Plantagenet Penguinista

So... you wander into a local supermarket, collect a few necessary purchases, wander back to a register, politely greet a fairly intense, well- stanced , neatly-dressed “checkout chick” & pass across the shopping... & what does she tell you? “Nice weather?” Sports results? Shop specials? Plain old hello? Nup. She tells you that she tried to install Linux on her PS3, & it didn’t work yet. Er... what? Nah, dead serious! Her “slow” BigPong “internet link” (I’m presuming a crippled 256/64 DSL1) took a “very long time” to download the pieces. So... I’ve pulled down an ISO, burned an appropriate CD, stuck a config file onto a used USB stick & tossed the lot at the shop. Can’t let dedication like that go unpunished^H^H^Hunrewarded, can we? (-: Let’s see if her flame of curiosity burns strongly enough. Her careful intensity reminds me uncannily of Mrs Waugh, so if we get a fraction of that ...

Ah, the wonders of an accessible command line! To think that some meat-head boasted about removing it from his OS? Anyway... Was given the task of preparing some photos to be inspected & maybe used by an Eastern States co, one of the features being a photo release form — only available in PDF format. So... fired up pdftohtml & now had an editable (not pretty, but close enough) HTML version of it. Easiest way to edit it was OpenOffice Writer, so done. Difficulty was going to be getting mentions of each photo written into the form, so I left it saved as HTML, with a keyword plonked into the doc at the point where photo refs were going to appear, in a paragraph by itself. Now I can use gawk to search for that keyword & replace it with a table of image files (system “cat”). So far, so good, but the image names weren’t regarded as distinctive enough by themselves, so out came identify (an ImageMagick tool) & md5sum so now each image has distincti...

Is amazing how much a little thing can get marked up. I saw a 50g pack of chips in a vending machine at Whitfords Station today, priced at $2.00. Put another way, priced at $40.00 a kg. For fried potato. “Wargh!” I thought, “you could buy good-quality chocolate for less than that!” I thought, it seems, correctly. While I was grabbing some veggies in Woolworths in the city, I checked, & the typical prices (in 100g lots) were about $30.00-$35.00/kg. There were a few fancier items up around the $50.00/kg range, but they were rare & isolated. Hmmm. Seems that buying expensive chips isn’t limited to casinos. Idly wondered how much software was per kg, since a 20g Ubuntu CD doesn’t cost too much, & does come with free office suites, graphics design suites, 3D editors, games, programming languages, etc.

This is what a Falcon looks like after you put a truck through it: The mother & daughter driving in it were both hospitalised with multiple head injuries, back injuries, & so on... about as you’d expect. Daughter was flown the best part of 1,000km to a big hospital in a capital city, to deal with a blood-clot in her brain. Her torso had torn through the seat she was sitting in so she wound up in the back of the car. Both were given at least two months before they’d be considered as candidates for release from hospital. Both were released home within 6 days. Doctors were “shocked” at their healing rate. If you’re the depressive kind of person who reckons that only nasty things happen around us, this should be some food for thought: yes, a nasty thing did happen... but the vast majority of the consequences have been shorted out & dissipated. You could call it a coincidence, an accident — but what it really means is that in real life, you ...

Have had an idea floated before me for setting up a long-term bar-camp / foo-camp / unconference style arrangement in a small country town about 3 hours’ drive from Perth WA. The idea is to collect a flock of hackers who are happy enough to stay put & would form an undisturbed base-line community which, basically, hacks as it pleases with a background idea to “sponsoring” occasional *-camp style events, either locally or down in Perth (where access is simpler for interstaters/internationals). ADSL/LAN would be provided (blue cables to each residence, common switches & wireless router ), probably a resident server for web & stuff, cheap rent (maybe $100-$150 a week?), basic facilities (laundry, kitchen etc) provided, town has shops, hospital, many broader services (including stuff like parks, a maze, barbecues, skate & BMX tracks, museum, hotel, motels, caravan park, lookouts, historical sites, scenic drives, clubs for golf/trotting/pistols/hockey/ponie...

Got to sit down this morning & read stuff from my laptop — a TwinHead DuraBook Pro 15D running Mandriva Linux 2008.0 — to make sure I’d got it correct (not sure why, but more & more people seem to like what I write & want to use it), & while I was doing this... Another bloke had to come to terms with the fact that his Windows Vista™©®£¥€ laptop was no longer playing the game, then turn to re-making his presentation by hand. Three or four genuine experts had a go at getting his laptop going, but to no avail. Ever since Tech Support at a workplace heat-shrunk the dodgy PSU connector, my laptop has been as good as gold... or possibly, platinum. As long as I remember to put the thing in my backpack, I can rely on it absolutely. Viva la pingouin! (-:

Now here’s an inspired explanation! (-: Imagine that you’ve wandered out to do a bit of light gardening — tend to the flowers, pick strawberries, check for ripe fruit swinging from the trees, whatever. A few butterflies flutter across your field of view, adding some bright colour & gentle activity. Nice, isn’t it? OK, now let’s vary this scene a bit. Instead of, say, three butterflies, let’s say that you’re joined by... well, π,000 (3,142) of them. They get in your hair, you can’t see anything worth describing, the gentle tickle of hundreds of little legs (as they walk on you) gets distracting, you can’t breathe in without inhaling one, they’re sitting on whatever you try to pick up (when you can actually see it), you’d be treading on them with each step... they’re everywhere ... you’ve got chronic butterflies. Not so nice, is it? So with many otherwise good things in life. Say you’ve got several ...

Found an unusual use for a camera just now. Not stunning scenery, not beautiful people, not magnificent sunsets, not (as one hack would have it) brown trout on the beach at Sydney... this time, it was the back of a stove. Mine hosts have acquired themselves a replacement electric stove, as the old one was getting a tad dodgy. Just how dodgy, they discovered when it came out: there were two “active” leads, one red... & one green/yellow. Oooh. This might explain one of the pre-blown 15-amp fuses in the fuse-board. The wires from the fuses (red & white) lead (with a black neutral cable from the neutral block) into a 3-core cable which emerges (with a bonus external green/yellow lead which really is a ground) in the kitchen. The photo was of the old, printed, circuit-diagram on the back of the new stove, to be sure that we’d wired it correctly. The technology enters this story with The GIMP , which was used to restore some detail ( GREYCstore plugin ), optimise ...

The ThunderBolts crew have dug up another interesting chunk of history : a hirsute Venus. The Ringu-Ringu people of central Queensland, “call the star Venus mimungoona or big eye” & assert that “no water exists in the star, but there are ropes which hang from its surface to the earth, by means of which the dwellers visit our planet from time to time, & assuage their thirst.” Quotes in there from Jumbapoingo & other local crew. Needless to say, these guys didn’t exactly have a Mount Palomar kicking around to observe these kinds of things with, so it follows that in the past these effects are likely to have been more visible, such as during each ion storm. Little pieces of history like this are socio-locally interesting, as they reveal how “unqualified” people do in fact observe “impossible” things — & sometimes reconstruct them, in various ways. A habit, it seems, inherited by y’all FOSS hackers. Another ...

Bonus points for getting no error messages out of the logs. Answer? Install two dodgy TrueType fonts amongst scores one night, forget about it, then turn the machine on again next morning. kdm breaks. kde breaks. startx breaks. startx konsole breaks... but startx xterm survives. So... “ konsole ” into that yields a SEGFAULT (Signal 11). Hmmmm. “ strace konsole ” into that yields consistent death after processing a font named Alphabet_2 . Remove Alphabet_2 from /usr/share/fonts/... . “ strace... ” on that yields consistent death after BERLIN_REDRAIN . Sigh. Look forward to an afternoon with rm as your friend. Remove REDRAIN. Everything springs back to life. Whew!

Have you ever had the experience of sitting down to analyse some random program, & being faced by code (typically BASIC or some database language) which was obviously generated by something else — maybe The Last One (but of course, it wasn’t) or another 4GLish system? It seems that the awesome complexity of DNA was not good enough, so scientists have moved along to discover epigenetics which are another controlling layer (one commentator termed it “the puppet master”) managing DNA expression. This is one reason why identical twins can have differing DNA, as the epigenetic arrangements are what’s shaping each twin — as managers can direct programmers, so that one programmer might produce completely different results on two similar-appearing projects. This & other mysteries solved (no doubt more opened as well) if you happen to have a Science magazine subscription (I read over someone else’s shoulder), but the basic principles at fir...

Today’s little head-banger problem: I have a machine with a SiS SATA controller , which offers me two options at boot: no SATA controller, or SATA controller, but with the attached IDE drive defined as /dev/sda . This presents two problems, because all of the kernels I have available for setting the sucker up to boot order the drives normally (SATA as sda , IDE at hda ), so tangling with grub-install gets complicated; & because the systems this is a prototype for have two SATA drives, the (initial) booting member of which will always be defined as sda . Options at this point appear to be selecting a machine with a different SATA controller, or standing in a second SATA drive for the IDE drive. I suspect that the faux deity I described to sline is at work again.

Not really Linux, but it’s fairly entertaining & I’m sure we’ve all seen equivalent digital labelling: Mr Kipling Exceedingly good cakes 6 Deep Filled Mince Pies butter enriched pastry filled with mincemeat (48%) Made in the UK, it says, South Yorkshire. “A generous dollop of my rich fruity mincemeat encased in crisp buttery pastry, delicious warm with cream.” Oh, yes, & “SUITABLE FOR VEGETARIANS” plus warnings about nut traces, cherry stones, gluten, milk & sulphites. Quite tasty little fruit pies, but really don’t have the substantial culinary impact that a big lump of finely-chopped moo or chook would bring them (-: especially after [reads carton] two months outside of the freezer :-)

Facing an interesting challenge. I updated a few machines in... remote places, & in so doing had to run the installer sans RAID (it complained about different machines in different ways) in a hurry, & now I address the challenge of enRAIDing a system by remote control. I’ve grabbed a disk image of one of the remote machines, & plugged it into a local machine as a test-bed. This has revealed an immediate issue: the SATA controller in this machine is different to either of the others, so it won’t boot the disk image. At the moment, I’ve booted a rescue image, borrowed part of the prospective RAID partner-drive & am bzip2 ’ing images of each partition into the borrowed partition, to implement a simple worst-case restore scenario. When that’s secure, I’ll get into making the confused SATA drivers happy, then use the resulting bootable hard disk to walk through the process of making a small chroot-ish area on a transient partition, then wal...

Some people in Tas wanted to talk to me but didn’t want to shell out mobile call rates if they could avoid it, & this house has no land-line (the ADSL is “naked” — ooh!) so they urged me to install Skype , which I did. Skype provide a Mandriva RPM, which went on straight away & worked ferpectly. This morning, Tas crew called in, which also worked ferpectly... but after maybe 10 minutes, the caller faded to near-inaudibility. We broke & re-made the call, which went exactly as before. I suspected that some setting in my shiny new installation was wonky, but the caller Skyped another (to her) local, & got the same effect. Ah, the munders of wodern technology! (-:

Last two ’plane flights & train ticket suddenly jumped into the credit card together last night, leaving /ME wondering why they hadn’t landed earlier — like, before I flew or railed? Days or weeks ago? Happily, I happened to have a few $ (added the same night to a different account) to cure the slight over-run it caused, but this adds another question: credit cards have limits, why did MasterCard let it go over, no questions, no reminders? Works out well this time, but might not on another. Will wait & see.

OK, so I bzip2punned it. Survive! Grow from the experience! Ditch the emotive facade, make room for a genuine sense of humour! (Er... no... puns ain’t it — but the ability to cope with or include puns is a good growth symptom). These tables are strewed around Cook, South Aus , & appear to be a rather excellent re-purposing of the old-style “logs” (sleepers) now that they’ve been obsoleted by concrete ones. Ummm... I wouldn ’t bother squinting into that map in search of the above tables, as it looks like the map is older than the tables might be. The railway line runs closer to the shop now, by at least 50m. Bonus picture: doesn’t this chunk of Trans-Australia Railway at Rawlinna, West Aus look so very... outback? Functional rather than beautiful.

...that Sydney might have a decent beach or two. Not something I’ve paid much attention to away from WA, which has not just a few decent beaches, but a large flock of rather excellent ones. Few of those in other places .

...to spend whizzing across a flat spot in a train. Some of the eagles were impressive. I lost count of the number of thousands of concrete sleepers stacked alongside the tracks. There are a few hysterical^H^H^Hhistorical spots worth seeing. A mine-site. Oh, & looots ’n’ lots ’n’ lots of flat dirt, sometimes interspersed with saltbush. Plus the odd freight-train or few (including one which broke down west of Kalgoorlie, clagging the line for an hour & a half). The front-end loader with a flat tyre about 500km from the nearest civilisation in SA was quite memorable. Some of the bush in towards Perth was actually quite pretty. As was a 22yo German passenger while she self-chiropracted during reaching up to fetch her bag from a rack at about 04:00 this morning. Some of the perambulations & gyrations undertaken by seat (not “sleeper”) passengers while they attempted to rearrange themselves for comfortable rest were also quite amazing. The food...

View it & weep! (-: I’ve long wanted to add an “Any” key to the standard keyboard (which would not be talleyed (as in “105 key keyboard”) because it’s not a particular key) but after seeing this I might just stick with writing programs. One day, I will add a “Maybe” button to an “OK”/“Cancel” dialogue box. Oh, yes, one more from Iliad /JD... think about it. (-:

Now for an interesting (Australian) observation completely from left field: you are becoming what you eat .

Douglas Adams once wrote about pens sneaking through wormholes in space to a planet of their own, where they built a peaceful biroid civilisation. I think I’ve just run across a similar situation. I recently opened my suitcase to match a loose sock against its pair-mate, & discovered — sitting more-or-less in plain view — a battery charger (& three AA cells) which I had been completely unable to find (despite disassembling the suitcase, the backback, & pretty much the entire room) at my last stop. The charger unit is a single unit about the size of a plug-pack (~5x6x2cm), so kind of difficult to overlook in a suitcase maybe 100x60x20cm. This find, with the recovery of my soldering iron, screwdrivers, side-cutters & solder, makes me glad that my next hop will not be on an aeroplane. In fact, due to Metro thoughtfulness, I can be dropped in the nearest town centre (a couple of km, I could walk it easily enough... even dragging the subsequently-mentioned...

I have occasionally wondered about movie depictions of comets as big, fluffy balls ( albeit sometimes with surges & waves adding a bit of character) since the only other nominally fluffy things out there are stars or gas clouds, either of which are relatively huge in comparison. Fluffy things “not out there” can be quite different. Now the Thunderbolts crew have run across some information which seems to show that comets are most un-fluffy with corners & other sharp bits. This accords well with my thought that in order to survive anything substantial by way of a number of orbits, these bright little suckers would have to have a correspondingly substantial physical makeup. It also accords better with the observation that in only a few decades, astronomical things have been watched changing, which of course renders the straight gradualist approach to astronomy fairly pointless (which will of course be, er, naturally unsettling to some people). Oddly enough, this k...

Yes, there are another bunch of people willing to give me a fair go (despite foreknowledge of my sense of humour), & a pleasure to share a super-veggie-burger thingy with (including tasty capsicum), plus some roast (including some surprisingly tasty roast jalapenos) plus friends & company of those friends’ children. Once again said fair go is an inconceivably effective therapy against ages of being beaten down, & against repeated programming of the mantra “you are useless & can do nothing right or successful.” Thank you — once more — digital community, for raising & releasing such excellent people. Next time anyone criticises you for this attitude, you can simply laugh: it works, it is powerful, positive & progressive, none of which they can match (they’re left — by their own choice — with mere whining & selfish manipulation, each of which is (in its own way) self-punishing). These are practical arguments agains...

Ingredients: 1xLED Torch ($4 from Reject store), 3xAAA eneloop NiMH rechargeable ($6.50 a cell from Tricky Dickey), wire coat-hanger (free after shop use), super-glue ($1 for a pack of 4 tubes from Reject), large/thin peg (free from random source, guess about 12¢ ea in large-ish packs new). Will publish photos in a few days (’net access permitting). Method: swap boring (Super Heavy Duty) AAAs with torch for rechargeable. Wind coat-hanger around torch to not obscure the unscrewable end, optionally super-glue into place. Match short straight length of coat-hanger against side of peg, super-glue it into place (range of about 45cm for large-ish books, 30cm for simple paperbacks. Useage: click switch on unscrewable end of torch, clip peg onto book cover, read. These little $4 torches have 9 very intense LEDs therein, so light up the book quite well; the “eneloop” badged (Sanyo) 800mAh AAA cells drive them quite brightly (will drive high-current loads like cameras quite...

Today’s amusement has been signs. I snapped a shot southwards as the train neared Lidcombe, & found this sign: I presume that’s a comment on the excessive marbling of the flesh involved. I also wandered past a supermarket today, which showed this sign: I guess that’s a fairly direct instruction. Nice biscuits.

I’m a bit of a pedant about checking things like the actual writing on items like booking slips. It avoids mismatches between transport media (bus, train, ’plane, tram etc) on the day. This paid off in work terms when I stumbled across an installer treating RAID-1’d partitions inconsistently after I’d read some boring text displays on-screen. It paid off “in real life” when I called up my next air booking... to discover that it wasn’t on Sunday, as I’d supposed (to match up with my next hop), but tomorrow. Thinking back carefully to the late-night session on Monday when I made the actual booking, I remember being bounced because someone had just taken the last (under $6xx... or, for commercial seats, under $1400) Sunday ticket between me bringing up the timetable & me clicking to book it. Aaanyway... cheap seats aren’t refundable & are expensive to move (50% in this case) so I’m glad I caught it early. Oh, look, the 80...

Hmmm. I grabbed a small packet of “Brown Candy” (‘Sucre en Roche Jaune’) to try, from one of the local Viet-style supermarket-lets. The ingredient list says “SUGAR CANE, WATER” so I thought to myself, “Yeah, yeah, right!” — but upon breaking the sucker open (literally) & tasting it, I’m afraid it was indeed serious. Crunch, crunch. As it turns out, mine host may indeed need a sugar rush in the course of cycling to work tomorrow AM, so it’s tactically not a dead loss.

Flash! Bang! Had a lightning strike a few minutes ago with no delay at all between flash & bang. Very unsettling. Pix 1 One side-effect of a quite boring ’plane flight has been a number of fairly reasonable cloudscapes, sample following: One assertion which frustrates & disappoints me is that I will not be permitted to show such pictures to some people I love & respect because apparently it’s too remote from them, too indirect, & not on the very short list of topics I’m allowed to broach with them. Now, if I described these as being not so much like surfey waves as like big, fluffy candy floss in a gentle blue setting, apparently that’s right out of the question. However, I can so show them to you, & so describe them, & hopefully you’ll enjoy at least a small fraction of the challenge I faced in getting a cheap little camera to accrue even this much reality through a thick, smudged perspex AirBus window. Pix 2 The next shot arrive...

Still only initial impressions, but the trains seem to be grottier, as does the, uh, amateur calligraphy. Train ticket from the airport was a bit bitey, as apparently that station is privately owned & run. Zebee’s book collection is quite imposing, even trumps Dad’s (pre-cleanup) aggregation. Wodehouse sharing space with “A Treasury of Fantasy,” “Agincourt,” “Medieval Combat,” Monsarrat, Pournelle, McCaffrey, Bliss, Brin, Cherryh... & other stuff, quite a variety.

I’m sure you’ve heard (or uttered) the claim “I’m sick of it!” Well, this time I really am. In the last few days, I’ve been put back under the stress of having to justify who I am, what I can do, what I am worth, before people who are important to me, at the same time as I’m effectively prevented from saying anything meaningful or constructive — Heaven forbid that I should dare to actually raise a practical issue with the possibility that it might actually result in a contradiction of somebody’s flawless imagination — or that of their friends. Oh, yes, being classed as insanely violent — in addition to arriving completely shockingly to people who know me at all well — doesn’t help with providing any equitability here, either. In those few days, I’ve gone from basically healthy — despite all of the running around even a mediocre Volunteer actually does — into tired, listless & physically i...

It turns out to be cheaper to take Indian-Pacific across the Nullarbor than to fly, if you’re a pensioner. Would actually have been marginally ($12) cheaper to fly SYD - ADL than to train, but at the last minute some eager little critter trumped the last available special fare, leaving me to book SYD-ADL on the train (too late & an inconvenient time) or settle for second-be$t. I think this speaks to the margins left in the cut-throat airline business as much as it does to the politics of the situation, as those airlines which post the actual fare costs show that over half of the cost to them is taxes & duties of various sorts — so less than $50 of a $100 fare is actually for flying the aeroplane — a bit skinny a markup for my comfort. Another bonus (sorta) is that stopping at a mid-point is — most unlike an airline — an economical thing to do. In another odd fact, the drop in price from hopping off the I-P at Kalgoorlie is greater than the discou...

Caught myself sitting here wondering why a dual 3-GHz machine should be taking over an hour to plan ( urpmi ) a 5-generation distro upgrade. Gone are the days (plural) of long upgrades, it seems.

Tas Ka is a little Asian food shop, down on Malvern Road about a block away from here. I say “Asian” rather than naming a country style like Thai or Viet, simply because they don’t. I see Thai & Malay flavours but also dishes like “Lemon Chicken” which aren’t tied to a particular nationality. Either way, they’re quite economical & very tasty. They are so economical that they have a policy I haven’t seen for a while: little EFTPOS purchases attract a small fee. Still leaves them cheaper than the Thai & Indian places across the road, noticeably cheaper than the pizza place a block towards the city. The LazyWeb shows mostly Dutch places under that name, with one sole entry amongst Stonnington business listings, but Google Maps knows where to find them .

Dear ANZ The reason for installing an ATM ( Automated Teller Machine) is to provide service when there are no human tellers available. Such as early on a Sunday morning... which leads me to wonder why the two ATMs in your Glenferrie Road branch at Malvern are shut into a little foyer which is only open when the bank branch behind it is open? YF, LB Figured out why there are so many trams along this otherwise unremarkable chunk of Melbournea: the administrative district of Stonnington seems to have a tram depot inside it. Tram runs off to the south-east or through places like Bourke Road to Camberwell are vaguely oriented on the depot.

...who as well as providing an engaging morning (hello to Sandra, Ken, Michael, Russel, Shirley, others) & a miscellaneously-flavoured lunch (featuring avocado, chocolate biscuits & bananas) also casually disproved some of the assertions made at me in past months about how bad (blind, pre-programmed) certain classes of people are. The exertion-echoes of my small part in the Conf are now kicking in big time (sincere respects to Steve, Kim, Kim, Erin, Donna & other much-harder-than-me workers) so it’s good night from him; chat with you tomorrow. Oh... yes... nobody commented on the diversity.conf post, so I guess it was received with universal acclaim?

Yes, this post is for those amongst us who had hoped to duck the Broome issue this year. (-: There are many great places which will miss out on holding an LCA for the very simple reason that they don’t have critical mass. Broome is one of them. Ask one of the young’uns (-: hi Jess, ’Chi :-) whether they’d rather see a presentation about DDR, or do one on Cable Beach ? Cairns is another one. Would you rather cram into a theatre at 9AM for a slideshow, or be wallowing in fresh mangoes by a warm beach at 7AM on Green Island ? Training to rein in PERL bugs, or straining out the windows of Kuranda Railway ? Then consider a few other places — like Devonport, where a conference could be run on the Spirit of Tasmania each way from Melbourne (try a Sheffield health retreat; where else would you go?) — or across a table of Simmo’s at Busselton or Dunsborough — or (who knows?) in the splendidly characteresque, forested, exquisitely built Hahn...

One refreshing thing about Linux people is that there are so many, & that in general you (we) are honest, forthright people. Note that I said “in general” because as with so many golden principles in this world, there are exceptions... which here are few & far between. You may not think of yourself as being perfect (well... not for long, anyway :-) but by & large you do fairly well. One effect of this has been repairs for one Leon Brooks, as in helping out with this conference , I’ve run across an enormous variety of people, who have been frank enough to comment on what I’ve been doing, & thoughtful enough to do so politely. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but on many occasions (such as starting a new job, living in a new place, or even facing brainless things like social/racial prejudice) you get judged & condemned for what people assume about you rather than what you’re like or what you’re actually doing. Ass-U-Me...

Had an interesting experience last night, walking out of the backpackers from the Google student party en route to acquiring some hard-earned gelati. A chap across the road, definitely not an LCA participant, was engaged in verbal dispute with a friend, then turned to him & said, “Oh... [pent breath] Google it, then!” (turned away, flushed with an aura of success). So... Google seems to have become a verb, as far as the general public are concerned. I’m sure that in business terms, that’s generally a mark of success. (-: