Plantagenet Penguinista

Nah, seriously, they really are cool . Some of them are cooler than Venus, and they don’t fuse... not even deuterium. In fact, some red dwarves don’t come anywhere near the temperatures required for fusion (roughly 10 8 °K standalone; with the help of a few other factors, maybe 3,000,000°K), which raises an obvious question. Why do they glow? At all? “Gravitational collapse” can only get one a part of the way towards an explanation. In fact, Chandra detected a brown dwarf throwing a big Xray flare in 1999 , which presents an even more stark dilemma. What’s a star ( LP 944-20 , ≅60 Jupiter masses) that can’t even fuse, that’s gravitationally collapsing (adiabatic compression) doing throwing flares? Even more MiB: why haven’t we been told that our mainstream astrophysics has many such issues and is well past due for a revolution?

This “electric cosmos” stuff seems to be characterised by people who are well tired of beating about in the bush , and I quote: In today’s world many people characterize themselves as being “scientists”. Only those who always carefully follow the “scientific method” are deserving of that title. The Scientific Method Scientists are distinguishable from artists, poets, musicians, and others in that they use what is known as “the scientific method”. It is not that “inspiration” or “the muse” is not valuable in science, it is — but it is not the starting point of what we call science. In the process called the scientific method1 a true scientist will: Observe nature — carefully record what is seen. Seek patterns in the observed data — put numbers on the data — fit equations to those numbers. Generalize those equations into a word description of the process — this is a hypothesis. C...

Playing on the Thunderbolts site led me to look for papers by a scientist named Alexander Borisovich Kukushkin , and I found this one on electrical phenomena. It’s... a bit mind-blowing. He treats direct scalability of phenomenon from the millimeter level to thousands of lightyears as normal, and says of events ranging from sub-microseconds to at least kiloyears that they “may be qualified as ‘status quo’&nbsp”. Further cerebral meltdown can be obtained by considering parallels between galaxies and clusters on the one hand, down through tornadoes and ball-lightning to molecular-scale bucky tubes. This lad is evidently not at all frightened to go wherever the evidence takes him. Consider this soundbite [brackets mine]: The [self-assembling cold-plasma] skeleton in tornadic thundercloud may be responsible for the fast long-range transport of electricity (e.g., with respect to electric charge acquired by the skeleton during condensation of charged water drop...

Try Foxit’s PDF reader . Loads in an instant (no grunging through scores of plugins that you’ll never use), fast and light display. What more could you ask for free? The paid versions also do text extraction (they claim “the best available” and I’m so far inclined to believe them), gross editing (page reorganisation and the like) and “like a normal editor” Piece by piece, I can foresee a time in the distant future when I can almost make XP a livable environment. Stuff like a PDF reader just comes with Linux, I never even think about it. It’s like having lived with an automatic gearbox for years and suddenly having to deal with a manual. Except that this kind of “manual gearbox” doesn’t have any of the control, bump-starting and safety advantages of the automotive variety.

I’m all in favour of interesting astronomical research, but this is really reaching (and from JPL, no less — slow news week before xmas?): Partial Ingredients for DNA and Protein Found Around Star NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered some of life’s most basic ingredients in the dust swirling around a young star. The ingredients — gaseous precursors to DNA and protein — were detected in the star’s terrestrial planet zone, a region where rocky planets such as Earth are thought to be born. The findings represent the first time that these gases, called acetylene and hydrogen cyanide, have been found in a terrestrial planet zone outside of our own. Acetylene and prussic acid are “precursors to DNA”? Only in the same sense that sand and copper are precursors to supercomputing cluster. Methinks someone’s reaching for publicity that they haven’t yet earned. Show me absorbtion lines for a handful of amino acids and I...

As I was scanning the LXer article by Don Parris, A Year Without (MS) Windows: Completing the Conversion of a Windows User , when it dawned on me... I’ve been a Linux™ user since just before Christmas 1995, four scant years after the blessed Saint Linus the Benevolent uploaded his toy Unix to the University of Helsinki’s FTP server (should we start referring to the event as “The Diet of herring”? :-). My first Linux system was SlackWare installed on an ancient laptop with a massive 2MB of memory and 200MB of hard disk (interesting coincidence, the workstation I’m typing this on has 2GB of memory and 200GB of hard disk). Word-processing consisted of vi and cat >/dev/lp0 where a salvaged dotmatrix printer (which happened to run on 12VDC) pounded it onto fanfold paper. It was pretty primitive, but it was to computing as Lego® or Meccano® is to toys: you could knock stuff together to do whatever you wanted — oh, and it didn't crash o...

Looks like it’s not a good day to be Microsoft. Again. Without directly raising the spectre of another CodeRed-intensity wormflood, The Washington Post is reporting an advisory from Symantec: an unpatched WMF vulnerability is exploited and... The exploit code, first posted on security mailing list Bugtraq, states that the included Internet address can successfully exploit a fully patched Windows XP system with a freshly updated [Symantec] Norton Anti-Virus. (bracketed amendment in original) Now would be a good time to hide your MS-Windows workstations behind a proxy, and order it to block anything named .wmf, claiming to be a WMF image, or file(1)ing as a WMF, since it seduces any graphical web browser running in BillSpace.

Find out how many seconds it takes snake3d to totally trash your sense of position. Think it’s easy? Note from the little yellow eyes that two of these snakes are running upside down. Certain weaklings in this household simply refused to even try. (-:

The Belgian company ScanIt reports that: a fully patched Internet Explorer installation was known to be unsafe for 98% of 2004. And for 200 days (that is 54% of the time) in 2004 there was a worm or virus in the wild exploiting one of those unpatched vulnerabilities Comforting. (-: Their browser test gave Konqueror a clean bill of health, too.

Eurekalert reports that a study published in The Annals of Pharmacotherapy shows that the “abortion drug” (abortifacient) RU486 (Mifepristone/Mifeprex) can cause hæmorrhaging and even death. Of the six hundred odd AERs (Adverse Event Reports) investigated, The most frequent AERs were hemorrhage (n = 237) and infection (66). Hemorrhages included 1 fatal, 42 life threatening, and 168 serious cases; 68 required transfusions. Infections included 7 cases of septic shock (3 fatal, 4 life threatening) and 43 cases requiring parenteral antibiotics. Surgical interventions were required in 513 cases (235 emergent, 278 nonemergent). Emergent cases included 17 ectopic pregnancies (11 ruptured). Second trimester viability was documented in 22 cases (9 lost to follow-up, 13 documented fetal outcome). Of the 13 documented cases, 9 were terminated without comment on fetal morphology, 1 was enrolled in fetal registry, and 3 fetuses were diagnosed with serious malformations, sugges...

Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond said a truly noteworthy thing — two of them, actually. Both of them are very short and in their own way very profound: We’ve discovered that our entire view [of planets] is wrong; it’s just joyous to me. (Brackets in source article).

...for a concise but reasonably complete desription of a very common but not widely recognised programming effect. Specifically, that the application and the scaffolding for it can have a similar or greater impact on the malleability of an application than the language it’s written in. Read his article for some interesting sidebands on the main idea.

The inspiring Baen’s Universe SF magazine has just launched, and amongst many other things, the copies you buy online feature no DRM at all . Surely, if a tiny, cost-sensitive company like (and its artists!) this can survive without DRM, so can an electronics behemoth? From the home page: Welcome to Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, a magazine of science fiction, fantasy, and fact. We Believe in Stories. We believe in stories, short and long. For many popular authors, however, the low rates magazines pay for short stories have made writing them a tough economic choice. We’re going to change that situation in the simplest way possible: by paying more. We promise to publish stories that keep you turning the (electronic) page, stories with characters and feeling similar to those of popular novels. Many of the stories, in fact, are set in universes already popular in novel form. Some of the well-known authors who’ve already signed on to appear in the first few issues include: C...

This is a slinky, singular. The slinky was broken in half by enthusiastic children yesterday, and one half left on a car’s dashboard during the heat of the day. Et viola, the circle is complete... ...ly unlike the original star shape! Photo courtesy of the family’s newest photgrapher, Aiyana. Was also pleased to see the new laptop’s serial port seeing immediate use. #1 nephew Christopher was given a Lego SpyBot, which interfaces through an RS-232 port and is pretty close to useless until it has been initialised by the main application. Mum’s new laptop doesn’t have a serial port.

It turns out that PAIP Giglio Firenze’s prepacked potato gnocci, suitably fried up, make excellent Pommes Noisettes.

After some discussion over the relative merits of “Merry Christmas” vs “Happy Holidays”, “Happy Hannuka”, “Peaceful Solstice” and so on, the official verdict is that the most common Christmas greeting is “Will that be cash or card?” I had to meet a relative at Coles in Ocean Keys today, and the entire front of the shop was gridlocked with overflowing trollies. As in, totally. There was no room to move, and shoppers still loading their trollies had to go back down the aisles to the rear of the store, then up the next aisle and return, and so on across the store. Which of course caused more congestion. The queue for the express lanes ran right through the middle of this, across the front wall of the store and down into the ’fridge aisle, and there wasn’t a happy face in it. Christmas is truly a merchants’ holiday.

It seems that Mandriva 2006.0 will indeed install on a Durabook R15D, and the magic word is “ noauto ”, as in, hit F1 then type “ linux noauto «Enter»”. The double-take part of this is that noauto is not supposed to actually change anything that the installer does, except to make it stop and ask about device drivers for everything instead of auto-detecting them. It auto-detects them anyway, but this time they work. D’oh? However, the installer then botches the detection of the video card (it’s an Intel 915) and sound (i810), and once the installation is complete, it doesn’t boot. Adding the parameters from the install/rescue boot don’t make it go, either. It seems that the kernel used for installation and rescue is not as similar to the identically-versioned running kernel as it ought to be. Since there doesn’t appear to be a binary RPM for the installer kernel, I’m setting about making one. I’m reasonably ...

From Spy mag in January 1990, with rebuttal. No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total — 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau [as at 1990] . At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west(which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa h...

...in one link .

I’ve modded my little snatch-stuff-from-the-camera script to fetch from a usb-storage device mountpoint, naming the images using the exif(1) utility, like so ($TODAY is the directory that the script has chosen to put the images into): n=1 LIST=$(find $(mount | gawk '/^.dev.sd[a-d]1 / { print $3 }') -iname '*.jpg') TOTAL=$(wc -l <<EOL $LIST EOL ) for i in $LIST; do t=$(exif -t DateTime $i | gawk '-F: ' '/^ Value:/ { print $2 }' | sed -e 's/://g' -e 's/ /_/g') echo -ne " $n/$TOTAL ($[$n * 100 / $TOTAL]%): dsc${t}_${n}.jpg \\r" cp $i $TODAY/dsc${t}_${n}.jpg n=$[$n+1] done Now I need to figure out how to get it into the script chain invoked by hotplug(8) when a card or camera is plugged in. Mandriva have this set up to invoke a little dialog, which fires up Konqueror aimed at the newly-plugged device (if you agree) so you can drag’n’drop photos: This downloads...

I went on a necessary trip to Albany yesterday, and since I was down there anyway, took some nice pictures from the top of Castle Rock (to be downloaded and posted shortly). In the course of walking up the hill to get there, I discovered that being able to ride 40km without obvious fatigue doesn’t necessarily prepare one for being able to climb ≅600m without obvious fatigue, and I was dizzy and panting like a dog by halfway up. I felt very old. The trip back provided some entertainment. Once on the freeway, I came across a “muscle car” ute trying to find someone to prove himself better than, so I accelerated a little, making as if to gradually pass him, with predictable results. He obviously didn’t consider my junky old Peugeot worth racing against, but still didn’t want anyone getting in front of him. So I stayed on his case until he needed to nip ahead to avoid being trapped by slower vehicles, then pulled out into the next lane again once he was th...

Halfway through the weekend, and the meatheads are a no-show so far . Here’s hoping that things looked different when they sobered up after the last round. My (Caucasian) landlord felt safe enough today to crack jokes with his (Asian (Laotian)) wife about nipping down to Scarborough Beach to see if anyone had turned up. Our African (Zambian, Kenyan, Congan) friends weren’t even aware that there could be a problem.

Leonard Susskind, “the” Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stanford University in California, is interviewed by New Scientist on the demise of String Theory. Some startling quotes: The mathematics are rickety, but that's what inflation implies: a huge universe with patches that are very different from one another. The bottom line is that we no longer have any good reason to believe that our tiny patch of universe is representative of the whole thing. ...where “our tiny patch” is billions of light-years across... What finally convinced you? The discovery in string theory of this large landscape of solutions, of different vacuums, which describe very different physical environments, tipped the scales for me. At first, string theorists thought there were about a million solutions. Thinking about Weinberg’s argument and about the non-zero cosmological constant, I used to go around asking my mathematician friends: are you sure it’s only a million? They a...

We eat cytoplasm for breakfast every morning — it’s part of every cell, so everything that ever lived has cytoplasm in it. Your bacon and eggs (better known as “hygeine-blind scavenger with chicken periods”) has cytoplasm in it. Less... second-hand food like muesli or grapefruit has cytoplasm in it, too. What’s different about this breakfast is that it actually looks like cytoplasm as well as having cytoplasm in it. (-: Take some random dried fruit (I used cherries and sultanas; raisins, currants, blueberries, cranberries, anything which re-hydrates into a blobby form is good), add a roughly equal amount of sago to it, place in a small saucepan with about 3x as much water as there is dry ingredients, and cook for 15 minutes, stirring frequently. Add a splotch of honey as you turn off the heat, and stir again to mix it in. Leave the saucepan to idle to a halt as you break out the bowls and cutlery. The “organelle” blobs (mitochondria, lysoosomes...

Stumbled across a couple of articles on cars recently, which really raised my eyebrows...   The first is the Peugeot Moovie , an eye-catching two-seater electric concept car designed by André Costa and actually built. You climb into it through a wheel (the front is supported by two spheres, but steering is by differential force on the high-efficient main wheels). It has an unequalled field of view, incredible stability, sliding doors and mirrors which fold away for close parking. The second is the Jeep Hurricane , with all-wheel completely independent steering (giving a turning circle of — more or less — zero) and two 5.7-litre vee-eights (total of 670hp!) with a “multi-displacement system” which allows you to run on any arbitrary combination of 4-16 cylinders (and to hit 100km/h in six seconds from a standing start).

If you’re hunting for a high-res image to show off your new widescreen monitor with, y’all can stop searching now. The full size version of this one’s 27,000x6,000 pixels (167 megapixels, Canon/Sony/Konica/Fuji/etc eat your heart out!): This is the Spitzer Space Telescope’s view of a tiny chunk of the Milky Way, the full width is nine degrees, roughly the same as an outstretched fist. Spizter is the model for the Avahi logo .

...and in fact I need a Resident Return Visa the instant I get my passport, else technically I have to be “returned” to Canada straight away. D’oh! But — naturally — I need my passport first in order to get an RRV. Does anyone else see a problem with that? Aaaanyway... I’ve got a set of “welcome-to-Canadia” papers on their way across the Nullarbor to me now, so in principle I will be at LCA2006 and can now set about finishing the arrangements. Meanwhile, I’ve also applied to be Australian again to help with the paper trauma next time I need to travel overseas, and possibly also to head off the possibility of expiring RRVs or other bureacratic insanity.

“ Buffy ” is the informal name of 2004XR190, a new rock (with “a diameter of between 500 and 1000 kilometres, making it somewhere between a fifth and nearly half as wide as Pluto”) buzzing around in a circular but highly inclined (47°) orbit beyond Pluto (just under 60A, but it comes in as close as 50AU). The circular-but-inclined orbit is already giving the theorists conniptions , but I wonder if it will have moons ?

The following idiocy, posted here for the record, arrived on my PostFix server from a dynamic DSL IP in Tennessee via an apparently compromised MS-Exchange server belonging to SprintLink customer Wilde in Massachusetts. Nine times, so far. One has to wonder why the Yanks (if it is the Yanks) are making these claims. I quote the terrifyingly brainless drivel verbatim, except to reduce the obscenity count a little by putting a bullet (•) through some of instances of it. We are the Sons and Daughters of the ANZACs. We can not expect our treasonous Government to protect us in these times, they are the ones that bought us to this very place. With 150,000 Arab immigrants entering our nation "legally" each year it is time Australians stood up and were counted. For we are the Sons and Daughters of the ANZACs, the men who protected us from invasion and threats in years gone by. Now it is your turn, OUR turn, the guard has changed, the times have changed, but true patriots shall NEVER ...

I was imported into Australia from Canada on my father’s passport 41 years ago, and at the time the Immigration officials were quite firmly of the opinion that this action made me an Australian citizen. Now, they’re not. Citizenship took a month to work this out. If I file an application for citizenship today and it’s all correct, I can be an Australian citizen in two to three months , at which point I can apply for a passport... which might take ten days to two weeks to arrive. So we’re looking at late March before I can get a passport. I’d hate to be in a hurry, need to visit a dying relative or whatever. The solution is apparently to travel as a Canadian, and the entire paperwork process should take less than a week, including snailmail from Canada to here. Does anyone else see anything wrong with this picture? Meanwhile, once I’ve got a passport I need to apply for a Resident Return Visa, otherwise Australia won’t let me back in (even ...

Having an 8 wide, 60km long fissure open up near the Red Sea while “powerful” earthquakes hit East Africa (just down the rift from there), Afghanistan/Jammu/Kasimir (twice) (it’s a little to the east of the new fissure) and eastern Turkey (a little north of it) doesn’t seem to have rung any alarm bells, but they’re just a few of the recent large quakes. I’m idly wondering what effect, if any, the many decades of enthusiastic oil extraction in the region has been having on its geological stability; so I google for “earthquake” in the news and discover that there have also been Richter magnitude 5 or greater earthquakes near Wellington, the Kermadec Islands (which are also NZ, hit four times in the last week including a Richter 6.4 strike), Fiji (twice), Lake Tanganyika (Congo/Tanzania), Romania, Southeastern Siberia, Komandorskiye Ostrova (Russia), Japan, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea (twice: one near Lei, one near Ra...

Narwhals have often piqued my curiosity. Their “horns” are pretty much unique — there are no “nearwhals” with shorter “horns” (actually, they’re teeth) or anything else like them either living or fossil from which to extrapolate development or a purpose. Like the turtles and so many other species, they stand quite alone and distinct in the underground bony “audit trail” we call The Fossil Record: The tooth’s unique spiral, the degree of its asymmetry to the left side, and its odd distribution among most males and some females are all unique expressions of teeth in mammals. [...] In the past, many theories have been presented to explain the tooth’s purpose and function, none of which have been accepted as definitive. One of the most common is that the tooth is used to display aggression between males, who joust with each other for social hierarchy. Another is that the tooth is a secondary sexual characteristic, like ...

Even if these guys are barking up the wrong tree, they have some interesting and spectacular images up. It would go some way to explaining some of the odd cratering I’ve noticed here and there.

Background: John and I regularly twit each other in a friendly manner over Linux® vs MS-Windows; this time I thought that, since I'd gone to the trouble of writing a lengthy response, I’d publish it. On Tuesday 13 December 2005 01:00, John Xxxxxxxxx wrote: Reliability: Analyzing Solution Uptime as Business Needs Change (PDF version) http://list.windowsitpro.com/t?ctl=1A2C8:358B67 Uh, thanks, John. (-: It seems obvious from this that they are not making effective use of the uniquitous packaging systems available for the various Linuces: At a high level, the Windows systems were dramatically more reliable than the Linux systems. On average, patching Linux took six times longer than patching Windows, and there were almost five times as many patches to apply on Linux (187) as there were on Windows (39). More important, perhaps, the Linux systems suffered from 14 “critical breakages,” software dependency failures in which software simply stopped working on those system...

The logon page still throws a wobbly about an unsupported browser, but there is a Firefox logo on there as well as the “Netscape Now” and MSIE. There is no mention of OS. In point of fact, it seems to work fine (modulo some slightly wonky JavaScript menus, which doesn’t surprise me since they used to also be a problem under Firefox in ancient times) under Konqueror 3.4.2 too. Maybe one day their site will even pass the W3C’s Validator as well, although it’s already considerably better than certain competitors .

It seems that the North Magnetic Pole is packing its bags and heading for warmer other cryogenic climes , which (I guess) will make a significant difference to where magnetic compasses in Australia point.

“For posterior” or IOW to make them easier to find as a bunch when I want them back one fine day: Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done. — Andy Rooney Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant. — Mitch Kapor There’s a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn’t true. — Ian Hart If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution. — Robert Sewell Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java’s designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them. — Paul Graham C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your wh...

Having someone attempt to auction a “zero-day” (ie, unpatched) exploit for a competing spreadsheet looks to me like another fine reason to use OpenOffice .

This is a very important thing to do, especially when it frees a whole branch of science up to explore fresh alternatives: We don’t know what we are talking about [...] Many of us believed that string theory was a very dramatic break with our previous notions of quantum theory, but now we learn that string theory, well, is not that much of a break. [... The 1911 Solvay conference, facing radioactivity for the first time] were missing something absolutely fundamental; we are missing perhaps something as profound as they were back then. Not just some random from the backwoods, either.

The motto “Peace through superior firepower” has an honourable history, the basic message being that some malefactors won’t take “Please, no!” for an answer, and you really do have to have the will to go out and slap them down unless you actually like being raped, pillaged and murdered. However, leave it to the Yanks to do this mod:

I wandered in today and donated my second dose of whole blood . Now that I’ve donated whole blood twice, I can come back in four weeks (and then every two after that) and donate just plasma and platelets through a nifty little gadget which uses a process called “apheresis” to rip out just the components that the Red Cross most need, and not the components which would reduce my donation frequency to once a quarter. As well as the more frequent donations, apheresis is able to extract roughly three times as much of the important bits as a whole blood donation would, meaning that I’ll be able to source enough essentials to support (more or less) eighteen times as many lukaemia patients or whomever as through whole-blood donations. The process, including paperwork and recovery, takes of the order of an hour and a half instead of half an hour, so I guess I’ll finally be able to catch up on my breathtakingly long reading list backlog.

I pulled out onto Erindale Road today, turning right (north) from Delawney Street behind another vehicle. Fully expecting them to proceed smoothly and knowing that there was plenty of shelter from the traffic islands to do this if they bailed, I followed them across two very temporarily empty lanes. When they propped instead of proceeding, I widened my turn and parked behind their left rear quarter, not blocking the driver’s view of northbound traffic, and waited for them to pick a gap in said traffic and get on with it. Instead of looking for a gap, the driver and her boyfriend ignored the traffic and started verbally abusing me — and I do mean abusing, too, starting with “WTF do you think you’re doing?” and working down from there to coarse and most uninformed discussions of my anatomy and habits. So I picked my own gap and drove off past them. There was plenty of room for them to follow me, but they were much too busy with important things like hurling...

Another Grandpa Roger specialty is entertainment; he had an enormous collection of riddles, limericks and weird stories, and while not exactly fond of dressing up, got totally into the spirit of the thing whenever he did. With a name like Roger, of course, pirate material was pretty much second nature, but like the inscrutible Jeremy Malcolm does, he had an astonishing thespian repertoire to draw upon at need. Don’t try this at home, kiddies, lest someone pat you on the back at an inopportune moment.

Microsoft doesn’t deliver Halo-the-movie, either, they just take the money and run... (anything really new there?) the delivery is being done on a Linux-based server farm in the Land of the Large White Crowd . Hey! Cool thought! Maybe we’ll get to see stills at Dunedin in January ?

Another “worth doing well” habit of Grandpa Roger’s was gardening. If you or I mentioned ”planting a few fruit trees” it might amount to a lemon and an ornamental peach; for Roger, it was forty-something trees, plus grape, taxonia and passionfruit vines. He was also into growing flowers in a big way, not only big in quantity, but many individual flowers with blooms larger than my head. He also spent many a happy hour behind “the fabulous monster” (it roared, moved, left tracks and breathed fire, or at least hot exhaust), his rotary hoe and I long ago lost count of how many tonnes of fresh vegetables he provided to friends and family. He also specialised in growing luscious stuff on paddocks which others had lost hope in.

JPL’s PhotoJournal recently emitted a hi-res mosaic of Hyperion’s whacking great crater . What immediately struck me as I scrolled around the full-size JPEG of it was the paucity of round craters. Also, that monster crater has to be the result of internal subsidence or something like that, as there is NFW you could slap Hyperion that hard with a bolide and leave ought but an expanding cloud of hot gravel afterwards.

I’m sure you’ve heard the adage, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well”. “Bumpa” Roger epitomised this. If he fixed something, it stayed fixed. There is a small refrigerator in the kitchen at the farm, which was difficult to reach down into for things like the vegetables at the very bottom, so he built a little stool for it to raise it about 18 inches to a comfortable height. Out of 2x4s. With cross-bracing. I'm pretty sure you could park a truck (or at least a 4WD) on it without it so much as creaking. There is also a shed with a “long drop”, a stopgap until a proper digestor/recycling system is built for the house. It’s one of the very few loos with jarrah floorboards, and once again it’s solid and dependable: one can clamber about on the roof etc (a recycled roll-a-door) with complete confidence. I’m going to miss that dependability.

One of the things which many grandchildren remember Grandpa Roger for is his passion for model railways. In his voluminous and varied collection of literature (and “varied” is not a term I use here lightly), I found a little book of poems by a local (Hilton) bloke named Andrew Morling and entitled The Lament of the Railway Modeller which it turns out Roger was given by the author. The book is full of entertaining poems on topics as diverse as office automation, garlic and aviaries, but centred around railway modelling; if you’d like a copy, drop an email to authorsfullname @bigpond.com (no spaces, dots or anything in the name) or ask me for his ’phone number. Andrew has graciously permitted me to use one of his poems (which Roger would have cheerfully confessed to resembling): It’s not for me, it’s for the boy He came inside and brought his wife, they’d come to buy a train, I asked them was there anything they’d like me to explain, ...

It seems that Mandriva Linux 2006.0 needs just a little over 512MB of RAM if you’re going to use it flat out as both a server (DNS, DHCP, web, rsync, FTP, ssh) and workstation. With everything but OpenOffice2 running, it chews ≅600MB of RAM and feels incredibly responsive compared to 512MB of RAM. Arcing up OOo2 as well and opening a few items ramps that to about 700MB. This machine now has 2GB of RAM in it, so I should be able to GIMP huge images with relative impunity.

Frank, our neighbourhood mobile mechanic, fixed the water pump on our van for 20% under budget, and it’s running one notch cooler than it ever has before even though the thermostat is the same, which I attribute to better water flow throughout. Frank also seems to have bled the clutch, and not mentioned it on his bill. If you’re in Perth’s northern suburbs and chasing a good mechanic, Frank trades as C & A Autos on 0414-803-185. The fixed water pump has allowed me to try out the shiny new injectors and freshly re-sealed fuel pump, too, and the difference is quite startling. Subjectively, it feels about 50% more powerful and while an 1800cc diesel 4WD van isn’t ever going to be popping any wheelies or blowing the doors off anything but snails it is certainly much more interested in keeping up with the traffic, and much easier to ramp up over 3000RPM (its TDC on the tacho; 2500 RPM is about where it starts seriously pulling, and that seems ot last to about 37...

From this Age article : That’s the technology — the business model is based on making money by giving things away. This is counter-intuitive, which is why Microsoft and others with mindsets stuck in the early days of the information industry just don’t get it. There’s also a good follow-through statement: When wealth was based on physical objects, value came from scarcity. In the information age, value comes from abundance. Google realises this; so does the open source community. So does Microsoft, in a way, but it believes it can control that abundance. While it thinks like that, it will only be halfway there. There’s a cute penguin logo for the story, too:

Rest in peace, Roger Napier Gibbons, died 07:40 this morning of metabolic collapse induced by prostate cancer. This was more than a week after being formally and officially written off for the fourth time, and nearly twelve years after being formally and officially written off for the first time, so it wasn’t exactly unexpected. This does not — in the estimation of countless grandchildren — in any way make up for his loss, but it is an impressive achievement. If any one else is suffering from a systemic affliction like cancer, Dr Red bought him at least an extra four weeks after his third writing-off, and is a harmless thing to try .

The meteor which I mentioned yesterday is finally hitting the news sites. Oddly enough, in Pennsylvania and China first, rather than Oz. This video frame doesn’t do the thing justice; the roofs mask the illuminating effect. The reality was many times brighter than the biggest magnesium flare I’ve ever seen, easily dominating the moonlight and the sportsground’s lights.

[ Post One | Post Two | Post Three ] Eric Flint writes: Baen’s Universe , 4th post: the Universe Club The Universe Club will have four levels of membership, depending on the size of the contribution. (Just like fancy museums and such.) Each level will have ascending degrees of benefits, as explained below. We haven’t decided whether to use a “circus theme” or a “universe theme” as titles for the various levels of membership. In the end, we just figured we’d let the contributors decide. What’ll happen is that we’ll offer each membership under either title, and whichever the buyer selects will constitute a vote for that theme. Once the first round of buying is over — Big round! Big round! — whatever the majority wants will henceforth be Ye Official Monickers. Here they are: Runaways (circus theme) or Titan Class members (universe theme): Cost: $50. What you get: A six-issue package of Baen’s Universe (the first year of the magazine). A free electro...

[ Post One | Post Two ] Eric Flint writes: Baen’s Universe , 3rd post: subscriptions Starting early next month — don’t worry, we’ll let you know, you can bet on it — we’ll be starting to offer subscriptions to Baen’s Universe magazine. I’m using the term “subscription” a bit loosely, since technically what we’ll be selling are six-volume packages — i.e., the first year of the magazine — much the same way we sell the Grantville Gazette. The difference is simple: With a package, you always get volumes 1-6, regardless of when you make the purchase. Whereas, with a subscription, you’d start getting your copies as of the date of the subscription itself. That is, you might start with Volume 4 and continue on through Volume 9. We may eventually move to a modified traditional subscription system, but we don’t want to do it for the moment because that sort of subscription gets you involved with a number of co...