Plantagenet Penguinista

Wade , the IPW2200 in my ACPI-crippled laptop is one of the few pieces of hardware in it that worked first time with Linux (Mandriva 2006.0, in this case, with the firmware RPM from PLF ’coz the Free version of the distro can’t ship it — one for Intel’s ToDo list, I guess), whereas XP on the same laptop drops persistent connections (typically ssh) about every 20-60 seconds at random, and also flubs about every 10th web-page (delays some, refuses to load others, yet a reload 10 seconds later is fast and perfect).

Let’s see... a bipedal beaked crocodile ... hmmm, shall we revive the species? They’d be so handy to have around!

An octopus attacks a CAD$200,000 remote-controlled mini-sub . The enraged screeches from the octopus are later interpreted as “You do not park on my lawn again. Evah! Understand?”

Here we have Jeff Waugh preparing to wow the locals (Davyd Madeley was flag bearer for the little group I chose, but I didn’t take enough happy snaps). Jeff (being Jeff) couldn’t resist hamming it up. This was a really suave tree we went past on the way to Woodhough Park for the BBQ. It govered an entire large housing block. The steep and otherwise empty block (with a path running up each side) was evidently once a street. The crown of the roadway at the top is wrong for a tee and right for a crossroads with the cross-contour street dominating. Unfortunately, the many omitted happy snaps include (or, really, exclude) Woodhough Park, the BBQ, the pigeon, the Water of Leith running past, Davyd in his flag, Jacqueline’s hat and so on. Davyd does, however, get a cameo part at the left of the first photo.

...about twice the size of the normal article, with the same iridescent-green-on-gray chest as the kea and some of the smaller straight-beaked birds. Grey-brown (diamond-dove-coloured) wings and a cream abdomen. Sitting in a tree about five feet above me, stripping it of leaves one by one. And me without my camera. Many of the WA crew gathered in Woodhaugh Park (Davyd wearing a flag, Jacqueline a LOUD pink floppy hat) to celebrate Australia Day while the professional delegates and speakers were off at their respective dinners. Fush and Chups (including Kumara Chups, made out of a sweet-potatoish) and a sausage sizzle. Beer (and in one case sarsparilla) made in Australia, salad and local icecream. Luxury!

...as an LA OCM. Now I have to figure out exactly why and follow through on it.

DIMIA emailed me to say that my Resident Return Visa has been processed, but with no explanation of why since they were waiting for information from me which I still haven’t been able to find. Carefully averting my eyes from the state of this particular horse’s teeth, I now wonder how I set about getting an RRV stamp on my visa.

Insert hard drive, pull jumper to make existing hard drive into slave, then boot and... cd /migrate dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb count=1 sfdisk /dev/hdb < diskdump.txt dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/hdb2 mkswap /dev/hdb5 mke2fs -j /dev/hdb3 mount /dev/hdb3 /mnt ( cd /home; tar c . ) | ( cd /mnt; tar xv ) shutdown -h now ...disk out, jumper back in, and next machine, please. The conf organisers are gearing up for registrations at 15:00, I’m babysitting a disk copying process to free up our scarce Ryan Verner resources. It’s kinda hard to swap back out of “holiday mode” again, but probably valuable to blow the cobwebs out of my skull before I have to actually use its contents in anger.

There’s a bunch of photos from the last few days up here . The Uni of Otago looks really picturesque, more photos from that will go up soon.

Sitting in the fair city of Dunedin, blogging over a very dodgy wireless link courtesy of Hoyts Octagon. Not a great deal there yet, but some, and I’ll put up more stuff later when I have a better link and more time.

StarDust seems to have returned home safely, with samples. Not bad for such a little device after a 46,000km/h (here to Perth in under 3 seconds) re-entry. I’ve posted too much today. Shutting up now.

ANU builds a 4-grid ion motor for the ESA which is 4x more fuel-efficient and significantly more compact than any competitor. Aussie ingenuity strikes again... oh, hang on, I’ve got a few months left before I can say that with the proper ring of associative pride again.

I’m sure we’ve all seen Theodor Geisel’s wettest dream, glow-in-the-dark green ham [as reported by Chris Hogg, thank you BBC] by now, but how about a green, glow-in-the-dark style planet? This a snapshot of Earth in the extreme ultra-violet (EUV). Like the auroral corona? Good, ’coz it’s there 24x7. It gets wider and narrower, fuzzier and more intense, but it’s always there, even if we can’t see it with our carefully tuned little eyeballs. The fuzzy ball represent Earth’s “plasmasphere”, which like the magnetosphere, ionosphere et al surrounds Earth and protects it from lots of cosmic nasties. It also fluctuates, depending upon a variety of factors, not all of them well understood. /ME has to wonder what effects this has on the ionosphere, global warming, yadda yadda. With all of this plasma happening, starting a few tens of kilometers up, it’s a wonder that Red Sprites, Blue Jets, ELVEs, TROLLs and the like weren’t officially noticed a long time earlier.

There are well over a billion Chinese, a billion Indians, nearly 200 million Russians, as many in the República Federativa do Brasil — and so on — all with a vested interest in levelling the playing field . It’s just a matter of time, now. There’s even a name for this bunch: BRIC ( B razil, R ussia, I ndia, C hina), and of course they’re not the only ones (Indonesia, South Korea, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Mexico . . . even impoverished King Leopold’s Congo has 60 million people in it, who will sooner or later have their day in the sun).

Microsoft-dependent Redmond Magazine has published an article on how to “win” something called “the Linux wars”. Here’s my response: It’s going to do your readership no end of harm to hit the field thinking that they’re armed when they’re not. Your “Winning the Linux Wars” article is typical of the misfiring arms that the troops from Redmond have had to deploy with. To cherry-pick a couple of examples: You take two unsupported opinions from salesmen whose companies absolutely rely upon Microsoft products for their living, and treat those as meaningful data points; The “independent analyst white papers” to which Marshall refer are nothing of the sort, and your people will be left looking like idiots when the customer points this out; Beamer’s opinion “I know what my tool set looks like. With a Linux tool set, there are some dark areas out there” is nothing but FUD -casting; your Linux opponents will know what their tool set looks like and what your tool set looks like, and you’ll come

...ially a Canadian now. I vote we hold LCA2007 in Ottawa or Montreal!

Microsoft are crowing about having patented the FAT filesystem, but like Shyster Shylock from The Merchant of Venice , who was allowed his “pound of flesh taken from about the heart” from his debtor Antonio, but (as Portia pointed out) was not allowed any blood along with it, the patents don’t actually cover FAT itself, they only cover FAT32 and VFAT . FAT itself is derived directly from CP/M’s braindead filesystem. It even has a directory layout with scars from CP/M’s FCBs (File Control Blocks, the in-memory representation of an open file). Except for the fact that the FAT32 extension seems “novel” and “non-obvious” to some lame-brain in the USPTO, I would have said that FAT itself is essentially not patentable. Microsoft claim that they developed FAT for a standalone BASIC in 1976, but with its obvious CP/M heritage, it was not noticeably different from all of the other random filesystems floating around at the time, and Seattle Computer Systems (of QDOS fame) evidently didn’t have a

After several days consistently in the high 30s (Celcius, for our North Mexican visitors), the weather decided to be cold and rainy today, the one day in ages that I relied upon cycing for transport. I discovered that it was not actually cold enough — cycling releases enough heat into a spray jacket to make the inside wetter (from sweat) than the outside. For the curious, the full rhyme quoted in part above is: Whether the weather be hot, or whether the weather be not, we'll weather the weather, whatever the weather, whether we like it or not! Other than being sodden (and heavy), the actual riding was fine. I entertained myself by finding the driest pieces of path to ride on, which was sometimes the skinny kerbing on the edges. It turns out that there’re two immigration departments in the same building; the one I waited in (for over two hours after the receptionist remarking that the queues were unusually short today; I was glad to have lugged along a laptop and got some writing

Customers will get me. On a completely different note, how do you reckon craters like this pair get formed? They’re from the Coprates region on Mars, just under the Valles Marineris, and they’re about 200km across, so if one of them formed on, say, Nannup, it would pretty much obliterate the South West of Western Australia (everything from Bunbury to Augusta and across to Walpole, at least). Special features to note: the extra hole in the middle, the “terraced” or “double-walled” rim, and the many similarities to each other.

So far, the honours are about evenly divided. The wireless LAN isn’t reliable under XP (even with power-saving disabled for it), and the power management (speedstep, suspend-to-RAM) doesn’t work (yet) under Linux. Except that the CPU fan never comes on under XP; I’m assured by TwinHead that management of this fan is a hardware function, so I suspect that the speedstepness is jammed at less than full blast. Update: XP just failed a resume as well (laptop woke up to a black screen, and the hard disk flashing every few seconds... forever...). Only once, so far, but it does make me wonder why this whole ACPI thing needs to be so complicated and dodgy.

At first glance, this seems like a dumb, dumb question: because meteors fall into them from above , duh? Well, actually, they don’t — at least, the vast majority of them don’t. If you took a brick halfway to Lunar orbit and dropped it, it would fall (approximately) straight down through the atmosphere and possibly even survive to make a crater. But why a round crater, even so? Bricks are not round (at least, I have never seen a spherical brick, and I think any brickie who did would be screaming and running away). Think about all of the photos of comets and asteroids that you’ve ever seen: only the planet-buster sized ones are anything like round. The others are elongated, and often bent. You would expect many of these, falling straight down, to make an elongated crater, no? Yet very, very few craters are anything but round. Then think about the descriptions of meteors you’ve read or hear. What were these meteors doing? Invariably, they were streaking across the sky or some similar d

The Scotsman reports that a new gravity-causing electromagnetic drive is to be developed, which if pushed far enough flips the driven vessel into a kind of hyperspace, allowing — in theory, of course — an 80-day trip to Proxima Centauri. The whole concept sounds uncannily like the “wedge” space-drive used in SciFi author David Weber’s “ Honorverse ” series, complete with a hyperspace mode. The only obvious difference is that Weber’s hyper-drive leaves you in hyper if it shuts down, but this one (in theory, remember?) kicks you back into normal space. Also, I imagine we’ll be a fair while working up to building eight-megatonne warships which can hit an evading opponent with a beam at a million kilometers even if all of this does work out anything like the theory predicts. Some reference material: scientist wins 2004 AIIA “best paper” here , pictured here , based on this bloke’s theories. The paper in question is here [PDF] as a part of this collection. Enjoy! (-:

Quad City Times reports : [A local ISP] has been awarded an [USD]$11.2 billion judgment against a Florida man for sending millions of unsolicited e-mails advertising mortgage and debt consolidation services. The judgment against James McCalla of Florida is the culmination of a multi-defendant lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa in 2003 by Robert W. Kramer III, owner of CIS Internet Services in Clinton. [...] the judgment also prohibits McCalla from accessing the Internet for three years. Now if only they could nail another few score thieves-of-time, we’d have a bit of electronic peace at last. I feel a warm, rosy glow at the prospect of relief. (-:

Hilarious! The closure of McDonald’s in Altamura, Apulia, was hailed yesterday as a victory for European cuisine against globalised fast food. Luigi Digesù, the baker, said that he had not set out to force McDonald’s to close down in any “bellicose spirit”. He had merely offered the 65,000 residents tasty filled panini — bread rolls — which they overwhelmingly preferred to hamburgers and chicken nuggets. “It is a question of free choice,” Signor Digesú said. His speciality fillings include mortadella, mozzarella and eggs or scamorza cheese, eggs, basil and tomato, as well as fédda, a local version of bruschetta [...]. McDonald’s opened [...] in 2001, infuriating devotees of traditional Apulia gastronomy [...]. They campaigned against McDonald’s as the Friends of Cardoncello, named after a southern Italian mushroom. [...] “There was no marketing strategy, no advertising promotion, no discounts,” Il Giornale commented. “It was just that people decided the baker’s products were better. Da

Since Computer Business Review/CommentWire are unlikely to publish this comment themselves: Your most recent story about SCOX’s court antics ( D74040F3-9621-4295-82F5-FC6D8D9F7CDD ) is highly irresponsible reporting. We have not seen any evidence at all out of SCOX yet, ever; the few shards they did file are all under seal. Their “millions of lines” has been reduced (not increased) to a few hundred, you can bet your last penny that big slabs of that will just be rejected out of hand by the Court for various reasons, they’ve dropped all patent claims, and the single remaining copyright claim rests on very rickety legal theory. On top of all of this, they still have counterclaims to answer in at least three court cases, all of which have excellent chances of being awarded show-stopper amounts of compensation. Far from being in a “better” position, as the whole tone of the report implies, SCOX’s response was pathetic; they are closer to death’s door than ever before. So I don’t have a

52% vs 3%. Source Secunia . That makes a better headline, don’t you think?

67% of Linux vulnerabilities are network-safe, vs a mere 13% of MS-Windows XP vulnerabilities. Source Secunia . That makes a better headline, don’t you think?

18% of attacks were remoately exploitable vs 60%. Source Secunia . That makes a better headline, don’t you think?

12% vs 40% (or 12% vs 71% if you count worse bugs too). Source Secunia . That makes a better headline, don’t you think?

31% of MS-Windows flaws for 2005 were rated “Highly Critical” or “Extremely Critical” (13% of the group were “Extremely”. 0% of Linux flaws reported in 2005 were so rated. That’s right: none, nada, zip, zero, diddly-squat, sweet fanny adams, scratch. Source Secunia . That makes a better headline, don’t you think?

22 vs 12 for 2005. Source Secunia . That makes a better headline, don’t you think?

45 vs 33. Source Secunia . That makes a better headline, don’t you think?

This Korean article is a short, sharp lesson in what happens when you allow Microsoft to stealth their way into control of your systems: According to Naver, the country’s largest portal site, more than 98 percent of its users were using Internet Explorer (IE) as of late last year. However, OneStat, a Dutch web monitoring company, said that almost 20 percent of Internet users in the U.S. and Western Europe are not using IE. More than 15 percent of Internet users in the world are also using software other than IE when using the Internet. This means that Korea’s dependency on Microsoft is uniquely high. Experts say that this is because functions, such as Internet banking, the online issuance of civil affairs documents, and online games, are not conducted on web browsers other than IE. Kim Jeong-hyeon, vice president of Apple Korea, said, “When Microsoft announced last year that it would end support for Windows 98, the Korean government had to visit Microsoft’s headquarters and beg for co

This is what you get when you buy a slightly up-market DVD burner instead of the cheapest on the wholesaler’s list: It’s always nicer when it’s official, isn’t it? I wonder how many hours of bending paperclips the design team spent before they settled on this shape?

You put <b>HTML codes</b> around words while you’re wordprocessing instead of selecting them and hitting Ctrl-B . ...and you reflexively type apostrophes as “&rsquo;”.

Some kind soul in Greenwood chucked a Repco “Evolution” 21-speed mountain bike out into their pile of kerbside junk. Due to my foresight in collecting numerous other more-or-less intact bikes, it was easy to find a seat to replace the existing sun-damaged one. The rest of it was just routine maintenance like oiling the chain, pumping up the tyres, and tightening the skinny nuts on the axles to adjust the bearings to “firm but not squashed”. Judging by the wear on the tyres, (possibly the original set although they show little sign of weathering) and the original genuine Shimano brake pads (to match the Shimano running gear), this thing got ridden for a month or two after it was bought, and then parked outside somewhere and forgotten. I also picked up a Repco “Tracer AllTerrain”, and for a moment there I thought I finally had a pair of bikes (I want an identical pair to slice up and turn into a dual kid-carrier) — but it turns out that the one already in the carport was an older model o

Brad’s post elicited a response from Kai (VK6KSJ): Gotta love it when that happens, especially because “Linux is sooo hard to use, didn’t you know ?!” Quite a while ago I had Linspire installed on one of our laptops, I was out on a job and the CEO booked out that laptop for use over the weekend. I didn’t get any calls over the weekend but when I went to use the lappy again on Monday it was still hibernating with OOo Writer open, with a 10 page report done up complete with graphs and formatting, quite impressive since the CEO is fairly computer illiterate, and “Linux is sooo hard to use, didn’t you know ?!”. I guess the secret is: don’t tell them it’s hard, and then it won’t be.

From Brad Campbell on the main PLUG list, comes this interesting and heartening story: I set my admin desktop at the office to dual boot XP and Knoppix 3.9. Recently employed secretary sits down at machine with admin manager to show her the ropes and starts using it (I accidentally left it booted into knoppix). Runs through the mornings work until yours truly arrives at the office... Sit down, introduce self to secretary and start casual banter... observe the KDE desktop and ask about her familiarity with Linux and OpenOffice... Comment back from both was “Oh? Thats not Microsoft Office? But it looks like it and I had no problem using it. How much does it cost?” Admin manager stunned and amazed. Considering study to move large portion of his other business over to StarOffice (coz they want $$ support) and canceling pending order for 100 copies of MSO. Progress little grasshopper Perhaps we should call this “value subtracted marketing”, in which the artificially inflated value of close

First, you are not alone . (-: Note that the reference is not to a random tinfoil-hatter, but to New Scientist article quoting respectable researchers, and another NS article details experiments being done by mainstream scientists into electricity-dominated cosmologies, something I’ve been having fun with recently. There are big, unfilled gaps in the assorted theories there (most notably, any mechanism for generating the stupendous amounts of electricity involved), but in practical terms a terrifyingly large number of “inexplicable” phenomena are readily explicable using it — for example, the mystery of quantised redshifts, a feature of the universe long favoured by Creationists . One feature of it which has made the concept a bit of a lighting rod for an inordinate amount of hostility is that it is incompatible with the Big Bang as we know it. As a result, we now have the amazing spectacle of a religious war between Atheist and Atheist. This image is quite a controversial one, as

I saw some very sneaky highway patrolmen today. They’d evidently finished their country run early, so they parked their shiny (flouro-orange stripes, reflective chequerboard, headgear) pursuit car in a medical clinic in Wanneroo where the garden clutter hid it from the road, and taken a portable laser speedgun out to a bus stop in front of it. Who looks at people loitering at a bus stop? They waved people to a stop instead of using der blinkenlights, so there was no warning twinlkle in the distance. I was glad to have been paying attention at the time. Plenty of other people hadn’t been; they were doing a roaring trade. (-:

Couldn’t decide whether to call dessert “Hyper * Strata” or “Technicolour Cowpat”. Followed by a magnificent yellow skyglow, a rainbow, and some gentle rain through the pleasantly warm afternoon air. Gotta love Perth in summer. * as in “hyperactive”

Brasil, with a booming economy, is doing something almost unheard-of: not only paying its USD$15.5 billion IMF debt, but early , and on top of that, it’s paying off a USD$2.6 billion debt to the Paris Club early as well. Many countries take out IMF loans only as an act of desperation, and the IMF usually interferes quite heavily in the country’s autonomy as part of the conditions. Many IMF loans are also never effectively repaid. Not only is FOSS-loving Brasil on target to repay the loans, they also issued a global bond offering backed by Reals, not foreign currency and it was extremely well received. /ME is now wondering which FOSS-supporting country will be next to demonstrate obvious signs of prosperity. Pia in particular has spent a fair bit of time telling us how motivated the Sudamericanos are (particularly about FOSS, but that’s not all) over the last few years, now we’re starting to see some tangible, measurable, obvious results.

This is probably what Eta Carinae looks like end-on. It’s the supernova remnant from Tycho’s Star, seen going bang in 1572 by the gent it’s named after, Tycho Brahe. And, of course, it’s not obeying the laws of physics — our’s, not the Universe’s. The blue filmy-looking bits are a (relatively) cold shockfront that should be about two light-years in front of the wooly-looking bits, the debris. The fact that the debris has chosen to bunch up like it has instead of spreading out randomly, almost smoothly, is also cause for conventional concern. If you view this as an end-on picture of an Eta-Carinae-like situation, rather than as a supernova per se, then the “dumbbell” formation (with a ring around its “waist”) is relatively common, and represents an unusually energetic plasma pinch. Another interesting image to consider is this starspot: Note the copy of our Sun imprinted top left for scale. Quite a sunspot, no? And utterly impossible to conventional stellar physics. If you view a star

Next, we get a little closer to home. We all know that comets are chunks of slush which boil as they approach the sun, outgassing big, steaming clouds which are then blown back by the Solar Wind to form the tail. As y’all regular readers would have long ago guessed, there are... a number of problems for this view. In fact, if you look at just the images and text published by JPL’s Photojournal about Comet Borrelly , you will quickly conclude that the traditional view of how a comet works is, well, more than a little crazy, because: the ejecta are in thin, well-defined jets from a few spots on the surface, not all over it; the ejecta typically aren’t from the side facing the Sun; several comets have been seen with multiple tails (one image of Halley shows it with seven of them); the comets so far seen are not spheroid, as you would expect if they were (re-)formed by the condensation of ejecta, but elongated; the ejecta jets are typically offset, the majority coming from one end of the c

More “whaaaat?” material this morning... in particular, the star FG Saggitae (from the planetary Nebula He 1-5) went from a boring, ordinary hot star around 1920 to a much cooler but brighter (as its spectrum dropped from UV to visible) star in 1955, then by 1970 had picked up a whole stack of new spectral lines. In 1992, it suddenly dropped five magnitudes of brightness, and over the next four years, a further two magnitudes. You’d have to be au fait with stellar astronomy for the implications of this to really hit you between the eyeballs, but stars aren’t supposed to be capable of changing character in anything less than thousands of years, and even then it’d be considered indecent haste. Worse, the changes FG Saggitae went through have absolutely nothing to do with canonical stellar development . A star pulling gauche stunts like that just to get attention would be bad enough, but wait! There’s more! V 605 Aquilae and V 4334 Sagittarii (“Sakurai’s Object” — astronomers demote yo