Plantagenet Penguinista

This post is aimed at some Yankee (& South American, & European) readers who won’t be familiar with Australian flowers. These are hanging in our back yard, from a gum tree. The “bud” opens out to be a few flowers, via the smaller, red buds. These shed the little plastic-looking red cap to reveal the (yellow) flower proper. The main bud is a bit larger than an inch across, & the (European) bee should give you a good idea about the scale of the flowers. These are quite moderate. There are other (introduced) gum trees in the area which flower about January, a single huge (4-6 inches across) bright-red flower from a single bud. No, this isn’t the oddest Aussie flower, not to some degree. (-:

I trained back to Edgewater station & biked it home from there. The server update went reasonably well, considering that many modules had been deleted from Apache, it won’t Listen to 0.0.0.0 any more; the init script for it had changed (breaking the old installation), the BIND now chroots itself (& so can’t see the zone files at /var/named/ any more) & many other small changes happened. However, I’ll be crashing straight after dinner. It’s been a long & wearing day.

The film “Happy Feet” has won an Oscar for George Miller. Quotable quote: “I asked my kids what I should say. They said, “Thank all the men for wearing penguin suits’.” Those kids evidently lived through the making of this Aussie film, no? (-:

So... are our government going to force us to replace our CF light-bulbs with these ? Genital Electric have been working with incandescent light bulbs, have doubled their efficiency & are expecting to quadruple it. The bulb type is known as HEI (High Efficiency Incandescent), and while it incorprates new technology, can hardly be the environmental load that the chemical-coated glass tubes, plastic & electronics that CF (Compact Flourescent) globes represent.

I remembered today just how hard it is to cycle down the Freeway to town. Yes, I should have packed some shrapnel & caught a train before 7AM while bikes are allowed on. That’s well over 20km in one lump. In consolation, I was riding faster than the freeway traffic around about Whitfords & again about Stirling/Osborne Park. Not that this was a feat of athletic might or anything; I think my flat-&-level speed was only about 60km/h. That would make the Freeway a bit of a doctor’s exercise this morning: full of patience. Aaaanyway, it’s a firm reminder that I’m still a long way from completely fit & healthy. Now to update a Mandriva Linux server & maybe have breakfast. The latter, I can do. The former depends on whether my brain kick-starts well this morning or not. Well, it feels OK so far. (-:

Opera’s CTO, Håkon Wium Lie, has put forth his objections to MS railroading their OOXML document standards through the standardisation process, & done so most elegantly, also taking a swipe at ODF: he wrote a book in HTML. Ayup, that’s it: if you object to a document format, use a different one. And he did. (-:

There will be another update release after 2.0.0.2, since our dear Polish enbugger, Michael Zalewski, has turned up a remotely exploitable bug . It’s good to see these vulnerabilties being fixed early in the cycle, as this means far fewer updates will be needed down the track. I imagine that updating things like public Internet kiosks could work out to be a bit of a pain, for example. It’s also encouraging to see that the vast majority of oopses turn out to be difficult to exploit, very few show-stoppers along MSIE’s historical lines.

One of my favoruite authors, Eric Flint, has written an interesting essay : To give an example, most shoplifters do not steal in order to resell at a profit. They steal for their own use — but it’s worth the risk to them because they eliminate the cost of paying for the stolen item. The thief’s equivalent of the old saw, “a penny saved is a penny earned.” And that’s what drives most — not all — electronic copyright infringement. People do not generally “pirate” an electronic text in order to sell it for a profit. They do it in order to get the text itself, for their own use. There is one major exception to this rule. But that involves people who can operate openly on a mass production scale in countries which do not enforce international intellectual property rights. And the only thing I’ll say about that here is that all the arguments advanced by DRM advocates are silly when you’re dealing with this one (and only) instance of mass-s...

The chips haven’t stopped falling yet, but a squabble (instgated by Microsoft) between Microsoft and some MP3 patent-holders could have opened a door of opportunity for Ogg to see major commercial success. Which is odd — when you think about it — for a totally free codec, but when market penetration is needed to make your format acceptable to manufacturer’s lawyers, it’s a bit of a Godsend, one to be grabbed with both hands. Myself, I use Ogg because it produced better sound quality & only uses about 2 / 3 to 3 / 4 of the space to do it in. Nobody’s going to sue non-commercial little me for using MP3 format for personal give-away sounds, but if they did, they’d be sad since a pair of one-line commands is all that’d be needed to revert to Ogg-only format, and they’d be hearing about their indiscretion for several years to come.

None of the security issues fixed look that easy to take advantage of, but FireFox does indeed have an update set ready . Time to click on “Check for updates” in the Help menu? FireFox’s holes are so rare that I’d forgotten where it’s update mechanism was hiding.

Not tool-makers, this time, but some scrub-jays have been watched planning ahead to avoid going hungry later. We’re talking strategic planning, too, not just accumulation of a bundle of food. So... if we have the jays planning ahead, & the crows building tools for them, the expression “take wing” might wind up with more implications in civilised society than it does today. (-:

If you know anything about !sunny Tullah , near Rosebery, please post a response to let me know. We’re likely to be moving there in a couple of weeks. AFAIK, no penguins, they’re a bit further north .

It seems that monkeys aren’t the only tool-making animals, New Caledonian crows ( Corvus moneduloides ) do it, too . Being raced by a monkey is kind of believable, but having a noisy, violent, intrusive bird as a competitor is kind of annoying. (-: New Caledonian crows use tools to forage for invertebrates in dead wood. They use at least four different tool types, including tools cut from the thorny edges of leaves of Pandanus trees. These tools are produced in a series of manufacturing steps and have complex shapes — they are the most sophisticated animal tools yet discovered. The shape of Pandanus tools varies regionally, and it has been suggested that this may be the result of cultural transmission of tool designs, with crows learning from relatives and other members of social groups how to manufacture and use particular designs. In other words, it is conceivable that these crows possess a culture of tool technology — akin to that found in our own species. I’l...

It seems that Senegal’s chimpanzees have been making — and using — spears against smaller animals. Look upon it as another failure of patent law. (-: The implication is that if they’re doing it now, then it’s likely that older evidence for similar practices is real, which will muck up various people’s nice neat theories about how various animals developed, & how mankind’s weapon-making skills kept us ahead of the crowds.

Sir is having an identity crisis at the moment. Madam mis-heard a word, so now Sir has to drive a “Jeef” around the floor, & is finding the experience quite distressing. “IT’S NOT JEEF!” followed by some floor-thumping accompanies most of their conversations at the moment. It’s worse than people pronouncing that crash-dump language “peh’rruhl” or this fabulous operating system “leenooch’s”. I diagnose the problem (to SWMBO’s distress) as “Too many Jeefs & not enough Indians”. Hmmm. I wonder if they could be convinced to re-release an “Indian” model without the “Chief” suffix?

I’ve been glad to have some older tools sitting around in recent days, for doing those odd little jobs... but it seems that the ISS carries a few as well. It seems that spacewalk to repair a cargo ship will require the astronaut to bash away at the offending part with a hammer & chisel. It seems incongruous to have a bloke bashing an object with a hard rock, in orbit a few hundred km above the normal hard rocks, but it illustrates a point: sometimes, the newest, trendiest toys are simply not appropriate for the job. Many times I’ve set up a few simple little bulletproof services on a Linux box, & saved the owners thousands in licence fees alone on trendy but vulnerable software which they didn’t have to install any more. Oh, & a complete new server to carry ’Doze, because the trendy services required that & refused to run on Linux — & ’Doze wouldn’t do some of the vital stuff that the Linux box was doing.

Lake Joondalup, looking droughted, covering maybe 1 / 20 th of its normal area.

Rosetta is on course for its swing-by Mars mission, hooning past Mars in just under a week. It must be interesting driving with a 17½-minute steering lag, which is the current distance to Rosetta. Rosetta will fly-by at least two asteroids on its way to rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will drop a lander named Philae. The Mars swing-by is a kind of bonus for a very busy 10-year mission.

It seems that — after all of the debate — your spine can repair itself , a discovery which “establishes a new doctrine for regenerative neuroscience” according to Vassilis Koliatsos, associate professor of neuropathology at Johns Hopkins University. Some of the transplants changed form as well as replicating, lending new hope to the concept of providing medical treatments which address spinal damage. “We’re still in the proof of concept stage, but we’re making progress and we’re encouraged.” quoth the scientists. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when this comes to conclusions and the results get handed out to Joe Random Genius for further development.

After having not been observed for a very long time, it seems that Dark Matter may not be getting a green light. By carefully re-examining conventional gravity theory Fermlab scientists have decided that if gravity “differs from general relativity on large scales”, it can fill Dark Matter’s role without adding any new particles or otherwise over-exciting the physicists. Favourite quote: the case of dark energy also hinges on the assumption that general relativity describes gravity on larger scales. Dark energy is even more difficult to explain than dark matter, so it seems almost natural to look at gravity as the culprit in both cases By borrowing Jacob Bekenstein’s TeVeS (relativistic covariant) theory of gravity — a theory which usefully generalises MOND (modified Newtonian dynamics) — they can “test TeVeS’ predictions in detail & compare them to the standard dark matter paradigm to see if TeVeS can be a viable alternative”. I...

A new study of how the “boob-tube” impacts children has come to some interesting conclusions: it’s not so much this or that single factor as a whole flock of them (autism, eyesight damage, weight issues, Alzheimer’s disease, type-2 diabetes, sleeping patterns etc). I’m sort-of wondering about how many of these might be prevalent in watching a coputer screen? It's certainly mucked around with my sleep patterns.

Well, it seems to work for Ohio State University. The idea is to give students less “cook-book” instruction & more “real experiments that leave room for additional inquiry” instead. Rissing’s overarching goal is to teach students to be independent & objective thinkers, to create a group of scientifically literate citizens who can intelligently discuss multi-faceted issues ...which seems to be working. Amazing stuff, this freedom to think for one’s self. Again, it seems to be a kind of Open Source training technique.

SWMBO gets email attachment, a Zip file. What is it? How do I open it? She can click on the Zip, which shows random-looking files on her Linux-based desktop. Husband ain’t around, so she sends it to a friend, with questions. Friend opens the Zip & totals his (Windows-based) LAN. Oh, well, its a cost of running Windows. Someone should upload a copy to William Henry’s Porsche (III) as he slides past one day.

I whomped together a French Onion Soup, cooked up from basic ingredients in a ThermoMix . I wound up with give-me-more flavoured soup, & just one item (3 pieces) to wash. That included all cooking, & serving (the top of the ThermoMix is a juggy thing). The recipe is very simple (adapted from the original): 4 large sweet onions (or just ordinary onions), sliced 2 tablespoons margarine 1 teaspoon sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon dried thyme ½ teaspoon dried mustard 2—3 teaspoons shoyu (soy sauce, tamari, Braggs, etc.) ¼ cup red wine (I used dark grape juice) 6 cups veggie stock (use a good one!) To make it, cook the marg up in a saucepan, then add the onions & salt, for one hour (the ThermoMix’s timer came in very handy here) Add everything else except the stock. If you’ve used the wine, give it a few minutes to cook down. Add the stock, bring it to a boil, & you’re done... well... except for the eating, & the wishing you’d ...

A chap named Robert Shapiro has a number of interesting things to say about the origins of life, including that an Open Sourcey-looking beginning is far more likely than any of the traditional approaches. For example, he completely trashes the Miller-&-Urey experiment as a means for producing DNA or RNA, then goes on to point out that an RNA-based origin is “the prebiotic chemist’s nightmare’. After spending a few pages totally wiping the floor with these traditional methods, Shapiro then proposes assembly of smaller molecules. He’s got quite a few impressive qualification to do this from. His diatribe against RNA is pretty amusing: The analogy that comes to mind is that of a golfer, who having played a golf ball through an 18-hole course, then assumed that the ball could also play itself around the course in his absence. He had demonstrated the possibility of the event; it was only necessary to presume that some combination of natural forces (earthquakes, winds...

I’ve been forcing PDF views to happen in XPDF recently, as a steadily-increasing tally of PDF files load up in KGhostView & then go blank (as in, get painted over in white). Now I’m pleased to see that XPDF has been captured & given a brain-supercharge as okular , a mixed-mode viewer for KDE4 . Amongst other things, it renders PS through libqgs now, which results in much cleaner, faster PostScript renderings. As one of the commenters mentions, it’s already lightning-fast compared with acroread. As other commenters mention, it supports DVI, & Pino Toscano mentions that it already supports sounds . They’re working on supporting annotation formats, & they already support a more application-like selection of text (for copying, etc) than the existing “lassoo” style. Support is included for DjVu, TeX, EPS, fax, and so on. The “fax” plugin has grown up to include many kinds of formats for sequential images, too. The’re putti...

I was quite pleased to discover this friendly little chap on, of all places, Happy Penguin . One of the places we’re considering moving to is a place in Tasmania named — plain & simple — “ Penguin ” after a couple of local rookeries. I’m wondering how this would go there as a bumper sticker...

Looks like hubby didn’t chuck this one back in fast enough ! UWA researchers were scanning some 20-year-old placoderm fossils and discovered... meat. The Gogonasus fossils have already “changed and revolutionized” our ways of interpreting evolution, & kicked sharks out of the “oldest fish’ queue by having muscle development similar to lampreys. Part of the surprises included finding that “much of the human body plan is pushed back into the fishes” so the phases of being an amphibian or a reptile seem a little bit less than useful now.

It seems that the hard-working firemen have chased off the Porongurup fires . Given that two houses were destroyed, & we know whose one was, & that the other was under construction, it seems that ours & Ted’s have escaped. Hurrah!

It looks like our farm-property’s luck with regards to fires is running out . Uncle Ted has been evacuated to Toby & Bev’s farm as fire-fighting helicopters & trucks move in. Naturally, I hope our little house survives, but even more than that, I hope Uncle Ted’s place comes through OK, as it’s his whole life. He has chooks & other “pet” animals which he wasn’t able to take with him when he was ordered out, too. )-:

¾ cup margarine 1 cup unrefined sugar 1 egg equivalent (e.g. banana) 1 teaspoon vanilla 1¼ cup whole wheat pastry flour 1 / 3 - ½ cup cocoa ½ teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon baking powder ¼ teaspoon sea salt 1 cup any kind of “chocoloate” chips (peanut butter are good) Run your oven up to 180°C. Mix the margarine (or oil) & sugar until they’re creamy. Seriously, it avoids a crunchy texture. Add the “egg” & vanilla. Mix all else but chips in another bowl. Mix everything together & fold in the chips. Form the mix into smallish balls & squash them a bit. Put the squashed balls onto baking sheet or flat tray. Bake for about 7-9 minutes, until the top stops being gooey. You can use crushed apples (½ cup) & oil (¼ cup) in place of the marg, but will need more flour (just under double). Very tasty, very easy to make. (-:

This interesting blog entry shows some system-call graphs for Apache versus... some other web server. A quick glance at the collections of lines gives you a summary of why Linux web-servers break much less often than... the other kind. An amusing appliction of “your call”. (-: A system call is an opportunity to address memory. A hacker investigates each memory access to see if it is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. The developer must do QA on each of these entry points. The more system calls, the greater potential for vulnerability, the more effort needed to create secure applications. Yes, it all does count!

Yes, it’s another ’Doze rant... We have this loaned machine with a handful of games on it, and the freakin’ thing can’t keep its act straight. Some of the games want 8-bit colour (indexed) & will crack a big sad if they don’t get it. Other games want 16-bits of colour & will likewise sulk if not accomodated. Still others want 24-bit (or 32-bit) colour — & you guessed it, go all dark-faced if they don’t get it. Linux, on the machine next to it, with an inferior graphics card, will open 8-bit windows on a 32-bit screen painlessly. What’s the big deal? Meanwhile, the ’Doze machine has no less than 3 versions of the video decoders aboard, all of them incompatible with one another. And all of them installed automatically because they are “necessary”. Incompatible? Well, some days a program will get an advanced version of the codec & do well. Other days, the codec will either break partially (e.g. play in monoch...

Mother upended the remains of her ice-cream over Miss 5’s banana cake, to make it less dry. Master 7’s explanation for this was that she wanted “dry ice-cream”. The mind boggles... It explodes when you pour syrup onto it? Cures excess lip (& throat) hair as it’s ingested? Automatically extinguishes dessert fires? Sterilises the dessert by asphyxiating any organisms which may have sprung to life in it? Either way, it’ll be a while before Master 7 gets an opportunity to make any, by which time he’ll hopefully have forgotten all about it. (-:

  I know I’ve been sitting in front of a CLI screen for too long (or in fact at a vim screen) when I notice some things in my word-processor: Lines aren’t deleted when I hit dd ; and There are extra i s where I’ve inserted new text; and After I type ZZ , the text is still showing. Then I know my world is turning edge-on when I read that Professor Claus Rolfs of Ruhr University is planning on changing the decay rates in radioactive waste to make it faster & easier to dispose of. That sounds like there’s a little dial on the waste packages marked “years” & you can crank it down from “1600” to “100” that easily, reducing the half-life. Naturally, it’s a little more complicated than that, you have to cool the material inside a metal container, but nevertheless it’s going to provoke questions like “& just how long was this ‘ancient’ object sitting in this tin in the ice? If you can tell me...