Here's something annoying: people who say "all my efforts are worth it if it only helps one person". It's like "Good grief! Don't you people have any concept of value?!?" Sorry, but most people are not worth that much. Sure, you want to take your time and money and try to help other people, that's great. But don't take my time and money to do it. I don't like people who are disruptive for the sake of trying to get their message across and help "one person". It just seems quite inconsiderate...

Monday night 22:00 and here I am at work goofing off. I'm pretty much done for the day since I'm going to sleep here because I have a class tomorrow morning. Meanwhile two of my cubemates are still here so I can't really do crazy things while they're around. Just my luck to be stuck with a couple of guys who work late often.

I spent an hour or two replacing package import statements from my team's Java code. Package imports are imports where you import the whole package, for example "import java.util.*;". Those import statements will be illegal in Oracle CRM code which I agree with. A package import is a blind import, because you don't guarantee what classes you get. If the imported package gets more classes you might get a name conflict and access the wrong class. That and it's much easier to tell what foreign classes you're using when the imports are explicit.

Anyway, as soon as I saw the email that we needed to do this eventually I went ahead and did it for my team's files. I'm not going to do the whole group since that's dozens of files. It was more of an opportunity to take a break and do something a bit mindless. Not that I was doing all that much work. I was dejectedly working on a bug I need to file with Dialogic. It's just tedious getting log files and running test cases and describing your environment -- trying to provide all the information they'll need all at once so that they don't come back to you with more information. Really, I don't want to look stupid or lazy by not providing enough information for them to diagnose the problem...

ClickTV is dead and I really miss it. Zap2It, which I guess bought out ClickTV doesn't seem to use the ClickTV database. Certainly they don't use the search engine, which is more limited than ClickTV's. The Zap2It database doesn't seem to be as thorough as ClickTV. I'm pretty much resigned to use TV Guide Online which also has a bad database, just not as bad as Zap2It. ClickTV was great: spartan and fast interface, fast servers, good search engine, detailed program descriptions. Simple thing like "what particular episode of Xena is on tonight" is beyond Zap2It and TV Guide Online. I did look around a bit but nothing is even as good as those two second-tier services. Oh well, times change...

As I was runnin my Backup Folder AppleScript yesterday, I noted that two files had I/O errors and wouldn't copy. Upon further investigation I found that they were both corrupted. Now, theoretically Jennifer backs up my web files, but since the first thing a Finder copy does is delete the overwritten file, there was nothing on Jennifer I could recover from. Horror of horrors, for one file was a CoolPix movie that would be lost forever (the other file was one of the Star Trek MP3 files which I can just re-record from tape).

As luck would have it though, I did make a backup of the site for Alicia to use. So I hooked up Alicia's hard drive to Jennifer and retrieved the file. In the process I found out that Alicia's boot drive is quite bad, as I couldn't start Jennifer with the drive in the SCSI chain. That leaves with only one external drive, an old 4 GB from APS. I think I've gone back to deciding to just leave Jennifer on Mac OS 9.1 and not upgrade it to Mac OS X. It works fine now (well, more or less) and I don't want to fuss around with my fileserver. I guess I'll wait until I replace it.