Plantagenet Penguinista

I was handed a machine running this (4 or more years old) Linux distribution to update & make shiny today. Other than the old version of URPMI (Mandriva's package manager) not knowing rsync:// URLs, it all went smoothly — the machine is now a Mandriva 2006.0 box and awaiting some more RAM (it only has 128MB), all without me signing my life away in blood or hex-encryption. Amazing stuff. A few index updates & the command  urpmi --auto-select  makes it all look too easy. I can’t picture it being much more difficult with any of (say) Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware or SuSE either.

Paul Wayper has Uranium consumption from coal spotted. A few years ago, Muja A powerplant in Collie, Western Australia was burning 4 million tonnes of coal a year — at 3 parts per million Uranium, that’s 12 tonnes a year of Uranium going somewhere . Don’t know what it’s doing today, but more power plants have been built since. Can you imagine the hullabaloo which would be raised if an official nuclear reactor lost 12 tonnes of Uranium a year? At the time, coal workers were on the verge of a strike, so the politicians all went quiet about it rather than de-powering the entire South-West of WA by provoking said strike. So... I’d advocate moving to nuclear power reactors because they’re safer (less deaths per megawatt-hour) than our current set, less polluting & involve a great deal less mining, storage and transport to keep them operational. And maybe the coal could go somewhere more productive instead of into people’s mobile-phone chargers?

Here I am, looking at a BarCampEarth report and wondering if anyone is setting up these kinds of camps anywhere in Oz? It sounds relatively simple and easy to organise, so it might make a great city-at-a-time complement to LCA ... maybe a few months beforehand, to let the BarCamp act as a kind of seeding exercise for LCA sessions? I vaguely had in mind running an LCA on a train for a few days, but something of this nature would be so much easier to fit into a BarCamp-style arrangement, perhaps a run up from Pinjarra to Dwellingup plus an overnight stay there? The Tasmanian coaches look about right for 1-3 sessions apiece. Or possibly a run up the Avon valley instead, perhaps to Merridin or even to Kalgoorlie ? A conference with great food should be fairly popular, no? Due to us only having a million and a half people, Perth’s railway facilities are a bite bare & nebulous (although the volunteers themselves & equipment are top-notch), so I’m sort of wondering how peop...

This article on recent Dark Matter reports takes a somewhat, well, dimmer view of the situation than was first published : “Direct” means “having no intervening conditions or agencies” — implying that dark matter has been observed. But it hasn’t. The pretty image above gives the impression that dark matter radiates blue light. It doesn’t. The mass of dark matter that astronomers “find” is fabricated from assumptions and calculations. The telescope images have had an artefact superimposed — a blue “lensing map” that paints in what NASA scientists believe should be there. They’ve done this before: They painted hot lava fountains onto images of Io where the camera pixels were inexplicably overexposed by intense light. Digitally superimposing some imagined thing or mathematical virtual reality over an image is an artistic activity. It isn’t science. Positing unobserved matter to account for physical phenom...

...so now I get to admit to being 44 years old. That feels so very ancient... maybe now I’ll become all quiet & respectable & stuff? Nah, it’s probably too late; I may have to stay at least slightly irresponsible for a while yet. One pleasant little birthdayism has been a “Spicy Ginger Block” of Whittakers’ dark chocolate, a tasty little surprise. “Whittaker’s premium quality chocolate is crafted to a traditional recipe using the finest Ghanaian cocoa beans.” Very flavoursome but not perfectly healthy (29% fat, 62% carbohydrates); never mind, it’s a mere quarter-kilo and a very yummy. It’s made in Wellington , New Zealand — the capital — which is about as close as the North Island comes to the South Island (where LCA2006 was held). Certain government departments have still not completely decided that 42 years of living in Australia is enough to make me a Permanent Resident , but progress is being gradually made....

A cable guy showed up to rewire our telephones, and had to slope off for a couple of hours in the middle of the session to attend his doctor (not related to the work). So for about 3 hours today we were without land-lines or ADSL, and I was amazed by how purposeless and aimless I felt. Scary. It makes me wonder what I’d be like during a war or natural disaster or the like.

This lass is not one of mine, but her dexterity seems to be up to the task of “bumping” a five-pin tumbler lock, armed only with an “blank” key and a gadget to nudge this key with. The technique seems to involve rattling the key up & down fast enough that all of the tumbler pins happen to cross the shearway at the edge of the chamber (bore) all at once; gentle turning while this happens simply undoes the lock. It’s an old enough technique that Isaac Newton wrote about it before suitable locks were even invented. Do you feel secure now?

Who says that nobody reads your mail? Some spammers have figured out that there is a Canadian aspect to my life, so now I'm getting spams from “Canadian” companies offering tax scams, misplaced inheritances, lottery winnings & all manner of other bogus “instant money” crud — this in addition to my usual Australian fare & aimed at several different email addresses in different domains. Since I’m whining anyway, I discovered this morning that one of our little children knows how to wind the toaster up to full blast. Not even really good bread wears that too well. Breakfast was slow. The other one, playing “in the back yard” was spotted waving a stick & yelling at passing cars on the road out the front of the house. About time to move out to the country, I think, where the streets are further away.

Observe as SCOX’s past actions catch up with it; in a rabble-rousing interview of old, they said a number of things which completely, utterly undermine their latest legal tactic. Now, how’s this go? [...hunting... ah! Thought I’d seen the like!] “I am unworthy — how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth.” So says the Book of Job, in chapter 40, and doesn’t it fit SCOX so precisely? (-: What? They can’t both have their claims and eat them too? To misquote Marie Antoinette, queen of Louis XVI (actually, ’t’was said by Marie-Therese, queen of Louis XIV), “Let them eat truth!” Now that they’ve dug it, let’s see if they’re laid to rest in it.

I recently had to head-butt an MS-Windows workstation. Spent some time pulling stuff from WAIX-connected mirrors, and a lot of jobs became much easier. Pulling OpenOffice meant I could now make PDFs and repair some broken MS-Office documents; Pulling PuTTY meant I could talk to my home machine; Pulling XMing meant I could read email from home (and run other applications like Konqueror); Pulling down The GIMP meant that I could actually edit images instead of using a cut-back (lobotomised) TuxPaint-like toy named MS-Paint; Pulling Firefox meant that many web sites started working again, with tabs ’n’ other features; Pulling Thunderbird meant that email started working again, and not shipping bonus copies elsewhere; I wanted much other stuff, but it normally only works on (comes with, in many cases) Linux, not on MS-Windows. So I waited until I faced a Linux workstation again later. The ’Doze machine also found itself a new virus when I tried using the misnamed Lo...

Works, but it took them 28 days (including shipping to and fro across the Nullarbor) to decide on a busted motherboard, replace & test it. Three years is a pretty brave warranty for a laptop. Mr Durabook is back on the air again, with all files intact etc, which is a considerable relief — and at $0 to me, an additional relief. It’s all cleaned up, as well, which is nice.

As of 06:00 this morning, the rain measure was jammed on “full” (50mm) and it's still been raining a fair bit (lightning & everything) — so while it's hardly rainforest weather, Perth seems to have finally settled on finishing up a wet winter, um, wetly. This should make today’s running around with extra medical paperwork kind of interesting.

So, you’re going to write FOSS ? Well... why not start out without knowing a computer language at all, with a project which has already been done several times, & as part of a social minority in the computer sector? That dang-the-torpedoes approach, “we’ll do it anyway” style, reminds me of Mrs Waugh and her energetic husband too much. (-: Well... lo and behold, this enterprising FOSS author is also feminine & evidently has her own share of the “You say that I can’t do what? ” gene pool handy. This should work out to be interesting. (-:

...or, to put it in another (completely different) way, does any reader write fluent Brasilian? If so, I could use some minor but genuine help with translating the occasional phrase for use in a book. Not a formal, traditional book, so much as one which touches on a descendancy of Brasil’s modern culture. If you’re interested, please email me via leon at cyberknights com au.

STEREO is a pair of sun-watching satellites, which will do serious exploration of CMEs (Coronal Mass Ejections) which cause the majority of magnetic field disturbances bouncing from Earth, and also most space “weather”. It’s good to see some basic, relatively-close-to-home space research being done, especially of our explosive inner neighbour. I’m guessing that if Earth sees problems from space, old Sol is going to be heavily involved — so the more we know about it, the better we’ll be able to react (if at all) if/when it happens.

GCompris , a wonderfully varied suite of childrens’ educational games (the name means “I’ve got it!” as in “Ah-hah!”) has recently been through a cleanup cycle. “Later” arrived for lots of “fix up later” issues, and they’ve put considerable effort into making it easier to package for lots of systems. It’s currently at the BETA4 stage of release 8, so now or soon would be prime time for trial-running it against your own children.

We saw a marvellous piece of reasoning from Miss FiveYO this morning. She wants to be a parrot — not a little girl — so she can fly around the ceiling with her friends and “not get eaten by Cane Toads”. The Toads were mentioned in a story yesterday, other than that I have no idea how they were introduced to the mental thread this morning. The parrots are & were kicking around in the back yard, where we (according to the gauge) took at least 40mm of extra rain last night. And are still taking it. It’s not really cold enough to feel truly wintery, but the precipitation is generally in the right range.

I mentioned some time ago that remembering old passwords didn’t work so well any more. Now I have a new defect showing up: I keep having to not type in an old Internet Banking password. This is officially weird because the old password is more complicated and so principally much harder to remember than the new one, and the new one also has a similar base to another new password — which I have no trouble remembering — so it should dominate. But of course it doesn’t. Both passwords are well (years) pre-accident, so it shouldn’t be a timing factor. Oh, well... another small inexplicable for the burgeoning pile. <shrugs> <walks>

That’s how it happens on Mars, it seems . Every Spring, CO2 accumulations at the South Pole burst into the air, carrying dust and other debris with them. This is going to change the way weather is predicted on the 4th planet — to be sure — and one wonders what other interesting “weather” effects might be altering Mars and other planets and moons without us even knowing — & what changes we’ll be making in our understanding of planets as a result. It's always interesting to see these small revolutions happen in science.

FREeDom space station is all set to take a few Shuttle-loads of new pieces such as 50kW of solar sails, plus the Eu and Jp modules. A reality check quote: The station literally becomes a new spacecraft with each assembly mission Let’s see how NASA gets on with this complicated task.

So say the tracks , anyway. (-:

It seems that LinuxAus is the single constant user of a .conf.au donain, and auDA rep Jo Lim said “future plans for [the] domains would be examined later this year”. The report also says that “one option would be to switch off both [conf.au & info.au] domains and encourage existing users to register using other domains. An alternative approach would be to grant the rights to sell [domains] to a commercial registrar” Neither option would be ideal; the first would cost us the lots, and who knows how well the domains would do under sale? Anyway, if things go “blip” later this year, now you know why. This was linked to by Lxer .

I noticed that many more people were prepared to sit with my enhelmeted, tired-looking and grumpy self than were willing to sit with a delightful Indian-looking grandmoother or a neatly-dressed Asian lady, or a similarly neat African lady I’m not sure that this was the best reaction... but I felt embarrassed to be Caucasian. I didn’t impose myself on any of the other three candidates, and I felt much too tired to stand up myself or grump at anybody, but still felt embarrassed.

The trip down to town this morning averaged maybe 20km/hr, straight down the Mitchell Freeway. Then I got a neuro-psych analysis, part of determining whether I can have cranioplasty (sticking my head back together), and I think I did well at it (will find out for certain in a day or two). Then back to Royal Perth Rehab for my day’s therapy, starting with completing a woodwork unit, a “doll house” bookshelf made mainly from MDF (which the workshop instructor calls “compressed cardboard”), then Speech (thanks, Natalie!) and finally Clnical Psychology (thanks, Gary!) and finally wended my way home by train.

This bonnie wee beastie started running out of disk space, so I started bzip2’ing some of the dozen or so CD images in /home. Text CDs typically compress better than 2:1, even the ones which are Zipped etc. CDs of RPMs (basically bzip2’d tarfiles) — not so fortunate: I was lucky to get more than 1% compression on each. Oh, well, I got a few hundred megabytes back from each text CD.

Wandered into SJoG hospital for an EEG scan last Wednesday. The map showed it stuck in the side of a carpark building west of centre, but they've moved. Apparrently, someone needed to turn the EEG scanner section into a corridor, so they moved into a small room tucked into the basement of the main block. The EEG scan was intriguing, I had to hold my breath and focus in various places at various times, including on a blinking light some times, while 26 little contacts spread around my noggin recorded my encephalogram. The lass who did all of this to me was very patient, quiet & polite, measuring my head & carefully sticking (literally) those contacts precisely on my skull (or in many cases technically within my skull), then driving the machine — a desk covered with lights, switches and a pedestal — which produced an inch or sour of computer paper (bigger than A4, fanfold) covered with sweeping curves. She also took & enjoyed some dried paw-paw/papaya (ex Kakulas Bros in...

I was scrolling through an ElReg article linked from Lxer on ODF vs XMLRS (Microsoft’s answer to ODF), when I stumbled across a link to another blog (apparently since unlinked) which asked an important question: What job does each do? That could sound odd, since each purports to be an Open document standard, but it’s a very real question. ODF was indeed written into OpenOffice as a literally Open document format (and their default), whereas XMLRS’ primary purpose is to support o single office suite by making it look more accessible. The consequences will become more obvious with time, but we’re being asked to decide between them now (or soon). The ’blog mentions that they’re aimed at the same job — sorta — and makes the point that our decision should be based on what each format was designed for . If we want to live in a MS-controlled (MS-owned) world, then XMLRC is appropriate, but otherwise ODF is the clear winner. It’s a questio...

Well, it seems that Buddha likes Free Software as well , since using it instead of stolen software helps you to avoid breaking The Five Precepts (precept #2 is “do not steal”). I have to guess that simply “not stealing” would put you ahead of the pack with many faiths. Some of them seem a little bit uncoordinated with their rules, but it looks like a good general match, anyway.

This is kind of US-o-centric but includes some amazing reading. It doesn’t say so outright, but this matches up with so much I’ve read about our intake altering our behaviour. Much grotty behaviour — say the nutritionists with some justification — should mostly be blamed on the junk-food commonly consumed by the offenders. Research in prisons and amongst teenagers backs this up solidly. This reading covers a wider variety of topics, but does include some interesting snippets, including the improvements in heart-rate, blood pressure, disease rates and so on. Steeper gains for Vegans than for Ovo-Lacto-Vegetarians. A couple of studies caught my eye: non-smoking non-drinking vegetarian religious group outlasted non-smoking non-drinking omnivorous religious group by 7 years (& I betcha the veggos weren’t even 100% veggo); veggos move the same amount of blood around inside their circulation with 20 beats-per-minute less; infection rates drop 97% for non-meat u...

From this odd book comes an interesting observation: The most difficult thing for any human seems to be to admit being wrong — to confess error of belief and conviction — to unlearn false knowledge as well as to learn true knowledge That’ an intersting statement from a man who upset so many others with his claims. (-:

Remember the van-Allen radiation belts? The bloke who discovered those, thus re-establishing the USA’s place in the space-race has died . Mr Jim van Allen would have notched up 95 years before clocking out, so his was not a short innings . Jim’s name appeared on the front of a lot more than radiation belts (for example, he also worked a fair bit with Pioneer satellites #10 & #11, and some serious military toys as well). His careful, thoughtful life has inspired a moving benedictory talk from the University of Iowa’s Interim President, Gary Fethke.

It seems, disguised as an advantage , MS’s Ryan Gavin has confessed that MS-Windows is too simple, too predictable, or in other words has only limited possibilities. Ryan complained that one always knows what to expect with 'Doze, but not always with Linux. If I was a virus-author, this would be a red flag to my eyes. Well, no, in Linux we don’t constantly get a stream of security invasions and layer upon layer of code dedicated to the prevention of this. For example, it’s technically impossible to secure display-function invokations in ’Doze, but it works safely in Linux. Is this absence of risk supposed to be a dis- advantage, somehow? Well... only if one is looking for control over one’s customers as the big aim, rather than indepoendence and safety. So... MS’s grand aims still haven’t materially changed all that much over the years, have they? I myself will stick with flexibility instead, thanks, where everything is documented for this very ...

The machine today ground along with a little whir & tug rather than a lurching stop, so I enjoyed (if the word can be truly used of C-T scans) that a little more than last time. Got home to find not ADSL, as AmCom had started emailing me invoices... to accounts I didn’t know I had. This, for some reason, completely failed to get the bills paid. The tech support lass was able to breathe life back into the account for long enough, so I transferred some funds in there to pay the outstandings.

Elein Mustain shows us how to use PostgrSQL in “time-travel” mode , deferring or avoiding some CPU-expensive parts of SQL database management and exposing some new & useful techniques in the process. Amongst other things, you can have an audit-trail-like experience instead of deleting old records, allowing your database to figuratively time-travel to show a set of records as they would have looked (do look) at a given time.

All to be done at SJoG hosital, fresh & early (I’m already fasting, and it’s not yet 6AM here as I first post this). This is to pinpoint the exact remaining (internal) shape of my head for its theoretically final rebuild. In practice, it means sitting inside humming, scanning machines for a few hours.

This performs nicely, but from the surroundings is definitely a beta; for example, the only way I could get the Live CD to install was to completely avoid “further options” and just do a plain boot; also, the “loose” RPMs are a bit of a dog’s breakfast (as you’d just about expect from a Beta), so I bolted this system directly onto Cooker (their development RPM repository), from which it can be easily updated later. Having said all of that, KDE 3.5 is performing well, and everything else I’ve clicked on has worked as it should so far; if that’s a real benchmark towards the official release, then it’s going to be a grand one. Making the Live CD install was pretty painless (no package selection lists, for example, so for a real customer system there might be some entertainment with the RPM management GUI afterwards), and I think anyone with half a clue about computers (Linux or lacking it) should get along with this “jess fahn...

The GIMP’s files have long been documented only by the code which implements them, but recently, discussions about OpenRaster format led to the actual format being formally documented at last — by developer Henning Makolm , who wrote down what he knew about the XCF format (including authorship of xdftools and reinforcement from the GIMP’s mailing lists). This will also aid The GIMP in changing its default format, which is currently tied to its developers’ expectations and own internal structures. It’s due for massive revision in the next major GIMP release (3.0? 2.4 is going to pop soon). The GIMP’s Summer of Code projects look interesting: Vector Layers Vanishing Point Cloning Healing Brush Tool GIMP Resource repository New Brush System JPEG 2000 Ruby Scripting UI Improvements If you’re interested at all, jump in and help now since there’s never a better time. (-: and you’ll be able to script with Ruby in it shortly :-)

We wandered across to Jarrod and Narelle Duncan’s place last night to participate in a birthday party for the delightful Mrs Jess Curnuck. I got to watch dear, sweet little Monica scarf down enough chocolate mousse to completely explode a normal person. Mon, however, wrapped herself around it with minimal effort and will no doubt go on being infuriatingly slim and fit afterwards. (-: Jarrod had caught himself a fish for the occasion, and was wandering around handing barbecued chunks of it to anyone who was interested. In general, the food & the people were all excellent quality, & except for the late hour we got home, I’d enjoy doing this again regularly.

A century or two ago, a chap named John Franklin made a number of Arctic exploratory trips, leading up to a final, fatal one . What makes this remarkable is that Uni of Alberta researchers (particularly Dr Kinga Kowalewska-Grochowska) did some autopsies on (frozen) expedition members many years later, and discovered that of the six groups of bacteria preserved in the corpses, three carried anti-biotic resistance. Note that this includes resistance to anti-biotics developed more than a century after the men died. One wonders whether our understanding of how resistant organisms form is as complete as we like to think it is. The final expedition was memorable in its own way, with evidence of events like scurvy, lead poisoning & attempts at cannibalism on the record. This after John’s naming as “the man who ate his boots” from an earlier expedition.

a Planemo is a starless planet, and a Uni of Toronto researcher (Ray Jayawardhana) was surprised to find a pair of twin Planemos , explaining that “[The system’s] mere existence is a surprise, & its origin & fate a bit of a mystery.” They appear to have been forged from a contracting gas cloud (like stars) but are much too small to ever be real stars. The researchers are reluctant to call them “planets” because of the implication that planets orbit around stars — which these don’t. A question not obviously asked in the ESO-based study was “how far does this go?” — for example, how close can a Planemo-like system come to being star-like? Presumably, that’ll be in next year’s grants.

It seems that somebody kissed enough frogs to find a prince , with Maria McNamara of the Uni of Dublin finding more-or-less intact marrow in the bones of a frog dated at 10 million years old. That’s an old frog, and it wasn’t exactly dropped in liquid nitrogen on Day One, either. It just goes to show that whatever you show, someone’s going to find a major exception to it one day. Quoth Ms McNamara: The find suggests that palaeontologists may have missed marrow residues inside many more intact fossils. “People never tend to look inside, because the bones are so valuable for science that you don't want to smash them up,” says McNamara.

Mars’ weather amongst other things, is most inhospitable, blowing electrostatic willy-willies and snowing “toxic oxidants” across the surface. These acids & discharges would have to be faced by any molecule wanting to qualify as “life’ or anything like it. Including anything you wanted to grow. I imagine that the electrostatics would make anything mechanical kind-of interesting, as well.

In fact, the 8139C-for-Charlie is the first version of the 8139 that I’ve had work reasonably reliably out of the 8139 series — genuine or not — earlier models would do stuff like go off-air after some random number of hours (or minutes, in some cases), and the cards made out of 8129s (note the 2 not 3) sucked big-time, often needed special DOS drivers to configure them, and they were better than many of the previous Intel-clones and others (some of which seemed to need a chisel and some patience for configuration). RealTek went on to releae an 8139D-for-Delta, which was an almost-reliable chipset, then moved to the 8140 etc. Let’s just say that I don't regard the chipset as exactly a kiss-of-life for a card. The 8139D had odd limitations which made the writing of drives into a PITA [read the Linux driver source for details], like odd DMA boundaries which implied CPU-copying of network packets to make it all work. Why someone would deliberately use those chips a...

A German researcher appears to have discovered how to speed up nuclear decay using metals (for the ‘free’ electrons) & low temperatures (for supercnductory-type effects). One (specifically I) wonders what else can act to warp decay rates... This could make implementations of Le Berm much harder to detect, and/or possibly make non-radioactive Uranium bullets, for example. The possibilities are kind of endless.

Dr Kim Fong interviewed me today for a medical progress report. I won’t use any of his words (they are, after all, his), but the results were encouraging. My recovery has been (words-like) amazing, given the extent of the initial injuries. Dr Fong’d let me drive but for my oncoming cranioplasty possibly destablising things & the amunt of administrative mucking around necessary to tunr things off & back on again. If necessary. So driving waits post-cranioplasty for about a month (following neuro-psych stability tests). My speech is better (intelligible & controlled, basically), my physiotherapy is tailing off, my clinical psych has covered everything he wants to, and so on. All looking good for a nearby closure.

In between the doors I was sitting amongst on Thursday’s train home were 34 passengers. Of these, eight had music players (think iPod style), four more had PDAs or mobile phones that they were contantly reading or keying into, four (including two music-listeners) had books. So... of the 34, 14 were reading and/or listening to their own gear.

[various sources] Theories and goals of education don’t matter a whit if you do not consider your students to be human beings. — Lou Ann Walker Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today. — Malcolm X [that's one scary bloke] There are young people out there cutting raw cocaine with chemicals from the local hardware store. They are manufacturing new highs and new products buy soaking marijuana in ever changing agents, and each of these new drugs is more addictive, more deadly and less costly than the last. How is it that we have failed to tap that ingenuity, that sense of experimentation? How is it that these kids who can measure grams and kilos and can figure out complex monetary transactions cannot pass a simple math or chemistry test? — Senator Kohl, from the U.S. Senate Hearing: “Crisis in Math and Science Education.” There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly w...

Wind River® is selling Linux™ as a submarine-hunting framework to go into Boeing 737s being modified by the USAF to specialise them for the task. Wind River® still charges their per-developer up-front fees for the Linux™ versions of their products, but unlike their self-made VxWorks, there is no royalty fee after that. Wind River® have also released a new update to their Commercial Grade Linux™ releases, known as “Wind River® Platform for Consumer Devices, Linux™ Edition 1.3”.

It seems that Diebold have outdone themselves by making a touch-voting machine which can be simply booted from a Flash card into whatever the operator desires. The march of progress: goodbye privacy, goodbye votes.