Plantagenet Penguinista

The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a young woman. There was no possible way that she could have been mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille. — Terry Pratchett, Maskerade Yes, that’s part of fortunes-discworld from PLF

The DIRECT launcher system is touted as being able to lift things which we need Shuttles to lug up to space now, in chunks up to just shy of 100 metric tonnes. Because the one lifter would replace two, it immediately saves 16 billion USD in development costs (35 billion eventually, they say). Due to using Shuttle parts, much more development & learning is also bypassed. The little, baby one lofts 70 tonnes (or an Orion CEV module plus 48 tonnes) so could lug large Hubble parts up to service said ’scope, and could also lug up chunks of ISS to Fred, in lieu of pieces scratched by the approaching Shuttle end-of-life (Centrifuge Accommodations Module, Habitation Module, Propulsion Module, Science Power Platform, etc). I think its most appealing aspect is that — to put it politely — it’s not beautiful. It looks like a Shuttle tank & boosters with a few trinkets strapped onto the top. In other words, it looks built to task, rather than built to impress.

“AMDTI” to make graphics and CPU chips as a unit , says IT-World. The chip-merger is billed as saving power, but I’m wondering what it could achive by way of improved performance & interaction between CPU & graphics. Regardless, I’m certainly looking forward to a laptop with a top-of-the-wozzer display — & better battery life, as well. Especially in Quad Core ...

Microsoft, it seems, will only promise security for people who play by their rules . Many people seem to be makng progress by carefully stepping away from those rules. Er... does anyone else see a problem with MS’s attitude? One wonders how they will constrain black-hats to play only by the official rules, rather than using violations of them as a to-do list.

In the words of your friendly local blast physicist, “Well, ravioli isn’t a gas, but under enough pressure, ravioli behaves as a gas.” This is a discussion of the question “Would a chunk of metal (can of ravioli) impacting another, larger, rest mass structure (star destroyer) produce an ‘explosion’ effect, or simply punch an appropriately shaped hole as it passed through?” Let’s c what happens towards the end: At around .985 c (Cerenkov 1.2 or so), the ravioli now weighs twice what it used to weigh. For a one pound can, that’s two pounds... or about sixty megatons of excess energy. All of it turns to heat on impact. Probably very little is left of the space-cruiser. ...and... At around .9998 c, the ravioli radiation beam is still wimpy as far as nuclear accellerator energy is concerned, but because there is so much of it, we can expect a truly powerful blast of mixed radiation coming out of the impact site. Radiation, not mechanical ...

Manolis Tzanidakis installs SANE on a machine or two & explains (carefully) that you don’t need extra software to share your scanner(s) across your LAN. Most modern distributions will install SANE more neatly & automate the network setup somewhat, but he does get the point across that SANE is shareable, & the conspicuous absence of licence fees is bound to strike a few people who read the article. A point he doesn’t get into is that with an SSH forward or two, you can share your scanner with road-warriors, as well. This compares favourably with the bodgy, every-one-different scanner programs available under other systems (“TWAIN is not SANE”), where to run someone else’s scanner you basically have to take over (effectively stop) their machine while you do it.

This tiny little fellow from Burma (Myanmar) is causing much interest in biology — by stretching the starting-line for bees back by 35-45,000,000 years earlier than it should, er, bee. Also, he’s not bee-ing normal (ie, he’s not just a thrown-back bee as usual), he has aspects of wasp about him as well. Sadly, because he is a he and not a she, we probably won’t discover what sort of pollen this kind of bee fossicks after, ’coz the femmes do the collecting. I guess that would be hoping for too much info from one find. (-:

“None of my peers are impressed by what kind of car I have. They’re impressed when I have a T-1 line in my house. This all goes back to evolutionary biology where we're all competing for prestige because we think it will get us babes.” After a long pause, an audience member called out: “Is it working for anyone?” There came the resounding unanimous reply: “Nooo!” — Eric Raymond, addressing the Atlanta Linux Convention, 1998.

Joanna Rutkowska gave MS all of the right advice about a Vista crack , only to have them ignore it & then patch Vista’s kernel in a stop-gap fashion — in a way which (once more) makes writing low-level & security tools for Vista that much harder. MS want to stop others from hurting their software, but they’ve had this bonnie wee lass get them to do it by the simple and stealthy technique of telling them the truth. (-:

This bloke wants to integrate two web systems together; the server is in Queensland, he is in Perth. I can probably do it, but my web skills aren’t exactly shiny so I’m passing this one across if I can. [quote] I need the following to help develop www.slinky.com.au [a dating site] on an ongoing basis; Expert in: php/MySQL developer Competent in: Html design Someone who: Can work with us on an ongoing basis at various times creating new applications, maintaining and expanding existing framework and developing new and innovative modifications. Who is not employed fulltime with a big firm (ie: is available during normal business hours) Who can work in our office or remotely if required Email me at: peter () slinky.com.au detailing experience, hourly rate required and availability. [/quote] Peter seems to be fine to work for, I’ve just fixed up some debris on his Queensland server, and on another one in the US. And added rsync (thanks, Tridge!) so they can back each othe...

NASA is all set to let the Stereo project loose in a few hours. Stereo is a pair of solar-observance satellites, which carry some interesting instruments. One coded IMPACT measures solar particles & the transients presumably being raise by Coronal Mass Ejections; another coded PLASTIC measures plasma and high-temperature ions; another coded SWAVES (STEREO/WAVES) looks at CMEs & related events in great detail & with the idea of correlating views with the other satellite; SECCHI investigates coronal & heliospheric connections between sun & earth in a kind of 3D/stereo manner, so we can begin building a real understanding od how our loudest neighbour interacts with us. CMEs are the most energetic eruptions on the Sun, are the primary cause of major geomagnetic storms, and are believed to be responsible for the largest solar energetic particle events. Hopefully, words like “believed” here will succumb to investigation. It’s interesting that NASA don’t officially kno...

Scientists looking at some of the first rocks to be dated have decided that rocks which had taken “10 million years” to form — instead found under study that “most of the formations originated during the Ireviken event, which lasted for only 1 million years or so.” Really, that replaces about 10 megayears with “only 1 million years or so”, and since many, many other rocks are dated based on these ages, it looks like much other rock is about to lose 9 million or so years. What surprises me is that they’re basing these dates on “the ratio between two isotopes of carbon, carbon-13 and carbon-12, in a rock sample,” but carbon isotopes decay fairly fast — maybe 100 kiloyears tops — so I wonder about this being used on rock which is aged at hundreds of millions of years old. Well, perhaps that’s another thing that will be re-considered while they’re analysing everything. It’s going to be interestig to s...

Scott Adams (think “Dilbert”) works on & gets his voice back after 18 months of having it dysfunctional. In best FOSS tradition, he did this by stepping outside the recommended methods & picking his own modified technique. As usual, it’s interesting reading his story.

So say National Science Foundation researchers after investigating the crater and debris around it. They’re looking for a later impact. Another interesting (and rocky) fender-bender happened in Australia, at a place called Bedout , off Hedland and Broome where signs of a potential oil find were investigated & found to contain feldspar glass & other shock-impact minerals (maskelynite) atypical of vulcanism. Their conclusion was that it may have been the cause of a major (70% of all lifeforms) Permian/Triassic extinction.

Our neighbour/landlord gave our children free access to a loquat tree in their front yard. We score on the number of seeds whuch one loquates while eating the fruit. Yum! I had one fruit with a total of 8 seeds — & when I unpacked the seeds, I got a bonus loquaterpillar.

Quoting Phill Twiss G’Day All :} I am in the final stages of shutting down the OSWA Center ( part of the reason I havent been responding to some of these posts ). I would like to take this oppurtunity to thank everyone for their assistance and support of OSWA, and to invite you all ( and anyone else you know who is into opensource in one way or another ) to closing drinks on Monday 30th October 2006 in the afternoon/evening. ( I was thinking of starting around 4pm, finishing ohhh , I dunno, later the same day :} ). Of course, since we have no budget ( and never really had one ), I would request that you bring along a few of whatever you want to drink ( Ill have some food and maybe stump up for a couple of pizzas :}, but recommend you bring some nibblies too :} ) Nearly everything is packed up. Leaving a nice big empty area for plenty of people, so dont be shy, its your last chance. Dont forget, the address is :- Enterprise Unit 3, Suite 3 11 Broadie Hall Drive Bentley  WA ...

It looks like some new things have just been learned about dating astronomical events. The supernova RCW 86 was apparently spotted by Chinese astronomers in 185AD, but scientists had thought of it as being 10,000 or so years old. The events were suggested by astronomers as being connected, but it wasn’t until Jacco Vink and team from the University of Utrecht (the Netherlands) did studies with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory & the ESA’s XMM-Newton Observatory that suggestions that “historical records of the object’s position in the sky” could be seriously used to establish the connection. The supernova forms a shock-wave, and Vink’s team used the advanced space ’scopes to look at the wave and calculate how long it had been going... about 2000 years, according to Aya Bamba, coauthor from the Institute of Physical & Chemical Research in Japan. With this extra information (and the ’scopes) Vink is now planning to “probe the orig...

Hits Percent   Browser 7830 66.66%   Micro$oft Internet Exploder 1924 16.38%   Firefox 1867 15.89%   Netscape 124 1.06%   Opera Pulled from a Webalizer report, hence the initial browser name. “Netscape” includes Mozilla but not Firefox, and many of those are AppleWebKit (artists).

I stumbled across a GIMP 2.3 ChangeLog recently, which goes some way towards explaining why 2.3.10 is so much smoother and “cleaner” than 2.2.x; here’s a snippet from it: added support for a registration color in the Decompose plug-in the Align tool now also aligns to guides added plug-in for colormap manipulation allow plug-ins to register in Layers, Channels, Vectors and Colormap dialog bug fixes and code cleanup (x many) better interpolation for “smooth” curves in the Curve tool added an Auto button to the Threshold tool that picks a suitable value added Red Eye Removal plug-in allow Merge to work on a single layer added menu items for “Text to Path”, “Text along Path” and “Text to Selection” allow to initialize a new layer mask with any of the image’s channels added clipboard brush and clipboard pattern added “Sample merged” and “Selected Pixels only” options to Palette import added acti...

Today’s episode consisted of feeding some bits of grass & other plant debris to a small & perfectly safe electric mulching machine. It has to be perfectly safe, so I could pass out using it & not hurt myself. After much less than an hour of doing this minor task, I was completely frazzled: sore back, slightly wobbly limbs, tired, all of the hallmark reminders that I’m physically damaged. I kept getting the thing jammed up, too, a sign that I can’t even cut stuff to bits with any talent any more, which is definitely not typical of the prior me. Glad I’d fixed up a customer’s machine in the morning, because if I’d tried to do it in the afternoon, I’d have failed. Miserably. Note to self: distrust cars by default. Even J Random Peaceful Driver might have malice tucked away in his (or her) furry little heart. The thing about taking a head injury isn’t so much a focus on having a single big fault to complain about as having dozens of little, a...

This evening’s spoilage is the Penguin Liberation Front repositories . They contain stuff like a passel of multimedia codecs, and a newer version of Opera than I had. So... the big, serious update command reads like this: urpmi --auto-sel Woof, that’s hard! For context, I’m comparing this with the traditional process of manually checking version numbers & finding downloadable chunks which will install an upgrade, then downloading them, running them, finding the broken bits & patching those, renaming and/or moving some pieces, editing mystery config files (or registry entries), fetching some “glue logic”... lots of stuff which I have no interest in or reason for doing, because I use Linux . My previous non-PLF update had just sharpened my ClamAV database , so I didn’t even have the excuse of blundering across a virus somewhere. Not that I ever have (in Linux) but the tripwire was there in case I somehow did this time. Later, I used my shiny new Opera...

This particular website is laden with SciFi books and gets hit from worldwide, so it’s got a good — but conservative — visitor set. Of the 1190 hits since Sunday morning, 1189 were advertised as from Windows users, and 857 claim to be from MSIE, leaving 333. One of those is an OS/2 user (or says (s)he is, anyway), the other 1189 claimed 'Doze & 257 of those are Firefox... so: MSIE = 72% Firefox = 21% Netscape = 3.5% Opera = 2.9% Other = 0.6% I’m sure that there were other Operas masquerading as MSIE under Windows (it’s the default setting), so from this, MSIE has less than a 72% market share. Granted, the data filtering is pretty shonky & all, but these are real, non-teed-up figures. I’ll watch it for a month before telling you rowdies where it is and mucking the tallies up.

SGI went through a Chapter-11 (which is normally considered to be a corporate death-knell) and survived ! How long for? That’s an open question. They have a well-earned reputation for producing quality systems but lots of competitors. Let’s wait and see.

This is the kind of levels down to which FOSS people should be doing business. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, makes tiny loans (“some as small as $20”) for people to escape their financial bondage & stock up to go into business for themselves. He’s been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Could you imagine a standard bank floating a separate loan for $20? That’d be as crazy as giving away your software, no? I think that there’s a connection there, between smallish software investments & smallish banking investments. Like many software companies (& workers), the Grameen Bank is a for-profit enterprise, having a 99% repayment rate & having loaned 5.72 billion dollars in micro-loans since 1983. At first glance, the enterprise could be mistaken for being a bit chicken-feed, but figures like these tend to give it a bit of hard reality. Why not set up a low-overhead high-turnover software business to aim at similar levels?

It seems that IE7’s rollout will be gradual & random , to give time “to set companywide policies for browser deployment and possibly recode any intranet sites that are not compatible with the new version of the browser”. Well, so much for “support” of Internet standards, if IE can’t even be compatible with IE, let alone everything else. Also, the rollout will take 3 months, “automatic” updates will prompt users before following through, and the recipients will be chosen randomly; “it will be a phased rollout” and the speed will be determined by the number of support calls seen... So... we have an update that breaks existing policies & sites, happening at random & in ways which are inconsistent with expected behaviour — and this is supposed to help smooth things out? And... “even those who have configured Automatic Updates to install software automatically will be asked after the download is complete whether to insta...

I rebooted my laptop into ’Doze-XP for the 4th time ever, as I need to write an article featuring portability & wanted to test it & grab some screenshots. To get Qt Designer & Ruby on, I had to muck around finding one-click downloaders instead of firing up a system tool, clicking a few times, & letting the tool sort out the dependencies — which is what I’d just done to get the same stuff installed on Mandriva Linux 2007.0 . Hurrah, though, for the authors of those installers, else I would have been unpacking Zips by hand, editing the Registry, sorting out even more dependencies, & so on. Then I had to get the installers across to ’Doze, which refused to read anything, including a camera-formatted flash-stick, until I finally gave in & burned it all onto a CD. Floppies would have been too small (90MB of stuff to shovel across). In addition, Qt wanted a copy of CygWin. Let’s just say that if I’d been connected to the ’net by dial-up, I would not...

It seems that Wanneroo weren’t recycling for chucking-out days. The guy driving the bobcat made the machine dance (he even pushed the truck around a bit) but it all got fed to a pair of ordinary rubbish trucks; there was no separate collection of any metal, wood, anything that might want recycling. They also left a fencing panel — sorry, two of them — which I guess got mentally tagged as “asbestos” and in theory dangerous. I’ve seen a couple of other panels on other people’s kerbes, too. Compared with the skilfully-dancing bobcat, that’s nothing to worry about in safety terms — but it’s not my decision to make.

“linux.conf.au 2007 has received more submissions than previous conferences, and it has been an extraordinarily difficult process to choose only 70 of the 300 talks and tutorials submitted, as the overall quality was excellent and inspiring.” [humorous par about John West deleted] 70 out of over 300! I’d better start looking at the mini-confs , as advised...

This linux.com article shows that GEGL has been pulled off the slag-heap and made to work. Still very experimental, the demo mentioned in the article is just a test-bed, but it implies that GEGL will be available for GIMP sooner rather than later. What does this mean for GIMP? Portability, for starters. Porting GIMP won’t involve rewriting the graphics display code, colour management etc, it just needs a GEGL port for the majority of the display changes. GEGL will also adapt The GIMP better to odd display types (indexed, for example) & one GEGL port will move a lot more than The GIMP across platforms. Changes made to the common GIMP code will be present (& effectively tested) across all platforms, allowing GIMP programmers to focus more on what the program does and less on how it manages to actually do it all. Esoterica like CMYK will more or less fall out of GEGL as a part of the plan, Special colour-spaces won’t be so much work any more. This will eventually also hold tr...

So... what’s unusual about that? In this case, the tree was a palm growing out of a drain-hole. Some kind soul had dumped it in there weeks ago and the silly thing started growing instead of following the “die off, fade away” script. A truck with a tank and a big hose aboard parked on the hole and astride the road and literally pumped the tree out, along with tonnes of gutter muck. What a glamorous, rewarding job... glad that there’s someone there to do it. Sorry, no photos, by the time I thought to grab some, the truck was done and packing up.

This site is a vegetarian site — a Christian one. I expected it to be overflowing with “the Lord wants you to do” type moralising, but it started with just a single little burst: The apostle Paul taught that we should take care of our bodies, which are sacred gifts from God. He wrote to the Corinthians, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?” (1 Corinthians 6:19) After that, the site gets into the pragmatics quite heavily (snippets follow): Vegetarianism substantially reduces the risk of heart disease in several ways. The amount of cholesterol in the blood correlates strongly with heart disease, and diets heavily laden with cholesterol and saturated fat elevate blood cholesterol. Even the leanest meat is high in cholesterol and saturated fat. free radicals contribute to clogging of the arteries that feed the heart, brain, and other organs. Iron, which is concentrated in animal flesh, promotes fre...

Herself was up for the first week of the holidays & at her “Grinpa’s” request, up for the second week as well. Being a teen from a split family is never a bed of roses, but Aiyana seems to have come along very well so far. There are issues — some of which can be stepped around & others of which just have to be lived with — but she put up with a fair few of them this time around, showing very little complaining & much steadines of heart. I’m not sure what I did to deserve such an excellent daughter, but I’m very grateful for her & for time with her. Now what I’m looking for is a good way to make her life less stressful. Not “easier” as such — since I suspect that much of her patient character has been born in the storm, so to speak — but a method for finding solutions that genuinely achieve the incredible goal of pleasing everyone involved. That’s harder than it sounds, but I expect it to be occasionally possib...

IBM, it seems, have lowered their sights onto SCOX by resurrecting an existing document & using it in support of their request for Summary Judgement. The document is interesting, because it was originally rejected on technical grounds, but it cuts no corners in terms of what it has to say. The document includes this show-stopper at point #95: Furthermore, in the Strategic Business Agreement, Caldera expressly warranted to IBM that IBM would be protected against claims of infringement relating to the material in Caldera’s Linux products, and promised that it would hold harmless and indemnify IBM from third party intellectual property rights claims “Game over” as one GrokLaw commenter addressed it. Here’s another one from #175: [The Court says that] SCO has had ample opportunity to articulate, identify and substantiate its claims against SCO [UNIX]. [SCO’s] failure was intentional and therefore willful based on disregard of the court’s orders and failu...

I bumped by laptop up to Mandriva 2007.0 — I think more from a sense of masochism than to suit any driving need — but it’s turned out reasonably well. I say “reasonably” because somewhere in the update tangle I lost my KDE taskbar, but on the other hand the GUI interface works remarkably faster & more smoothly than it once did. I also got to taste a few newer products, including OpenOffice 2.0.3 and The GIMP 2.3.10. OpenOffice is noticeably faster (I think 2.0.3-5 is a slightly 2.0.4-ish version) but there are a number of y’all who read this who'd be interested in the changes in The GIMP, so I'll write about that for a moment or few. The most obvious change is newer, shinier icons ’n’ stuff, but there are many slight improvements “across the board” as well. For example, many more tools are built right into the menus; the “Colors” menus now sports 14 main entries, plus four submenus. The Edit menu also sports Paste...

17 screens on the kerb for a local council chucking-out day, plus 26 computers & assorted other junk (including a concrete lawn roller, a pair of single bed-bases, 3 desks, a freezer, some fencing grille & 4 (left out of 15) pushbikes). If they do actually recycle this, I will have contibuted more than a year’s worth of recycling in one wad. A couple of the computers are quite heavy (a dead old DEC Professional and an SGI O2, for example) so despite using a trolley I came yea close to straining myself getting it all out there. However, it would have been much work to make them all go again, and is now much less to grunt along when we move house.

TimeSys will be getting their real-time support in the 2.6.18 kernel source , so it will be real-time by default, from then on. What this means in terms of Linux being able to Do Stuff without special downloads & patching first is very pleasing. Hopefully, more mainstream distributions will start bundling real-time support with their fundamental packaging, allowing J Random Linux Installer to set a system up (“out of the box”) for real-time applications much more easily than (s)he can today.

On Friday, we took a trip across to The Maze , out near Bullsbrook . Big surprise, we got to play in many different types of mazes, from those bounded by wooden planks, to another bounded by pine-trees, to another “hedge” maze made of tall, thin pine trees & stakes. We also played mini-golf, went over walk-on (no barriers) mazes, visited lots of animals including peacocks and turkeys — but not the Koalas, they were closed — & enjoyed an excellent lunch. Very relaxing, all in all.

I went and visited “ Doctor Bob” Scott this afternoon & I feel amazingly untangled now. It creeps up on you so gently — this tightness of muscle & bone — after half a year in hospital. So... I’m delighted to be rid of it again. Thanks, Bob!

The trip in took over 45 minutes rather than the usual 20 or so. The train kept stopping for very long times at stations and toddled along the freeway at maybe 60km/h, passing cars etc on the carriageway as it went. The driver kept giving messages about “events in Perth” and “keeping you informed” — which they didn’t, except to mention that there were “4 or 5 trains” still between us and Perth. I still don’t know what the events-in-Perth were, but that they slowed down the freeway traffic to maybe 40-50km/h along at least 15km was impressive.

...a "fused power supply". I must have a word with the TV's user about their mains supply (which is at the end of a long piece of 11kV 3phase wire — and this despite Celestial being Chinese & so almost by definition they’re used to odd mains supplies) but it’s all fixed for the moment, hurrah!

This Astrononmy Picture Of the Day shows an interesting thing: An unusual spot has been found on Mars that scientists believe is not natural in origin. The spot appears mobile and is now hypothesized to be a robot created by an intelligent species alien to Mars. The spot is the Opportunity rover, which was indeed built by aliens-to-Mars (yup, that’s us!). It was still impressive (to my tiny little brain, anyway) to be able to make out individual rover features from an orbiting sat-shot. You can see not just the camera tower (as pointed out in the page) but also the solar panels, “head” & general orientation of Opportunity. If you could make such shots down through Earth’s atmosphere (who says that you can’t?), you’d be able to hazard a good guess at who was driving certain vehicles, and the like.

Ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils neat enough to be described as “they look like ‘roadkill’ ” from the comment “Something happened with the chemistry that’s really good for bone preservation. Some skeletons are pale white even though they’re in black shale”. This includes “the monster”, a pliosaur probably measuring 8m long. Comments include: You can’t walk for more than 100m without finding a skeleton. That’s amazing anywhere in the world ...and... Everything we’re finding is articulated. It’s not single bones here and there, and bits and pieces — these are complete skeletons ...which is quite remarkable, compared to many “boneyard” collections. I guess Jorn Harald Hurum & the other officials of the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum will be both excited & busy for some time in their section of Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago (a set of Acrtic islands nor...

Or at least National Assembly Deputy Bernard Carayon does, including ODF transactions with the rest of Europe. Crikey, this could even make up for their Académie Française! (-: Now, with OpenDocument an international standard , who knows where France will stop?

We went to visited the koalas, caves & cockies at Yanchep today. The black cockies have white tail-feathers (the usuals around here have red ones), apparently because they’re being driven up towards yanchep by the pace of suburban development further south. The caves were excellent — different, nothing breath-takingly large but quite pretty. The koalas were soft & fluffy, as you’d tend to expect for something that can take up to five days to digest a meal (of gum-leaves). Many of the terrorists tourists were a bit of a worry, rowing boats backwards, walking into walls, getting pecked by ducks, that kind of thing. But we survived OK and had a fine time. We had just feasted on a bunch of strawberries from the local fuel station (they have a stand for them, it’s not as if they were being ejected from the hose or anything) so were feeling quite replete.

Uncle Ted’s “Celestial” brand TV died again & I was surprised to discover that it is still under its primary warranty. Will be until June 2007! So... R & I Electronics get to lay their paws (& soldering irons) on it. R & I are located in Morely . They have fixed up some amazingly broken things that I know of & are the State agents for an awesome number of electronics manufacturers (yes, they really are that good — despite the website). I was quite pleased to see even cheap on-special television gear (“Celestial”) getting a real warranty treatment so long after purchase. Especially a piece I’m responsible for! (-:

Had a bit of a play with a Marsouinian SQL database today, and was pleasantly surprised. The thing’s obviously grown up in The Real World, with lots of esoteric little statements available for quickly & conveniently getting Real Work done. Oh, yes — several of those are usefully bound to little command-line tools, so one can achieve much Real Work without even cranking up a database client. That and a single-line urpmi command to install the server, client & numerous tools endears the little blighter to me (yes, it would be the same in apt-get or yast or yum or whatever).

My dear littlies arose at 05:40 this morning, to check on an “alligator egg” which they had sitting in the kitchen. I got to sleep just after 11:00, so was not as joyfully radiant to wake five & a bit hours later as I could have been. The good Professor’s receptionist (and she does much other work) rang me back today to tell me that within Royal Perth Hospital... My CT scan hadn’t been announced to the technicians building my new skull; The scan itself had been uploaded “to the wrong website” so they hadn’t seen it by accident; someone wrote the wrong case-number down, so when they went looking for it anyway, it took them a day to find it. So... in summary, it’ll be the 22nd of November before my skull parts are welded together, so I can get my head stitched back in again. On the positive side... Arjen, Stewart & Reggie have been giving me useful pointers for a discussion between certain databases.

It seems that Western Australia is one of two on the shortlist for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope to be plonked down near Mileura Station , 100km west of Meekatharra (here in Western Australia). “Plonked down” doesn’t even start to cover it. There are listening station sites scattered all over WA, a handful across Oz, one even at Dunedin in south-west NZ, where LCA2006 happened. Getting the ’scope would cause lots of industry here as the parts were built & installed, international recognition & visiting scientists, plus no doubt a few scientists choosing to live near the installation, if not on the station itself then in & around Meekatharra . Only a few people, overall, but with wide-spread effects.

Perhaps its just me, but this part reads very form-letter to my eyes: please be aware that because {$SITE} is most compatible with Internet Explorer, and as you or {$NAME} may be aware, using other Browsers can cause discrepancies in accessing ${SITE} properly. Due to the fact that we are trying to enhance the site, and that Internet Explorer is the most used Browser, then this is the reason for our recommendation to use this type for Program. I asked them why they didn’t simply stick to international standards which worked across many web browsers. I also asked how someone who was not able to use MSIE operated their site & gave them a few examples of work-sites which had switched off MSIE for security reasons (didn’t say so, but some of these switched it off after fellow sites had been completely snowed-under by black-hat software pulled down through MSIE; so far, abstainence has worked for them). Note that their instructions included clearing the cache (& “files...

Scientists in California are trying to preserve soft Tyrannysaurus Rex tissue found after a bone was broken apart a few months ago to fit it into a helicopter for removal from the dig site. I have trouble seeing something as reptilian (& old) making a tasty piece of barbecue & the scientists have no overt goals of reproducing the sample, but it would be kind of eerie to have RexBurger or Grilled Rex. Given that this is soft tissue, there might be some serious squabbling about the age, too. How does one preserve meat — essentially intact — for 70 million years? Or even for the thousand or so “reasonable minimum” that it must surely have been there for? One half-heartedly wonders what else might be possible. Wing of pteranodon ? Mosasaur jaw? Whole roast diplodocus carnegii ?

It seems that Europe was washed away from Britain in less than a day, by massive floods washing down past Dover. The finding has emerged from an advanced sonar survey of the bed of the Channel that revealed huge scour marks, deep bowls and piles of rock that could have been created only by a giant torrent of water. [...] “In places this valley is more than seven miles wide and 170ft deep, with vertical sides. Its nearest geological parallels are found not on earth but in the monumental flood terrains of the planet Mars” Well... that explains some odd things about Englanders... (-: The flood is pictured as “sudden biblical-style catastrophe” but as I remember things, that would take up something like a year & involve the entire planet. Too ambitious, this was “only” a mile-high glacier stretching from Scotland to Denmark, although to locals the catastrophe would seem pretty overwhelming. The wash-down of molten ice-cap/glacier would have taken “...

It seems that the local IGA store has Belgian chocolates on long-term special. They have bigger boxes, too, with more & interesting duck-do flavours like Marzipan (Almond). This could get very addictive.

Said auction site wrote back last night, telling me that despite me shipping perhaps 20 letters of problem ID to them, they couldn't find the problem or respond to me but had to respond to the original user. Fat lot of good helping someone does, then. They also recommended that I/we visit a community help site (how private and unique that would be!) for answers instead. Finally, in line with the mention above, they completely failed to respond to my questions. Not a word. This is community support like a Halo vest would be.