Down just a teeny bit today, nothing to get excited about.
However, I am alarmed by this image that’s come into my possession. It appears to show an advanced spacecraft going into warp, or something
Warp Factor What?
(The sharper ones looked a bit too plasticy to bother with, and yes, this is a sign that I really do need to get out and about and take some proper pictures)
I did a bit of reading earlier and it seems that the double translated spam I mentioned earlier is something sploggers[1] have been doing for a while, presumably in an attempt to not be caught by services which look for copies of people’s content being posted by such odd beings. This fails more than a little when they link back to the original site…
Anyway, while looking through my spam comments, I noticed a load of very similar ones. There are minor variations in wording, and they link back to a number of addresses, but they’re all offering something quite wonderful that nobody would want to be without[3]
Hi, i simply needed to come here to inform you about a very inexpensive service that posts comments similar to this on millions of WordPress blogs. Exactly why you may ask, well you may want to sell something and target webmasters or simply just improve the quantity of backlinks your website has which will increase your Google rankins which will then bring your web site more visitors and money. Take a quick take a look at this web site for much more information.
Yes, they’re trying (and failing) to post comments on my site telling me that they can successfully post lots of comments on sites. Now if I was the kind of person who’d want to post huge numbers of irrelevant comments on other people’s sites[4], I think I’d be more impressed by a service that wasn’t so bad at it…[5]
And are Google “rankins” related to Robert Rankin?
And then there are the people running sites that are little more than ad farms who keep trying to get me to link to their articles which have nothing whatsoever in common with what I post here.
[1] Spam bloggers. Strange automated creatures who presumably try to get their presumably ad-infested[2] sites in front of people’s eyes
[2] Wouldn’t know. AdBlock.
[3] Or not
[4] Which I’m not, which is just as well, as I’d have to cross the road to avoid me if I was, which could be tricky
[5] Akismet is doing a good job for me these days
Just yesterday, I was looking through the spam comments that Aksimet has kept away from Losing it[1] and was thinking about a post mentioning some of the weirder bits. Well, today I got something really weird – it looked like a link to my earlier post about XCode breaking iTunes, but when I clicked through to see the source before letting the comment through, I saw this:
Naturally, іf iTunes isn’t іn succession, docking аn iDevice (Pod, Pad οr Buzz) causes іt tο initiation аnԁ ԁο іtѕ usual synchronisation equipment. Nοt thіѕ calculate, even іf. Sο, I ongoing iTunes , whісh аftеr grumbling a bit popped up a helpful thουɡht:
Which would appear to be the result of translating my words into another language then back into English. Badly, and presumably automatically. The original was:
Normally, if iTunes isn’t running, docking an iDevice (Pod, Pad or Phone) causes it to start and do its usual synchronisation things. Not this time, however. So, I started iTunes, which after grumbling a bit popped up a helpful message:
The site’s URL makes it look like a news site for the quite excellent band Elbow, but it appears to be grabbing and mutilating content more or less at random. I won’t link to it, as I’d rather not encourage them…
Well, that was, err, interesting. It’s so rare that I have a software problem with my Macs that I thought I’d mention this one.
While I am not an actual coder, I occasionally like to have a bit of a play with programming languages, so yesterday, I installed the latest version of Apple’s XCode development environment. Nothing unusual there.
What was unusual was that when I docked my iPhone this morning, nothing happened. Normally, if iTunes isn’t running, docking an iDevice (Pod, Pad or Phone) causes it to start and do its usual synchronisation things. Not this time, however. So, I started iTunes, which after grumbling a bit popped up a helpful message:
iTunes was unable to load dataclass information from Sync Services.
Reconnect or try again later
Thinking this might be something to do with that XCode installation confusing things, I restarted the iMac. This time docking the iPhone did make iTunes start 
But then it said
iTunes was unable to load dataclass information from Sync Services.
Reconnect or try again later
It then went on to produce the quite magnificently silly error message:
iTunes could not back up the iPhone “Les Bessant’s iPhone” because the backup session failed.
Which basically says it couldn’t back up because it couldn’t back up. Nice one, guys 
I did a bit of searching, and found various reports of these errors, but most of them applied to running iTunes on Windows rather than Mac OS X, so weren’t that helpful.
Then I added “XCode” to my search, as it seemed to be the likely culprit, and found the answer on the Apple Support Forums, where David Brady reported his fix. Basically, you need to reinstall iTunes, which needs to be done in a particular way which I’ll repeat here in case that link dies at some point. My comments are in italics:
And after that, it worked. No rude messages, just a normal synchronisation.