HD1s Personal weblog

At the weekend, I went through my credit card statement. Usually, this is a routine task, I look at the amounts and who charged them, measure them against my own meticulous record keeping and schedule a payment. However, the last line on the statement includes a charge from a certain Alliance One in Washington State. Now, the only company I regularly deal with in Washington state is Amazon. I'd never even heard of this lot. Their corporate office number is in Pennsylvania and there is a link to complain about them. I've never seen that before on any website. It's a good touch, but really, mates, are complaints about you so common you need a webpage to process them? I fully intend to file a complaint through my credit card company to dispute this charge as I had never heard of this outfit before and doubt they're on the up and up anyway. Will keep you lot updated as to how things go.

Our (so-called) friends over at the TSA have well and truly come out of the gutter and into the sewer when trying to defend the ridiculous ban on liquids in containers larger than 3 ounces (they call this the 3-1-1 rule). Never mind that the conditions required to set off a liquid explosive in a moving airplane are nigh impossible. America, get off the movie plot threats, please. Defending against them is good press, but in the end, impractical, and possibly counterproductive.

I received a disturbing email from a friend regarding one Rehan Akhtar, pictured to the left, a British national, who found himself stopped by the police in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Mr. Akhtar was going home from the public library sometime last week and witnessed a theft. The police came and asked him for his papers, per SB1070, which Mr Akhtar did not have. The lack of documentation, coupled with a foreign accent, lead the police to send him "back" to Mexico, where, apparently, every person with brown skin comes from.

In response to my mate, Danny's post entitled how google and apple sold out the cellphone revolution, I have to add several more data points. Google would have been accused of favouring one device over the other had they not abandoned the Nexus One. I still have one. It is, save for the lack of a physical keyboard, the best phone I've ever used. And it's unlocked, so I can take it to the UK, and put a Voda SIM into it and it will work fine. However, due to a quirk in frequencies, I'll get 3G in Britain, but not here, because the FCC has mandated the US use different 3G frequencies than the rest of the world. Ditto with the iPhone, I assume.

This weblog is, for better or worse, driven by MySQL, which means upgrading/downgrading is a pain. Indeed, I'm still running the abandoned version 6 such a pain was downgrading to version 5.5. Unlike last time, this was a somewhat planned migration. The steps are after the flip, but basically, you dump your database to a flat file, remove the database directory tree, install the new version, and then restore your data.

I don't know about you, but every time I watch television news at the car dealer, I'd love if the channel would give KML coordinates as QR codes for people to dig deeper into the story.

Readers know I'm a rather big fan of Amazon Kindle, as I have it on every single one of my various devices and love it on all of them. Amazon seems to be aiming to merely control the DRM, not where/how you use it, so they should open the source of the Kindle up and let others design devices using the Kindle's DRM for free. It would be a great boost, though given current trends, it isn't likely to be on their radar at present.

The Guardian has obtained the entire casualty data and an explanation thereof. I'm sure a lot of visualisations are forthcoming; this is just a note apprising me of their existence.