the snargawok blog

Say no to internet filtering.

This is going to be an epic battle in which I really can’t see the Church of Scientology winning. Wikileaks has posted the full Operating Thetan here. On the same page is the Church of Scientology’s response in the form of a threatening letter from their lawyers. And here is an analysis of the so-called sacred documents.

Here’s another random combination of numbers and letters, for your enjoyment:

ed2k://|file|scientology-ot-levels.pdf|17788660|977911F17568753C60114C13A0FDEA4B|/

I just feel like sharing some random hex pairs:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

From 100,000 to over 2 million google search results growth in one day… The impressive power of blogs.  They are going to have a hard time censoring the above hex number. A couple of related amusing links:

A poem written around the banned number.

One of the main Digg threads, while it lasts… (scroll down for great ascii art).

This guy has tattooed the banned number onto his chest.

I’m sure there’ll be many more amusing works of art created. It’s DeCSS all over again.

If you updated your operating system correctly to the latest timezone updates – tzdata-2006p (which you probably have, as most distributions have provided updates automatically), then you would have noticed that mythtv’s internal program guide hasn’t skipped a beat, provided mythtv’s TimeOffset setting is set to “Auto”. All your shows should be recording at the correct time. Mythweb, however, will have still been one hour out (ie “Ten News at Five” displays as being at 1600h on mythweb only). Mythweb is PHP based, and as such doesn’t use your operating system’s timezone data. PHP has it’s own timezone database. As of this date, the 2006p timezone update has made it into php’s upstream CVS, but as far as I’m aware, there have been no official releases of php since that commit. You could grab a diff from PHP’s CVS here, and compile your own version, but I suggest a much simpler work around until an official version filters down to the various distros: edit php.ini and set date.timezone = Asia/Tokyo which is the required +0900 offset that we need. Restart apache and your mythweb will be fixed.

Every time I’ve dealt with them – in person or over the phone, I’ve felt like strangling somebody. They have broken promises to follow up on many issues we had, particularly to do with incorrect (in their favour) rent collected. Many of their agents, including the head honcho (Dee Gow) seem to have attitude problems (“we’ve been doing this for xx years, so dont tell us how to do our job…” sort of attitude). Thankfully the property we live in is not managed by them any more, but we were quite amused to talk to the new real estate agents (who have been wonderful) and find that they had a very bad experience dealing with Gow in the changeover procedure. Changing over to Gow was also apparently a major issue for the real estate agents we had previous to Gow (and a bad experience for us also).

Gow Real Estate – you should avoid them in my opinion.

I hope this information is helpful to somebody

Symptoms: Randomly doesn’t start. After anywhere between 30 seconds to 60 minutes (or longer), the injectors pulse once (click) and the fuel pump fires up for a few seconds. After this point, the car starts normally. Sometimes (less often) the engine stops whilst driving, followed by the above procedure of waiting for the “problem” to reset. ECU code retrieval (bridge pins 5 and 6 on the diagnostics connector under the dash – watch flashing engine light) reveals error code 46 (No Reference Signal while cranking). Problem seems worse after stopping the motor and trying to restart it, for about an hour or so afterwards.

The Problem: faulty Hall Effect sensor located in the distributor.

Info and some hints: VS (and probably VR and VN etc) Holden Commodores with V8 motor do not have a crank angle sensor on the front like the V6 ecotech. The only way the computer knows when to pulse the injectors and fire the electronic ignition is from the hall effect sensor in the distributor, which activates each time a gap in the hall rotor passes by it. Obviously the hall rotor has 8 gaps. Some tips: Dont muck around – remove the bonnet straight away. Grab some soft pillows to put on the engine so you can kneel on it – getting the distributor out is really tricky, because theres only a very small gap between the intake manifolds and the firewall. It does pull out though, although mine was really really stiff. Siemens don’t make the original hall sensor anymore, you can get a “universal” replacement from most good auto parts shops. You’ll need to drill the rivets out of the old sensor and attach the new one accurately in the right position, as well as solder/rewire it into the existing connector.

-update: you can get the exact replacement part from Altronics and probably Jaycar