holygoat.co.uk

Possible cause for concern

Combine this:

Discussion of the downsides of Apple being in your app signing chain

with this

Google disabling my AdSense account without recourse

… and you end up with a worrying future.

Google what?

I got a form email this morning from Google AdSense, letting me know that my account was disabled for posing a “significant risk” to their advertisers. Apparently this is not an uncommon problem (ask adsenseaccountdisabled.org!). A few months ago, just like Paul, I got my first AdSense payment. Every few months I log in and check my stats. It's not a significant number of clicks… and I don't even see the ads myself. Is it the sponsorship in the sidebar?

Apparently it's not worth appealing — you won't find out why, and you probably won't be reinstated. Thanks, Google.

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Kindle

I just watched (or re-watched?) the Amazon Kindle video. It really is very compelling; smaller than I expect every time I see it, and it would make reading much more accessible. I might even mail documents and reference material to the device, and you can take notes, do dictionary lookups, etc.

If I began commuting on the train, it might be a worthwhile investment of $370 — just as soon as I've finished reading the pile of books in my queue. That's the problem, y'see — I can't “import” my existing dead-tree books, and (unless I want to read out-of-print free books) that means I have to start buying content to get any use out of the device.

I'd love to see a feature like the copy-protection used in old computer games: “what's the third word on the fourth line of page 120?”. Get it right, and you get the ebook for free.

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Skype: Failed to sign in: unable to mount database

This thread on the Skype forums about being “unable to mount database” is full of dangerous brute-forcing. There's no need to delete your entire user folder. I deleted a couple of old .lck fils and index*.dat, and all was well.

I get to keep my chat history and everything else about my account. Don't follow their instructions!

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Death

I'm working on my will, last wishes, etc. this afternoon. As with many things, once you start to dig into the process of your own death, you realise there is a lot to think about: what to do with your organs; who to invite to the funeral; dragging together witnesses; etc.

At this rate, I think it will be much more convenient to not die at all.

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Hashing and caching

I've heard it said that computer science is an exercise in the application of caching. Sometimes I think that it's an exercise in the application of hashing.

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Long time no blog

Quite apart from my (interrupted) flirtation with GTA IV, I've been so busy with an endless parade of work, things to do, and miscellanea that I've had no time to blog! Soon, I promise.

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Backend rewrite

I spent this afternoon fixing my blog's speed problem: I dumped all 1,500 posts into MySQL, and rewrote the frontend to use it. Database queries are faster than munging 1,500 files over a slow NFS link on a busy server. Let me know if you see any problems.

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