It seems my blaming UPS for not receiving my iPod case was a bit premature:
In any case, it’s now finally arrived in its purply goodness. Without further ado, I therefore bring you, my new iPod case:
Isn’t she a beaut?
To compare, I took a photo along with my matching phone case:
Beautiful awesomeness. Also the cases. And they’re in Britney’s two favorite colors 
I’m apparently unable to make small amounts of food. Last month, I had lasagna because I made a rather excessive amount of bolognese sauce. This month, I decided on casserole.
With that in mind, I started purchasing stuff. First, I started with the meats:
I use hot dogs instead of cocktail sausages as I find I typically get better quality for the same price.
After frying most of that, my 10 liters pot was mostly filled:
I took away half of the meat and froze it down (around 4 liters of cooked meat goodness). I then started adding vegetables:
Root crops are cheap at this time of the year, tasty and healthy. Mix and match as you see fit.
Cooking everything, adding a bit of water (very homeopathic!) salt and pepper, a liberal amount of thickening and half a liter of cream, and I ended up with 10 liters of casserole:
Again, we take something away, and freeze around 4 liters. The rest should be able to sustain me for days. The final step is adding some mashed potatoes as a side and end up with:
Yummy.
Quick recipe for mashed potatoes: boil potatoes, mash them. The more advanced recipe: Do as before and add liberal amounts of butter. Though it hurts me saying so, this is not really needed with the above casserole, as the large amount of meat and cream easily replaces butter for an extra healthy diet.
For an extra homeopathic diet, serve with water. The best way to serve water is in the form of beer.
I have a strong suspicion UPS has just forgotten all about my packet, and left it to rot in Marseille:
I also wonder how my packet is still on time – yesterday ended more than 45 minutes ago, also in Marseille – and why they write that my packet has encountered an exception, seeing as this seems to happen more than half the time. Why not write that the packet has encountered a regular scheduled delay and will arrive later than promised and paid for (with no recompensing, naturally). They could then call the rare fact that a packet arrives on time for an exception and an unscheduled early delivery.
dDist week 7 is all about guest lectures and DNS cache poisoning. Here are my slides, this time lovingly edited in iMovie as the ustream video screwed up the slides; for you this means higher quality and less garbage in the beginning and end of the video.
Get the Flash Player to see this content.
A couple days ago, I discovered that my hard disk was failing. I decided that the best COA was to do nothing about it except posting on my blog. The reason is that I’ve been using Time Capsule and Time Machine for hourly backups for very long (since the beginning of September 2009, where I upgraded to Snow Leopard and archived my old backup), so I was not nervous about losing any data (my most recent backup was only 10 minutes old).
So, yesterday I decided to reboot my computer and test out the hard disk using the installation media. This did… Something. Anyway, I was not able to boot my computer afterwards. I did not really want to spend any time figuring out what the problem was, so I decided to just say screw it and reestablish my backup.
Only problem was that I have a bunch virtual machines, 50 GiB worth of them, I didn’t have recent backups off (generational backups take too much space for those). Luckily, I has spare room on my server and could just copy them over. If I could mount it (I could not boot the computer). Luckily, the installation media had already booted my old installation and allowed me to escape to a command prompt, and after issuing a
mkdir /Volumes/Users mount_afp afp://michael:<password>@coherent/Users /Volume/Users
I could back up all virtual machines using
cp -Rv /Volumes/morphism/Users/michael/Library/Parallels /Volume/Users/Shared/Dropbox
This of course, took a quite a while (though, backup is not too bad when it happens at 1750 MiB/minute). It is also possible to see the backup in my server stats for the last couple days. The two big spikes are backup and restore, the small spikes before the big spike is the hourly backup of my server and the silence between is me disabling backup while restoring the operating system onto my desktop.
After that, I decide to zero out the hard disk (write 0 over all old data). This exercises the disk and locates any bad sectors, hopefully prolonging the life. It does not, however solve the problem. It only allows me to use the hard disk without fear that too much data is lost. Because I have a backup and can restore to any point in time in the last 6 months. Otherwise, this is a big no-no and will corrupt your data.
Also, it seems my drive really is failing big time, to the point I will need a new one and soon:
