DON'T PANIC!

I'm getting tired of all the news articles regarding people being outraged at the CERN staff for building the LHC. No, they're not going to blow the Earth to smithereens. Or have it sucked into a black hole. Or turn it into cosmic gravy. Or open a portal to the 8th dimension. And for chrissakes, don't feed trolls like Mark Millar. It's already bad enough that he's a narcissistic, sexist bastard. Don't make him a preacher.

Anathem

I recently picked up Neal Stephenson's latest work, Anathem. It is a fascinating piece of literature, not only because of the science fiction in it, but particularly because NS's novels are very well-researched. He covers topics from a wide variety of fields, spanning geometry, rhetorics, metaphysics, cosmology, and sociology among others. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a fictional work that does a great job at meta-inspection of the knowledge of Western society.

Leopard firewall issues:

Symptoms:

• The firewall will ask you if you want to allow configd and mDNSResponder when you boot up.
  
• Adding the above to the allow list for applications does NOT fix the issue.
• Restoring the com.apple.kerberos.kdc keychains does NOT fi the issue.
  
• Setting the firewall to "allow all incoming connections" temporarily fixes the problem.

Probable cause:

• You removed the battery from your machine, or let it drain, or the OS was not shut down before powering off the machine.

Solution (for me):

• Reset the firewall configuration by restoring /Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist

Edit: Nope, that didn't fix it either. And coreaudiod is on the fritz too. I'm thinking of just disabling the alf altogether (e.g. prevent it from starting in the first place).