Let's say you want to study if people will help you if you have a heart attack in the middle of the street," Menczer said. "This is the same circumstance. There is no way this study could be conducted if the potential subjects were aware of what was going on."

Safe travels

Getting to first base

According to ESPN Magazine, there are 23 different ways for a batter to get to first base in a baseball game. Not all of these are scored differently in a typical scoresheet, and some of the distinctions are almost nonexistent, but they're all mentioned separately in the Official Baseball Rules. Here they are:

1. Hit
   
2. Fielder's choice (throw + tag play)
   
3. Forceout (at another base)
   
4. Preceeding runner put out (tag)
   
5. Failed sacrifice bunt
   
6. Hit by pitch
   
7. Error
   
8. Walk
   
9. Intentional walk
   
10. Pinch-runner
    
11. Dropped third strike
    
12. Catcher interference
    
13. Batted ball hits runner
    
14. Fielder obstructs runner
    
15. Fielder interference
    
16. Fan interference (with ball)
    
17. Fan obstruction (of batter)
    
18. Runner out on appeal play
    
19. Failure to pitch within 20 seconds
    
20. Four illegal pitches
    
21. Runner on first; game suspended; runner is traded before game is made up. New player may take his place at first.
    

Undead PowerBook

Late last week I was shocked to find that my trusty Titanium PowerBook had gone to sleep and wouldn't wake up. When I tried to reboot it, it hung early in the boot process. When I booted in verbose mode (hold down Command-V right after turning it on) to get more info, it stopped while still in the power-on self test (POST). Ugh. Resetting parameter RAM and reset-all in Open Firmware didn't change anything. To my great relief, I was able to get the computer to come up in FireWire Target Disk mode, and the hard disk seemed fine (I backed it up at that point, of course).

I quested off to meet the Genius at my local Apple store, who quickly concurred that it looked like a main logic board gone blooey, which would cost me about $300 and a week without the PowerBook while it visited the repair spa. As I pondered my luck (out $300, but data intact), I compared my situation to that of my fellow Genius Bar patron, a young woman whose cat had tipped over a vase full of water onto her nearly-new powered-on iBook. She faced a repair bill of > $1000 and an unknown fate for her hard disk. Bad kitty.

The Genius said my PowerBook would be in the hospital for a week to 10 days. It came back yesterday after only 48 hours! (That's called "under-promise and over-deliver".) I picked it up and verified that it worked again, with its new main logic board. I looked at the Parts Used list, which included this inscrutable entry:

810-1703 BZL,ALUM,PNT

Yes, the Apple repair tech had touched up the paint scratches on the case. No charge. Cool.

Very good things: FireWire Target Disk mode, Apple repair service, Apple store.
Lucky thing: hard disk surviving dead main logic board.
Bad thing: cat.
Lesson learned: back up your data!

Google Sightseeing

The buzz about Google satellite photos is on display at Google Sightseeing. This site collects bunches of cool satellite photos of interesting structures and sites from around the world.

Bagpipe solo

You might know the early '90s pop hit "Under The Milky Way Tonight" by The Church. This one is rocking along, when suddenly, a bagpipe solo breaks out. It's almost comical, but it works. It's surely one of the most unexpected solos in rock music.

Baseball wackiness

Major League Baseball returned to the US capital yesterday for the first time in 34 years, when the Washington Senators moved away to Texas following the 1971 season. As twisty fate would have it, the ceremonial first pitch was thrown out by a man who once owned that Texas team, President George W. Bush.

That last game in Washington was never completed. The game ended in a near-riot as fans stormed the field to take souvenirs and the game was forfeited to the opposing team. The 34 years between games at RFK Stadium is the longest such gap in baseball history.

In other insane baseball news, the ancient Yankees-Red Sox rivalry added a new chapter when Yankees right fielder Gary Sheffield and a fan got into a little shoving fight.

Secret origins of code names #47

kennyw works on Indigo, a new interprocess/Internet messaging technology from Microsoft. According to his blog, the code name Indigo came from a billboard in the San Francisco Bay area depicting an indigo-colored iMac.