Plantagenet Penguinista

$ ls -l get* -rwxrw-r-- 1 $USER users 11617792 Oct 31 12:28 access- $CUSTOMER -HOWTO.doc -rwxrw-r-- 1 $USER users 241002 Oct 31 12:28 access- $CUSTOMER -HOWTO.odt -rw-r--r-- 1 $USER users 196751 Oct 31 13:13 access- $CUSTOMER -HOWTO.zip -rw-r--r-- 1 $USER users 83624 Oct 31 13:12 access- $CUSTOMER -HOWTO.7z Same document in each file. DOC is MS-Word format, ODT is OpenDocument Text, ZIP is, well, a Zip archive and 7Z is a 7-Zip archive (both of the .doc)

ABC fm hosted a free concert by this 14-member WAAPA percussion ensemble at Government House this afternoon , so we trotted along for a listen (11 people in our group, 5 of them adults). It was excellent, highly recommended. The first piece, here is the shell that was never ours but remembers , [yes, the capitalisation is correct] was a little spooky but every piece was interesting throughout. Pia will be pleased to note that the most impressive players overall (IMESHO) were the second and third shortest girls, and the single most impressive performer was also femme (she played a fast-paced Brasilian composition on a Glockenspeil(?) with five (5) sticks at once, including special effects produced by whacking the ends of the bars with the “neck” of some of the sticks). The array of instruments they featured was pretty awe-inspiring, from drums the size of a matchbox up to massive kettle-drums that sounded like thunder, via tubular bells, tiny chimes made out of “pian...

Cycling back home from work (well, from Whitfords station — I cheated on the way back due to time constraints, but I did cycle all the way to town in the morning) in the early afternoon on Friday, I decided to take a short-cut past some historic ruins and the relocated Wanneroo Primary School [PDF, ≅3MB, photos on p35] which you can see in the southeast quadrant of this satellite image of Perry’s Paddock . I would normally do my run up the cycleway to the west of the lake (which you can see wiggling NW/SE in the southwest quadrant of the image if you squint), cross Ocean Reef Road, then cut across the lake on the north side of the bitumen, picking up the cycleway again for the last few km home. As I approached the little bridge across the vestigial channel between lakes, I was surprised to see a bloke with a lawn mower — the ordinary little garden-variety kind — trundling noisily across the vast reaches of the paddock. If you find the large roughly-right t...

Today, I moved gear around in the office, including my Billion 711CE ADSL modem, because I have a back-pain type headache which is exacerbated by staring at screens too much (what you see here is quota for about an hour) and my chiro isn’t available until late today. When I plugged the Billion back in, she’s a no go. Some experimentation with tcpdump on startup reveals that instead of its normal (and default, for the model) address of 192.168.1.254, it has assumed 10.0.0.2 and begun ARP scanning from 10.0.0.2 on up. Eh? Attempting to log in via the web interface reveals that it responds to neither the password I’d set, nor the factory default. So... out with the paperclip. One reset later, and hurrah for Firefox remembering the web pages with all of the settings on, now all I have to do is laboriously plug about twenty “virtual server” (port forwarding) settings in. But... wha...? Has anyone seen this kind of bizarrity from one of these before?

Building on a one-line LXer comment from “ salparadise ”, “ number6x ” came up with this little gem: Attention all investors! Microsoft admits it can no longer compete on technical merits. Microsoft has admitted that it is incapable of implementing the open document standards freely published by the OASIS group. These standards have been implemented by other software companies like Sun, and even by unpaid volunteer amateurs in the free software community. Microsoft claims that adoption of Open Document standards that are published and free for all software companies to implement could lock it out of important business opportunities. This would be like an accounting firm claiming that requiring them to be able to add columns of numbers together could jeopardize future business prospects. This admission of inability to implement simple technical standards comes on the heels of several years of disastrous stumbles by the once great software giant. Microsoft was nev...

I’m sure all-y’all Linux heads out there in reader-land have read an oh-my-goodness-this-is-hard story about someone’s struggle to get accelerated OpenGL working with this or that video card. Well, here’s the other side of the coin. Last night I had to do a fair bit of sitting in an office, waiting for things to happen, and I had to do it in front of an MS-Windows 2000 machine. So naturally I began improving it. After a little of the usual cleaning up, my attention turned to the video, which was set to run at 85Hz on an LCD screen. D’oh? I wound it back down to 60Hz, which looked fine, no extra flicker ’n’ all, then installed the Really Slick Screen Savers from a copy of TheOpenCD . They didn’t so much run as limp. So I tried some other 3D stuff. The short story is that despite (eventually) having the latest drivers installed, and everything switched on, and everything saying that OpenGL was in Hog Heaven, it was not. No amount of tweak...

I keep forgetting how frustrating it can be. The Task: get two MS-Windows machines to talk to one another to verify that a piece of software doesn't break simply due to being run from a Samba share. Simple, no? The Result: finally, the first (XP) and fourth (XP) machines talk to one another. The Path There: Nothing can connect to the first’s share. The second (2000) machine won’t talk to or share with anybody. The third (XP) keeps prompting for a guest user password, and nothing will satisfy it. Yes, I have enabled the guest user. On each end and both ends, just in case. Yes, I have tried giving the guest accounts a password, and making real accounts that match. No, we’re not on a domain or AD setup... although the first (now working-ish) machine thought it was joined to (a nonexistent, never-existent) one when I first sat down to it. The Remaining Problem: the application still breaks just as badly XP-to-XP (which is exactly the situation the developer has set up...

One house about two blocks from here put a huge pile of stuff out, slightly larger than my car and including many bikes and a barbecue. Within 6 hours it was down to just the barbecue. Another house half a block away had a couch piled high with gear, including a small microwave. It took two days this time, but they’re down to just the microwave (but now without the glass plate), no couch and no other gear. It’s kind of like a huge flea-market but without the cash registers.

Oh, good. Something else to do with all of my spare time. It seems that a small UK company has decided that it doesn’t want to be crushed or bought out. I’m wondering if they will suddenly be made an offer that they can’t refuse, but meanwhile it’d be great if they do succeed in Open Sourcing Xara Xtreme. Either way, the cat is out of the bag (another favoured way of putting it is “The can is open, the worms are everywhere!”); they’ve even published a Torrent for it. Open Sourcing is a good, productive reaction to the threat of destruction. DeScribe launched one last version of their software for free before closing their doors forever , but it would have been even better if they’d also published the source. The GPL wasn’t a major force in those days. Xara aren’t shy about their big ideas: To create a new cross-platform industry standard To change the graphics landscape forever To create the best drawing / vector graphics s...

A local developer who prefers to remain nameless was pleasantly surprised to discover that PostgreSQL’s stored procedures support is if anything considerably better than MS-SQL-Server’s . He is now converting his MS-SQL-Servee-backed application full-tilt to PostgreSQL. He had a look at MySQL and was very impressed with a number of its features but regretfully concluded that it did not have the right stored-procedure features to support his application (which is basically written as a big flock of stored procedures which a very thin GUI application layer invokes when it needs to do real work). It’s not as exciting as an umpty-thousand-desktop mass migration, but it’s much more up close and personal for me, and having this one developer change will swing at least hundreds of users across to an Open Source system, and soon see MS-Windows depart one of “my” server rooms entirely.

A week or so ago, I prognosticated that some craters on Satturn's moons looked like they were from gentler impacts. Lo, for a Nature article promptly arrives saying the same thing, as does a Mars Global Surveyor shot of secondary craters in western Arabia Terra . The Nature authors (Edward Bierhaus, Clark Chapman and William Merline of Lockheed Martin ’s Space Exploration Systems [link features a cool GoogleMaps-like satellite imagery navigator] division and the Southwest Research Institute ) are not shy about the implications: We now return to questions of crater distributions in the Solar System in general, and the implications for impactor size distributions and age dating. Laboratory-scale experiments demonstrate that impacts into ice and rock targets yield ejecta fragments with steep SFDs [size–frequency distributions] , with ice-impacts generating ejecta more efficiently. [...] The Moon and Mars both possess a steep branch in their crater SFD at sizes below a few kilomet...

Spent a few precious minutes reading some of Terry Pratchett’s latest book, Thud! , which has a section smacking of the “ What have the Romans ever done for us? ” skit from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian : “War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for? ” [Sergeant Fred Colon] said. “Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?” “Absol— well, okay.” “Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?” “All right, I’ll grant you that, but—” “Saving civilization from a horde of—” “It doesn’t do any good in the long run is what I’m saying, Nobby, if you’d listen for five seconds together,” said Fred Colon sharply. “Yeah, but in the long run, what does, Sarge?” Everything I’ve read so far is classic Pratchett. Just the right level of nonsense to peel a day’s screen-gazing away from one’s synapses.

I keep forgetting how bad it is. This is Andrew Pollock. No, this is not Andrew Pollock on drugs, this is him on MSIE. PNG is an open standard, and therefore inherently evil according to Microsoft’s internal and unofficial Q’ballah, so apparently the thing to do is not support it properly. No tabs. Searching requires laboriously visiting a search engine by hand, instead of thumping in text and letting the browser soft it out. Bookmarks are a menu item and a dialog box, not “I want this «click» URL in this «release» menu”. The autoscroll is clumsy and replaces the ever-so-handy middle-click paste-to-go-here facility, as well as the click-to-open-in-new-thingie facility. No dictionary. No HTML facilities. No adblocker. The popup blocker only blocks useful popups, like SourceForge downloads. (For Konqueror users) no fish:// or any other interesting protocols. The progress bar tells gross and offensive lies. For example, it shows progress in t...

RFC3514 specifies that Firewalls, packet filters, intrusion detection systems, and the like often have difficulty distinguishing between packets that have malicious intent and those that are merely unusual. We define a security flag in the IPv4 header as a means of distinguishing the two cases. How is this achieved? To solve this problem, we define a security flag, known as the "evil" bit, in the IPv4 [ RFC791 ] header. Benign packets have this bit set to 0; those that are used for an attack will have the bit set to 1. But what happens if an evil application refuses to co-operate and leaves the evil bit reset on packets generated by it? RFC3514 has a submission date of 01 April 2003, but this does not: Microsoft Office 2003 introduced Information Rights Management (IRM) that provides a way to help restrict recipients from copying, printing, or forwarding e-mail messages. [...] Opening the message with other e-mail applications or even using different types of accounts might...

Cort Fritz, “Media Solutions Architect” (near the top of the heap for their media products) for Microsoft, says (emphasis mine): Microsoft could even shut itself down and take it's video codec ball home and stop everyone from playing. But Cory is hiding the fact [...] that in reality of variety of platforms that play WMV is h u uuuuge. and growing. We are a mandatory codec for all next-gen DVD players. Yes that includes Blu-ray. Why? Because we are great at what we do. Oh, and we provide DRM. Which artists, content owners and governments have a right to use. But not, I notice, end-users. How very Microsoft. (-: Microsoft are great at what they do, that is, marketing. WMV and WMA have spread widely not because of any inherent technical superiority (many other codecs hammer them flat for quality vs compression) but because the marketing department has hammered them into every crevice available. The key point is that, modulo screams from consumer protection officials...

Coles got back to me, thanks Sharon K. The justification of the day for preventing camera use in Coles is for the safety of staff and customers. I’ve asked some questions which will hopefully stir the people above Sharon in the corporate heirarchy into wondering whether presuming that a customer with a camera has fell intent is indeed a good idea. Eskild Hustvedt gives some insight into what “guilty until proven innocent” feels like ; I’m not interested in letting it happen by default here, even for trivial stuff like taking pictures.

This one says: You have 2 options here, Option 1 - You can put ANY text you want in here. Option 2 - We will fill it in with the text only portion of the     html message if you put the macro UNIVERSITY DIPLOMAS [contents of said macro appeared here in the spam]     in here. NOTE: Some email clients don't disply html data. In that case what you     put here will be seen by the recipient. If the email client does     display html data then this will NOT be seen by the recipient.     Based on this you may wish to put a text version of your add here;     however, you can also put some macros here to make the message     more random. [contents of the macro appeared here for the second time in the spam] So, it looks like spamming kits are available (metaspam?) for those too dumb to spam unaided. And that they have useability issues. Hmm. I wonder, has anyone done any passive OS fingerprinting on spam traffic to se...

Small Sir pointed at a steel rule serving as a number line yesterday and correctly guessed that there were 3.4kg of M&Ms in a glass jar, which he got to collect today. He did not go to sleep easily. It’s also a substantial investment in chocolate and sugar for someone. The retail price of his indulgence is AUD$46.

ABCfm got a bit esoteric while I was driving schoolkids around today, so I flipped the wahless across to 94.5. They played the Boomtown Rats’ I don’t like Mondays , which says ... The telex machine is kept so clean As it types to a waiting world ...and the epiphany struck: none of the kids I was driving would know what a Telex was. Nor, it turned out, did my sister-in-law Jane or our mutual friend Monica. Jane’s hubby Jamie knew, but only just. <geezer> I remember working at a West Perth consulting firm (long since defunct) when the boss sent a huge (seven foot (as in eighty-four linear inches of paper with printing on)?) Telex from Malaysia. It was full of meandering generalities, half-formed thoughts and such but very light on for actual information. At the end, it asked a whole pile of long and random questions, mostly unrelated to the preceding waffle. The two leading employees responded, one by replying “YES” and the other by replying “NO...

A chap called Peter Lieverdink has just posted this to the OSIA list, and I think it’s something worth your consideration as well: For a large part of your average working day, I hang out on the #ubuntu irc channel on freenode, supporting and/or abusing various Linux users. As of probably about a month ago, a lot of filipino users associated with small businesses (like internet cafes etc) joined the channel, asking for help. This was a bit odd, as their influx grew rather suddenly. This morning, one of them actually mentioned why this is. About a month ago, the Phillipines government, after signing a FTA with our favourite imperialists, announced that businesses would have 30 days before they (in association with the business software alliance) would start raiding, arresting and fining windows and other license violators. Australia recently signed a FTA with the same imperialists, so that leaves me to wonder when the razzias might start here. A kiwi mentioned something similar is...

I recently built two identical servers, Bob and Helen, which use heartbeat and STONITH to provide a “virtual” server named Mirage. I’ll see if I can rename the remaining Windows 2000 server “Syndrome”. I watched the stocks arrive at Navada’s Greenwood store still in the sealed cartons. I watched David break two (or four) of everything out of the bigger cartons and place it all on the counter, so I can verify that there was no mixing of new with old stock between manufacturers’ cartons and customer. I took it all home to assemble. The first (ATI Radeon X300) video card had a square, black heatsink, the second had a silvery, arched one. Some of the front-panel wires were a different colour on the second 4RU case and the hard-drive brackets fitted slightly differently. The second (ThermalTake TR2) PSU had a six-pin 12V power plug not present on the first. The second (ASUS DRW-1608P) DVD burner wouldn’t read the boot CD much past the splash...

Picture a company in a Perth industrial area, not far from the CBD. An area that has had ADSL for at least 4 years. Zoom in on the ADSL modem, note the Telstra badge. Pan across to the filing cabinet, notice the Telstra account for ≅$700-$900 a month for ≅4GB down, ≅1GB up on a 1500/256 ADSL link (a 1000MB limit, mind, not a real gigabyte, then 19c a meg each way past that), and well over $100 a month line and equipment rental. Mystery solved. Four customers like that pretty much pays a technician’s wages. Take the firm’s financial controller to a random ISP’s web page. Click on the broadband plans. Watch him go grey, as he figures out that they’ve essentially thrown away $750 a month for the last two years.

Since LSA is a part of my daily ritual now, I’m afraid that this will be inordinately healthy porridge. If your diet is total junk, you may be surprised — nay, alarmed — at how effectively one dose of this tasty stuff speeds things along. Take one ThermoMix . Tip in one tablespoon full of almonds, two of sunflower seeds and three of linseed. This is probably an overdose and could readily be halved, but I like the taste. Tip in “some” of your usual dose of porridge, maybe a few tablespoons full, to provide enough bulk for the blades to engage the other ingredients solidly. Crank the “whizzer” around to full for about 30 seconds or however long it takes to reduce the almonds to powder. These gadgets are great, and will effortlessly smash up ice or brazil nuts just as readily. Optionally whack a small handful of chinese dates to add texture and a fruity taste. Tip in the rest of the porridge and your usual amount of water in. Whizz all for litera...

The entire contents of ( not link from) a Text/Plain spam: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <TITLE>404 Not Found</TITLE> </HEAD><BODY> <H1>Not Found</H1> The requested URL was not found on this server.<P> <HR> <ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.31</ADDRESS> </BODY></HTML>

Alli Russell asks : I really liked Quanta+, it was easy and I just hit a button that put all the tags etc in. I know, writing HTML is pretty easy, but I dont see why I should have to. [...] Surely there is a nice application with a GUI to do that for me? There’s probably a GNOME based one I just haven’t bothered to look for it. I’ve used BlueFish and liked it. It seems to have its own subdomain in OpenOffice Holland now, which tends to imply a certain GNOMEicity. You might also like Screem (not Screen, not Scream), which is oriented more toward the management of _sites_ rather than pages, but is nevertheless very GNOMEish. BTW, I use KDE, and I known what you mean but in reverse. The GNOME stuff works kinda oddly under KDE. The GIMP and a few others make serious efforts to overcome this, though, so you can (forex) drag a file from Konqueror or the desktop to GIMP’s toolbox to open it.

Here is an interesting interview with Bradley Edwards, AKA Mr Space Elevator .

Mandriva Linux 2006 (the full version including Contribs — apparently Mandriva is “the only Linux distribution certified for Intel® Centrino™”) ships with MySQL 4.1.12 (the default), 4.0.26 (conservative) and 5.0.4 (bleeding edge). The RPM description includes the dual licence clause: The MySQL software has Dual Licensing, which means you can use the MySQL software free of charge under the GNU General Public License ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ ). You can also purchase commercial MySQL licenses from MySQL AB if you do not wish to be bound by the terms of the GPL. See the chapter “Licensing and Support” in the manual for further info. Seems fairly straightforward to me. About a dozen packages directly require MySQL, and about 30 depend upon it being somewhere in the system (e.g. apache-mod_auth_mysql, gda-mysql0, postfix-mysql, ruby-mysql). I haven’t checked, but there must be a big swag more that depend on it through one of those depen...

Saturn’s moon Dione seems to combine most of the interesting surface features of all of the moons scanned so far, with the possible exception of Jupiter’s moon Io’s sulphur volcaoes . The most recent images are here .

Try it! . Switch on sound, cool tune and fx.

James Purser asks : What is it about F/OSS that attracts you? That’s easy: the Lego™ factor. I can build whatever I want to, very quickly. I can take something another person has built and alter it, very quickly. I can see how anything is put together, both to check its functionality and to pick up better techniques for my own work. I can quickly and easily swap parts and sub-assemblies for testing and improvement (or for “political” reasons). The absence of red tape helps a lot, too. I don’t have to bend my mind around deliberately-obtuse licencing rules or get financial clearance before adding more users or processors to a server. I don’t have to find a hologram or a serial number for each and every software component before installing something, nor type (or mistype) sixty-digit codes into rego screens to get stuff working.

Link? For this loser? He can drum up his own hits, thank you. Consider this snippet from his article: If that [Oracle buying Innobase, on which certain of MySQL’s more advanced features currently depend] wasn’t bad enough, Mickos is being denounced as a traitor by noisy fanatics in the open source software community because last month he dared to make a deal with SCO Group, a company reviled by fans of Linux and other open source software. Open source programs are made available with their source code, or basic underlying instructions, available for anyone to read, modify or copy. Traditional software, like that sold by Microsoft, ships with the source code kept secret. For die-hard open-source zealots, this difference is not just a matter of personal preference or technical advantage; it’s a holy war. And SCO is the Great Satan. That’s because in 2003 SCO sued IBM, claiming the company took code from Unix, for which SCO holds some copyrights, and put it into Lin...

...and nor is it what you might call a professional velocity, but with a moderate favourable hill and a slight (~10km/h) headwind I got the FOSTFLG Beastie up to 52.0km/h today. Because of the headwind it felt nearly supersonic, but we all know how well subjectivity and impartiality get along. The ongoing effort of cycling has unquestionably opened up my lungs a lot, as well as upping my basic endurance and strength. I’m idly wondering what exercise to complement it with. Something that involves using my arms a lot. Swimming? Squash?

So here I am struggling to figure out why my camera constantly snaps into USB mode when there’s nothing plugged into the USB socket. I’ve stripped the back off it, and it works perfectly... until I go to put the back, back on. The fault looks like a loose connector, worn cable or dodgy PCB track — but no sane amount of pushing or twisting of components can induce failure, only reassembly. Not even complete reassembly, either, sometimes it goes bonkers when the back is well over a centimeter away from being properly seated and sometimes it stays sane until the back is almost in place. Argh! The frustration! There’s no rhyme or reason to it and at this point I’m about ready to spike the camera into the ground... But then I remember that my highly esteemed sister-in-law, the professional photographer, is due shortly to retrieve one of her offspring. An electronics tech, she’s not, but she is bright, careful and generally good at whatever she turns her h...

Macadamia kernels     $34.98 Walnut kernels     $16.98 Free range chicken breast     $14.99 Gourmet mushrooms 200 $2.98 $14.90 Beef teryaki stirfry     $10.99 Rump steak     $10.25 Chicken sausages     $9.50 Chicken breast     $8.99 Small field mushrooms     $8.47 Porterhouse steak     $7.95 Strawberries 250 $1.95 $7.80 Beef mince     $6.50 Roasted penuts     $5.98 Chicken drumsticks     $3.99 Bananas     $3.98 Broccoli     $3.98 Sweet potato     $3.76 Granny Smith apples     $3.68 Chicken wings     $2.99 Roma tomatoes     $2.68 Hi Early apples     $2.58 Packham pears     $1.85 Watermelon     $0.78 The average is now $10.25 a kilo for the whole collection, $7.34 for just the veggies and nuts here ($5.04 without the overpriced macadamias), or $8.20 for everything here.

For your amusement, the contents of Coles’ online feedback form : The basic issue concerns me taking photographs in your stores. The staff at Wanneroo very politely told me that this was not allowed. Points for the staff, they did their job. They were unable to explain why I was not allowed to photograph. Shame on Coles for not keeping them informed. The local [cool site, for a supermarket, pardon the 100m long URL] Dewsons store was quite happy to let me photograph, once I had assured them that I was not from Coles and was not there noting prices so that Coles could undercut them. I am not interested in being told that I can’t take photos in what amounts (lawyers and technical details notwithstanding) to a public place. Dewsons had a valid reason for questioning me, but went ahead and let me photograph (and write down prices, even! I’m teaching my children about food). Coles did not even ask questions, just said “no”. In terms of shutting out the compet...

This arXiv article says: It is shown that the rotation curves for the Milky Way, NGC 3031, NGC 3198 and NGC 7331 are consistent with the mass density distributions of the visible matter concentrated in flattened disks. Thus the need for a massive halo of exotic dark matter is removed. That’s quite a contradiction to other recent papers claiming to have found “the missing” Dark Matter for a famous corner case, no?

Pamela Jones interviews Marten Mickos from MySQL AB. The summary: no money went to SCO from MySQL, so MySQL is not supporting SCO financially [hoorah!] it was SCO seeking out the partnership, not the other way around [big surprise there, not] MySQL had stopped supporting SCO in 2004 [see comment below] MySQL did not put out the press release about the partnership. [good, but again no surprise] Mickos did provide a quotation for the press release however. [something you could hardly avoid] This comment by Mike Kruckenberg in April 2004 (referenced in the GrokLaw article) is interesting: SCO Unixware support is being stopped. If anyone knows: What about OpenServer? What is the practical difference between “support” for SCOX OSes and “partnership”? Call me inconsistent if you will, but stopping support for UnixWare (unless MySQL was running out of UW customers) is inconsistent with embracing a partnership with SCOX. SCOX certainly haven’t changed, except th...

Yes, Ian , there is an easier way to display files side by side : pr -Tm file1 file2 *nix has been around for a looooong time. (-:

It looks like MySQL’s office is full of elephants. For those readers who’ve been living under a rock for the last decade or so, MySQL AB is a company which produces a competent SQL database under an interesting dual licence system. MySQL the company have done some innovative things, a few people I highly respect (such as Arjen ) work for/with them, and I’d very much like to see a few of these hybrid business models play out successfully. However, they seem to be under attack from both sides of the hybridity. Elephant-in-the-room #1: on the FOSS side, a bunch of arrogant and greedy unmentionables calling themselves The SCO Group have wooed MySQL into a partnership. This could be a kiss of death all by itself; it has certainly done MySQL no favours in terms of their precious reputation amongst Free Software advocates. However, what’s worse is that MySQL’s corporate leadership seem to be having trouble keeping their rationale straight when it comes to their r...

Some more numbers from Kakulis Brothers (185 William Street, Northbridge; they don’t appear to have a website), this brought the mean cost down to AUD$10.75 per kilo: Apricot kernels 200 $3.90 $19.50 Pine nuts     $18.99 Almonds     $13.99 Brazil nuts     $12.99 Dried bananas     $9.80 Honey (tub)     $8.50 Sesame slice     $7.99 Pitted prunes     $7.50 Dried mango strips     $6.95 Olive oil 4000 $24.99 $6.25 Dried apples     $5.99 Dried apricots (Chinese)     $5.99 Dried pineapple rings     $4.20 Dried pawpaw spears     $3.50 Urid Dahl     $3.00 Sunflower kernels     $2.99 Lima beans     $2.99 Borlotti beans     $2.70 Cannellini beans     $2.30 Black beans     $2.20 Sultanas     $1.99 Lentils     $1.75 Oats     $1.60 Popping corn     $1.50 It’s noteworthy th...

In typical Jim Baen fashion, an important announcement was unceremoniously dumped into the middle of a minor and completely unrelated thread in the Publisher’s Podium conference of Baen’s Bar : Big news! Baen.com is publishing an sf magazine. Baen's Astounding Stories of Science Fiction and Speculative Fact. Eric Flint knows all about it. I can just about picture Eric’s “Uh, thanks, Jim...” Eric’s more detailed response in his MutterOfDemons conference said this: It seems that Jim posted a notice about this in “Publisher’s Podium.” We’re still putting this together, but, in brief, here it is: Baen Books will launch a major SF magazine in electronic format. The title will be something like “Baen’s Astounding Stories.” I’ll be the editor, and Paula Goodlett will be the assistant editor. The one other member of the editorial board thus far is Dave Drake. We’re committing to three issues of the mag...

Forgetting how much swearing it contained (fairly mild stuff, but nevertheless...) I showed Short Circuit to Master 6 and Miss 4. Dreading the expected consequence, I watched der kinder carefully for the next few days, and to my somewhat startled delight, the only quote picked up from the movie — albeit with perfect timing and intonation after precisely one exposure — was Miss 4’s rendition of Johnny Five saying “Hello, knuckleheads!”

It always surprises me that people will pay extreme rates for boring/everyday food, but flinch when it comes to paying the same or lower rates for exotica. For example, if you buy a 200g (large) packet of potato chips (“crisps” for poms) and pay a typical price of AUD$3.20 for them, you’ve just paid $16.00 a kilo for potatoes and fat. A kilo of cashews will cost about the same amount, as does a kilo of reasonable quality steak — and the same kilo of potatoes and fat piping hot and tasty from a fish-and-chip shop will cost you about 1/3 as much. That’s still a higher rate than most fruit and veggies, although about the same as dried pineapple or pawpaw. A kilo of water will cost roughly $1.50-$3.00 for a bottle or effectively $0 from a tap. Buy the potatoes and fat in a 50g bag instead, paying $1.60 for it, and you’ve just shelled out $32.00 a kilo, more than most of the slightly exotic chocolates (a Chocolate Orange or box of Cherry Liquer chocolates...

Cycled down to East Perth this morning, 1 hour 40 to cover ≅35km of more-or-less flat terrain from 05:10 to 06:50 (equals roughly 21km/h average) and saw a couple of things which twanged my sense of the bizarre. One was a fitness club... almost buried under vehicles. Practically the only busy premises on Scarborough Beach Road at 06:30. Phrrrk, phrrrk, is this thing on? You’re here to do what? And you walked here...? Ran...? Cycled...? Hello...? The other was the cycleway on the west side of the Mitchell Freeway near Powis Street . I normally scoot down the east side at this point, but decided to be different today. If you have a look at the satellite image for it , you can see the west-side mixed-use path curve (southbound turning east) under the freeway en route to joining the splendid mixed-use overpass paralleling Main Street to the east. About halfway through the curve you can see a white patch on the outside, which is the pram-ramp for crossing Powis Street. Follow the ...

Linux on the left, MS-Windows on right (via Terminal Services and rdesktop, of which this is not an artefact), pointed at the same image ; same thing happens in all available browsers (Firefox shown here). The only unusual thing about the image is that it is CMYK encoded instead of RGB.

A random event today catalysed an idea which has been lurking half-formed in my gray matter (ie cement — at least, on bad days) foir soem considerable time. The Earth system gets hit by meteors all the time; thousands or more substantial hits a day — so often, in fact, that we can use the meteor trails as a radio reflector , and a great many of these meteors are not much more then chunks of ice or whacking great snowballs. Some theorists even postulate that Earth’s oceans are the result of patient additions to our ecosystem by these soggy meteors. Lurking in the back of my mind are pictures of many battered-looking moons, including Phobos ( with the massive Stickney Crater at one end ) and Hyperion , with its most amazing collection of craters and Comet Tempel , described as a ball of slush and yet quite well cratered also. How can a ball of slush get cratered? Surely anything substantial hitting it at speed would either plough right through or destroy it? Part of t...