Plantagenet Penguinista

Take some potatoes, put them in the oven on a steel tray at about 300°C. Wait some time, decide that they’re not cooking fast enough. Pull them out of the oven, cut ’em in half, return to oven. Sit down to watch an enthralling historical fiction video. Completely lose track of the time. Panic when the house starts to smell like a chip shop. Remove from oven. Wait for “pink” cooling noises to die down. Paint with butter or marge, sprinkle with Tinderbox Herbal Sprinkle (tasty lawn clippings from Balingup ), eat with gusto. They’re like big, thick, chunky chips but with much less fat.

I’ve finally found a (relative) bug in our new demesnes, which is that of an evening a billion or so apparently harmless little insects like to congregate on our side of the lake. Not up near the house, as such, but certainly down near the playgrounds and cycleways by the shore. This makes it hard to both see where you’re going and avoid becoming a blind insectivore. The shire’s answer is the depicted debuggers. I’ve only seen two so far, parked near a foreshore playground, and I’ve not seen them lit up, but they’re about 1.8m high by about 1m wide, which is a serious zapper.

Ad Astra Games , “games that combine fast furious fun with scientific realism” are preparing to hand me a (space)ship-list to arrange the repeated proofreading of, and it’s driven home a lesson. My nephew Christopher wants to build a robot. In the beginning, he had in mind something completely autonomous, with the canonical laser eyes and such, and didn’t see any problem with cobbling this together out of pieces from broken radio-controlled vehicles, magnets, dead digital clocks and assorted computer parts. Rather than coathanger these marvellous aspirations, I asked him to think about what he wanted his robot to do. About a month later, he explained that he’d decided to make it remote controlled rather than having it think for itself. Now, about a month after that, he’s started to consider the mechanical aspects of a simple arm to wave about and grab things, and details like the need for vertical lifting to actually pick things up and move them aroun...

Here’s another randomly interesting bit of weather. It looked for all the world as if someone were drawing a great big blanket across the sky — none of the usual puffy forerunners. This went from horizon to horizon as viewed from the Currambine shops, so I'm guessing that the feature was at least 60km long. The sky to the right of scene (East) was 100% bright clear uninterrupted blue.

Misty mornings are just excellent. This shot eastwards from Burns Beach Road towards Carramar has the classic “cartoon animation layers” or “theatre scenery” effect, where each feature looks like it’s on a separate sheet of glass, and if you only knew where the handles were you could slide each of them back and forth independently.

I wish I had this much time on my hands. This Sokoban game is running in sed. Yes, that's right, the command-line search-and- destroy replace tool we’re all familiar with. Apparently, there’s also a version in vim, which implies another in EMACS LISP “just because”. All living proof that someone, somewhere will have the time to do anything , no matter how bizarre.

Does this look like busy, industrial Osborne Park? Well, ’tis. I walked to a customer site from Stirling train station today, past impressive (for a civic works) amounts of machinery trying to beat the swamp into submission (thirty or forty years later, they’re now down to digging out and replacing about five meters of peat, but I still think that anyone digging a wine cellar there is going to get a nasty shock, and a decade or so from now the lawsuits over subsidences etc will start to roll in), and right alongside the dual-use path just north of Hutton Street and half a stone’s throw from the Mitchell Freeway was a happy little market gardner toiling away. Just behind the trees is a four-lane highway, and immediately right is seven lanes of freeway. Everything else to the right of the picture is shops and light industry. Canberra denizens will be used to having cows and such within earshot of the CBD, but someone from Sydney (where the last farmland was three hours b...

The little keyboards went in, and it looks like they've made a penny drop. Except for a mild burst of SuperTux-mania and occasional fits of desire for the Polly Pocket™ website, der kinder haven’t shown an overwhelming interest in computers. Safe, I thought, they might grow up sane. The advent of the little keyboards seems to have certified the computers (or at least, that computer) as being for their little selves instead of just an adult device that they borrow occasionally. Above, you can see AnnéRose with a small mouse firmly in her grip; they now compete quite vigorously for the driver’s seat. To the left, you can see a piece of Tuberling Art by her four-year-old self; both littles have also taken to TuxPaint big time and we have a growing gallery of essentially random artwork from that.

Ryan Verner has been having trouble with morons from Windows space... turns out to be a common problem here, too. I have an “expert” in another state advising people I’ve never met, but who have the ear of the owner (currently an absentee landlord as he opens offices in other countries) of a local company — and while said consultant seems quite well intended, there are some... obvious shortcomings in his understanding of how anything larger than a single fixed MS-Windows domain (or AD equivalent) is supposed to work. I seem to know considerably more about how such things work, which is not exactly a compliment. Such are the politics of the situation that he’ll probably wind up planning the network, install SBS everywhere at four times the cost of using the equivalent Linux boxes, have problems with dodgy semi-real Active Directory domains, have to maintain the suckers regularly (the head office Linux box has required intervention about once a year on avera...

This works, is relatively simple and is pretty much immune to being scraped even by amazingly advanced ’bots – even a massivly underpaid human “’bot” would take a little while to sort it out: <script language="JavaScript"> function href(spamtrap,username) { return 'mail' + ('to' + ':' + username + '@' + spamtrap).replace(/ /g,'.'); } ...and wherever you have an email link, you put something like this: Email: <a href="mailto:username domain com au" onmouseover="this.href=href('domain com au','username')" title="Click to send to real email address">username at domain com au</a>. If you want to armour it even further, omit the “at”, use an image (not a nice, clean readily OCRable one, either) or don’t even put the shadow of an email address there. Using the JavaScript function throws off the vast majority of bots, because there’s no “@” si...

A bunch of young larrikins burst into the saloon, obviously excited after the rodeo. Most of them headed for the bar, but one noticed an older man sitting alone at a table, just a-settin’, staring at a bowl of chilli beef on the table in front of him. The lad moseyed on over. “Howdy, grandpaw!” he greeted tham man loudly, slapping him on the shoulder. “If yer gunna sit there all day lookin’ at that an’ lettin’ it go all cold, yer won’t mind if I have a bite now, will yer?” The man, looking a bit dazed and bemused, wobbling a bit after the manner of drunks everywhere, shook his head and pushed the bowl across towards the lad, who grabbed a spoon and began shovelling it in, grinning, as the man watched carefully. As he got to the bottom of the bowl, his spoon bumped against something, so the lad stopped, dug, and lifted out... a dead rat. Stiff with age, patches of beef’n’bean-soaked fur falling, plib, splut into the bowl.....

Didn’t get a ride in during the day, but the moon was bright tonight so I went out on a little moonlight cruise, about 6.5km in all, basically a lap around Iluka on the paths. Iluka is the big square-ish region including much bulldozing slightly left of centre (mostly paved over with houses now), Burns Beach is the block of houses top left, Shenton Avenue runs across the bottom, Burns Beach Road across the top and Marmion Avenue vertically through the middle. Starting to actually feel fat now, hope that’s a good sign.

For the first time in a while, we’ve chosen a house to rent which we haven’t had to pick in a hurry. This one’s in Wanneroo, not far from Lake Joondalup, and has an actual yard worthy of the name. The lake-shore has buckets of playgrounds and lawns and ovals and cycleways to everywhere, plus it’s a good deal closer to der kinders’ school. Oh, yes, and it definitely has ADSL. BTW, word from my source is that Telstra are now promising ADSL2 for the little ISPs in January. Ish. Not September. Big surprise there. <sarcasm> Good to see Telstra caring for all Australians and not giving the small players a hard time, as usual. <sarcasm> I’ve been having fun with PCREs, trying to match “chicken pox” (“len.gthen your me/mber by over 3 ln*ches”) and “screeech” [sic] (“cheeeeep viaaaaagraa”) without trashing any real email. It’d be handy to have a simple, neat way of saying “and” and ...

It looks like Perth”s leading multi-talented bachelor (lawyer, IT guru, thespian, human spam-assassin, world-famous speaker — and these are just the ones I know about) is finally getting knotted ! Congratulations, y’all!

If you do this across the road to a favourite 4WD playground... ...then people will do this... ...leading to this... On the same trip, I exposed another limitation of photography, not limited to the digital variety. These flowers... ...are in Real Life™ a much deeper, richer and purpler purple than the flattish pale blue hue on your monitor would have you believe. The camera ain’t got the sensors to campture it, and if it did, your monitor wouldn’t have the phosphors (or whatever) to display it. Coming back from this ride, on a slight downhill with a tailwind, I got the FOSTFOLG Beastie up to the point where I couldn’t pedal any faster. The bike was certainly stable, but the vigorous bouncing up and down on the dirt road was threatening to do the rider’s head in. I also got some nice shots of big, healthy banksia flowers (~20cm tall by ~8cm thick) and some yen-whan native wattle (darker and deeper colours than the imported stuff they plant alongside the mai...

Here’s some milk cartons as requested. Not cow’s milk, beans’ milk, but you can’t have everything. Our kinder don’t take too kindly to large doses of moo juice. Many artificial milks (like the two flavoured ones pictured) are a chemical nightmare – near as bad as commercial ice-cream – but they don’t send der kinder so troppo.

Australian wildlife seems to specialise in being... different. This flower is native to the Joondalup area, but I’ve never seen it elsewhere. It starts out as a reasonably normal-looking bud, then opens to show a bundle of pale green rods with darker tips. The rods lengthen, then separate and spread. The spread rods then each split and “peel” back from a very slim translucent core to form a pillow of pale yellow curls bearing the normal polleny, nectary bits that the bees so enjoy wallowing in. This then collapses down again to a dry, leathery core which falls apart to reveal a few seed-pods. The pods split to fling the seeds a few meters, where (if they’re fortunate) they get to start a new bush. The leaves are as sharp as they look. The bushes typically stand about two metres tall, and they are typical (for Western Australian flora, at least) in their response to lack of water. First they rush any existing seed-pods to completion, then the whole bush dies sudde...

This is mostly a cheat-sheet for my own reference, it’s not much harder than using a wordprocessor and for some reason Google picks up Blogger posts really quickly. (-: For the onlookers: the traditional way of doing things on UNIXishes is to bind everything to the system users, so each user has a directory in /home/$USER, a mailbox in /var/spool/mail/$USER (or similar), a matching Samba login bound to their UID, and so on. This can be made incredibly flexible though PAM, but in this case I didn’t want to associate mailboxes with normal logins. So... urpmi postfix postgrey amavisd-new clamd dovecot postgresql-server apache-mod_php twig All software fetched and installed, bah crackey this Linux shore is hard t’use! Debian advocates might like to try s/urpmi/apt-get install/ and some of your directories might be a little different, but the rest of this should work out more or less OK. Where you see “domain.com.au”, replace it with your own domain, and ...

Or, An Open Letter to Email Marketers “ Spam ” in this context is unsolicited commercial email (UCE) . Spam uses up people’s lives. How? Let’s say that a typical piece of spam takes round five seconds to identify and discard – some less, some more. Let’s also say that 90% of it gets eaten by spam filters or bounced for various reasons. Now say that you’ve just queued up one hundred million messages, a modest run by contemporary spammers’ standards. Ninety million of them get filtered or rejected, and ten million get delivered. Those ten million messages take fifty million seconds for people to identify and discard. That’s about forty waking man-days, or seventy working days. Now say that you do one such run a day (again, very small bikkies for a spammer), Monday to Friday, every week. In just over a year, you’ve used up someone’s entire waking life from cradle to grave , or the entire working lives of two people . If you ...

...was the Empire Copyright Act 1911 , or more specifically, that act as incorporated into Australian law by the Copyright Act 1912 , which in turn amended the International Copyright Act of 1886 (a spinoff of preparations for the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works ). The Berne Convention began the “demise+n years” idea; the previous arrangement was the 1710 Statutes of Anne , with a fixed copyright term of 18 years. Before that, a hodge-podge of laws and arbitrary grants protected mostly the printers, rather than the authors, and were often designed to also serve as a government-controlled censorship tool. I’m looking at the practices of Eric Flint , David Weber , John Ringo and several of the other authors who deal through Baen Books , they seem to be releasing the complete text electronically under a licence which is essentially the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (ie, “you may copy this as-is but not sell...

Sat down to read a chapter or two of an old favourite (in the form of a hardcover library discard), got curious and searched on a short but reasonably unique string from it . Viola, three copies on line (that Google knows about). What is the copyright status of this work in Australia? It was copyrighted in 1966 and first published in Great Britain in 1967, but all of the Australian references I can find speak of the Copyright Act of 1968, which provides for 50 years past the date of the author’s demise – a ridiculously long time to start with – or the AUSFTA amendments, which make it demise+70 years. What Act was in force at the time of publication, and what did it say?

It seems that TSG had to unseal a 2002 email explaining that none of their copyrights existed in Linux (incidentally, X/X11/XFree86/Xorg is not a part of Linux). So how do they respond? By quoting another email which says that there’s lots. So far, so good... except that the second email was written in 1999. D’oh! Or possibly, D’ohl. Key text from the 2002 email explains a lot: The project was a result of SCO's executive management refusing to believe that it was possible for Linux and much of the GNU software to have come into existance without *someone* *somewhere* having copied pieces of proprietary UNIX source code to which SCO owned the copyright. ...oh, and does this sound familiar? There was, at one stage, the idea that we would sell licenses to corporate customers who were using Linux as a kind of “insurance policy” ...so it looks more and more like D’ohl was simply to fixated on the idea that FOSS couldn’t posibly have done what it re...

Problem solved. Try this . .

“My name is Narelle and I used to earn $500 per week working for a boss. Now I earn well over $2000 per week and I work from home around my children. [B&W photo of woman and 2 teenagers included] My business is expanding rapidly and I urgently need people to open new areas all over Australia. “Highly Lucrative Training Provided FOR FREE INFO www.igniteyourdream.net ” Brilliant. No details. This will involve selling. Hit website, get redirected to the above .com, Google for “60 Minute Money”, find “ Herbalife Unsuccessful Stories – 2004/2005 and these words: Two years ago I fell for the Herbalife opportunity. This was a group, now as large as David Beven, called 60 Minute Money, run from South Florida, initiated a few years ago by Russell Gain, Palm Beach FL. This is a further scam to conceal the fact it's Herbalife. In fact take a look at our website www.the-success-happening.com , the one out of three sites, the recruiting one. I w...

I cycled due west towards Burns’ Beach yesterday after lunch. FOSTFOLG performed well, even getting up to top cog in the wiggly chaos which it pleases modern developers to call “streets”. Even though developers have *“improved” most of the area with bulldozers and scrapers some years ago, they haven’t got around to replacing more than about 1 / 3 of the “improved” area with random brick boxes yet. The impact of all of this for a cyclist is that there is no pleasant bushland to cycle through roughly, and no hard, clear streets to cycle through smoothly – just soft, blowing, mostly yellow sand. My next micro-expedition will be a tad further north, along Burns’ Beach road. I’ll take my camera and see if I can grab a shot of the weird bundles of green rods that seem to serve as flowers hereabouts.

Michael Kortvelyesy also posed that question, and a chap named Greg Schofield from the ECHALK list found this answer , syndicated from here (apprently in August 2003, although the two sites referenced are current). And it’s an interesting one, simple and unique, and relatively easy to implement. It starts by making a couple of claims almost singular on the topic: most suicide bombers are not religious ; and most suicide bombings are over territorial disputes . The dude keeps records in the (many!) original languages, so he’s not just blowing hot air. And unlike so many of the people who disagree with the existing US presence in the Middle East, he doesn’t just propose that the US walk away or cave in as an answer. What he does propose is that the US revert to a fast-response fleet-based presence rather than burying the locals in troops. This answer means that US troops are constantly in the area, but not constantly in the faces of people worried (by agents provocat...

About half an hour ago my ADSL router lit up like Christmas. From time to time someone will pound a site hosted on this end of it looking at images or Weber books [update, Thu AM: and still hasn&rsquol;t – but hallelieuyah for small mercies, hasn't got perceptibly worse, either], but it's usually pretty sporadic. This didn't let up. So... punted around in the webserver logs, and lo and behold, Senectus had thoughtfully posted a link to my Lappyvator page in a SlashDot article about putting a PowerBook on a cardboard shelf. Because the cardboard shelf is so rivettingly exciting, my ADSL link is now as slow as muck, and getting worse. Oh, joy.

“Dear Diary” — feel impelled to confess that I’m mainly typing this as a cranking-over exercise for my brain this morning rather than from my normal drive to randomise other people’s brains. Did a presentation for the PLUG crew last night at the OpenSource WA venue (called “The Crimson Panacea” [link coming after I fire up my lapatop ] and co-starring a red sapphire) and shouldn’t have. A big problem with burning the candle at both ends is that sooner or later the flames meet in the middle. If you’re a Sandgroper and haven’t visited the OSWA centre yet, do. Director Kevin Russell and manager Phill Twiss are happy to provide rooms, power, networking and access to scores of computers to practically anyone who is pushing hte Open SOurce agenda in Western Australia. OSWA also have a pair of shiny new projectors, one of which I broke in last night. Only 1024x768 but incredibly crisp for all of that. And a portable PA. And a really...

Walking through the Karawara shopping centre today, and I spot an ATM stuck through the window adjacent one of the entrances. On the back of the ATM is a CRT, displaying... what? Useful status information? Nope. Cutting-edge advertising? Hah! No, what we get is a very MS-Windows looking screen explaining that this device contains intellectual property owned by Diebold and you’d better not steal it or else. Diebold? You mean the same schmucks who repeatedly get done for running stupidly insecure voting machines and the like in the USA? Can anyone else see a disaster waiting to happen here? And... which bank was this gullible?

I got to take the Flouro-Orange-Shading-To-Fading-Out-Lime-Green Beastie out “in anger” today. Steven “ Frame Breaker ” Hanley I’m not – even uphill slopes you could barely see were quite noticeable, and the “aerobic&rdquo part of the exercise plan was depressingly easy to achieve. All in all, despite that little embarrassment, it was quite an enjoyable ride, just a couple of klicks down to the local supermarket and back. It’s amazing how much heavier a 9kg pack full of groceries feels than one with just a digital camera and phone in it. I can no longer just stand up and fling myself around in the course of accelerating, I have to carefully moderate the pedal-pushing lest the bag fling me off the bike. The FOSTFOLG Beastie itself is much nicer to prod along than the temporary Blue Beastie. The thicker tyres, for starters, drastically improve the ride. The gearshift feels precise and new, and each click on the handlebars corresponds exactl...

No, not the musician; no, not the NetBSD contributor. This Richard Earnshaw is an historian and a war veteran from South Carolina, across in Belgium to help his daughter and surviving grandchild to recover from a car smash (t-boned by an idiot). Richard has always been very helpful and careful, a very effective moderator-without-authority on Baen’s Bar and a producer of typically interesting and detailed posts on anything historical. He’s also a father and grandfather, both biological and adoptive, and his good character shines through in all of his children. There’s much more depth to Richard than you can squeeze into less than a book, but it should be enough to say that I’ve known him on-line for years and it feels like I’ve lost a beloved uncle or someone equally close. Richard dropped in to a clinic for a routine blood test about three weeks ago, was told that there were some warning signs there and he should get a liver biopsy done, went in to do t...

I felt so smugly satisfied with this response to an InformationWeek article that y’all are about to suffer a reprint: zlib is used by practically everything on the planet, including MS-Windows and Mac OS X programs, all of the BSDs, VMS, embedded systems and so on. On top of that, Linux uses other compression libraries as well. Calling it “Linux Compression” is fundamentally silly. Neither is it a flaw in “the” format (zlib is used in many file formats), but in the implementation of the libraries which usually handle the format. Such ignorance is most unbecoming in a magazine which purportedly exists to provide expert information. But let us move on... A typical well-equipped Linux system will have one (1) copy of the zlib libraries installed. A bulletproof replacement for this will typically arrive as part of the machine’s next update run (I typically set mine up to do this nightly or weekly). OS X and the BSDs and so on also have at least adequate ...

Interesting that Haast’s Eagle should have “a truncated wingspan of around three metres, for flying under the forest canopy” and yet “weighed between 10kg and 14kg – between 30% and 40% heavier than the largest living bird of prey [...] approaching the upper weight limit for powered flight” and on top of this “the New Zealand bird was in fact [genetically] related to one of the world’s smallest eagles – the little eagle from Australia and New Guinea’. We are the Spanish Evolution! Our three main weapons are fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency! No, wait, our four ...

“Viagra and two other popular impotence drugs may cause sudden blindness in one eye in rare cases, the [US] Food and Drug Administration said in a formal alert yesterday. [...] The condition, called non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), is caused by a blockage of blood to the optic nerve. [...] The FDA [...] had received 43 reports of NAION in men who had recently taken Viagra, Cialis or Levitra. The vision loss is generally not reversible.” Is that what you call “hard luck”?

Interesting that even with obvious power to spare a couple of feet above them, it was evidently cheaper to add solar panels and batteries to power these instruments (and presumably change out said batteries every 5-10 years) than to step down power for them from the wires. This pole is whare the railway passes under the road near Lake Joondalup Baptist College. And sorry, Chris Samuel , if what I wrote made it appear that you were making a claim for a solution. No, that’s just what I see implied in the data. That’s enough about murderous nutcases for a while, let’s change pace slightly. This tastes seriously yummy even if you don’t make it with all of the right branded bits. Also on a completely different topic, I finally have a replacement for the Blue Beastie, the Flouro-Orange-Shading-To-Faded-Lime-Green Beastie. As you can see from the handlebars, the price was definitely right. All it needed was ten seconds of TLC with an Allen key to tighten up the handleb...

Quote from a lying, deceitful piece of spam received today: Truth has beauty, power and necessity. Weak people cannot be sincere.

This article also puts the number of injured at 700, 350 of whom are still in hospital. Thanks to Chris Samuel for his information. It tends at first glance to suggest a wipe-and-reinstall of all Islamic higher education centres, which seems a bit drastic. Yet I know a fair few practitioners of Islam who are not at all violently inclined, so perhaps a well-defined minority of such institutes can be selected. Real life, however, is seldom so simple.

Quote : According to a recent study by Evans Data Corporation, more than a quarter of European developers using Visual Studio .Net as their primary development environment have written an application for Linux, and more than a third are likely to write a Linux application next year. The thing which impresses me is that these are not just net.randoms, they’re developers using one of Microsoft’s core developer products. The enemy (that’s us) are within the very Gates. Now if Visual Studio will run under WINE despite Microsoft’s indifference, these developers can be developing on the same platform they’re deploying on. Which entails them both turning more attention to their new environment and making more requests of other software developers for Linux versions of applications. Another small way to keep the Linux snowball rolling.

“Global warming could be controlled if we all became vegetarians and stopped eating meat. That's the view of British physicist Alan Calverd, who thinks that giving up pork chops, lamb cutlets and chicken burgers would do more for the environment than burning less oil and gas.” says PhysOrg . Finding it hard to make ends meat?

Study author Susannah Fox says : “People are scaling back on some Internet activities,” [...] “People are feeling less adventurous, less free to do whatever they want to do online.” The important point that she misses but the reporter doesn’t is: While some computer users knowingly install spyware and adware, they often hitch rides with games, screensavers and other freebies, or exploit security flaws in Microsoft Windows operating systems and Internet Explorer browsers. Read my lips: Linux does not support spyware . All of the widely deployed (and in fact deployable) spyware is unique to MS-Windows. So to borrow and mutilate a bumper sticker: Know Linux, no fear No Linux? Know fear “About 28 million American adults ended up spending money to get their computer working again, typically in the range of $100” (from the study: USD$129.15) — er, was this included in all of those TCO studies? I advise people who have too much vested in non-po...

While it’s not a patch on the number of innocent civilians killed and injured worldwide every day by land-mines alone — some of them no doubt manufactured, brokered, shipped or whatever by London-based companies — deliberately setting out to kill more innocent civilians has to be the single stupidest way I can think of to get one’s point across. If the London attacks really are Al Quaeda (and if not, it will be someone of similar stripe), then of course they need to be stopped — but how? All of the simple answers have been tried, and have failed. To be merciless enough to exterminate every potential terrorist simply kills, you guessed it, still more innocent civilians and generates the resentment needed to form the next generation of indignant murderers, and anything less than that won’t have a measurable effect. Education hasn’st worked. It is seen (and rightly so) as an attempt to replace one extreme ideology with another, and will provoke a c...

Some sources claim 12, some 8, others only 2. Other sources are saying that a group of Al-Quaeda sympathisers calling themselves “Secret Group of al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe” (sound clumsy enough to be genuine ESL, at least) is making unequivocal claims to have set the bombs. Said idiots apparently also threatened Italy and Denmark, of all places. Who on earth has Denmark offended recently? The claim is against Zionists, but Denmark has never struck me as being a hotbed of Zionism? I’m wondering how effective a death penalty for claiming responsibility would be.

Oh, yeah, and the reason I was in the reseller’s in the first place was to order some child-sized keyboard-and-mouse bundles . I’ll let y’all know how they go in a few days.

Today, I watched Microsoft shooting itself in the foot. I stood at the counter in a local computer reseller, and listened to the following customer problems ( C: ustomer/ S: alesperson/ L: eon): C:  I want a copy of Norton’s S:  $79 thanks L:  [wry grin] spot the Windows user C:  [looks sad] can’t take chances [walks out with Norton’s] C:  do you have any memory sticks? and a virus protector? S:  [shows her Flash stick range, brings out boxed copy of Norton’s ($79) plus OEM copy of McAfee ($25)] C:  why is that one only $25? S:  it’s an OEM version C:  what’s that mean? S:  ummm... L:  no pretty box and no manual C:  oh, is that all? S:  [shrugs] yes. C:  great! I’ll take this one then [selects McAfee, launches into monologue about her machine having just been fixed again ... obviously resentful at having to spend even $25 to stop it happening again] C:  [selects all of t...

< quote > The European Parliament rejected a law on patents for software, ending a three-year effort by companies including Nokia Oyj and Siemens AG to counter U.S. domination of Europe's $60 billion market. The parliament in Strasbourg, France, today voted 648 to 14 to throw out a draft law [...] “ We buried a bad law and did so without flowers ,” said Eva Lichtenberger, an Austrian member of the parliament’s Green group. “The legislation would have hindered the development of small companies and helped big businesses because they are the only ones that can afford patent lawyers and litigation costs.” </quote> Oh, what a shame <leap> <click> (-: But watch the slimy buggers try to backdoor it despite the 46:1 “ NO! ” vote. Thanks to Con Zymaris for that link.

... this could be why: Many companies were unaware that providing hosting services on a commercial basis required an SPLA, [Microsoft regional hosting specialist, Phil Meyer] said. “You can't fault a reseller for wanting to make a buck, but many have inappropriate licensing for hosting,” he said. “These guys are undercutting those who charge the correct pricing fees.” Meyer said Microsoft had legally pursued various service providers because they did not hold a suitable license. In essence, Microsoft want to (have for a long time) rent software to hosting providers instead of selling it. While this is more expensive (big surprise there), they spin it as being a benefit: With SPLA, service providers have near zero start-up costs, since they only pay for licenses based on what they used to provide services each month. The SPLA is also complicated ; the “user rights” document describing what the provider may or may not do with each package amounts to ...

Sunshine, blue skies, warmth — that’s my kind of winter! Perth weather back to normal for a while. Hurrah! However, all of these pleasant circumstances are marred by the news that an internet friend of some years, literally a gentleman and a scholar, has unexpectedly been attacked by “an aggressive sarcoma”. He went in for a test yesterday, and found himself on the table losing a spleen and some lengths of colon. He’s soon to start chemo- and radiotherapy on his liver. Liver cancer does not have a good survival rate. This comes a few months after losing a son-in-law and a grandchild to a nut loose behind the wheel.

Extrapolation. “Do you realize that in about 30 or 40 years, we'll have thousands of old ladies running around with tattoos and belly button rings?” Perspectives. “I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then suddenly it hit me.” Are you sure you want to know? “A woman was shopping at her local supermarket where she selected: A 2-litre bottle of HiLo milk A carton of eggs A litre of orange juice, A head of hydroponic lettuce, A kilo can of coffee A brown paper bag of mushrooms As she was unloading her items on the rubber belt to run it through the register, a drunk standing behind her watched her unload them. While the cashier was ringing up her purchases, the drunk calmly stated, ‘<hic> You must be single.’ The woman was a bit startled by this proclamation, but she was intrigued by the derelict's intuition, since she was indeed single. She looked at her shopping on the belt and saw nothing particularly unusual about her selections...

My laptop gets called “The Hussy” because I spend more time with it than with anything else. Having sent it on a six-day holiday this morning, I miss being able to: sit near whatever der kinder are doing, supervise them and still work sit in a truly comfortable chair and work lie in bed not whimpering and work sit outside in the sun (such of it as there is at the moment) and work drop in on customer sites and have a full working context immediately get work done when I would otherwise be twiddling my thumbs I don’t know how to assign a monetary value to most of these, but it must have paid for itself several times over already.

Trotted around to James and Jane’s at 6:30 this morning to hand over my laptop for five days. Jane has only about 4GB of Flash to store stuff on, and they’ll be spending mucho time in Kalbarri and on the coast up to Shark Bay. Photogenic country, that, as is most of our coastline and big swages of the inland. Very unlikely to fit into 4GB. Nothing had been packed. At all. They woke up as I arrived. Jane turned to asking questions like “How can I redirect my ’phone while I’m out of range?” (which they will be * for most of the trip) or “Can I get my email to send back a message telling them I’m away?” (hello, spammers, this is a working address!) and James was dealing with three children out of four having left their sneakers (and the dog’s bed, and maybe some other stuff) out in the rain overnight. This while they dressed all four, breakfasted and hurriedly packed up a mountain of stuff that I really can’t see them fitt...

It seems that Microsoft paid IBM USD$775M rather than be sued by them for antitrust violations over OS/2 and SmartSuite. I think they got off rather lightly. The face Microsoft put on it says a lot about them: “With these antitrust issues behind us, both Microsoft and IBM can move ahead, at times cooperatively and at times competitively, to bring the best products and services to customers,” said Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith Not “We’ve been naughty, and got caught, and we’ve learned to not mistreat you” but “Now that this is over, we’re a great company with great products [and implied], we’ve never really done anything wrong, trust us”. Business as usual — screwing the system, and everyone in it, over — seems to be the order of the day once more. But at least they had to shell out several of their many hoarded billions to resume it. Never mind, they’ll be among the first against the wall [mortgage on ...

Apparently we’re doomed, or at least on shaky ground . Ah, well, media looking for conflict to report on and times are quiet, I guess. The second article linked from that story is an announcement back in February of the instantiation of Planet Linux Australia . If news is that slow, perhaps we should do more exciting things to stir up controversy, like maybe hold LCA in New Zealand next year ?

Just got a machine back from Queensland after a “Linux expert” had been “helping” to get it configured for dialup. He had: destroyed the existing – working – dialup configuration somehow put in a new one with his password in the TIMEOUT field of the chat script missed the absence of a modem atteched to the box been “unable” to get the box talking through a working (Windows ME) laptop with ICS either, despite me talking him through downing the firewall completely and setting a defaultroute through the laptop <rant> People saying “Yes, I can do X” (in this case admin a Linux box) without qualification (just to get the work) need standing against a wall. Would you say that if someone was looking for a jet pilot? A dynamite monkey? A brain surgeon? No? Then why for lesser issues, especially when the consequences are costing the customer – one way or the other – hundreds of dollars an hour to fix? (Raises hands, claw...

This one’s to balance the cute pictures and high praise, so prospective parents don’t suffer an overdose of the “rosy glow” effect. So... here we are, having just walked about 250m down a path to the beach (the one off the southern half of Anchorage Drive, Mindarie), then about 50m along the beach, when Miss 4 pipes up, “Dad, I can feel my poohs starting to come out.” She was wrong. When I checked, I discovered that we were dealing with a... fully emergent phenomenon. And we were equipped with what by way of spares and cleaning gear? Zilch. The help and sympathy I was offered were encapsulated in just three words: “Well, she’s yours.” I finally managed to beg a handkerchief from Greville, who assures me that he doesn’t want it back again, thank you, dug a shallow hole, levitated madam while she completed her, ah, transaction, then covered it, took the knickers and handkerchief down to the waterline and scrubbed them lots in san...

Still young enough for the occasional nap.

Quoth the teacher, an official DET employee, in email to me: Basically Microsoft/copyright is scaring me, hence starting the exploration of open source software, particularly if I want to give old computers away to needy families. A thing about Educational pricing: it stops being legal to use software so acquired as soon as you stop being a student. So say you (as a typical contemporary deal) have a wad of software included in the cost of your course. You install it, use it for two years, then finish your course. Now you have a choice to make. Do you keep right on using it, illegally? spend twice the cost of a new whitebox computer replacing just the basics at non-OEM non-Edu pricing? switch away from something you just spent two years familiarising yourself with? I find it fascinating that almost all of the companies which do this are members of the BSAA.