Cox Crow

Last year, Amazon enabled buyers to contribute to presidential campaigns. Today, Amazon and the Red Cross enabled buyers to help with disaster relief. As of 21:57 EST, they have raised

The Associated Press reports that few animals were killed in the tsunami.

ALA NATIONAL PARK, Sri Lanka - Wildlife officials in Sri Lanka expressed surprise Wednesday that they found no evidence of large-scale animal deaths from the tsunamis — indicating that animals may have sensed the wave coming and fled to higher ground.

An Associated Press photographer who flew over Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park in an air force helicopter saw abundant wildlife, including elephants, buffalo, deer, and not a single animal corpse.

Dumb? Perhaps. Ignorant? Not when it comes to survival.

Dear Spammers:

I’m getting more than a little annoyed by the comment spam. None of your spams will be permitted, and none will contribute to an increase in PageRank.

If you would re-enter civil society, I welcome you. Otherwise, I will continue to ask my Congresscritters to institute the death penalty for this behavior.

Naff off.

Maybe if setup.exe were a shell script, then the author would have fixed his mistake. Anyway, when one upgrades from a down-level version of Internet Explorer to any version greater than or equal to 4.0, said installer program, or one of its descendent processes, may complain that

Error Initializing the cache. Shutdown all programs and run scandisk or chkdsk. Delete the cache, cookies and history directories in your windows directory and then restart IE. If the problem persists reinstall IE.

If one then attempts to delete those files, and can’t, because Access is Denied. You Don’t Have Permissions or the File is in Use, then one may want to find and kill the process which has the file handle open.

Thanks to Mark Russinovich of SysInternals, this is easy. His Handle program displays a list of open files, much like lsof(8) does on *U?X systems. It is essential.

But, Microsoft, you wrote when this problem first surfaced, on Windows 95, that

The presence of one or more of these files prevents Runonce from creating the Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, or History folder that Microsoft Internet Explorer needs to store cached data.

I don’t suppose it occured to y’all to test for the existence of those files before attempting to create them? Or, at the very least, correcting it so that the problem might only apply to that particular release?

No? I didn’t think so.

With the great disaster in our minds, and the end of the fiscal year looming, now is a good time to balance our accounts.

How much did you spend this year on goods from companies which oppose you? How much did you oppose them?

How much did you do to help yourself? How much did you do to help others?

In response to the error message

error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Invalid argument (22)
error: db4 error(22) from dbenv->open: Invalid argument
no packages
rpmdb: Program version 4.2 doesn't match environment version

do

mv /var/lib/rpm/__* /tmp ; rpm --rebuilddb

The database indices have become unreadable, for the reason given, and need to be rebuilt. In the above command we move the previous versions to /tmp and allow them to be deleted later if they aren’t needed. Wildcats and BOFHs may wish to simply rm(1) the indices.

Novarese points to the Department of Justice’s memorandum on the Second Amendment, “Whether the Second Amendment Secures an Individual Right.” It’s a bit long for reading online.

In A Christmas Carol, Dickens warns to beware Ignorance, for he is the Doom of Man.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

The tsunami killed more because of ignorance. Many wondered at the strange sight of the seas rushing away from land, and children rushed to play in it. And then died.

Amazon needs to integrate with AllConsuming.

But the AllConsuming API doesn’t do PUT, and the Amazon webservices don’t permit modification of the wishlist.

The desired feature is the addition of an item to “my collection,” and the removal of an item from “my wishlist.” Now, Amazon could implement this as a new feature of their service, so that I can maintain a copy of my catalog there, or the LazyWeb could tie the two data sets together.

We all had a merry Christmas, despite some aches and ills. I hope you did too.

I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this before, but if you don’t want more people living where you live, don’t pretend to be fair-minded and make zoning changes intended to control the population growth by decreasing housing density. Be straightforward and honest about it: place a maximum on the population of the area, not the housing density. You’ve been trying to control an effect, not the cause.

I picked up Images of America: Putnam County the other day while Christmas shopping. I find this series from Arcadia Publishing both interesting and depressing. Interesting, to see what was, and depressing to consider how things might have developed differently than they did. I suppose if I were an enthusiastic admirer of our local built environment, then my opinion might be different, but I think that Sturgeon’s Law applies fully to much of anything built since the middle 20th Century.

Or maybe I’m just tired of having to drive everywhere.

Joel Spolsky whips out a copy of Visicalc to demonstrate the economics of pricing, its effect on demand, and price discrimination as the road to profit — or to Hell, as the case may be.

Price discrimination involves altering the price of a good for each customer according to their willingness to pay. Bob is willing to pay $50 for the good, but Alice is willing to pay $25. Our costs are under $25, so we’d prefer to sell to both Bab and Alice, thus maximizing our profit. The classic means of price discrimination are bargaining and auctions. More modern means include different media formats, coupons, rebates, brand cachet, and distinguishing between buiness and residential customers. The problem with price discrimination is that customers feel bilked.

Another means is changing the price over time. Early adopters, the least price sensitive, will pay handsomely, while the more price sensitive customers will purchase the good later, after the price drops.

My wife is lost somewhere in Pound Ridge. The cellular service is only good enough for a few seconds of talking. This is not long enough for me to find out where she is, but plenty good enough to transmit her GPS co-ordinates. But our phones are too incompetent to do that. They know exactly where they are, so they can tell the snoops and E-911, but they won’t tell us.

On my phone, the LG VX6000, location information is revealed to E-911 by default, but it can tell others. The settings option choices are

• Location On
• E911 Only

OK. Now WTF did that do? Nothing.

Perhaps what I’m saying is that all phones, by default, if they know where they are, should tell the holder. Not just this or this or this other party.

Comments are enabled, but moderated. I tolerate no spam, and wield a wicked pen.

Merry Yule!

• “PLAYING WITH URBAN LIFE: How Simcity Influences Planning Culture,” The Next American City, October 2004
• http://www.planetizen.com/news/item.php?id=15294

Chris Gillen reports that Herr Hitler was a tax evader, before suddenly finding himself forgiven in 1935.

When you use something frequently enough, its use becomes autonomic. So-called “muscle memory” causes you to use vi keystrokes in Microsoft Word, for example.

Mozilla Firefox takes advantage of this: / will bring up the find function.