You can blame my absence on the blackout. Although, really, we only lost power here for about 5 hours – and it’s been four days now since I’ve posted anything.

It’s surprisingly hard to come up with something to say every day, especially when nothing really noteworthy is going on. You wouldn’t think it would be.

I had the dubious honour of being one of the many people in Ontario and New York State, and many other parts of the US, to be hit by the biggest blackout in history.

As annoying as it was, it didn’t really panic me. In a bizarre way, things like this almost always end up being a lot of fun – you get to meet a lot of people in your building (I live in a condominium) and on your street with whom you wouldn’t normally talk. It’s a big social event. Plus I got to walk up and down a pitch black stairway – luckily only three floors – with only a flashlight to keep me company. In the end, the only thing still working in the building was the deafening lobby alarm indicating a power failure.

Ironically, I was in the middle of a backup of my server and workstation when the power went out. Everything seems to be in order now – except that I can no longer login to my backup software! (Go figure.)

I haven’t turned the TV back on again, but for a while none of the Toronto based stations were working – I had to watch American news. (Not a bad thing in this case.) Although we had cable, we didn’t have an Internet connection for a while – but that’s now back up again too.

I just love the fact that nobody seems to know what caused any of this – and every official seems to be pointing the finger at somebody else. Mostly cross-border too. (The Candian politicians blame the States, the American politicians blame Canada.) Personally, I don’t really care what the initial trigger of the event was – I’d just like to know how it could possibly have cascaded as far as it did. I’m sure that there are going to be some serious “back room” discussions, and probably some political face-saving firings over the snafu.

Have you ever discovered a picture of something on your computer and wondered where it came from? How about stumbling onto a drawing on the Net somewhere, but outside of any context that would let you know who drew it? Have you been frustrated that there’s no search engine like Google (which lets you type in keywords or phrases), but which would let you submit your image for scanning and then compare it against similar imagery in its database and let you know possible correlations?

This is something I’ve thought would be very useful for a while now. It wouldn’t necessarily even involve pattern recognition, but just algorithms for scanning the image in certain ways and storing the data in some kind of comparative fashion against other pictures scanned.

I just found out that this kind of thing may be coming sooner than I’d thought. There a company call piXlogic that’s working on this very sort of thing.

I have one of those Xerox “WorkCentre” printers that’s a printer, copier, and scanner, all in one. Ever since I got it, I’ve been fighting with the buggy scanning driver that’s my only option. This morning I got hit by it again.

What happens is that it will start to scan – then simply stop. It won’t respond again. Once this happens the only way of getting it going again is to reboot, remove the driver, reinstall it, then reboot again. Just turning the computer off and on again isn’t good enough. It’s a real pain and I always wonder when my little game of scanning Russian Roulette is going to kick in and bite me.

This is a belated update on the situation with that classified ad I mentioned last week.

So as not to disparage the local paper too much (although it does deserve at least a little bit of healthy chastisement for various issues) I have to say that that missing ad was run after all, both in the paper and online, on the same day I’d said it hadn’t been.

It turned out that, for some bizarre reason, it had been put in the real estate section. Apparently, different sections cost different amounts of money. When we’d placed the ad, the sales agent had never informed us of this and had just taken it upon herself to put it where she did. (Supposedly thinking that we wanted to save some money by putting it somewhere that wasn’t obvious, rather than spend more and put it where it might draw more attention?)

Needless to say, we cancelled the remaining two days and are going to reinvest the money somewhere else.

I just got my first public comment to Errant Musings – if it weren’t so late, and I hadn’t already brushed my teeth, I’d be breaking something out to drink.

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine the location of the comment.

(Also, while I love Michelle, and hers was the first entry into the database written by somebody other than myself, I can’t help but think that considering hers to be from “the public” would be stacking the deck slightly.)

I guess this means that now I really do have to be careful about what I post…

I just discovered that my Subject: blacklist filter wasn’t working properly – a silly typo was preventing the check from happening. I’ve made the appropriate change. Maybe this is why Michelle has been recently seeing more spam than normal? (Me too, now that I think of it…)

I’ve also slightly increased the tolerance of the SpamAssassin check, as I think that it may have been blocking some recent false positives.

This week I’m going to start working more full time on designing a Web site for J.J. Orr Jewellery. I’ll need to create a database for certain items and link the data into Web based forms via PHP scripts. This is simple enough, and I have all of the background knowledge, but I’ve never actually implemented such an interface yet – so it will be exciting.

There’s also going to be a section on the site for some of the “latest” fashion news. I intend on making use of my experience with Movable Type (the very piece of software responsible for creating the journal entries you’re reading here) to do this.

…at least for a while.

Another round of system updates to my Linux server and another round of things that broke. I soon managed to fix most of these, but some others went undetected for a while. Once pointed out, however, they too got corrected. (After I spent a little while wondering how in the world to do that.)

One issue was a “library” file that was replaced by a newer piece of the system, but which some other pieces relied on. I had to back everything out, get the older file, back it up, upgrade to the newer, then restore the old one so that I had both versions at the same time. (Despite what some of the software installation routines think to be the case.)

Another issue was some faulty installation routines in my mail software. I had to make some manual corrections to some linkages that weren’t done automatically. (Specifically, the latest postfix RPM didn’t rename the binary from the latest sendmail RPM and put the appropriate link in place to its own version.)

Lastly, I spent some time fighting with the upgrade procedures for phpBB 2.0.6, the discussion software that’s used by Ask Virgil. It turned out that the only way to get it to work was to have the upgrade script files in two different places at the same time. Before I stumbled onto this I either got error messages with no other result, or the server simply crashed. Of course this was never explicity mentioned in the documentation or anywhere else…

Up until a few days ago I used to moderate just the Mozilla Builds section of the MozillaZine Forums. Due to some recent reorganization and, I suppose, my contributions and good track record there, I received an email telling me that I’d been made a member of the “Uber Moderators” group. (I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not making this up. If you go to the site and check my name there – jasonb – you’ll see that my title is “Uber Moderator”.)

What this essentially means is that I now have the ability to edit / delete / move messages in more than just the one discussion group. (There are a few that I still don’t have access to.) Just tonight I finally exercised this fearsome ability, and moved an off-topic post (in a location previously off-limits to me) to its appropriate location.

Now if only I could get paid to do this…