Month: August 2006

Ridiculous clause in the Hotmail terms of service

From Hotmail’s terms-of-service, aka Microsoft Service Agreement, last updated July 2006:
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Potentially Unwanted Software
If you remove or disable “spyware,” “adware” and other potentially unwanted software (“potentially unwanted software”), it may cause other software on your computer to stop working, and it may cause you to breach a license to use other software on your computer (such as where the other software installed the potentially unwanted software on your computer as a condition of your use of the other software). By using features of the service intended to help you remove or disable potentially unwanted software, it is possible that you will also remove or disable software that is not potentially unwanted software. If a feature of the service prompts you before removing or disabling potentially unwanted software, you are solely responsible for selecting which potentially unwanted software the service removes or disables. Before authorizing the removal of any potentially unwanted software, you should read the license agreements for the potentially unwanted software.
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Ahahaa….. yeah, THAT’S gonna happen.

Well hello there


How am I? Well thank you.
A friend recently told me the only time I post is when I’m really busy. It’s a good observation. So here’s to slowing things down a little and getting back to my roots.
Today’s photo, which I took on the way home from work last night, is of the intersection of Fruitville and McIntosh. I love the sky lately. Firery red, juicy orange, vibrant pink.
Grain brought to you by the changing traffic signal.
As for my birthday, it’s tomorrow… thanks for the well wishes everyone! Replying to comments in the last entry: Hil: tea sounds excellent! Cam: you’ll be 30 soon enough buddy 🙂

Apotheosis – O Fortuna


Recently my colleague Michelle got me thinking about oldschool techno, of which it turns out we’re both a fan.
So I decided to look up one of the first underground tracks that I’d ever heard, thanks to Z95.3’s Saturday night radio show, “Club 95”, way back in 1992: Apotheosis’ O’Fortuna. From a user on discogs, here’s the story behind the track:
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richardfloor – 24-Nov-04 01:05 AM
The famous of O’Fortuna track by Apotheosis..maybe one of my favorites of all times and lot of people love it also.. It’s so popular all over the world…..We all know it was banned …deleted out of the market because of the illegal use sample of the classical gospel music carmina burana originally writen and produced by CARL ORFF.. This o fortuna track is just a piece of art … back in 1991 when I first heard it, i was so impress of how smart techno house music can be ..This track is just amazing and is also a collectors item since is totally out of print and hard to find this days!!
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It’s a great track, and I have fond memories of wearing out a crap 60-min Memorex tape I recorded it onto with the family ghetto blaster.
And, lo and behold, the CD single is on eBay. And there’s an item in excellent condition with no bids on it and with a starting price of $9.99! What’s up with that? It had five days left on it, so I was kind of iffy about whether I wanted to alert people that it was out there by bidding on it (that’s a lot of time during which you can get outbid!), but I figured: “what the hell” and plunked in $20 as my max-bid. For those of you who haven’t eBay’ed before, that means, eBay will auto-bid for me in $1.00 increments up to $20. For example, if someone else bids $15, eBay will automatically bid $16 on my behalf. If they had entered $25, however, I would be “outbid”, and would have to place another bid, higher than $25, in order to win the item.
So, that was last night. Today, I got an email notice: “You have been outbid.”
You’d better believe it. I checked the listing immediately after receiving the outbid notice… it’s now at $36!!! Gah. Curious to see where bidding will end up.

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Woes implementing org.xml.sax.ContentHandler

A word to those doing SAX-based XML parsing and implementing the org.xml.sax.ContentHandler interface: Don’t assume all the characters between a “begin” and “end” tag, e.g. given the following XML snippet:
<mycoolelement>My precious data</mycoolelement>
…I’m talking about the “My precious data” part — are returned in a single call to characters(). Yes, most of the time, characters() will smile and give you “My precious data” with a bow on top. But don’t be fooled! Sometimes it’ll give you “My precio” in one call, and “us data” in another. And you have no idea when.
The solution then, is to accumulate the data you receive from characters(), until you get notification the end tag has been reached, and THEN, and ONLY THEN, process the data.
Let’s just say I ran into this, and it’s caused me several hours of grief. Thankfully I was able to learn from others’ experiences (see question, reply, followup and answer). Yay mailing lists and Google!

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