Plantagenet Penguinista

Drove near ArachNet today, so I dropped in to look at their shiny new Malaga co-lo facility. They’re seriously interested in never having the thing go off the air. They now have 70Mb of microwave to QV.1, plus a gigabit of fibre (and the fibre supplier’s so happy with their layout that they’ve dubbed ArachNet the hub for pretty much the entire northern suburbs industrial belt) plus last-ditch copper backups. In their default configuration, the microwave link is dedicated just to WAIX traffic, doubling as an emergency uplink in case some maniac puts a backhoe through the fibre. Which means that WAIX traffic is now free for colocated boxes. The power arrangements are also impressive. They’re right next to several sets of big wires (we’re talking insulators longer than you are) and have become the local power hub as well (all of the dark green boxes for the block live inside their fence, and power for nearby industries is drawn from there). If the wires go ...

Drag and drop from KDE apps to The GIMP works. Dragging and dropping a bunch of images opens them all. Dragging to KDE apps half-works; KMail wants to know whether to attach a link or the file, but then can’t find the file.

There is a new Win32 virus doing the rounds, which sends email purporting to be a UCE ( U nsolicited C ommercial E mail, AKA SPAM) complaint. Two of my sites have already been added to RBLs by trigger-happy admins. You who are about to be deluged in crud, we salute you: When a cracker’s not engaged in his employment or maturing his felonious little code his capacity for innocent enjoyment is just as great as any other toad. Our feelings we with difficulty smother when administory duty’s to be done taking one consideration with another a SysAdmin’s lot is not a happy one. When administory duty’s to be done, to be done a SysAdmin’s lot is not a happy one. When the enterprising scripter’s not a-scripting When the black-hat isn’t occupied in crime He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling And listen to the merry village chime When the cracker’s finished 0wn3r1ng on your mother He loves to lie a-basking in the sun Taking one consideration wi...

Here I am dropping #1 daughter at her train in Perth City in my rattly old Peugeot 505 sedan and here comes Mr Ricer in his silver-grey badge-enhanced Nissan Pulsar with the BSN (Busselton) plates, rippin’ out of the driveway onto the road, revvin’ his model aero engine fit to pop the head off. Could I resist? No! So... at the next lights (Barrack Street heading towards the railway and facing St George’s Terrace), I occasionally revved the motor just a little to keep his interest, and then (knowing that the pedestrian lights there are slow), “drove off” about 3m several seconds before the light was due to go green. This left me with my ’roobar hanging over the line, and Mr Ricer driving across the intersection sounding like an enraged wasp. The lights went green just as he got to the other side. #1 daughter was laughing herself silly. Quite safe entertainment, no crossing traffic or at-risk pedestrians in sight. At the next lights (Hay Street), the pe...

My 15yod Aiyana came back from bio-Mum’s after 5 weeks away to report that a couple of her friends — likeable, personable girls — had made a suicide pact, bought the tickets to get there, chosen the building to jump out of, the whole box and dice. And she did something that very few teens would have the courage to do. Knowing that she would be ridiculed for doing it, she looked them straight in the eye and said “No. You’re not going to do this. Even if you hate me for it, I’m blowing the whistle.” And did. Her high school rosters responsible students as grief counsellors, and she was rostered on that week, so on top of having some fellow students taunt her mercilessly for being a tattle-tale (which she’d expected), she had to talk to many friends of the two about it and many “randoms”; the crowning glory was having to talk to complete hypocrites who were there mainly to get out of class time — including one girl who activ...

“In general none of the managers of RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company smoked. I asked them why they aren’t smokers. I was really surprised. One said: ‘We don’t smoke this shit, we only sell it.’ I smiled and he added: ‘We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black and the stupid.’ ” — David Garlitz, former Winston promoter The average nicotine addict claims to smoke one pack a day and actually smokes two. As well as hobbling your athletic abilities (which sooner or later translates to your libidinous activities), this costs about AUD$7,300 a year at retail prices, slightly less by the carton. Consider that the Dole amounts to about AUD$9,000 a year, and you’re well on the track to understanding the basis for some of Australia’s “petty” crime. Now toss in the cost of a block of tinnies a week (AUD$1,500 a year) and see how well the remaining AUD$200 amortises across things like food, medicine,...

Trent Lloyd asked for a logo for his Avahi project, so... The Spitzer Space telescope symbolises looking for and discovering things, which is what Avahi does. The A is of course for Avahi. The label beneath “explains” this. That the telescope rests atop the Avahi ‘A’ symbolises two things: Avahi supports discovery, the fact that the ’scope is in orbit and above the ‘A’ is a pun on ‘hi’/ ‘high’ . That it all stands on a platform symbolises both its use as a platform for other things, and its cross-platform nature. This logo is “scopeware” — if you think it’s cool, instead of rewarding or encouraging me, please donate to the Perth Observatory . If you’d like the XCF original to tinker with, email me.

Not necessarily of kindness. The occasional random act of neutral intent is good for you too. Today’s was attending a SlashDot MeetUp at Fast Eddy’s. Three of the original attendees of this meetup in Perth turned up tonight. Yes, Sue still works there. This waitress gets an award for rapid, attentive service, too. Most impressed, I was. Smiling but not plastic or effusive; quiet, polite, and all of those good things.

...the weather, I can cope with. The turkeys who start brake-dancing when the first drop hits their windshield are another thing. They turned a 40-minute trip into an 80-minute trip this morning. Why are we all going so slowly? Because there’s a traffic jam. Why is there a traffic jam? Why, because everyone’s going so slowly, of course... I also wonder how much automatic transmissions contribute to this. People driving autos mostly have to tap the brakes to slow down, they can't coast down very effectively — and of course, flash a brake light and suddenly 20 people behind you are pre-emptively panicking and dancing on their brakes, and so on.

Heard a rumour that Telstra would be lighting up ADSL2 in a lot of exchanges come August or September. I hope it’s true. Crew like iiNet have been driving the little guys to the wall recently with cheap, high-speed service that Telstra won’t let any if the ISPs dependent on them match. And it means that I can bump my 512/512kb ADSL to a 2/2Mb for about the same price. I feel the need!

Almost real time, posted ~20 minutes after the take (camera’s time was out by about 20 more). Reminds me of one of the Four Horseman from Bad Omens (Pratchett/Gaiman). It’s been like this for a couple of days now. There were some really spectacular sunsets the previous two nights but on one of them I got home after sunset and on the other, somebody had left the camera plugged into USB and switched on (it doesn’t powersave if it's on USB), so it was absolutely dead-dead-deaddybones flat when I grabbed it and rushed out to do the point-and-click thing.

This Spitzer Space Telescope image of the Cassiopia Supernova Remnant shows you what it might look like to a Mantis Shrimp . They typically have at least eight distinct colour sensors in their eyes (up to sixteen!), some species see infra-red as well as ultra-violet, and some species have as many as three discrete ultra-violet “channels”. Except for an innate tendency to punch random things out, they’d make great scouts.

Alien Picture Of the Day — this shot was taken over Quinns Rocks late yesterday. If it’s not Nessie placeholding for the sharks, then what is it? I’ll give you an unsubtle hint: your view is too negative.

Spent too much time reading The Road to Damascus last night. Very addictive. John Ringo is hard to put down at the best of times, and Linda Evans seems to have rounded out his writing quite nicely. Or possibly vice versa, since I’ve not read Linda before. Did a quick trip around PlanetLA this morning. Pia, that hackergotchi is so dignified. Ryan Verner, I feel your pain , we once had a property manager named Ilse. After she passed from our lives, <leap>, <click-heels>, another local Linux user had the same, um, honour ’coz the owner’s wife was a friend of hers. And then, to his infinite sadness, she got taken off the job for telling the owner late one afternoon that she didn’t work 24x7. Our current agents are a bit picky, but follow the rules and are human. Reasonable for a lessee, fabulous for a landlord. Rusty, in case you haven’t been thanked today, thanks for being the guard-dog of software freedom in Oz. James Dumay, I think you need to...

I’m looking at whomping up a project called GIRLS, the Gimp Interface to Ruby Language Scripting, and it makes sense to me to auto-generate as much of the actual bindings code as possible. Ruby returns multiple values, so it looks like it’s a better fit to the various GIMP functions than C or Python. However, the incestuous PERL code in tools/pdbgen/ which the hard-working, bright and patient JamesH has in part mutated to do some of the heavy lifting for his gimp-python extension is threatening to make my head explode. Stuff like... # The actual parser (in a string so we can eval it in another namespace) ...for a parser that does what? Why, writes hunks of PERL code out for later execution, of course. It looks like being easier for me to post-process the .pdb files to cherry-pick the information I want. It might be simpler to post-process the C headers instead, but some information gets filed off on the way to becoming a C header. In many cases it should be easy enough to g...

Someone stepped on my tiny optical mouse, so I’ve reverted to using the touchpad. The page for my laptop now has an Xorg/XFree86 recipe that works well for me: turn off tapping, make reasonably heavy pressing necessary and put a scroll zone on the right and left edges. I played with circular scrolling, too. It has its merits but the gain in resolution is (for me) not worth the loss of touchpad area or loss of horizontal scrolling. When someone puts a 1600x1200 display into a cheap (.LT. AUD$1500) laptop, I will be in the queue to get one.

Trotted along to Morely Seventh-day Adventist Church this morning, to watch some school-children sing. The projector spent the first half of the show service displaying candid shots of the Principal’s XP-based laptop rebooting. It was running really, really, slowly, to the point where it couldn’t even play CDs without skipping. I prescribed AdAware and SpyBot and sat back to enjoy the singing a capella until the machine finally cooperated about half an hour and six or seven “lucky (gypsy) reboots ” later. Had some of the most delicious mushroom soup ever for lunch afterwards, and chatted with some of the audience congregation. Of the three computer people I found, two are using Linux, one for his J2EE servers (backed by ibFireBird) and one for his desktop (SuSE). I like these people already. And their food. Heavenly! (-:

...and I’ve just had a brain-break scanning BuShips and Honorverse on Baen’s Bar . Why not, I thought innocently (which is a nice way of saying “foolishly” :-) combine the two? I am the very model of a modern Sollie Admiral I am the very model of a modern Sollie Admiral; the neobarbs all quail before my massive forces nautical; my fleets all bear the latest and most lethal technologically; and those by grasers not so cowed are tied down economically! I know about the principles of power all political, though nothing about Tacitus and Sun-Tzu – strategetical; my rank is due to those I know and helped by those whose palms I’ve crossed; success is gauged by battles – not – but total kickbacks that I’ve grossed... with total kickbacks that I’ve grossed – with total kickbacks that I’ve grossed – with total kickbacks that I’ve grossed! With battle fleets and battle groups I’ve pounded sepoys into du...

This was the only bit of today dry enough to take a camera out into. More typing today, too. Lost about 1200 words when I ran my laptop battery dry through carelessness (on the ’phone) and I was editing HTML, for which OpenOffice does not autosave. )-:

$ADMIN: “I want to host a new website at $WORKPLACE, but I don’t know how to do it with Linux.” /ME: Are you doing the name services for it? Will you be hosting their email as well? $ADMIN: “Yes. Yes.” /ME: OK, edit /etc/named.conf, copy this stanza [refers to a boilerplate zonefile] and change that name. Then restart the name service. You should be able to ping it now. $ADMIN: (typing, pause) “I can ping it.” /ME: Good. Edit /etc/postfix/virtual, add these two lines ["$DOMAIN VIRTUAL" and "@$DOMAIN $USERNAME@bigpond.com"] and reindex the file with “postmap virtual”. You should be able to send a test email now. $ADMIN: (some typing and clicking) “All right, that’s come through.” /ME: Excellent. Now make a new directory /var/www/virtual/www.$DOMAIN and copy the website pages into it. [the Apache in question is set up for dynamic virtual hosting; that and a wildcard A-record make new subdomains that easy] $...

East Hamersley Primary School has just posted a request for working hard drives larger than 1.6GB. I admin several machines with more RAM than that, and the smallest drive I actually run is 80GB. The smallest drive available new is 40GB - but sadly, the PSU demands of these modern 7200RPM $50 drives would break the PSUs on East Hamersley’s PCs. I exhumed a couple of 3GB drives from my scrap collection. If you’re in Perth and feel like helping, ring Tino Torre on (08) 9342-2002 to arrange collection. I suggested an LTSP arrangement — which would also wean them from The Borg — but it turns out that they have no larger machines which could go Terminal Server for the others.

Jeff Waugh’s proposed new Ubuntu splash would require Canonical to rename it Ubumtu (or possibly Ubumtre/Ubumtri). Don’t get me started on the possible implications of a “splash” screen! (-:

Behold, the ugliest civic building in Australia, possibly the Southern Hemisphere: Apparently, they won an award for it, and it wasn’t a joke award or “worst of” competition – you know, funniest government architecture or something – my book-keeper (who lives near and has to drive past it) has a couple of daughters; their name for it is “the plastic rubbish skip”. The footpaths outside are a testimony to the Vogon mindset which spawned it. The footpath crosses the south-western driveway, then stops and is vectored across the 4-lane highway. When it re-crosses about 20 metres later (<thwack!>), it joins the head of a wheelchair access ramp. A long, straight one, unbroken by flattened resting spots. An long, straight, expensive one, for which much landscaping has been done. A long, straight, totally pointless one, since better access would be provided by just running a footpath alongside either or both of the driveways.

It cost me half a day and half a night of agony, but I solved a mystery. One CyberKnights customer is a print shop. I had been working in short bursts there because I would swiftly (circa 20 minutes) get tired, so tired I looked like a Reach Toothbrush ad (the “flip-top head” one). On Thursday night, as I walked out through the workshop, the front section being locked, I walked past a section where a drum of solvent had been left open. By the time I got to the back door, I had a screaming headache, dizziness, overwhelming tiredness and was greying out. Mystery solved. Now all I have to do is work there when that solvent is not in use.

One for Stewart. Watch it! Watch it! You know you want to! (Made by the same people as The Meatrix ).

Idly reading a few mailing lists while I wait for a bunch of stuff to install, only to run across this: Pilot’s pre-launch brief of the carrier procedures to his passenger in a 2-place jet: “If anything goes wrong off the cat, I’ll say ‘Eject Eject Eject’. If you say ‘Huh?’, you’ll be talking to yourself.” To which another participant responds: Many years ago. Too far back to remember exactly, (later places it at 1965) I was fortunate enough to have a flight in an RAAF DH Vampire jet trainer. I asked the pilot what would happen if something went wrong. He replied “I will say ‘Eject Eject Eject’. Take notice of the first one ’cause the other two will be echoes”

Do an RPM listing before you start, and filter it through egrep -v '(^lib|^kernel|pubkey)' ; The older RPMs don’t try to update themselves first, so after establishing your package sources, start with urpmi urpmi libkrb53 iptables libstdc++6 ; The libstdc++6 part might be optional if the machine will never run a GUI, but I still recommend it; The iptables part might be optional if the machine does not run a firewall, masquerade or anything, but I still recommend it; The libkrb53 is not optional, without it you will break rpm – oops – and will have to hand-install it by rpm2cpio-ing the rpm (on another machine), tarring it up and unpacking it by hand; Do not attempt this over a mere 256kb ADSL uplink unless you have a day or so to spare; Do have plenty of space free on /var, since the older urpmi will download everything (typically ~300 packages) it thinks it needs before trying to install anything; If you cannot easily get to the machine (in case it breaks during th...

As I prepared to leave Kewdale today, it suddenly started bucketing down. My car, only about 10m from the door, was a barely visible blurry outline. After half an hour so so, I dashed out through a relative lull and made good my escape. Out on Leach Highway, sitting in the right-turn silo waiting to join Orrong Road, I was hit by wave after wave of water as the oncoming traffic ploughed into an eight-inch deep puddle. It was like being parked in surf. Off up Orrong and through the Polly Pipe, no worries... then ran into a queue to join Mitchell Freeway northbound, and parked atop the bridge/ramp near City West, gazing wanly at, I estimated (I had the time), roughly 900 cars nose-to-tail up past Glendalough Station. “Once more into the traffic, dear friends, once more, or fill the road up with our automotive dead”... well, it became obvious after the third carload of gendarmerie flogged past me – Christmas lights ablaze and theme song blaring – in the breakdown l...

Did some work in Kewdale yesterday, and got down to the top of the freeway at 07:19, transit time from there to Kewdale: 50 minutes. Doing some more work there today, got to the top of the freeway at 06:59, transit time to Kewdale: 27 minutes. Only about 20% less traffic, but probably 90% less skitterish morons. I’ve been driven around Sydney by the Waughs several times, and the CBD’s as choked from 6AM to 8PM as Perth’s freeways are for two hours each day each way. If I had to suffer through that every day (no! no!) it would be car-adaptor time for my laptop and find a way to strap a small keyboard across the boss of the steering wheel plus a flatscreen on the dash as a HUD . Can the Xorg server display upside down in mirror image? I’d be surprised if it couldn’t, and determined to fix that.

Thought I’d join the rush. It looks like Microsoft are going to be making the prime low-cost PowerPC server candidate (XboX-360) and Apple are going to become technically boring by shipping Intel CPUs. Why not AMD CPUs? Bring on the Quad-Opteron-Mobile Laptop! How long before someone hacks FreeBSD-derivative "OS x86" to run on random whitebox PCs, d’ya reckon? Or bolts the shiny bits plus an interface layer to real FreeBSD? And of course, the newly-released Sarge (pair of red and black ice skates shipped with every copy) will run on all of them. One CD-set to bind them all... or whatever. Meanwhile, back at the retail shelves, I notice new laptops being sold by both BigW and OfficeWorks for $997. They’d fit in a 1RU space, they have a screen and keyboard handy, they’d be low-power and independently brownout-proof. What better to use for a light-duty server?

Nice error message from SlashDot just now: Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It’s been 13 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment And I’m supposed to do... what? Good thing it wasn’t a long and/or wit-suffused post.

This is a direct quote from one of the RailsDay projects: Summary: Well, the result would probably be much better if more than one of us had used Rails before any of us could program in Ruby we had thought more about the user interface in advance we’d have invested some more time SaltedLoginGenerator hadn’t acted up on us But we did manage to create at least something ;) Pretty good environment if they could whomp something functional up in a day, starting from zero Ruby experience and almost zero framework ( Rails ) experience. Unlike many of the other web-programming-made-easy approaches I’ve seen, Rails doesn’t suddenly get much harder as the application steps outside the expected parameters.

This came through on the GEGL list today, from Sven Neumann. Mail on the GEGL list is an event in itself, but the content was interesting too: Now that GUADEC is over and everyone’s back home, you will probably want to know what has been happening related to GIMP at this year’s GUADEC in Stuttgart. Let me try to give a short summary of the GIMP meeting we had on Monday. About a dozen people were present at the meeting. We haven’t made a list but off the top of my head I remember Mitch, Michael Schumacher, Øyvind Kolås, Simon Budig, Raphael Quinet, Karine Delvare and her husband, David Odin and me. I know I missed someone. Please bear with me, I suck at remembering names... Picking up on the discussion about Sourcewear that we had on this list earlier, we talked about merchandising. I had the impression that everyone was rather happy about the solution that we found on the mailing-list. We agreed that we don’t need an official merchandiser but that i...

Well, no, that’s not really a KDE screenshot but the colours were bright and striking so I thought I’d post it anyway. KDE 3.4 is no palace revolution (so far; waiting to see what happens with 3.4.2 when – in theory – some of the Safari code-bomb gets integrated) but everything about it seems to be faster and prettier than 3.3. And everything speaks. That might be more major if you have trouble seeing. For an example of a minor but significant improvement , one of Konqueror’s help menu entries is “Introduction” which gives you four pages graded in complexity from “click here and see what happens” to “here in mindblowing detail are the specifications that I hew to”. It’s not the be-all and end-all of intro screens, but it’s visually pleasant and a potentially useful icebreaker for new users. The Cooker update also brought me a newer GIMP , which seems to have preview panes pretty much everywhere by now, along...

OfficeWorks are retailing laptops at the moment (1 per customer) for AUD$997.00 apiece. I trooped along today to have a look, booted BeatrIX and it all seemed to work. Dead standard Intel and RealTek chips, AFAICT. Here is a summary, an lspci listing (sent to my camera via USB) and a few photos. The battery life sucks (2 hours rated), the CPU is reasonable (1.4GHz Celeron), the touchpad is boring and the graphics chipset is unexceptional, but it all seems to work under Linux, and 40GB is twice the hard-disk space I’d expect to see in a bottom-of-the-range item.

Over 300 bounce messages on top of 37 MS-Windows viruses in my mailbox since tennish last night. Three and half viruses per hour. And probably accelerating. I’m guessing that this is the new Bagle virus that we were promised yesterday. Oh, goody. That’s going to make my day so much easier. If you use MS-Windows and haven’t updated your virus signatures yet, please do that before reading any email, will you? Hmmm... “can disable virus-protection software” – <sarcasm>why on earth would anyone want to protect viruses?</sarcasm> <!--#include "standard-rant-about-win32-viruses.inc" -->

The IDE cage (or perhaps card) seems to be happy under lighter loads. It has space on the board for a FireWire socket, and the manual speaks of it being dual-mode, so I’m guessing that the difference between the $50 USB2 version and the $85 dual-mode version is one fifteen-cent socket and one extra hole in the back panel. I’m amazed by how much trouble went into getting the blue power light to look trendy. The light is provided by blue LEDs in the ends of perspex rods, which appear to have deliberately induced optical flaws in them to produce a deliberately speckled lighting effect. Each of the three lit sides has a parabolic reflector behind it and a black grille. Disk activity is shown with a red LED on the right side of the front panel, which causes the panel to flash to purple during disk activity. In the photo above, the camera somehow caught the reflector at the back of that (clear-cased) LED, which is almost invisible to the human eye. I wish they’d put as much ...

Looks like SCOX is going to fly into the deck in a handful of months anyway, but by flapping their arms hard enough, the execs may keep the corpse shambling along until they’ve milked every last drop of blood from it. A pity. I want to see IBM spike them into the deck at hypersonic speeds, and I want to see a fast-paced and far-reaching witch-hunt afterwards.

BTW, the drive in the machine does 35MB/sec, and in the cage does 27MB/sec. Pretty reasonable, modulo the occasional gronk-out, which I’m currently blaming the USB2 card for (I’ll test the cage on my laptop later). Apparently, external drives are faster on a Mac Mini than the internal (laptop) drive. And the software price was OEM, not retail.

My Sister-in-Law is now up to almost 200 gigabytes of raw and processed photos and has suddenly realised that most of it is not backed up. And one of her data drives (yes, all IDE busses on her workstation are full) is starting to throw SMART errors. And she had the fear of God thrown into her by the sudden demise of one of my drives on Monday. So... quick trip to the wholesaler, one 250GB WD drive, one USB2 cage, and do the copy... and the cage drops the ball about every 8GB. <sigh> . So, out with the DVD drive and in with the WD. Copying, copying... 74% now after five hours of rsyncing. Would I like a multi-CPU multi-PCI-buss one-IDE-controller-per-drive to do this kind of thing in half an hour or so, neatly and with a RAID? Yes, but they cost money, which some people don’t have. The hard drive and cage cost about as much as a copy of XP Pro – and which would you rather have in hand? In less than 2 hours, I’ll finally have a chance to upgrade (new GIMP, amongst...

“I wish I had parents like that!” — nephew Christopher, upon hearing that his brother Joshua’s choice of birthday fare had been approved by Mum and Dad.