hacked by cyber_hunter

The last two weeks AIM has gone to hell in a handbasket.  While private chat still works normally, group chat (aka chat rooms) has become almost unusable.  People are being locked out of group chat left and right, and for no apparent reason.  At first I thought AOL might be updating their servers one at a time, as initially it was just one person at a time being locked out of the Daria chat room I frequent.  But the last few days have seen multiple people being locked out simultaneously.  Currently it is unknown if anyone is able to access that chat room: five of us who frequent the room are all locked out, and are using IRC as I type this.

As I mentioned here, some of us who are especially computer savvy have been experimenting with other chat systems, including IRC and Jabber.  The general consensus appears to be to use IRC.  It remains to be seen if AIM will fix itself or if a full migration to IRC will be necessary to maintain chat among Daria fans.  Ironically, there’s still an old IRC channel for Daria fans that’s been running since the late 90’s.

Last night I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Leopard.  Installation took less than two hours and went without a hitch.  None of the problems that have been reported have shown up, even though I chose the “Upgrade” option rather than “Archive and Install” or “Erase and Install”.  Only two programs so far have died on me: Google Earth (fixed by downloading the latest version) and Photoshop Elements 2 (which will cost some money to upgrade).  There’s a few other apps which potentially might be broken, but I haven’t gotten around to checking them yet.  The app with the most changes is iChat.  The buddy list is handled differently, with offline buddies thrown into a separate category.  A nice addition is a chat room manager, which can be programmed with your favorite chat rooms.  It is currently unclear if it handles Jabber better than the previous version of iChat.  There’s also some new video chat features, but I haven’t checked those out since I never do video chats.  Unfortunately, AIM is so fucked up of late that it appears I’ll be moving a lot of my chatting over to IRC, which iChat doesn’t support.   The overall appearance of the GUI has been standardized and noticeably altered.  The old brushed metal look has disappeared in favor of the matte gray look that iTunes and some other apps have been using for a while now.  The menu bar, which has been solid white since Macintosh was first released 23 years ago, is now translucent.  How good it looks depends on how bright or dark the desktop pattern is.  It would be nice if the translucence was adjustable.  The Finder looks more like iTunes now, with the same side bar design.  It also has Cover Flow, which I regard as useless eye candy (fortunately, you don’t have to use it). The Dock has been altered as well.  The translucent background has become a plain stretching off to infinity that mirrors the icons above it.  The black triangles that indicated which apps were open have been replaced by glowing blue ovals which look like something from a movie about aliens.  Finally, there’s Stacks, which are folders placed on the Dock which spring open when you click on them, producing a curved column of files.  Most people seem to hate it, but I dunno.  It works well enough for the Downloads folder. One thing I haven’t gotten to yet is Time Machine, for backing up the hard drive.  Once I’m certain everything is good to go I’ll activate that.  Overall, Leopard is a pretty good update.

As promised, I’ve posted the revamped Commuter Rail gallery. Photos are divided by line, starting with Rockport and ending with Greenbush. Enjoy.

I’ve created a new page just for Boston Engine Terminal. The first 46 images (most of the first two pages in the new gallery) are from the old commuter rail page, while the rest are new. New is relative, of course, as some of the new ones are from last fall. In the near future I will be replacing the other commuter rail page with a new one that covers everything besides BET.

I also need to get in touch with my hosting provider, as I’ve lost all FTP access to my site for the time being. I can log in, but then it hangs trying to load the directory. That means I can’t do anything with Contribute at all, and the only way to add stuff is to go through my CPanel and add each file individually.

I’ve posted a few new photos of the construction at Ashmont here (the last four photos on that page). Trackwork on the new trolley loop has finally started. None of the trolley wire has been strung yet, but the hangers are in place. Just as important, work has finally begun on the new station, with the framework for about a quarter of the new roof in place. Not much more can be built without blocking off more of the inbound platform. Best estimates are that the trolley will be running again by the end of this month.

I have begun work on redoing my Commuter Rail pages. I have a lot of new photos to add, and a lot of work to do on the galleries themselves. Since there’s so many of them, I’m going to put my Boston Engine Terminal photos into a new gallery. Among the new photos are some from the brand new Greenbush Line, which saw it’s first day of revenue service on Wednesday, October 31. I was there to ride one of the trains from South Station to Greenbush and back.

Apple released Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” this evening. I went down the Apple Store in Braintree for the event. Photos and a video are here. I pickd up a copy of Leopardfor myself, plus one of the free t-shirts they were giving away as part of the event. I’ll wait a few days before installing Leopard - I’ll let other people find out what the bugs are

UPDATE: I added another image to the gallery.

Thanks to my friend Slobbergoat, my homepage automatically shows my latest blog post.

I’ve updated my Greensboro page with some fall foliage pictures. The can be found on the lower half of this page. Enjoy!

In the last week I’ve noticed that at least three albums have been removed from Amazon MP3. Two of them were ones I had wanted to buy songs off of, and the third was the one I mentioned in my previous review with the mixed-up song titles. I have no idea if the other two albums had the same problem, but that is the only reasonable explanation I can come up with. Given that I have only looked at six dozen or so albums with the intention of actually buying songs, this problem appears to be much more widespread on Amazon than I would have expected. I hope Amazon resolves this and brings back those albums quickly.

The head of litigation at Sony BMG effectively just called most of their customers thieves. While testifying in one of the numerous music-piracy trials, she claimed that ripping CDs to make backups or to put music on an iPod was stealing. What an idiot. I hope Sony loses the case big-time.