Plantagenet Penguinista

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In Ada a good cause

Being Ada Lovelace day ’n’ all, I thought it worth mentioning that many women have done powerful things throughout history, including in computers. One odd general example is that women like maths a lot less than men, but in reality are much better at it. For a real-life example, a housewife I know well ran the 2008 TEE IT section (from Murdoch Unit). This would translate fairly well into computing. The Good Book is regarded as patricarchal in nature (but even the Laws of Israel were Women’s Lib radicalism for the time), yet many of the heroes (Ruth, Deborah, Rachel, others) were women. Recently, I was happy to sign the EndItNow petition, a request for the UN to take real measures against violence towards women & girls, wordwide (not just beating, stuff like genital mutilation of various kinds, emotional pressure, removal of valid life choices, etc). Violence will not resolve problems, simply raise more of them. Another thing to realise is that bullies are cowar...

Ripping the English pre-translation text out of a Google translation with vim

This next line is not really broken, but Blogger’s editor refuses to agree: :%s:<SPAN class="google-src-text">.\{-}<SPAN>.\{-}</SPAN>.\{-}</SPAN>::g ...then... :%s:<SPAN class="google-src-text">.\{-}</SPAN>::g ...all done (minus a bit of tidying up of <SCRIPT> junk here & there within <HEAD> section). The point? You can then Insert File into OpenOffice Writer & wind up with only the translation text.

Aerobic exercise

Stacking 60×20kg mud-bricks is that. ☺ Making 35×26kg bricks (meanwhile shovelling fill for those plus 139×20kg bricks) is also that ☺ oh, & on that day (Monday), was supposed to be 35°C, officially made 40°C, but we measured 44°C in the shade... Sweat? Just a tad... ☺ Global warming? Sunday was supposed to be 37°C, equal-hottest day this summer, managed to reach 38°C during a month which often peaks well clear of 40°C. Meanwhile, last week, 2xUS States had their coldest days ever , Burlington VT had 33" of snow on one day from one storm. Last year, the Copenhagen warming conference was snowed out. Next fairy tale, please...

OK, so it’s a _LARGE_ capacitor

I’ve been quietly reading a PDF archived on an odd energy website about CSIRO’s 2008 Energy Storage projects. These include an 8.54kf asymmetrical Ni(OH)2/C capacitor . Yes, that’s kilo Farads, or about a million times larger than the biggest electrolytic capacitor you’ll find in an everyday electronic appliance. They also invented a thing they call the UltraBattery , which is a blend between this asymmetric capacitor & a lead-acid battery. It gives the surge ability of the cap backed by the robustness of the battery. The cap “protects” the battery from damage through excessive demand. Performance is comparable with NiMH for around a fifth of the cost. Durability trials exceeded 100,000 simulated miles with no significant degradation. Like NiMH, the UltraBattery can be scaled to extremes. If the pollies (& the bankrupt philosophies pushing them) would just naff off & leave us alone, I think we’ll get on just fine with managing this...

Cable Beach (no, not in Broome!)

Varying from tech stuff a bit, still, but this was fun ! ☺ Yesterday, I carefully took some time off to exercise my visual abilities, dragged a camera down to Cable Beach, grabbed some images of amazing waves (there’s a sort of cross-wave effect from the adjacent Cave Point rocks which leads to some quite bizarre wave-shapes), & of the rock added during a stormy night in recent years (6x8x30 feet, which makes it about 100 tonnes, yes we get real waves here) &… dolphins! They leaped occasionally, but a few were literally riding in the waves as they rolled in to break, would occasionally extend a fin out of the wave to produce a tearing surfboard-like effect. I was wishing for my zoom lens, as that would have allowed something visible to mere mortals to fit within the lens. Beyond the lighthouse (in which no light remains, but it has a radome & plenty of Yagi antennæ & a satt dish) there is another rock effect similar to The Gap (about 100m furthe...

Thank you Janyce!

Jan has found a neat house for my Dad to purchase here in Albany. With several other competitors in the wings, his purchase offer was accepted literally within 5 minutes. For the risk of what you might call technical reasons, I’m not yet able to buy my own house, so this is being bought as an investment & will be rented to me. The house is not quite as large as I’d ideally like, but is very well fitted out & comes with a few really neat gadgets such as a super-efficient reverse-cycle style water heater. It also has (important for Albany) ADSL2 running (at high speed, it’s near the exchange) from a provider who is not Telstra, which will allow me to move my on-line services into the house, simplifying things for the people in whose house the server currently lives. The current owners are quite a unique contrast, & I was impressed to see how very well they do as a couple. Jan really knows the area, really knows what works, & has come up with some good id...

Karmic Koala won’t run your Mobile Internet...

...without an update for the kernel. Also, it fails to install wvdial by default. Stuffing this lot onto a Flash stick works for me: libuniconf4.4_4.4.1-0.2ubuntu2_i386.deb libwvstreams4.4-base_4.4.1-0.2ubuntu2_i386.deb libwvstreams4.4-extras_4.4.1-0ubuntu2_i386.deb libxplc0.3.13_0.3.13-2ubuntu2_i386.deb linux-image-2.6.32-9-generic_2.6.32-9.13_i386.deb wvdial_1.60.1_i386.deb You need to make your default user a member of the dip group else wvdial can’t run pppd. For Virgin (Optus) this needs to be pppd’s options file: lock noauth noipdefault usepeerdns -chap This needs to be in the pap-secrets file: ppp * ppp At that point wvdial works from the shell (but under [K]Ubuntu, spits some weird rubbish as kind-of progress messages, which don’t happen under Mandriva). You can then plug in any valid stick, without config changes, as authentication seems to be done by the stick itself.

Oh, yes, Chromium browser is nice...

They seem to have learned a few things from ( not cloned) Firefox, plus it picked up the cookies, bookmarks etc from FF flawlessly. Chromium is generally smoother & faster than FF, except for actually scrolling the page contents up & down. The visual design is excellent... nothing too jarring, but a few logical changes like enclosing both of the Back/Forward buttons within a single rounded-rectangle border-line (which looks pretty much like the rounded-rectangles enclosing each of Reload, Home & the URL field) & overflowing excess bookmarks into a right-aligned Other Bookmarks folder. Oh, & making the tabs look a bit more like individual objects (angled sides etc) which makes them easier to rapidly distinguish. This is Chromium 4.0.256.0 (32803) running under Mandrive 2009.1; to install it on that (or 2010.0), run this as root: urpmi.addmedia --mirrorlist http://eugeni.dodonov.net/rpm eugeni 586 ...then... urpmi chrome ...which is a few seconds’ work over Virgin M...

So you owe someone a little money?

Rest easy. The US National Debt has been officially-officially pegged at over USD$12 TRILLION ($12,000,000,000,000.00). A former Comptroller General stated as fact last year that it had really topped $60 TRILLION, which is more than the entire world’s Gross Domestic Product. About USD$480,000.00 per household. Which is probably not all of the debts (guesstimate around 3× to 5× that). Which means it will be repaid when? The budget shortfall was predicted at $1.6 TRILLION but worked out to "only" $1.4 TRILLION, which means that they are spending USD$180,000,000.00 per hour more than they earn. Hey, I want pay-rates like that! (-: It’s not a wonder that President Obama wants to sign away all political/financial/religious rights (so, responsbility) to the UN at Copenhagen... but why is Prime Minister Rudd just as eager? It becomes increasing obvious that free-as-in-price means about squat. Free-as-in-available will, I think, come to mean everything — not just i...

Free as in $ as well...

Albany is mid-council-chuck-out at the moment, which has yeilded 2 free PCs. With FOSS, one simply ensures that the hardware itself functions (playing digital Lego ® until it does), then bung in a CD, install, done. You don’t have to scrawl down serial numbers, count licenses, anything. KISS at work!

Well... I hope you’ve enjoyed our democracy...

...because next month it goes. Copenhagen is not about climate change (which is a furphy anyway, Dad’s twin, a serious geologist, has done the maths — everybody’s maths — & if anything, our next climate change will be a mini ice age — last winter was the worst (& strangest) the USA has had in a long time). The treaty at Copenhagen is about putting the UN in charge of everything (finances, politics, religion, etc), & no signatory can back out without first obtaining the consent of every other country, many of whom will be getting payments because Australia are signatories. Mr Rudd, of course, is eager for his government to be neutered. Are you? The treaty makes no mention of votes, elections, democracy at all. Signing your life away with a vengeance: insurance companies, eat your collective hearts out. There will be no more Free software. Or free speech. Or free philosophy, morals... name it. There will be no more free anything. The time to wr...

Non-IT post: avoid anything with an Aspartame derivative in it

Early this year, I noticed that P&N-brand diet drinks did odd things to me. I often became grumpy or confused for no apparent reason half an hour or so after drinking them. They (even many of the non-diet flavours) contain Neotame, an Aspartame derivative, thank you Monsanto. So I no longer drink them. Currently chatting with a Queensland-based ex-truckie, ex-bikie, who is literally dying of Aspartame-based effects consequential on drinking heaps of diet drinks while trucking. His liver & his kidneys are failing. Endless odd pains & tweaks here & there. Not good. This (Texan) crew are quite big on the whole Aspartame thing. Bottom line: if you value having a life (or even value your life) don’t touch the stuff.

nlp for lazy learning

I’m currently reading this in bunches. It’s a neat little book by a living-in-England Irishwoman diana beaver , which is focussed on ways people learn, but ventures a fair way into real Neuro Linguistic Programming. There is some controvery about NLP since the two founders (Bandler & Grinder) argued with one another & ceased working with one another, but a key factor in this book is that the author often gives small examples which one can test... & they work. Last year, I figured out the principal reason for me going through school with a genius-level IQ but getting only slightly-above-average results, then falling into IT & finding it to be paradise: I’m a visuo-spatial learner. Where someone with photographic memory would take away a detailed image for life (& a decade later be able to recall serial numbers, signatures et al ), I take away the patterns, the connections, the network — which is IT. So... in general learning/communication mode...

Electronic resurrection!

Last week, I drowned (completely immersed) a Canon A480 still-cam (which of course also takes minor videos) in Fortescue Falls while trying to take a video clip of same. Since the water is very close to pure there, I hauled out the batteries, the SD card, then flicked it as dry as I could. Carried it open-handed back to Forrestfield, then rested it on a shelf, panel-door open, for 2 days. Tried it. The electronics seemed to work fine but the optics were not. Massively over-bright & fuzzy. Frowned, hauled the batteries out while it was still powered on, leaving the lens extended. Left it to dry for a few more days. Jammed it into a case which went into a coach to Albany with me. A few days ago, without much hope, I switched it on again. Joy! It perks worfectly! (-: So... I used it for dazzling some Yankee friends with a morning video clip of Little Beach, using a real camera stand (-: eleven minutes of peaceful bliss, set to gentle wave noises! :-) & with some stills from around...

Wake up, li'l Suzi, wake up!

New toy: Suzuki Sierra. Sold to me(-ish) for $2500, happy with that as the Red Book price is $4500. Now getting accustomed to: the habits/skills of driving again more transport choices having more photogenic spots within reach It’s all good! (-:

There's one born every minute

You have a small business with 20 people using computers. Let’s have a look at some pricing. Basic server with Mandriva Linux 2009.1: $1100.00 Cost per seat: $55.00 Includes office software & a virus scanner. (No virus scanner is actually required). Basic server with MS-Windows 2008 (5 CALs): $3500.00 CALs apear to be about $200 a seat (Edu would be about $45), so... 15 more CALs for the above: $3000.00 Nett: $6500.00 Cost per seat: $325 Does not include any office software or virus scanner; you could, if you enjoy constant naysaying, try installing OpenOffice for free. A PC for each seat is $502, plus screen ($180). These workstations do not require a virus scanner, but each instance (user) running on an MS-Windows 2008 server does. The workstations can be set up to run MS-Windows XP (guessing that an OEM version could still be grabbed for about $150, Vista would be a bit breathless, don’t know about MS-Windows 7), so would require a virus scanner each, but there is no ...

Borderline-type tech stuff today

I did no programming today. (-: I discussed Internet connections with a realtor & with a doctor in the course of using their services. The result will be that the realtor saves at least $31 a month & gets a faster connection, the doctor saves $23 a month & also gets a faster connection. I filled out a DASS test, got 10 for D, 7 for A, 17 for S. The doctor after the doctor testing decided that the moderate A was directly due to my VSO’s influence, the dangerously high S was the result of certain pressures of which most can soon be removed, the high-ish D was a consequence of the S & again was high-ish rather than very high due to VSO. I began updating postal addresses. From Medicare, HBF, GP, Hudson Henning Goodman, others. I composed some Fathers’ Day thankyous. They will need to be vetted by legal eagles before being sent, but they will get there, they will be assuring & comforting when they arrive. The weather here was cantankerous. Started off fine, then g...

The KISS Principle

“Keep It Simple, Sweetheart“ sounds easy enough to do, but in many ways, this is not a simple world. I do, however, enjoy simplifying things. (-: Facing this rotten, ancient C program, having it segfault after a few minor changes for no obvious reason, I began to feel a bit stupid. So... what happens when “ We believe that we are stupid? ” The curious thing about this belief is that it has been inflicted upon us by somebody else. We would have no concept of stupidity if someone had not told us about it & applied the adjective to us. So reckons Diana Beaver, an educational researcher. After discussing life for a bit with someone I seriously value, in which I learned that being “The Crazy Grandpa” is acceptable, but that I am very much not stupid, I decided to apply KISS. It wasn’t working. Why not? I’d made only a few changes, so the reason is likely to be simple. Back to the basics. I sat down & pored through every line of code I...

Now one day older than my VSO...

...will be until tomorrow. [ VSO == Very Significant Other ]

exSCO app now prints to PDF

The easiest way to do that turned out to be writing HTML, then feeding that to a converter. The downside is that a 48-page report works out to be 700kB of HTML, which htmldoc chokes on & silently dies. So... a bit of re-engineering now to start a new temp text file (shut down & restart <html> & <body> tags in between), spawn htmldoc with a bunch of them instead of one file with throwing a  directive in at the end of each page. Extra victory: I have one report spitting contents into a <table> tag. It looks much neater & more elegant.