It’s all just 1’s and 0’s…

Update: The waking problems are probably caused by hardware issues.

I am currently experiencing some issues with waking my PowerBook. Sometimes it happens instantly, other times, I have to wait up to a minute before a password dialog appears, and sometimes I have to wait after I have entered my password.

The following log entries appear in the system log:

Dec 20 20:46:50 Doc lookupd[14561]: NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Dec 20 20:46:58 Doc configd[35]: SecKeychainFindGenericPassword err= -25308 ( =0xffff9d24, secErrStr=User interaction is not allowed. ) (current= je-ju.net)
Dec 20 20:47:00 Doc /Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager.app/Contents/MacOS/NetInfo Manager: NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local

After some Googling I ran into this changeset of Adium. I did some testing and sure enough, it only seemed to occur when Adium was running, so I filed a ticket. But despite my thorough testing, it only seemed to be the case. So Adium is not to blame.

After some more searching in man pages and Apple support knowledge base, I think that this may be an issue of the Keychain. I currently have two keychains, an old one I exported from my previous install and a new one, to which I plan to export all the things I use, so that I can do a bit of cleaning. But I forgot to move the password for my wireless network to the new keychain and since it’s locked by default, it might be trying to get a password and fail, because interaction is not allowed.

I sincerely hope that that is the problem and that I have solved it now…I’ll post some updates as soon as I know more.

Yup, like any other blog this blog was the target of comment spam, had about 40 bogus comments over the last week.

I’ve made it useless to do so now by automatically tagging every link in a comment with a “nofollow” property, so that it won’t improve your page-ranking on searchmachines.

I’ve also added a plugin to do “hashcash”, meaning your browser has to do some work before it can post a comment. Normal users shouldn’t notice a thing. Let me know if it breaks anything.

Why am I not using CAPTCHA you ask? Well, for one thing it’s not very reliable, and second, it is not very friendly to visually disabled surfers.

Big Brother is watching you

Microsoft will change Internet Explorer because of a patent dispute with Eolas. I don’t know the exact details, but the dispute was over a patent about using web-plugins. Apparently, Internet Explorer and its use of ActiveX plugins crossed the line.

The insanity of this is that recently a whitepaper was published, detailing how Microsoft will change IE. According to an article on eweek, the change will mean that sometimes a user will have to click one extra time, or be presented with a dialog box.

When such a minute change will settle this patent dispute, it shows how ridiculous software patents are.

This extremely stylish wrapper is for a new chocolate bar. A 100% slave-free chocolate bar. I bought one yesterday and it tastes pretty good.

The idea for this bar came when a Dutch television program “Keuringsdienst van Waarde” (a play on words, translate roughly as the Inspectorate for Values). They did some research on how chocolate is made. They found out a big part of the cacao beans production involves slavery and child labour. They discussed this with some chocolate manufacturers, but these seemed unwilling to change their ways and produce slave free chocolate.

In the end they took matters in their own hands and created their own bar of chocolate; Tony Chocolonely (Audio alert, nice tune though!). Unfortunately, these bars are only available in the Netherlands. I hope that they will start exporting these bars to other countries. Or even better, that the chocolate-makers come to their senses and start producing more of these kinds of bars.

Side-note: one of the journalists of the “Keuringsdienst van Waarde” program even tried to get himself arrested for eating chocolate. Because slavery is a crime, and buying something while knowing that a crime was committed in the process of obtaining this good is illegal (fencing).

He tried to turn himself over to the police, but they rejected him. He tried some other things (even tried dragging himself to court), but so far he has not been able to get punished for his crime.