Plantagenet Penguinista

On my way to a day spent mostly fixing stuff at and from my book-keeper’s place I dropped into the local (Stirling) continental supermarket and ordered a salad roll. I got handed a serious salad roll, although definitely not up to Stewart’s praiseworthy standards for victualic purity. It had heft. It’s not often that one gets to heft a salad roll. It also had a serious layer of cheese, and interestingly continental things like eggplant and dried tomato. If I’d wrung it out over my bike’s chain, it undoubtedly would not have squeaked at all on my way home. And it tasted seriously delicious, except for the polystyrene white-bread roll, but even then the flavour of the contents completely overrode the flavour of the styrene substrate. So... if you’re in Perth’s northern suburbs and interested in a salad(ish) roll with oomph, drop into the supermarket at the Stirling Village Shopping Centre on the corner of Cedric and Sanderling Streets, Stirling. (-:

It seems that FeedBurner also offer free deAtomising services and without the ads. The RSS feed is formatted to be reasonably readable with a web browser, too.

Thanks to nudging from “notthewest” and “m” I figured out how you can get your Penguinista randomness as an RSS feed . Many thanks to 2RSS .

Sign on Greenwood station. Evidently, people noticed the station attendants running off with patrons’ gear, so the administrators decided to extend them some official protection. (-:

I’ve been meaning to take soem snapshots of a garden at the bottom of our street which has mastly natives in it. Today, I took the time to do it. The banksias around here are all red, except for this one, which has yellow blooms: Another native in the bunch which quite impressed me reminds me of a bookmark. The red blooms have a kind of tasselly thing that they do. It also has smooth gumnut-like seed pods which grow directly on the stems at junctions (you can see some out-of-focus ones in the background):

The FOSTFLG Beastie’s steering creaked occasionally under stress, which distressed me so I disassembled the streering boss to find out why. I’m guessing that they do this so that under extreme force (ie, a collision), the handlebars will twist out of the way rather than gutting someone, but still it’s hardly a mechanism for inspiring confidence. I reassembled it with some water-dispersant oil so that it would twist and slide a little rather than creak and wear, then did the centre-bolt up tight so now I only have to worry about the bolt shearing instead of worrying about suddenly going hands-free through lack of friction. Oh, joy.

If anyone in WestOz has a paintball gun I can borrow for a week or two, that would be much appreciated. Also, if you know where to get pressure and ammo for same in the far northern suburbs, that would be likewise appreciated. Email to me within the cyberknights com au domain or ’mobile 0409-655-359. Ali Russell is shopping for hay in the wrong places. Over here it’s about $12 for a small square bale of oaten hay (about $6 for pasture or lucenre hay) and $60 for a round bale (which has considerably more than 10 small bales in it (typically 30-35, the density of all bales varioes enormously depending on the hay itself, the baling gear, settings on the bailng gear, moisture content, yadda yadda) but 3/4 of a tonne is a good rule of thumb for round bales — if you have the space for them) or super-bales (car-sized square bales) are around $150/t delivered. You can fit a round bale in a 1t 6x4 trailer, with suitable straps. At those rates, Ali should esily best Rusty’s car’s mileage. (-:

... Sandra Mansell’s call to condemn any plan to ban head-scarfs in schools despite having never worn one, being utterly unlikely to ever wear one, yadda yadda. First off, this’ll annoy the many Brethren using Western Australian schools. Brethren generally keep to themselves, are quiet, polite and respectful. We should be, if anything, encouraging these traits in school-children. Second off, it’s a sure-fire way to push moderate, rational and friendly Muslims toward being immoderate, irrational and unfriendly. That’s just plain dumb .

#1 son Xan’s Thunderbird 2 birthday cake. No drop-out cargo section, but he did get to eat the flames at the back, so he was happy. There were questions about my suitability for parenthood when I suggested that the icing for the flames should have included some chili powder,

Nephew Christopher holds up his entry in the jube-and-toothpick construction competition at #1 son’s birthday party: a 2x2 pyramid of tetrahedrons. Apparently, it’s important to keep the round side of the jubes upwards during construction.

Those of you who haven’t visited the Flying Spaghetti Monster site yet need to. It’s a riot! (-: One thing which struck me was that the site presents its case as if there were only three alternative theories of origins, namely Evolution, Intelligent Design and Pastafarianism. RealLife™ is seldom that simple, and it turns out that there is actually an enormous range of options to speculate on. Here’s an (incomplete) laundry list, presented roughly as a spectrum from least interventionist to most. Gradualist Evolution AKA Naturalism The basic idea here is that in the face of literally incredible odds, everything just fell together over time. Plasma begat hydrogen, which eventually formed stars; hydrogen begat other elements, which eventually formed planets; somewhere, somehow, enough molecules all bounced the right way (perhaps in “some warm little pond”, perhaps through radiant bombardment, perhaps via a clay template) and formed a self-reproducing assembly; this self-reproducing assem

I noticed this interesting effect tonight. This “insect-repellent” CF luminaire doesn't attract insects — but light reflected from it by the wall behind does. If you look at the image, you can see that the wall has plenty of insects (in reality, about a quarter the density that a standard “warm white” would attract), but none circling the fitting (the standard fitting has dozens circling it constantly). I wonder if, with a bit of chemical cunning, a paint could be devised which reflected strongly in those wavelengths regarded by insects as uninsteresting or even repellent? The result would be an insect-repellent surface. Not useful for keeping your windscreen clean, but if it halved the number of mozzies trying to batter their way through your flywire it might be helpful.

...but... it’s still a long way to cycle home from the city, and leaves an old fatso on a low-quality bike quite worn out. If anyone in Perth(ish) has an XboX MechAssault CD (the original version) which I can borrow or buy, ’t’would be much appreciated.

Read the 3rd and 5th posts. Consider also the characters’ relative ranks in the game. Thanks to Blaine Wilhelm on baen.humor for the link.

This interesting texture was hiding in an East Perth back-alley. It’s a pallet, which appears to have been made out of very, very coarse wood-chips. The field of view is about 10cm across. I guess the larger chunk size makes for stronger chipboard.

So what do you do with a dark and dingy bathroom with a single bayonet light-fitting rated at sixty watts? You trot down to Bunnings (of “buy-pass Bunnings” fame) or WA Salvage and nab yourself a 50W Nelson compact flourescent lamp. No, that’s not a replacement for a 50W incandescent lamp, that’s a CF lamp which draws 50W and allegedly replaces a 240W incandescent. This motherous great device is a good 20cm long, so don’t expect it to fit into a tiny enclosure. It has ventilation slots around the base, so I wouldn’t think it’d be much chop outdoors or without ventilation indoors. This throws more light through the en-suite doorway into the bedroom than either of the 60W incandescents in the actual bedroom throw.

(at least, for the many competent ones, same as any other trade) Tuesday night: headache/nausea Wednesday morning: up at 4AM, headache/nausea/vomiting Wednesday lunch: visit Bob Scott at the Como Chiropractic Clinic Wednesday afternoon: headache (note: no nausea/vomiting) This morning: up at 4AM, feeling great, doing stuff. Ride ~30km home from Perth, discover some horrible truths about Perth’s cycleway system. First truth: the cycleways are definitely an afterthought. In many places you get tossed onto nearby roads and left to fend for yourself for a km or two. Some of the routes are so tortuous that I kept expecting to see a big lump of cheese to announce the achivement of some incomprehensible-to-me milestone. In one place, the “cycleway” is sueezed into a bare metre (or less) between a cyclone-mesh fence and a limestone wall; in another, it's a concrete path not more than 700mm across. Second truth: the run more-or-less up the freeway takes you past that green plastic eyesore i

Nothing takes the shine off your day like waking up at 4:30AM with a screaming headache, and then vomiting. Y’all who aren’t indulging in this delightful pastime consider how fortunate you are. A little, ahem, taste of what morning sickness can be like, I guess. Just carelessness, too. All of the warning signs have been there for a day or two, but I allowed myself to be distracted yesterday until after my chiro had closed.

Went all the way around Lake Joondalup today. Needed it, too. Will be seeing a chiropractor tomorrow as well. Nice, smooth sealed dual-use path from about 2k north of us to about the same on the other side, then (continuing clockwise) several km of rough limestone track, short burst of nice path, longer burst of “triple-use roadway” then absolutely nothing, not even a footpath (except for a very short burst of concrete outside a new estate which is —ing useless ”coz it begins and ends in sand some way from the road and is hemmed in by gardens so there’s no way on or off except the pram ramp each side of the entry halfway along it) alongside Wanneroo Road all the way back down to the Shire depot, then dive in south of the pine plantation toward the lake again and back on the path. The sealed bit on the southern stretch, west side is quite nice, buried deeply enough in the bush that even the traffic noises are hushed to inaudibility — and I met absolutely nobody on my whizz through ther

Got to patch my bike’s front tube today. That’s gotten a lot easier over the years — I have memories of vulcanising stuff and little baby tyre levers to get the rubber on and off the rim, but it’s all chemicals and comes apart by hand — could probably have done it without removing the wheel. Careful inspection of the nuts, bolts and threaded holes as I undid everything suggests that this bike’s front wheel has never been off the forks before. No point in patching it, of course, ’coz the sky fell in about ten minutes after I was done. Busy writing up 6000 words about Moodle today. If you’re a trainer or teacher of any sort and haven’t had a good hard look at Moodle yet, now’s your chance. It’s a serious swiss army knife of a CMS, course presenter, document management system, surveyor, yadda yadda.

The long and the short of this is: if Linus does not pick up and realistically use the Linux trademark in Australia, we will one day face another situation in which a private entity wishes to control the name “Linux” here, or perhaps someone’s stupid enough to think that they can succeed where The SCO Group is failing embarassingly badly at being a troll under the bridge. The LinuxMark organisation was formed specifically to pursue recognition of Linus’ title to the name “Linux” worldwide, and in Australia, naturally enough, turned to Linux Australia for the actual execution of the plan. LA in turn assigned Open Source author and legal advocate Jeremy “Spammer Slammer” Malcolm to the case. So far, so good. Now comes this bunch of turkeys from SlashDot mailing LA’s Press people to accuse Jeremy of being a money-grubbing Microserf, Scientology lackey and Lord knows what else, and to demand an accounting from LA for their part in this nefarious plot. I quote, with great relish, from

Note that ww. domainname and wwww. domainname work just as well, so if you define these in your DNS, people who make a typoe will still reach you. With a little more work, you can redirect them to either www. domainname or plain domainname without any w’s at all . UseCanonicalName Off LogFormat "%V %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" vcommon CustomLog logs/access_log vcommon RewriteEngine on RewriteLog "/var/log/httpd/rewrite_log" RewriteLogLevel 0 RewriteMap lowercase int:tolower RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/icons/ RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /var/www/$1 [L] RewriteRule ^(.+)$ %{lowercase:SERVER_NAME}$1 RewriteRule ^w*\.(.+)/(.*)$ /var/www/virtual/$1/$2 [L] RewriteRule ^(.+)/(.*)$ /var/www/virtual/$1/$2 [L] Et viola! Dump a website’s files in /var/www/virtual/ domainname / and define a DNS entry for it, and she’s apples. For the terminally lazy (like me), you can even define a wildcard A-r

Some of the most amazing photo opportunities pop up when you have no camera with you. Driving up to brother-in-law Jamie’s place on Friday afternoon (SIL is still partying on in banana bender territory), the sky was pretty much filled with a big blue pancake of cloud. It felt very “Independence Day”. Around the rim of the cloud, the sky was filled with a white haze which had been around for several days at the time. In this white haze floated little blue cousins of the motherhsip: blue clouds in a white sky. And no camera. Earlier that day, sorting through the last dregs of moving, I ran across the memory stick which shipped with my first real camera, a Sony DSC-F505: an MSA-4A totalling a massive 4MB. My current (waaay obsolete) DSC-F707 could — but only if you chose your shots carefully — fit two whole photos on that as JPEGs at full rez. That brings to mind the full height five megabyte Winchester drives which were an AUD$3000 option for the DEC Rainbow in 1981, or the two megabyte

Left Miss 4.5 at the table to finish her dinner for two minutes last night to attend to her brother, returned to find this. There are days when I wish it was an option for me, too:

Not entirely sure what to make of this, but I suppose it’s better than 4500 messages in one day telling me how good something called “Software 3000” is (if you see anything called that, please hit it with a sledge for me. repeatedly.) — the original message is of course utterly bereft of MIME types or charsets: Date: 17:07:08 Sun 14-Aug-2005 +0800 From: "Roselyn Roe" <Roselyn@fxpal.com> To: "Calogera Petty" <susich@ one.of.my.domains > <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <html><head> <title>404 Not Found</title> </head><body> <h1>Not Found</h1> <p>The requested URL /d/a9.txt was not found on this server.</p> <hr> <address>Apache/2.0.54 (Fedora) Server at mega5.valnews.org Port 80</address> </body></html>

Wipes away grease like a magic wand. Wipes away dirt, weeds, chalk, labels, all sorts of stuff with equal facility. Cleans flyscreens, exorcises webs. And doesn’t do my back in. Gotta get me one of these toys for myself. I don’t usually enjoy the process of cleaning things, although the final result is often pleasing; there’s a lot of hard work involved before anything rewarding happens, but this gadget can do in seconds what formerly took many minutes of back-breaking scrubbing, sometimes in uncomfortable postures. Looking forward to the end of the interminable to-do list involved in moving house. Having trouble remembering when I last felt fresh and relaxed instead of tired and worn.

Starting to settle in here, and as seems to be traditional for moving in the hot water system is on the fritz — yes, you can have a warmish shower, but it takes half a minute to fill a cup with water. One of the many difficult-to-explain features of this new residence is what I’ve dubbed “the bizarrebecue”, a gas barbecue decorated with concreted-on power-pole insulators and sea-shells. Amongst the many odd features are gas fittings exposed to the elements (not a trace of shelter); a gas pipe leading across the rocks to a gas-bottle simply laid in the garden on its side (against a plastic pipe whose purpose we have yet to discern), hotplate edges turned upwards to hold the fat in instead of letting it drain, and a last supper which appears to consist largely of sand. The house also sports zero outside lights, and many switches which don’t appear to actually control anything. Given that one of the major engineering feats of the previous owner was dropping antenna cables down the side of

Hi, Darl. I see you’re being dishonest again . It’d be really nice if you could shoot straight for a change, but I think Kerry’s Dad will be selling snowplows in Hell first. Three years ago, when I first joined The SCO Group, we focused the company on the area that was most profitable and provided the most benefit to customers, investors, resellers, developers and employees: UNIX No, you focused the company on suing people, which was most profitable to lawyers and provided some golden parachutes for your buddies. People thought we were crazy. They were right. But since SCO owns the UNIX operating system The SCO Group does not own UNIX® in any sense of the word. The Open Group owns the UNIX trademark, definition and other rights , The SCO Group does not. The SCO Group doesn’t even own the UnixWare® or OpenServer® code, the rights to those are held by Novell and TSG use them only by permission and under certain conditions — which they have violated. Apparently you personally have had a b

When your disk controller card fails, you can drop the disks into another machine, or replace the card with almost anything else, and you’re back in business within minutes-to-hours; I’m very happy that this machine is not under my purvey. The manufacturer does indeed have spares for these AUD$3500 RAID cards... somewhere in the world. The customer’s main server might be back in business tomorrow if they’re lucky, or Thursday. The machine went wonky late yesterday morning, and it took until this morning for assorted experts to figure out what was actually dead. Meanwhile, production on several of their lines stops. These guys have had more RAID controllers fail in their LOB server machines than disks. As at now, they would have been better off without RAID.

This Eric Laffoon article singing the praises of the GPL and TrollTech’s relationship to it said this: 500 years ago the printing press ended the dark ages with an unprecedented sharing of ideas. The internet offers dramatically more potential. Given that the GPL is all about sharing information, a leading representative of a new way of thinking about information, a shorter way of putting that is: The GPL will have at least as much impact on society as the invention of the printing press did. I’ve thought around the issue a bit, and a few yesses and nos raised their heads so far, but nothing lethal and nothing requiring significant amendment. FOSS in general and the GPL in particular has made software for most purposes readily, legally available. The printing press did the same for “brain software” — the records and techniques which made training beyond the apprentice system and possible independently of the extant political authorities feasible. It may be argued that computers have m

So, having spent a week moving house, what does one do for relaxation? To unwind? Naturally, one’s 15yo daughter needs to notch up some abseiling (at least 12 descents using at least 5 different devices) as a key part of earning some credentials which are really important to her, so one drives one’s battered and worn body — along with seven others considerably less battered and worn — for forty minutes down to Statham Quarry in Gooseberry Hill, and spends the day running up hills, carrying stuff, staring into the sky and tugging on ropes as a belayer, and taking photos of people, rocks and wildlife. Some of the stuff I photographed is quite interesting. This smokebush-like flower has bright yellow stamens, a stark contrast to the grey petals (if petals they are). It’s smokebush-like only at first glance, the structure and detail are quite different. Smokebush is a plant which occurs here and there all over Western Australia, and the light-grey leaves look a little like smoke rising. S

Mikal writes : [Leon] ignores that it’s simply a shell script, which must be executed by the user ...which Vista will automatically execute without much provokation. Mikal, you also need to read the second quote in that post , which explicitly mentions that it’s an MSH script. Might I suggest a second coffee and a second read before kicking off the little red “Aha! I know better!” wagon? (-: Since we’re already being picky here, I should also point out that “He ignores that” is terrible grammar. American culture is beginning to saturate your mind! Quick! Toss your telly off the nearest precipice and stick to Australian IP addresses for at least a month! (-:

Scorecard for 5 major Australian banks: Bank Phishing Keyloggers Viruses & Worms Instant Solution Free Perm Solutions Browsers W3C’s Validator Alternatives Notes A Good Average Good None None Recommends MSIE only , supports NS4.7 Error city None Had to lie about browser ID to even read security info, info itself was very clear, with pictures and examples C Poor Average Good None AdAware Recommends MSIE, NS4.7; supports Mozilla, Firefox, Safari Claims to be XHTML 1.0 but is not, 16 errors None FAQ was detailed and informative in general, but blipped over some important issues M Average Poor Average None None Discusses MSIE, NS; does not say what it supports Error city None FAQ was very short N Average Poor Average None None Recommends MSIE, NS; works with Mozilla but gives a monthly nag page Error city despite a valid DOCTYPE None Security instructions very vague W Average Poor Average Symantec None Strongly recommends MSIE, NS; works with Mozilla 20 errors, mostly carelessness, few

Con Zymaris points to this ComputerWorld article from the OSIA discussion list , with the comment “With only 10,000 Vista users worldwide, their platform already has viruses” — An Austrian hacker earned the dubious distinction of writing what are thought to be the first known viruses for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. [...] The viruses were published last month in a virus-writing tutorial written for an underground hacker group calling itself the Ready Ranger Liberation Front, and take advantage of security vulnerabilities in the new command shell. So much for Microsoft’s repeated assertion that Linux has no viruses only because it’s not popular... here’s a second opinion/damage-control post: Although MSH was originally scheduled to ship as part Windows Vista, Microsoft has since decided to have its release coincide with the launch of Exchange 12. It won't ship as part of Vista, although both applications have a projected release date in the second half of 2006.

Mendel would be pleased. The new house has a bunch of nasturtiums growing out the front, and they have a nice gradation from near-albino at the front left (facing the house) to normal (ie, orange) at the rear right. I’ve not seen any so pale before.

Sandra Mansell quotes husband “Ix” writing on IRC: i’ve worked out why its called the human race too cause every bastard wants to be first Well, I’ve got another racing quote for Ix: The trouble with winning the rat-race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

Did you know that if your kitchen is too small, forcing you to put the ’fridge in the laundry — right next to the back door — defrosting said ’fridge is not only easy, it’s fun? You can ditch pieces of the nearly-defrosted “frail ice” into the back-yard, then force your tired, bruised and worn arms (from moving hosue) to direct the remaining chunks of ice at it. See how high you can bounce the rubble! And if one of your nephews gets in the way, you can give him a surprise lesson about snow.

Up to five vanloads and the difference in furnishings is now visible. Still all of the big stuff and computers to go yet. And everything hurts. ADSL has been provisioned on the new line — only a day over schedule, pretty good for Telstra — the ISP in between ( ArachNet ) is pleasantly surprised and has been most helpful throughout. The better half of the neighbours/landlords is a Laotian whose name is pronounced “No”; her best friend is pronounced “You”, and her son is “I” (or “Aye”). Conversations can be... odd. Shane (the worse half) reckons that having a “Yes” (as in “Aye, Aye”) and a “No” in the house can be a bit disorienting. (-:

  Yes, we’re moving. Do we spoil our offspring? This load was mostly toys.

Mike Brown has discovered another planet out past Pluto. Unlike Quaoar and Sedna, there is little debate over whether 2003 UB313 is a planet or not, since it’s bigger than pluto, maybe up to twice as big. And 97 times as far from the sun as us, take plenty of thick clothing if you visit. Another parallel discovery, more interesting to me, is 2003 EL61. This is about a third the mass of Pluto, or roughly the size of Charon – Pluto’s moon – but it has a moon of its own. It’s a tiny thing, roughly 1% of the parent’s mass, and orbits in about 45 days, and is entirely inconsistent with everything that we “know” (ie, knew) about Kuiper Belt Objects. This is good, because it’s causing some head-scratching amongst the planetologists once more (“dang! we’re going to have to work for our living again”), which hopefully means that they’re learning something. The good (theory) is the enemy of the best. What would it have been like if our Moon had had a moon? Think of the impact on astronomy and

ComputerWeekly says : There have now been more flaws in the Firefox browser this year than in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I think this needs considerable qualifying: The Firefox team have fixed more things than the MSIE team this year; MSIE has over six times as many outstanding (unfixed) bugs as Firefox; MSIE’s many outstanding flaws are rated “Highly critical”, FF’s few are rated “Less critical”; Working wild exploits for FF: zero; for MSIE: hundreds; Because MSIE is closed-source, only a very few people can audit it, but anybody can audit FF; This cannot be written off to popularity, since MSIE’s exposure far outweighs the popularity ratio. For some interesting if somewhat unnerving statistics, see here: http://nanobox.chipx86.com/ie_is_dangerous.php For the record, I use the Konqueror web browser.