Plantagenet Penguinista

The perfect name for a cavy, no? If you ever want an off-the-wall response to a question, just ask one of my littlies. This (the one on the right) is Mr Purple Pants. No purple, no pants. It took us a while to winkle out the foundations of this name. It turns out that new-cavy-owner Xan (5.5yob) is a big fan of John English’s character the Pirate King from the musical The Pirates of Penzance , but doesn’t remember either John’s name or the character’s – but does remember the scene from HMS Pinafore in which John as the Pirate King whips out Rafe Rackstraw’s contract and starts reading it aloud only to discover that it’s a love-letter from Buttercup, starting “I love your purple pants...” So there you go. There was a reason for it after all. Chasing down juvenile chains of logic has been an extremely entertaining education for me, something I can recommend to any geek. There is a price to pay in sleepless nights etc, and someone h...

Yesterday, the 40GB hard disk in my dogsbody machine was fine. Booted it this evening to make sure everything I needed was on it to teach people PHP stuff later, and it said nasty things about “zero length partition” when trying to mount /home, /var etc. Rebooted. Failed to mount /. Uh-ohhhh... Rebooted. What hard disk? Gone in 60 seconds. I am seriously unimpressed. Less than 2 years old, less than 1000 run-hours under its belt. Rust in pieces, Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 40GB serial number E1FESHAE. As with all hardware which lets me down badly, this one’s not getting tossed, it’s being carefully given to my 10yo nephew Christopher. What he does to them is... unpleasant. The plan is that when word gets back to the survivors, they won’t so much as blip for the next couple of decades.

The news aggregator that everybody loves to despise is running a story on Using Computer Stores to Spread Open Source , but what caught my attention was a post asking: How does the local computer guy, FireFox, GIMP, etc differentiate themselves not among the geeks, but among the general population? Being a marketing guy (hold the hisses) with a good dose of liberalism and technology I'm all for F/OSS, and I be happy to offer a few hours a week to good software I believe in. So, is there an opening on the F/OSS world for the marketing guy as well as the coder? You see, each copy of MS Office (standard) sold wins the OEM AU$60, and MS Windows XP netts them $75, which means that if they just made $120-$150 selling a basic $1000 system, then they make twice as much if they then sell MS-Windows and MS-Office with the machine. So... if you want to get them to distribute FOSS with the machine instead, you have to replace half of their profit as well. Showstopper? I think not. But is th...

My sporting-genius BIL, Jamie Gibbons-Eyre , reliably informs me that the Football Spider I recently photographed barracks for St Kilda. Here’s the real-life almost-crashed-a-Windows-user sign (the thin dark stripes are demister elements). Small things amuse small minds, I suppose, but I liked it anyway — and you can put those calipers away now, thank you.

I saw a little van on the freeway last night, labelled Scream Savers . Cute, I thought, and went browsing today. Much to my amusement, Scream Savers currently only supports computers using one of the Microsoft Windows operating systems . Perhaps even more revealingly, they don’t seem to support OpenOffice , Firefox , Thunderbird , ClamAV , and a whole host of common FOSS applications. The take-home lesson, of course, is that FOSS packages evidently don’t support a profitable level of discontent. How sad. I’m betting from this specific absence that these guys regard FOSS projects in general as tools of the Devil, a mortal business enemy with whom they are locked in struggle. This is doubly sad from their perspective, because sooner or later, they’re going to lose, and doubly sad from ours because their business is predicated on such a high default level of user discontent, they’re not always going to be around to provide pay-for hand-holding to those people ...

Snapped at my neice Erin’s 18th today. As a birthday present, her fiancee left the country tonight (he’s off to be a youth counsellor in the USA for three months). The spider was very difficult to image clearly as it was gyrating madly from a single strand hung under its web. If you boost the image brightness ’til it hurts, you’ll notice that the background is lighter to the left, that's a tin shed wall about 3m away. Actual size is about 3cm tip to tip. Red and white, whose team colours are those, Sydney Swans?

Aaron and Bob both grew tropical water plants and the animals which went with them. They were both fanatics, friendly rivals to produce the most splendid bonsai sea grass, the most vivid sea cucumbers and so on. But where the rubber really met the road was in animal wavy things: Aaron specialised in growing iridescent sea anemones and Bob in splendid coral fronds . All went well until one day Aaron stumbled across some biological additives which made his anemones glow in the dark, and began winning shows with this feature, which Bob regarded as a cheap trick. The competitiveness did stimulate Bob’s imagination, and through research he was able to produce coral fronds meters long and in all the colours of the rainbow, including a radiant deep purple which Pratchett fans described as Octarine, but Aaron’s gimmick kept winning him trophies. Their friendship foundered on the rocks of jealousy. Bob became reclusive, snubbing the shows and carrying on his own research privately i...

Steven J Vaughan-Nichols has done a do-not-miss article on his experiences at Linux World NYC ; here are some choice quotes: “[...] the halls are full of top businesspeople that run their enterprises on Linux. Look closely at what I’ve just written about Linux users: businesspeople. Not programmers, not open-source fans, businesspeople.” — S J V-N “We found that using [Linux on] the low-cost x86 hardware platform made our system run three times faster and was 90 percent cheaper than the mainframe using Unix had been.” — Robert Wiseman, CTO for Cendant Travel Distribution Service (Cheap Tickets, Orbitz, Lodging.com) “We were able to configure multiple Linux instances across multiple mainframes and multiple databases, giving us a back-end Linux environment processing credit card transactions at a rate of between 90 and 120 transactions per second per Linux instance.” — Aaron Graves, a senior VP at Citigroup Technologies Inc ...

My AOpen laptop now software-suspends pretty much instantly (under 2 seconds) and resumes not much slower... but... with the backlight switched off. If I suspend it with a Konsole session up it will do the stuff I type, but there’s nothing to see, folks. s3_mode has no visible effect and s3_bios stops it from resuming (lights come on, and that’s all, folks). Ah, well. Roll on some relatively free time, and I’ll see if that can be fixed too. The previous response was complete catatonia, so we’re well ahead of the game already.

So this is KDE 3.4? Everything’s noticeably faster. The Synaptics touchpad now has a point and click setup tool. There are some nifty new GL screensavers. I’d call that a win. The 2.6.11-8mdk kernel also seems to do much better at power management than the previous one (2.6.11-6mdk). I’ll get brave and try a suspend before I nod off.

Today’s daredevil feat is upgrading my laptop’s software from Cooker while I’m still using it. Some bits of KDE got cranky after the 3.3 libraries were swapped out for 3.4 so I was limited to the programs which were already running until I picked an opportune time (after the fundamental kde packages had all been updated), shot URPMI, logged out and back in again. KDE 3.4 has some sweet gadgety eye-candy, such as a fade-in mode for tooltips which looks kind of like a slo-mo of old-fashioned spot printing, but in reverse: a grid of blobs rolls across the area, left to right, with each blob shrinking constantly to reveal more of the tooltip until they've all dwindled to nothing and the tooltip is solid and complete. I’m looking forward to one day having time to explore it all. [big pause] The updates have all finished now, the difference between running and disk versions of assorted libraries are driving Firefox spaccy and have killed Konqueror (but Kontact an...

Didn’t have time to get any photos (or have my camera in the car) but a Windows user last night almost crashed and did make my day. I have a sign in the back window of my car, along the bottom edge where people like to put stickers announcing the academic success of their offspring, except that it says something like the pictured bumper sticker. As I cruised past a chap in screensaver mode and wearing “MSCP###” on his number plate (where ### is some random number), his numbed after-work gaze travelled across to my rear window, then stopped. Presently, he frowned. Then the penny dropped and the lights came on inside. He started laughing. And laughing. And laughing. And drove across the lane markers (“brrrump, brrrump, brrrump”) a couple of times, scaring the lady behind me into driving all scribbley herself and slowing down to leave an empty spot next to him. He was still laughing when he exited. I guess it made his day, too.

Good morning, John Rolland! You wrote me a letter and invited me to “Take another look at what Telstra can do for you now”. Why? Why wasn’t Telstra already doing these things for me? The only material benefit to having Telstra as a supplier of telephony is wider mobile range in the country. I’ve shifted our landline and both mobiles to a provider (Southern Cross) which uses Telstra’s network and so gives me exactly the same coverage – for about ¾ of the cost, so far. No gimmicks, no “special deals” that we either hardly ever use or find so complicated that we can't work out whether we're actually using them or not. I wouldn't choose Telstra’s retail Internet in a pink fit, especially after that nasty trick Telstra played with “low cost” broadband access. 200 megabytes a month is ridiculous, you can only keep to that by the most rigorous discipline, and several of my friends have joined it before asking enough ques...

The otherwise brilliant Lucretia opened my eyes once again to my favourite Jethro Tull song (the 43 minute version, natch), in which wise men suffer the handicap of not really understanding how everyday people’s minds work. She was using The GIMP to prepare some photos for eBay and wanted to put lots of images on each listing without having to pay for them, so I set her up a hole in the web into which she could pour photos. It took aaaaaaaaaaages for me to figure out that because The GIMP , and Konqueror (which she uses as a file manager ) and Mozilla’s file selection dialogue all look different, she had them mentally checked off as looking at different things. Hooray for the people who “naturalised” OpenOffice for KDE ; now if only I had time to do the same for the rest of GTK, or at least the bits used by The GIMP . I’ll be bumping her KDE up to 3.4 shortly in the hope of having eBay’s JavaScript work properly with it.

Having just read and then proof-read David Weber’s At All Costs , ( due out in November) I have to say: it’s his best book yet. His co-conspirator Eric Flint mentioned that a lot of the background had already been established in War of Honor , Crown of Slaves and Shadow of Saganami , (due out in October) so the decks had, so to speak, been cleared for action. And they most definitely were! It's a longish book by today's standards at well over a quarter of a million words (or if you like odd measures, about 300 milliBibles or 2.2 TMIAHMs ) but the action basically never stops. You get very occasional half-chapter breathers for important ceremonies and the like, but the rest of it is wall-to-wall space battles, political intrigue, people blowing things up, planning to blow things up, practicing blowing things up, being blown up, trying to not be blown up, working out what will be blown up next, and so on. Even many the relatively quiet bits are quite emotive, heavy on the ...

My favourite scifi author has just thrown a manuscript of a little (very little) under 300,000 words at me and asked me for some continuity checks based on some indexes I’ve built of his published works. I’m allowed some minor gloating (you’re looking at it now), but no disclosures. David Weber ( and his publisher, Jim Baen ) is unique in being an early adopter of a useful and very effective form of almost-openness. His earlier books are up on the publisher’s website for all and sundry to get hooked on — er, I mean read — and buying a hardcover version of one of his later books often gets you a CD packed with his works and the works of co-authors like Eric Flint . You’ll be pleased to know that sales of his earlier books picked up shortly after he started giving them away. It’s viral marketing at its best. Those who can’t afford to buy books get to read a time-delayed version for free and tell others; those who can afford it buy man...

The Lappivator is working, but it’s an uphill battle. Like climbing loose shale. Had a weird problem with an hp desktop today: NumLock was all funny on the USB keyboard, and while it was plugged in the PS/2 mouse ceased working. Hmm. Scratches head, runs lsusb — gets squat. Eh? Seems that the hp BIOS is turning the USB keyboard into a pretend PS/2 keyboard (and botching it) so Linux sees PS/2 not USB, and that either the BIOS rashly presumes that a USB keyboard present == a USB mouse present, or the PS/2 character stuffing interfered with the mouse. I tried modprobe usb-echi and everything suddenly worked right. Not sure why Mandrake’s HardDrake didn’t auto-detect the USB interfaces, lspcidrake lists the modules reliably. Had a few mail servers smashed flat by spam in recent days. The spammers or their zombies seem to have started batching stuff per-server so that one poor innocent machine will suddenly be facing a dozen or score kinds of messages addressed to ...

  Well, the mid-afternoon outdoor temperature in Perth has finally descended below the average maximum summer temperature for our LCA2006 venue next year... (-: Had to crash out for a few hours to assist the anti-inflammatory in making life bearable again (note to Mark Greenaway : lucky you, before I met chiropractors I was getting 2-4 migraines a week bad enough to make me curl up on something soft and whimper — blogging about it would have been right off the cards — so count your blessings), and woke to pounding rain. However, aside from watering the lawns etc, every cloud has a silver lining – even if in this case the “cloud” is, when you get right down to it, green.

Spent a long day working yesterday and got a clear and painful indication that I should have spent at least a large part of that day under my Lappyvator instead. Blurgh. Much as I detest pain, it is generally a very useful thing — like fear. Whenever you see a “No Fear” sticker or tee-shirt, remember to mentally translate it to “No Brains”. An Osborne Park company has had a look at the Lappyvator and is interested in making something like it for themselves. It turns out that the owner has back problems as well, and he showed me a nifty little sit-in device which looks like a padded plank swing with a separate back and a pair of stirrups, which also does good things for one’s spine. The “plank” goes under your legs, the back (attached to some rings on the straps supporting the seat) rides up on your back, and one foot goes into each stirrip, which are separately attached to the bar the whole thing hangs from and strapped to limit their di...

Hurrah for interface aliasing! The problem: client has three (3) ADSL interfaces, and a Linux mail server. The mail server now wants to do MailMan things, which implies having a web interface. Typing port numbers is too complicated for some of the people using the web interface <cringe>, but we can’t port-forward from tcp/80 on the primary/defaultroute ADSL interface because that already goes to a busy Win2k3 server which would be a PITA to securely set up to proxy the traffic, and we can’t just bolt the secondary or tertiary ADSL router into a second card on the mail server and forward stuff based on interface because they’re also busy with RDP traffic and need to be administered by someone without much of a Linux clue (and who is also seriously busy, so can’t take the time away from his other duties to pick up said clue, even though he’s otherwise quite a bright lad) and because the router might get replaced we can’t rely on MAC addresses eit...

Some Kiwi friends of ours crashed here for the night and left us a jar of Nuts About Chocolate . The stuff is nearly ½ fat and over ¼ sugar. That doesn’t leave much, does it? (-: And for Stewart , it’s Vegan .

Sleeping is still not up to scratch, but I was able to work mostly standing up from 08:00 to now (13:00, 5 hours straight) today, most of it standing up and with some walking around as a form of break. My lower back is stiff now but not seriously sore. I can sort-of-mostly sit down on soft chairs even after that stretch, which is a big step in the right direction compared with, say, Friday. I spent most of yesterday evening under my laptop, and had no trouble working recumbent. It does, however, slow down my response to domestic micro-crises. The physical stress also “blondes” me (<duck> <swish>) in that I start to miss a lot of detail in what’s going on around me as the stress builds up – a little like being very tired, in effect, although it feels quite different – and sometimes I can stare at a piece of documentation (I’m working on QMail Toaster at the moment (someone didn’t test some of the Mandrake mods to those RPMs and a cou...

I have no trouble running up a 10m sandhill or lugging heavy tables around, but this morning I had no end of trouble trying to find some way to sit that wasn’t painful. Yesterday was spent in company of some anti-inflammatories but today – other than this mornings, ahem, sit-uation – I had no trouble doing without. I hope that’s a harbinger of better days to come.

Today, Herself felt inclined to keep her feet on her face long enough for Dad to capture it. The hands are only necessary if you have to wait while Dad takes a picture, reboots the camera and switches the flash on before taking this one.

My camera’s battery mysteriously came to life today. The camera does odd things. Sometimes it thinks that USB is plugged in (this is down at the beach, at least 50m from the nearest USB cable and probably 10km from mine), sometimes the "up" and "left" buttons go dead (but a power-cycle usually fixes it). Weird.

$ ruby -rdate -e 'puts Date.new(1962,8,30) + 10000' 1990-01-15

A little while ago, Monica the Rat (named after a very-much-favourite babysitter and pronounced Wollicar ’coz that’s how you say things when you’re 3) had a litter of 12 – 6 boys and 6 girls. Miracle of birth and all. Instant family. Amidst much sadness, the time has come for them to find new homes. They’re going via school, presumably to show them just how bad things could have been. (-:

Well, that seems to work. For the first time in weeks I feel as though I’m actually catching up on work, rather than falling further and further behind. I was able to keyboard competently (well, for me :-) and recumbently until about 21:00 whereas yester-yesterday I was completely trashed by about 17:00 and had to have a few hours’ rest before another short (maybe an hour?) burst of work in the evening. I found that I used completely different groups of muscles than I normally do, forex you have to hold your arms up a little (by pushing them slightly downwards) to type instead of dangling them from my elbows and propping them on my wrists; also the stresses on my neck are completely different — there’s not the constant balancing act, but in compensation if you want to move your head around you have to lift it (push it forwards) first. I can feel that special new-muscle tightness in my arms and neck which says that they’re going to seriously ache in a day or...

$ date -d '30 aug 1962 +10000 days' Mon Jan 15 00:00:00 WST 1990 That’s the trouble with the younger generation. Always complicatin’ thangs. (-:

This was typed up on a Lappyvator Mark I . IW4M. About AUD$30 in parts and about an hour’s ginning about, and my coccyx loves it. Now all I need is a laptop with a decent screen. (-:

I’m gunna plant me a coconut palm! While we were all running around at LCA2005 , it seems that some ANU people have been busy, or possibly flat out like a lizard drinking . Dr Darren Lipnicki, from the School of Psychology in the Faculty of Science at ANU, found that people solved anagrams more quickly when they were lying down compared to standing up. [...] “In theory, there may be greater release of a chemical, noradrenaline, in the brain when standing up than when lying down. “It’s suspected that noradrenaline inhibits the abilities to solve anagrams and to think creatively so we decided to test the idea that lying down would actually help solve anagrams more quickly.” Dr Lipnicki asked 20 healthy subjects to solve anagrams in both a lying down and standing posture. There were 32 five-letter anagrams, such as “osien” (noise) and “nodru” (round). [...] Subjects were also asked to solve arithmetic problems, but the study found lyin...

...well, OK , but will they mind if we do a better job of it? Unlike the site it answers, this “nu” GetTheFacts site uses only external news to make its point, and lets each news item do its own talking.

I was pleased today to see at least one mealy-mouthed opponent of Linux and Open Source being figuratively stood against the wall . Now if about four or five others suffered similar fates, I would be a happy boy. It’s kind of alien for me to personally wish ill of someone, but in this case they’ve consistently and persistently gone out of their way to earn it, and the key point is that they continue to earn it . You couldn’t drive a twinge of guilt into some of these blighters with the J Arthur Rank dude’s golden hammer.

Having a dinged coccyx is, as I have intimated, no fun. One of the ways of convincing the painful little malefactor to set about healing faster is to give it periods of total rest. Which means lying down (sitting is a pain in the rear anyway at the moment). Which makes using a computer kind of difficult. This and a $99 Minitar WAP is my first go at a solution. The tubing down each side of the back of the laptop sports (so far) two tee pieces, one protruding forwards to support the laptop, and one protruding towards the centre to hold a cross-piece for extra rigidity. The blue line across the body just below the screen is a piece of Cat5 cable, and the pipes run up the sides of the back rather than making a 45deg turn just to add some lateral stability by clamping the laptop body to the pipework at the edges. The pipes are just jammed into the fittings at this stage; when I’m sure that all is well I’ll add some end caps and lay about with the glue. What have I learned so far?...

Glancing through my copy of The Education Technology Guide issue 5 and ran across this gem from AppleCentre North Sydney on page 106: How many viruses can a Windows user expect to prepare for, over a six month period? Try 5,000! They cite Symantec go on to assert that an naked XP will survive on the ’net for about 20 minutes. Then we get to the pitch, pardon the wonky grammer: Whilst chilling statistics send shivers through most individuals, however every Apple owner on the planet with very few exceptions, simply looks at all of this viral chaos and spyware noise and shrugs. And smiles. And pretty much ignores it all[...] I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that this went to press before the Apple dashboard-thingy crack went to air, but the point is that Linux users all over the world should be making more of a fuss about this, too. My past week’s email contained well over the demi-annual quota of 5000 virii – what with the internet being drunk on Sob...

Maybe it’s true. Maybe blokes do have their brains lower down. I’ve been getting increasingly fuzzy over the last two weeks, and this has coincided with increasing pain from my lightly-dinged coccyx, an event which occurred almost un-noticed during the post-LCA bike ride. The pain has stopped getting worse, but... I hadn’t made the connection until now. I took some paracetamol to make the pain go away so I can think clearly and the effect is kind of like an over-contrasted image: the pain has receded to just a small “lump” around its source, but now I can clearly feel the tension it’s causing, all the way down the backs of both legs, up the middle of my back and radiating across my shoulder blades, and in a kind of line down the inside and outside of each arm, even across the backs of my hands. Our bodies are marvellously complicated little machines (heck, each cell is fiendishly complex ), able to deal with problems in the most interesting ways, but...

The battery in my laptop is down to about an hour of life from about 3 hours new. Replacement cost? AUD$270, or just under 1/7 of the new price of the laptop, or just under 1/4 of the price of replacing the laptop with a new equivalent. Sigh. Now my camera (a Sony DSC-F707 ) has also spat a Li-ion battery. Within the space of about three or four sessions, the battery went from about an hour’s life to about seven minutes, From Sony, AUD$125; from a dealer, AUD$120; from a greymarketeer, AUD$89 + $10 p+p. Urk. Clone batteries are a “mere” AUD$53 or AUD$46 (plus $10 p+p). That’s a good argument, right there, for a camera that takes AA or AAA cells. The NP-FM50 pack looks like it holds 2x 3.6v AA-sized cells, which retail for about AUD$5 each. Hmmm. Eyes battery pack, reaches for packing knife... is there anything morally repugnant about using a camera to take shots of its own guts? The pack does indeed hold two AA-sized cells labelled US18500GR – apparently ...

One of the things I often wish I could do is sleep like a two-year-old. My 4yod recently demostrated another. Not that I'd go around doing it in public, but it would be nice to be that limber. Lying down watching television, she casually brings both feet back, placing the heels on her cheeks and the toes on her temples. No sweat, no strain, no helping hands. My tendons ache just thinking about it.

The image has some VBScript behind it, which looks harmless, but I don’t do MS Windows here so haven’t tested it. The static image is funny enough.

Google News found me a SciAm article Falcarius Utahensis which the good doctor in charge reckons is a veggo species descended from something like a velociraptor. Not sure I trust the source, though, since he wants the beastie to also be a proto-bird and never mind the absence of any feathers or the “modern” birds already found deeper into the fossil record. The SciAm article has a drawing of one whacky-looking beastie. For those who can’t be bothered following the link, imagine a couple of Moa birds caught in the act, behead the Daddy one and morph that a little with a random long-necked reptile.

This guy understands the mind-wars, he really does!

Gosh, security must be improving if it's been over a month since all the MS Windows machines got together and pounded the world's mail servers into the sand. Various news services are reporting Sober.N, Sober.O, Sober.P and Sober.S (won’t anyone stand up and claim Q?) attacking everything in sight and using up a significant percentage of the world's email badwidth, but the’re mostly reporting it as “a computer virus”. Repeat the mantra after me: It is not a computer virus! It is a Windows virus! It does not attack Linux! It does not attack Macintoshes! It only attacks Windows. As usual. Yes, I get a lot of work from tragedies like this. People pay me a lot of money to fix their broken Windows installations - and then don’t add it to the cost of ownership of Windows. Why not? Microsoft insists that ownership costs continue after acquisition, and in this case they’re right. So why not add the two to five hours of rescue and reinstall, at top dollar,...

While prepping for the post-LCA bike ride, I tried out a recumbent bike, thank Hugh, and was suitably impressed. The wheelbase is a lot shorter than it looks, so turning it is much easier than I expected. It’s also rock-steady compared with a two-wheeler and this one has das blinkenlights fitted. We also saw Tridge’s amazing new BikeKeeper application in action. Grin, duck, run. Since my Blue Beastie is now Tridge’s Second Deputy Guest Bike, if anyone in Canberra wants it, I’m sure Tridge would appreciate getting the garage space back. (-:

I’m doing a three-dose set of Professional Development sessions for some Perth (and one Albany) IT teachers. So that everyone got a turn at doing everything, the venue provided us with an identical decommissioned machine each to set up. The first discovery, the day before we started, was that Warly appears to have broken mkcd, the Mandrake script for turning a mirror tree into ISO images. Oh, well, out with the floppies and on with the network install. The second discovery is that ancient Harry Tan (Tang brand) floppy drives have about a 1/3 failure rate if left idle for long enough. The third discovery is that all of the identical machines weren't, specifically the LAN cards weren't. Some of them had odd 100Mb-only (ie, not 10/100) LAN cards for which there appear to be no Linux drivers. Of the four which were real EtherExpress cards, two like the eepro100 driver and two like the e100 driver. Some of the alternatives were... interesting. Like a hp card which did standard 10Mb ...