Plantagenet Penguinista

First off, once again they are having trouble finding their own. I think they’d still have trouble even with laser topology mapping and GPS. You may remember a customer being told that they didn’t have ADSL, despite being able to point to the flashy box in the corner and the 150kB/s downloads as evidence that they were no longer dependent on dialup? Well, in a far-too-typical demonstration of quality control systems in action, Telstra made it so. When the technician’s visit on Monday to install the ADSL that they already had working was cancelled, the existing service was cancelled along with it. Now, three days of headbutting walls later, the service is back on line again, and they’ve re-spread the entrails necessary to get a static-IP-enabled login back (by hand, Telstra refused to fix it for them automagically)... and it doesn’t work. Second off, at another customer, Telstra have blessed an ADSL line which features ≅50dB of attenuation. Needless to ...

Kakulas now offer dried strawberries for AUD$7.50 a kilo, and also dried (not glace) cherries in addition to their glace ones. Since potato chips at AUD$3.20 per 200g bag work out to AUD$16.00 per kg but the strawbs have unboosted flavour, fibre and probably even the remnants of some real vitamins, guess which my kids are getting as a snack? (-:

Well, it’s a bit Jingalese , but it makes a good read anyway: We are sure that Hayabusa has accomplished the great feat to collect sample soils from a celestial body other than moon. I am heartily proud of those brilliant youths of this country. Below is a live coverage of “The Longest Day”. That day, November 20th, I was studying the data from Hayabusa that flew as far as100km away in safe hold mode from ITOKAWA just like dreaming a nightmare. But Hayabusa team was not even allowed time to dream a nightmare. It took them a whole week by restless work to get it back to the original gate position. And so on. A blow-by-blow of Hyabusa’s most recent dance with Death. The AJAX crew’re sure that they have a soil sample from the big mutant dust sausage, now all they need to do is get it the bazillion or so kilometers back home.

Rohirrim. Apparently, about one in five quizzees wind up Rohirrim. To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?   brought to you by Quizilla

My Sony DSC-F707 camera turns out to be not completely broken. The battery is dead, but the camera itself runs fine (well... mostly fine) from the charger. Not bad for a plastic camera which was run squarely over by two tonnes of diesel 4WD van. I’ll see if I can get some close-up shots in a day or two to show y’all the newly rhomboid shape of the case and the tyre print on the camera bag. Perhaps more important than its actual survival is that the camera did not need any DRM for its protection. (-:

One of my pet hates in computer documentation is “thick as a brick” syndrome. One of the longest songs in existence this side of a Wagner opera is the extended version of “Thick as a Brick”, weighing in at over 43 minutes long. The key line in this song is: “And your wise men don’t know how it feels... to be as thick... as a brick.” Writers of documentation forget what it’s like to not understand the material they’re presenting, and consequently they make assumptions which are obvious to them, completely opaque to the student, and then build from there. This is sad, ’coz they’re supposed to be the clever buggers, and yet they consistently do this really dumb thing. Worse, they often “solve” it by talking down to their audience... still without supplying the necessary context, much like a terrorist tourist repeating his instructions to a local very loudly in the expectation that sheer volume will make up for a...

I’ve probably commented too much on this topic already, but I do so enjoy playing the devil’s advocate. David Jericho, your questions have already been pre-answered. The baleen whale question is of the same nature as the “why are snakes poisonous if there was no strife at creation?” question. Most of the variants of YEC that I’ve seen postulate dramatic changes in the environment, pivoting on the “cursed is the ground for thy sake” statement in Genesis 3 . Comparing fossil dragonflies with a wingspan exceeding a metre against modern dragonflies gives one the eerie feeling that yes, there may indeed have been changes in the time between the two. (-: In changed circumstances, the baleen might serve a different function, or be able to be used in volumes of seawater containing only vegetable krill. I think you might also get some takers for the idea that krill aren’t classed as “meat” by the Bible, but I strongly suspect that of b...

Last night, we had a splendid sunset — magnificent colour gradients, exciting cloud shapes, interesting optical effects (clouds lit up oddly with combinations of direct and reflected sunlight) — generally looking gorgeous. Next, we were treated to a short but energetic set of spectacular lightning storms. Some of the cloud-to-cloud forks covered 40 to 45 degrees of sky, and many of the ground hits were long-lasting multi-strikes. Much “oooooh” and “aaaaah”. This was followed by the Wanneroo Agricultural Show fireworks, which not only had the usual gaudy flashes and bangs (much more colourful than the lightning if nowhere near as powerful), but had them against a background of cloud, and in a stiff and stratified wind (I estimate 120km/h where the bulk of the fireworks were bursting, 80km/h up where the big ones went off, 40km/h at ground level). The fireworks would go bang and form a big octopus of smoke, which then drifted intact from the showgroun...

Pedders shook their head sadly and started quoting numbers starting at around AUD$3000. RenWreck fixed the whole front end (suspension, including a bent stub axle) of my Peugeot 505 in a morning for AUD$350 including parts. It’s nasty having to fix the things in the first place, but it’s always nice to shave your repair bills by an order of magnitude , isn’t it? (-: PS, this entry posted from a dual G5 with gobs of RAM and a niiiice widescreen monitor.

Reading Jeff Waugh’s most recent BadgerBadgerBadger promotion , I’m sort of wondering what you do to top a bleeding-edge description like “running with scissors”. Is it “sprinting with scissors?” or maybe “rapping with scissors?” No, wait, it’s perfect: “ whitewater rafting with scissors!” (-:

FlightGear recently had a new release , including volumetric shading, seasonal shading, working arresters/catapults on the carrier, lightning/rain, redout/blackout, massive scripting imporvements and lots of other kewl stuff like “Include an external utility that can feed saved nmea tracks back into FlightGear. If you take a gps on a real flight with you and capture the output, you can replay your flight in FlightGear.” However, two items in particular caught my eye: New aircraft available [...] : A380 [...] Aircraft that have had updates since the last release: 1903 Wright Flyer. Pretty good scaling, methinks, especially when you include a B52 and a Concorde.

Customer’s first non-CBD office requires music on hold. Customer asks ’phone installer what to use; response is “anything will do” and when pressed suggests a music-on-hold service which just happens to have a AUD$2000 flagfall plus serious ongoing costs. Customer then asks Leon if he has a solution. “What are you using now?” Turns out to be a laptop running Windows 2000, XMMS and an MP3 file — all of which requires rebooting every few weeks. OK, so SCP the MP3 file onto the country server, unpack it into a WAV to reduce CPU usage (not that it’s significant any on a 3GHz Athlon64), enable the sound card in the BIOS (I disable any device not in use, as it simplifies things, makes them more reliable and frees up IRQs), run alsaplayer over it and we’re away. Elapsed time: ten minutes. Value to customer: ≅AUD$12,000 an hour. ♥ Woh! Ah feel goood... oh, I knew that I would, yeah... ♥ (-: So... why not do the same in P...

Paul Hewlett of Perth Injector Exchange replaced the fuel pump gaskets and injectors in our Japanese Domestic import van (a Toyota “Master Ace Surf” diesel 4WD) for just over $500, and they even come with a 100,000km warranty! Cool! They don’t have a website, but Paul’s number (for all the diesel-ridin’ sandgropers) is 0411 430 576.

Timothy Jedlicka AKA bonzo at Lucent wrote to gimp-devel to say: This open source thing just rocks! I filed a bug report ( 321692 ) at 1AM, and Manish Singh had the fix incorporated into CVS 28 minutes later. You guys are amazing. Thanks for the hard work and great program.

Just started looking at the administrative details of getting to LCA2006 in Dunedin , and the sad fact of the matter is that gummint red tape (passport $170, citizenship processing $110 (I was born in Canada of Australian parents and exported here at age 2), proof of permanent residency (before any of my chidren were born, so I can get passports for them) $70, departure tax $38, probably some other chicken poop not yet discovered) will cost more than actually attending LCA (and take ≅5 weeks to arrange), and will even rival the cost of the airfares, one way. I suspect that the only reason more complaint isn’t raised is that airfares to anywhere beyond Singapore or the Land of the Large White Crowd tend to dwarf the cost of the assorted red tape. I cringe when I consider that processing times and costs (except for the Departure Tax) have come down dramatically in the past few decades. If you’re a born and bred Australian, a passport should only take ten days to process...

Remember my previous T rant ? Well, they’re at it again. This time, instead of fixing the customer’s DNS to reflect the new fixed IP address they inflicted upon them, they broke the ADSL authentication. Just in case anyone needs to multihome a Linux box in a hurry, here is a 30 second recipe. Call 1.1.1.1 the gateway for the first link, 1.1.1.5 the interface address for it; 2.2.2.2 the gateway and 2.2.2.6 the interface for the additional link. Define two (or more) new table names in /etc/iproute2/rt_tables, this example will call them oldlink and newlink; this step is optional but adds much clarity to the rest of the process ip route add default via 1.1.1.1 table oldlink ip rule add from 1.1.1.5 table oldlink ip route add default via 2.2.2.2 table newlink ip rule add from 2.2.2.6 table newlink Now set your default route to the link you want outbound traffic to flow through. Inbound traffic will return via the interface it arrived on. If you want simple but crude load-balanci...

The past week had been kind of busy, so the only cycling I got in was a couple of trips up to the local shopping centre, which is about three stone’s throws away. We had the unpleasant experience of having both vehicles off-line themselves at the same time, so I had to borrow a vehicle to drop #1 favourite teen (AKA “Pretty Much”) off to BioMum in Rockingham, and cycle back from dropping it off (Currambine → Wanneroo). All of the basic hard-won (well... relatively hard-won :-) strength and endurance improvements are still there, but everything has a kind of “mushy” edge to it, and the first endurance “wall” was noticeably steeper than usual when I first “hit” it. On the brighter side, I now have another 26" bike in my little fleet, and two more dusted off and on their way there, along with two nearly complete baby MTBs (the ones with golf-cart-sized tyres but designed to take an adult’s weight) which I plan to use as kids...

The sole point of contention in our household over the exclusive use of Linux has been a small collection of MS-Windows-based games and educational software. Now with the WINE folks getting all hot under the collar about installer support I decided to have another whack at installing some of these. In related news, a steadily increasing number of MS-Windows video card drivers no longer support screen depths below 16 bits. Related? One of the games refused to install unless it could have an 8-bit-deep visual (in fact, it wanted a 640x480x8 visual, but would settle for the “x8” part). A steadily increasing number of video cards, including (I was surprised to discover) crappy ones like NeoMagic and Savage, have Xorg/XFree86 support for 8-bit PseudoColour overlays on a 24-bit or 32-bit screen... so... out with Xnest, and now we have a Windows game running (well... mostly running) “full-screen” on its own private 8-bit-deep X server in a window. My next project will ...

DON’T! Customer, sited in a suburb reknowned for valuable-to-Telstra ISDN lines, finally gets ADSL to their area. Orders an ADSL connection to replace their dialup, which has a fixed IP address and has done so for the last approximately six years. Telstra tech arrives and configures router, then leaves. Leon arrives, in tow behind customer’s normal tech support, to switch an ancient Debian box from dialup to ADSL. Over the course of four hours , and a drawn-out game of telephone ping-pong between Telstra Tech Support and Telstra Billing, Leon discovers the following items: Telstra will not deal with you if you are not a nominated contact and can prove it — even if you own the business, pay the bills and are the husband of the nominated contact; The ADSL account is not at a fixed address; A fixed address can be had for $10(!) a month more, payable in advance; The fixed address cannot replace the existing fixed address, it must be a new one; This cannot be done over the ...

Heading for 30-something celcius today here in sunny Perth, Western Australia, not sure what Nicolai is upset about. (-:

I picked up a box of frozen stuff labelled “bubble and squeak” in the local Dewsons’ supermarket, read the label — it seemed good enough — and put the box back into the freezer until I’d bought all of the less perishable things on my list. As I put it down, the plastic wrapper squeaked on the plastic wrapper of the box below. Now I’m wondering what I have to do to make it bubble.

I was startled to see Benjamin Carlyle first come out of the chapel, or in his case the “home church” (a move somewhat akin in most technical circles to standing up amidst a wolf-pack and starting, “Hi, I’m Ben Carlyle and I’m a prey species...”) and then go onto make a rational post on the increasingly popular (but not increaingly rational or moderate) topic of CvsE. When I first started looking into this, it all appeared to be a reasonably straightforward dichotomy which would be similarly straightforward to resolve, but Real Life™ doesn’t often work like that, it seems. A couple of significant points I’ve seen made on the topic of scientific testability of Creationism... well, I could cheat and say thet they”d expect to find pretty much the same things that Intelligent Design advocates would be looking for, but that’s not quite true. The ID crew have done some scientific testing of various of their hypotheses and com...

Meet “Flash Linux”. Extramadura switched 80,000 users to Linux over a weekend . Here we sit dithering about the impact of ten desktops here, forty there. Poor Spaniards, perhaps, but they’re rich in enthusiasm.

I wrote a flame to a local newspaper about civil servants squandering money (more money than this house is worth), and lo and behold it turned up as the “star letter” for the week, complete with $25 prize voucher. I’ve always jokingly referred to myself as a “confuser insultant” — as in one who confuses the customer and insults their systems, and gets paid to do it — but who knows? Maybe there’s a living to be made as a human torch? (-:

While Dover, PA parents evict the Intelligent Design advocates from their school board (and presumbly any replacements were elected on a “We will teach only the One True Faith” platform rather than any ambitions to actually do schooly stuff — but maybe their predecessors were elected on a similar basis anyway), Kansas elects to “teach the controversy”. There are a number of surprising and disappointing features in this. One is that the arguments being presented on the Evolution-only side of the PA court battle seem to be decidedly weak, which is pretty disappointing. They should have no trouble coming up with strong arguments, but «shrug» seem to have missed that boat. They also told some direct lies, which to my mind was entirely unnecessary and won’t help their case. The transcript makes interesting reading (in places, in other places it’s as dry as dust). A couple of different accredited witnesses explained experiments they’...

ZDnet is reporting a leaked email from one William Henry “Trey” Gates III: Ten years ago this December, I wrote a memo entitled The Internet Tidal Wave which described how the internet was going to forever change the landscape of computing. This was the last-minute change of direction (“The Road Behind”) which saw MSIE bundled with later releases of Chicago (Windows 95) and resulted in the crapflood of MS-FrontPage, HTML-enabled MS-Office products and so on which pollute the net with wonky and incompatible code today; therefore it behooves us to carefully consider the consequences of this anniversary brainwave, hopefully to find ways of thwarting the likely ensuing destandardisation efforts. Today, the opportunity is to utilise the Internet to make software far more powerful by incorporating a services model which will simplify the work that IT departments and developers have to do while providing new capabilities. He’s soeaking in code, as usual. Decoded,...

tushi didn’t get it. turpie’s response was: If you’re confused as to how that popup dialog operates try reading this article for more information. Classic deadpan.

...of an earlier prediction , but I did bust a chain today, at Edgewater station about 6km from home. I found that scootering at ≅14km/h on the flat and level was comfortable enough, and I could maintain a rough 17km/h with some effort. My walking pace was ≅6km/h, up from ≅5km/h a month or two ago.

OK, so Wanneroo is finally getting around to doing some more bike-path work... on a section already adequately covered by paths, but which I am assured happens to be near a councillor’s house. Nevertheless, it is bike-path work. Part of the work consists of turning a short section of old road immediately north of Ocean Reef Road into a bike path. It’s in pretty good nick for its age, with only one small strip suffering from potholes and irregularities. The work probably looks good on a blueprint, but they’ve just destroyed a parking area which often has 2 or 3 vehicles in it during the day while their drivers take a refreshing stroll around Lake Joondalup, and from which a flower van regularly trades. Yeah, well, par for the course... but in chipping away most of the bitumen to leave a bike-path-sized strip, have a guess at which narrow strip they’ve left untouched? Yes, it’s pretty much inevitable that it’s the strip of potholes and irregularities, ...

Yes, that’s right, 2.7. Read it and weep (or perhaps expire laughing) — SCOX speaking through Hatch, James & Dodge and also Boise, Schiller & Flexner LLP: SCO[X]’s document requests do not impose undue burden on IBM. [...] SCO[X] requested for example: [...] “All documents concerning IBM’s contributions to the Linux 2.7 kernel ,” including “development work.” [...] this Court should require IBM to produce those materials. To do this, of course, IBM will require quite a powerful time machine.

Why be yourself, when you could be someone really worthwhile, instead?

So, is it Sell Linux Computers By The Tonne Week or something? Brasil is in on the act , now: stores all over Brazil will start selling computers on the installment plan, at low interest rates, for no more than US$ 440 [...] The idea is for consumers to take home a complete microcomputer, ready for use, with a Linux operating system and an array of open software programs with 27 software applications, including a photo editor, word processor, anti-virus, and internet navigator. Anti-virus? Que? Oh, well, I don’t suppose it’ll do any harm.

Had a very acceptable pizza for dinner, with eggplant (aubergines, for y’all from South Canada/Far Northern Mexico), artichokes ’n’ stuff not normally seen on pizza. It came from Caffino’s, pizza-and-pasta place in Wanneroo, just north of town centre on the beach side of the street just next to the prominent Video Easy store (2/981 Wanneroo Road, 9404-6700). The lass driving the cash register made a typoe the first time around, and the result was a very pretty, artistically laid out pizza, each slice crowned by a large upright shrimp. Visually impressive, but not exactly veggo. (-: They threw in a couple of garlic bread for the mistake and expressed the replacement pizza through the works. The blokes driving the oven had obviously been doing it for a very long time, each movement smooth and practiced, each gesture accurate, and the ingredients laid out smoothly, quickly and very evenly.

This is a worry. Now I’m catching myself doing stuff like kerb-hopping at 40km/hr and riding straight over kerbs instead of lifting the wheel and shifting my weight. I haven’t started stump-jumping or riding off walls yet, but I figure that a broken frame is just a matter of time now.

It seems that Japan’s Hayabusa probe hit a snag during a practice landing recently, abending the landing when the probe saw “an anomalous signal”. Hayabusa now orbits at 3km; there’s a good collection of images of the asteroid in question, Itokawa, at SpaceRef . So what was the “anomalous signal”? My random guess is that Itokawa’s material is a lot looser than expected (as in, heavier material but more loosely packed) — a great big bent-potato-shaped pile of gravel and bulldust — and that even the light thrusters used by Hayabusa were enough in the asteroid’s microgravity to kick up a little dust from a few km away — especially if the thruster exhaust is electrically charged — and change the probe’s view slightly. This would be consistent with the “gentle impacts” explanation for the odd cratering seen on other small bodies, and with the observations of Deep Impact . If Itokawa is indeed so loose...

LXer is reporting what purports to be a leaked Intel document about the “Farmer PC”, a Celeron-powered Linux-based low cost PC already being sold in Chinese rural areas for USD$350 and slated to be sold in “hundreds of millions” of units there. Amongst other things, it has a one-button factory reset facility and seems to be integrated into a suitable network of facilities (on-line courses, for example). If this is all genuine, then it would seem that Intel have decided that Microsoft are a bit of an albatross around the neck — at least as far as the Chinese market is concerned. Since Intel already manufacture at least CPUs, motherboards, cases, RAM and hard disks, a good slice of the revenue for this system will go back to them. If they’re also building the screens, mice and keyboards they’ve got a bit of a headlock on this particular band of the food chain. This year’s Halloween Memo , perhaps? Are Microsoft learning to hate the sight of...

No kidding! The bill number is T 097 843 703-7. It turns out to be a credit card processing fee from when I paid out the account . Hello, Turkeystra? Y’all spent maybe 2c on the envelope, 2c on preprinted stationery, ≅3c printing each of three sides... you’ve done your dough already. Then you spent some money (guessing around 25-30c) with Australia Post to get it all to me. <thwack!> Am I supposed to pay this with a credit card? If I do, will you send me a bill for 1c? The bill also says “Payment is not required until next bill”... er, tap, tap, is this thing on? The account is closed . I paid it out . What “next bill”? Third item: I’ve moved house. I changed providers from Telstra to Southern Cross Telco a few months before I moved, yet the ’phone number on this bill is for the line at the new address — and the bill was sent to the old address. Wha...? I guess it’s the old story: “ computers do not lie ...

Ain’t politics grand? Microsoft has barred the use of the Bhutanese government’s official term for the Bhutanese language, Dzongkha , in any of its products, citing that the term had affiliations with the Dalai Lama. ...and... What adds insult to injury is that, according to the Bhutanese news site Kuenselonline , the government of Bhutan, with the assistance of the Swiss Development Corporation, paid US$523,000 to add support for Dzongkha. It didn’t cost Microsoft a penny. Bhutan should have spent its money on free software [e.g. KDE had both Icelandic and Dzongkha support before MS-Windows did — no half-a-million bucks involved — and currently supports 102 languages and variants ]. It would probably have been much cheaper, and they would have control over it. ...and... The word rDzong has nothing to do with the name Tsong-kha-pa, literally “man from the onion district,” who founded the dGe-lugs-pa school of Tibetan Buddhism currently headed ...

My SIL got sent a Win32 executable purporting to be a sildeshow about the birth of a photographer friend of hers’ baby. Why do people do things like this? It’s like sending an electrical appliance to the other side of the globe and expecting the recipient to have the same wall sockets and voltage as you. Anyway, I shrugged and run it with WINE ... and it worked. All of it. Flawlessly. Even the 3D effects and sound, the complicated stuff you’d expect to break. This is the 20050725 snapshot of WINE, too, not the latest release, and completely virgin configurationwise. The slideshow turns out to have been made with Photodex ProShow Gold . First off, big round of applause for the WINE dudes<*>; second off, add that app to your List Of Alien Things That Work. <*> non-gender-specific use of “dudes”, natch.

“ Xan! Put away all of your Thunderbirds toys before tea! ” “ F A B , Mum!”

I saw two noteworthy trucks in Gnangara today, one with DEBT PROPELLED written underneath his windscreen in blue (should it have been red?), and another which was a truck-tow-truck... broken down at the top of Ocean Reef Road. I think this implies a need for two additional truck-tow-trucks, one for the original casualty and one for the new deader. They were probably in short supply anyway, as I passed two more on the way down the Mitchell Freeway.

These words led me to this website : Instead of balancing on your bum and your fanny on a tiny wedge of leather that rapidly cuts off circulation to both and leaves you feeling like someone’s taken to your nether regions with a baseball bat after a couple of hours on it, you get a nice, comfy chair to cruise along in. Instead of leaning on a metal bar that rapidly cuts off circulation to your hands, and constantly craning your neck upwards to avoid staring at bitumen all day long, you wrap your hands lightly around two upright handlebars down by your hips, lean back, and the world unfolds before you like a movie on a cinema screen. After a recommendation like that, who wouldn’t want a recumbent? (-: Number One Daughter also has knee issues, and the recumbent makes it easier to gear down rather than loading up. The downside is that these are about 10-12x the price of a K-Mart bike; the upside is that they’re built really well. Hydraulic brakes with reinforced (braid-...

Having failed to snow the technical people involved, Microsoft are working hard to snow politicians into believing that some great calamity will arise as a result of the State of Massachusetts electing to exclusively use the OpenDocument standard for all of their documents. The usual lies about excluding fair competition (the reality being only that Microsoft have been thwarted in their attempts to dominate) and conversion issues (the reality is that future versions of MS-Office will be just as prone to conversion issues; have you tried to open an MS-Word 5.0 document with MS-Word XP?) abound, but the key issue is: will the politicians be fooled enough to overturn the State’s decision? If the answer is “No”, speculation will then turn to Microsoft’s reaction. In the past, they’ve not been shy to use the courts or powers like the US Trade people (and didn’t the Latino countries just love that little manoeuvre?) to force recalcitrant markets to march to...

Ran across two interesting tidbits from the world of biology. The first is a new startup from Georgia Tech named The Center for Biologically Inspired Design , which is “capitalizing on the rich source of design solutions present in biological processes”. Can anyone else see this noble ambition colliding head-on with the many other patent-farmers lurking in IP-space? Not to mention getting slapped about both by the ID zealots for failing to acknowledge that design implies a Designer and by zealots for the cause of evolution for sailing too close to the terminological wind, using the word “design” where they’re supposed to say “accumulated statistical minima” or something like that. The second item is a warm-blooded shark. Yup, serious! Apparently, the north Pacific salmon shark is warm-blooded or at least warm-muscled. It’s able to maintain a body temperature of roughly 20°C above the cold water it swims in, which amongst other thin...