the foobar zone

Not much of a surprise, but the Vatican's latest statement on child abuse in Ireland falls so far short of the mark, you just have to gaze in wonder at it.  Blaming "weakening of the faith" as a "significant contributory factor" in the abuse, and calling for "deeper theological reflection on the whole issue", the two stated purposes of the meeting and press release were to get people to believe in Jesus more, and to restore the church's credibility.

It's only occasionally that an article crops up which is so completely clueless that my hackles are raised. But some drivel in the online issue of The Weekly Standard has really hit rock bottom in terms of factual inaccuracy, idiotic bias and nationalistic tunnel-vision.

Apple's Time Machine is a great system for managing client backups in a sensible way. Problem is, it depends on connectivity to a locally mounted disk, which doesn't really suit me. The reason it doesn't suit is because I don't want the constant hum of an extra disk drive while I'm working. Extra noise is bad. It also costs more to run, given that I have one or two servers powered up anyway.

Like most of the rest of the country, I'm going to admit to having some pretty serious levels of scorn for the housing economics pundits - ok, so it's shooting fish in a barrel. I know.  But listening to all this trash on the airwaves about a slowdown here, and deterioration in market conditions there just makes my eyes roll. 

It's not a slowdown, or a deterioration or any other euphemism. It's collapse: complete and total collapse.

Microsoft Outlook 2003 Error 0x8004DF0B has been plagueing me for a long time.  I have a couple of clients using Outlook in a bunch of different offices, and connecting into more-or-less out-of-the-box Courier IMAP setups on FreeBSD, with client SSL enabled for both inbound (imaps) and outbound email (both smtp with starttls and Outlook's poxy smtps/465).

The problems started when I installed NOD32 Antivirus. On a fairly regular basis, the Outlook installation would start reporting the following error:

So, today's job was to upgrade a pair of D-Link switches in the office.  They're relatively recent jobs: a DGS-1216T and a DGS-1224T.  Both managed and gigabit ethernet capable, with various bells and whistles.

The boxes had been irritating me for some while because the VLAN configuration web interface had clearly been designed by some stupid web developer who only used IE6.  As a result, you could only create new VLANs if you used IE6, or if you turned off CSS completely. Nice one, guys - I just love your testing procedures!

Oops, Cisco rightly messed up this morning by publishing the home page of their web site without the letter 't'.  It's amusing enough to see their opinions on a "Daa Cener", but this was one better: the entire HTML source for the page was buggered up, not just the visible text.  Stylesheets went missing, images failed to load, links didn't work.

Of course, Cisco aren't exactly saying a whole lot about why this happened, but I'd give a fair guess that some poor webmonkey messed up a regular expression on some whole page output filter.  Oh dear.

I mean, what are these goddamn news agencies talking about in their stories about a fire in a bus depot, that makes it necessary to bring in the terrorist aspect?

Looks like Jim Watson, Nobel laureate, has put his foot in it once more, this time for airing his views that black people are less intelligent than white. Oh dear. All scientists are nutters, aren't they?