...how beautiful Conny looks.
(the other two are her cousins.) But I'm way more proud of her being
a good and capable person.
Here's a very nice radio feature (complete text and mp3) that ran recently
on ABC (local gov't-backed broadcaster).
It discusses the mess and mindset that contemporary MBAs represent. Food for thought (*bwuahaha* - thinking, what an outdated notion, we've got leadership instead!) for my employer's vPHBs, oh yes indeed.
My newish Treo 680 has blue teeth, which is better than a kick
in selfsame (but not very much as shoddily as it was implemented by Palm). Being only a moderate
gadgeteer (and far from rich) I've been lusting after a
good/cheap/simple (yeah, I know RFC1925) navigation setup for the
car - and cable-less as much as possible.
So I got a cheap Bluetooth GPS receiver which is branded "HP iPAQ Bluetooth GPS BTG-10H". Interestingly that model seems to have been orphaned by HP and is now sold under the name Siraya. $20 for a new 12-channel receiver with data logging, some other goodies and a car charger; not bad I think.
A bit of digging determined that it uses an iTrax03 GPS chip made by Fastrax, a Finnish company.
Now I don't know about Finnish attitudes towards the Dutch in general, but this Finnish piece of electronic wizardry absolutely killed the Dutch fount of navigational wisdom. (Apropos nothing in particular: the Dutch have a reputation as lousy drivers all across the mountainous parts of Europe.)
Tomtom Navigator 6 works quite well - when it works at all. Specifically Treos and Bluetooth receivers are well known sources of horrible interoperability problems. Same here: my receiver gets a fix moderately quickly and the TomTom shows the way, but after no more than 10 minutes the TomTom locks up my Treo completely - until the GPS is switched off or the BT connection is lost.
This obviously sucks, and is a tale of woe oft repeated elsewhere on the intertubes.
I am, however, really stubborn about fixing problems. So I started digging through all the horror stories, tried all kinds of suggested things, learned a bit about NMEA, to no avail - until the really simple, really stupid cause dawned on me: During a session with a serial terminal reading the NMEA data from the iTrax I realized that the volume of stuff it sends is quite..substantial.
The FasTrax docs about NMEA and their chips are quite good. NMEA has a bunch of required and optional messages, and I learned that for barebones navigation one only needs RMC messages as often as possible; if one also wants to know things like satellite positions and fix quality, one needs GSA and GSV.
Other GPSs seem to have configurable separate output rates for these messages; most tips I found mentioned setting RMC to 1/sec and GSA/GSV to once every 5 secs - which makes a lot of sense, because there will be multiple GSV messages depending on the number of satellites in view.
Not so with the iTrax: you can configure the output rate very precisely (up to 5Hz) but only one rate for all messages - and by default it spews its (nonstandard) figure-of-merit message as well as a full set of GSVs every second. At least on the Treo this overwhelms TomTom after a few minutes (which sounds like very shoddy programming to me) and everything locks up hard.
The fix? Get rid of the GSV messages: you do lose the per-satellite signal quality and azimuth/elevation info, but that's all. The satellite status screen simply shows blank bars with the satellite number and the GGA and GSA messages still tell the TomTom enough to know how many and which satellites are in use and how good the nav fix is, so all is well.
FasTrax has made configuring the iTrax very simple: you send it ascii (nonstandard-but-NMEA-formatted) commands over the serial/BT connection and it stores them persistently in flash, done. I used BT Serial on the Treo, which works very well.
The online docs have all the necessary configuration info and the only thing you'll actually have to do is send it this one message, once:
$PFST,CONF,22,$A00222 is the SYS_NMEA_MASK parameter, controlling which messages you want, and A002 means "send only RMC, GGA and GSA". (The default mask is A023, which includes the above plus FOM and GSV. Sending
$PFST,CONF,22 shows you the current value of that parameter.)
Wasn't that easy?
Actually it's not just low on blood but stone-dead, but it'll come
back -- eventually (like in the film Reanimator...).
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...I would rate this Brand-New and Shiny Aluminium door sign.
However, as I'm just one of those no-good overeducated academics with
a profound distrust of manglement and the consequential cynical attitude,
I have to make do with a heavy dose of Dilberts and some
homemade jokes.
(The white felty things are the velcro where they took off our previous
not-shiny-but-sufficient door signs. I'm not holding my breath waiting
for this to be improved.)
Remember: Toilets are any company's most valuable asset.
(or, translated for the en-natives: we'd far rather blue bread
than blue blood!)
Here's our proof:
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Five-and-a-half months after buying it, I actually still like my Subaroo
- except for the lousy excuse for a high beam (which is the nr. 2 complaint
about
the older Outbacks, trumped only by Hal).
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A few days ago the rearview mirror in my car parted company with the
windscreen glass. Looks like it had been re-(super?)glued before.
So I read up on a number of (un)suggested glues:
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Just read the announcement (and news item) which tells us peons that
from now on, Ebay Oz is only allowying the inhouse-bank Paypal as
payment mechanism, and also that Paypal may keep your cash for up to 21 days
(IOW a big "screw you, sellers!" from the greedy bunch).
I'm not certain about how I take these badly disguised price hiking changes: as a buyer, fine, doesn't cost me anything and makes it easier to stuff around with a recalcitrant seller.
But as a non-commercial seller of leftovers every now and then, this set of changes sucks: the ebay/paypal combo is quite expensive. A commercial vendor will factor these in and eat them as side-costs do doing business, but on a $10 garage sale item the fees are not fun: 0.50 listing plus 5.25% of the final, 0.30 paypal plus 2.4% of the final for paypal again.
I just wish there was a reasonable alternative in Oz/the Asia-Pac region.
:-)
Should you end up with this cheap DVD recorder you'll note that by default it is region-crippled.
The thing has divx support, records to dvd and dvd-rewritables
and has vga-out, which is why I bought it for AU$130:
my Zensonic Z330 player is badly on the way out.
Region-lockout is at least close to breaching the law in this country and thus region-free gear is actually way more common - and legal.
Should you - like me - be very pissed off by the manual not saying anything about how to make the fellow region-free, don't despair. I voided my warranty by opening the box, found out that it uses a Mediatek MT8105DE chipset - and that on a no-name unidentifyable mainboard. No go so far.
However, looking around further I found out that the sequence Power on, Setup button, 8 1 0 5 gives you its internal system info screen (alas, with the region unchangeable). On a Hungarian board I found the crucial info that Setup, 5 0 1 8 gives you a menu with the region changeable (use 0 for any). Hit setup afterwards, power off and on again and everything works. (apprently the firmware is similar to another noname called chili/yanada dvr-8500x, for which i found the 5018 thing...)
This success helps at least a bit to offset the disappointment of lots of shite weather in the last 8 weeks (and counting). The farmers are happy, the dams fullish, the beaches are gone and the wind howls and/or it rains. Soon I'll have to develop gills and webbed fingers - unless the mould gets me before.
I have a new car (new for me, that is; June 2000 was its birthday).
As you can see the rego is "554 JTH", which I've decided stands
for "Just Tell HAL":
the car has a few very stupid gimmicks.
The radio install was...painful. First I couldn't get a matching wiring
harness and had to solder up my own (cursing the idiots at VDO for mislabelling
the ISO connector pins in their excuse for a manual), then I needed to
make an antenna extension (the previous radio, a clarion with cd but no mp3
capability used an odd diversity antenna setup: there's two coax cables in the
car, no idea if both are active - anyway, the antenna is in-glass, performs
ok and one of the coaxes worked). Then of course the dismantling and
reassembly job times two (because I ripped it apart yesterday but couldn't
finish and put it back together then), plus trying to figure out where
to put the UHF radio later on. Anyway, we have sound. And I'm in control of it.
The first and foremost is HAL, the climate control system. It's a completely stupid FPOS and works only properly when lobotomized (aka non-auto mode). Asking gargle about HAL is enlightening.
Here's a pic of HAL de-brained, which is actually part of the major disassembly job that is required to install a car radio. HAL lives in that innocuously looking top box with the LED blinkenlight panel.
The next gimmick I could do easily without, thank you very much, is the hill-holder. No, stupid car, I want you not to keep applying the brakes after I lift my foot and until I let the clutch go, I want you to roll. Roll, goddammit! ROLL! Do I have to push? ROLL! I can hill-start on my own (and without handbrake), and if I wanted such gadgetry I would have bought a bloody automatic! I don't and so I didn't.
Most of the other features are quite ok. What wasn't ok was that some idiot mechanic, wannabe or detailer had disconnected the fuel pressure regulator vacuum hose from the inlet manifold and left it to dangle in the wind: idle a tad high and slow to return on stopping, lousy starting behaviour. I found and fixed the dangling hose when hunting for the fuel filter (which this oz model apparently didn't get? Silly, as if this place wasn't dusty and dirty... And I had bought a replacement filter already, well maybe I'll retrofit it) in order to figure out the odd starting behaviour.
The 2652 pages of factory service manual that I sucked earlier came already very handy for figuring out where the hose should go. The result was immediately improved starting and lower/better idling. Very good.
As to HAL, well, at least there is the "Lobotomy, Now!" button. BTW, this is how the system is supposed to work; a fairly rotten setup if you ask me. Consequentially, this is how it actually works out for most Outback/Legacy/Liberty/Forester owners:
The Outer Limits Control Voice... "There is nothing wrong with your ACC. Do not attempt to adjust the settings. We are controlling operation. If we wish to make it warmer, we will bring up the heat. If we wish to make it colder, we will set it to 65. We can reduce the fan to a soft breeze, or sharpen it to full blast. We will control the vents. We will control the AC. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you feel and hear. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind of the Legacy Automatic Climate Control to... your rarely comfortable body."
A mnemonic I memorized once for recalling the layers of the OSI model.
Unfortunately it seems to be true
outside of the OSI/ISO academentia, too: I'm missing two recently acquired
ebay bargains...
ObXKCD:
Just had the joy of having to deal with the backscatter of
a spam run with
addresses from my domains (nonexistent boxes though) as sender.
And while my Mimedefang setup is reasonably
sophisticated, that run actually showed yet another minor loophole.
Minor as in "nothing bad happens that affects the public" but not minor otherwise: I got postmaster-bounces of every single "thanks for your bounce of the spam, but there is no such address here anyway". About 200 of them every few minutes.
Well, no longer. Mimedefang now fully checks whether cyrus boxes exist before letting sendmail get its greedy paws on the stuff. Still, the effort necessary to keep the assholes out but the good mail arriving at the same time is quite annoying.
Mucking out the garbage box, I saw this spam/scam/whatever junk
today:
Subject: Not for oversmart people
I think so, too. :-)
Rob gave me his surplus nice caliper (Thanks again, BTW!).
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On my recent trip to Austria I got exposed to/fed a bunch of really nice
musical stuff. Thanks go to Nina, Julia and Tamara (in no particular order).
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I'm with Rat on this topic.
However, my favourite underdo^Wunderpig has a point there, too.
(credits, as always to Stephan Pastis with a big thanks for the dark & nasty & great strip!)
Spam is good for something, after all. Two things in my case:
First it gives me a nice flow of test mails so that I can verify
that my servers do work as intended.
The second use is that every morning when I get my first cup of coffee,
skimming the spam&trash mailbox reminds me of recording my
weight, which I check every morning before showering. Usually I have forgotten
to write it down by the time I've finished doing my teeth, inserting my
eyes, getting the coffee etc.
Ten minutes ago \rho-bert and Anitta left Oz for the last time.
"Back to Europe" for them, "back to work" for me. We'll see how
soon I cease speaking German because of lack of exercise.
Today I talked to my daughter on the phone. Conny
complained about having read stuff on this here website, where I had
put one of her recent photos and where
I had said something about me hoping that she'd lose her extra weight
so that she can enjoy her life (and adolescence) more.
She took exception to that (well-meant!) wish. :-) But, and that's the good news, she also got rid of some of the weight: $conny-=7kg;
Very well done, dear Conny! I'm proud of you (and hope you do enjoy your life...)
In other news, the weather sucks and timing sucks and all of that sucks (on my wallet): I had planned to go to Rainbow Beach from tomorrow until after Easter, for a bit of relaxing beach flying. The forecast says strong wind warnings, rain, and a completely wrong wind direction, so all my friends have bugged out, and I won't drive the 350km either. So far so good, but I'll lose the hefty deposit for the bloody apartment... it hurts to write off $300 in exchange for absolutely nothing. *sigh*
Brutish Airways recently had someone old kark it in the air.
The cabin staff moved the ex-passenger to first class, propped
her up in a seat and that's it. Move on, nothing to see.
The article in the Times is pretty hilarious, discussing the "disturbed" snobs in 1st. Come on, what else could they have done? Turn around just because of a stiff in cattle class? "Bomb's away"?
The part I liked best is this:
"After the plane landed, those in first class remained on board for
an hour before police and a coroner gave the all-clear."
Heavenly Justice rules! The rich snobs get to leave last for once!
*hehe*
As to BA, having body bags on board might have been a Good Idea. And I'd have plonked the dead in a toilet, and locked that, but of course 1st class is almost as good a place to dump a slowly rotting corpse in.
Link to the Times article
A useful maxim for computer stuff and Unix people.
But I can also apply this to wood and plastic!
(Yes, I am that sick.)
The under-sink cabinet in my kitchen is cramped: a normal trashbin, a plastic bag dispenser and a bin for recyclables vie for space, not to speak of the water filters and all the other stuff in there.
I'm not just a packrat but also a perfectionist, and it annoys me greatly every time when I must move the recycling bin around so that neither the dispenser nor the other bin knock into it when the doors are closed.
But that's solved now: I've automated the bin adjustment process! And it's a super-low-tech solution too, no electronics required! *hehe*
Just finished watching "Komm Süsser Tod" on SBS. Strange to see Austrian movies on Australian state
television, the Viennese settings, the dialect etc. The subtitles were
an especially funny bonus...but likely involuntarily. Some figures of speech
are simply untranslatable, and it was very obvious that the subtitles were
made by some non-Austrian...translating from one strange language into another
very foreign one :-)
...of Things Going Wrong can be found at the
Australian Transport Safety Bureau's website.
Somewhat morose at times, with titles like "Collision with terrain".
I find the investigation reports quite interesting, not just because of me flying paragliders but in general. But then I'm a nerd, always happy to learn something new.
Two weeks ago I refurbished an inherited PC (thanks Richard!) to become
my desktop (1.6GHz P4, cd-burner, 64mb Geforce2 but only 256mb RAM).
I bought 2x1gb DDR memory modules, with the rationale being
that I'd better max the thing today, when this particular kind of memory
is actually readily available. Did a quick bit of research as to
compatibility, seemed fine. Thought I got a good deal at $170 for a new
unopened HP-branded pack (when this seller's other items went for $200+).
On insertion the box wouldn't even peep. Surprise, surprise.
I didn't realise at first that I had ordered buffered/registered+ecc rams. It turns out that most PC chipsets only deal with unbuffered/unregistered ram, and that I hadn't done my homework sufficiently well. Some Cursing ensued. The replacement pack cost me $270, because there's once again a shitload of fine print to consider when you buy large memory modules (this time it's "high-density"...I remember SIPP vs. SIMM and FPM vs. EDO, a nd single- vs. double-sided and...all this other PC crap).
So I put the Reg+ECC simms on ebay, hoping to recoup at least some of the loss.
Today the pack sold for $451, the money is already in my account and
the parcel is shipped. 8-]
Do not spray electrical contact cleaner into your T610 mobile, because
depending on where you point the bloody nozzle you will
fuck up the LCD.
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"It seems that you've been living two lives. One life, you're "NC2", programming subject for a respectable degree. You have a Bozo Code, pay your taxes, and you... help your students produce their garbage. The other life is lived in faculty computers, where you go by the hacker alias "INFT13-334" and are guilty of virtually every programming sin we have a commandment for. One of these subjects has a future, and one of them does not."Tuesday last week I was told to teach a subject this semester. This semester as in "lectures start on Monday, 11.09."...a whopping four days to prep for a subject I haven't done before; it's also one where the available material is quite lousy. Two different lecturers have taught it before, and one of them...
Back to the trenches, then.
Some articles about an Auckland police woman who's been
moonlighting as a prostitute. (Who will not lose her job or anything:
prostitution is legal in NZ.)
Pretty weird stuff.
but not out the other...
Amazing how our brain stores stuff and associates emotions with triggers.
What a lovely read:
"Emotional balance: The sniper must be able to calmly and deliberately kill targets that may not pose an immediate threat to him. It is much easier to kill in self-defense or in the defense of others than it is to kill without apparent provocation. The sniper must not be susceptible to emotions such as anxiety or remorse."Source: FM 23-10, US Army Sniper Training Field Manual, page 1-4 on Personnel selection criteria (html or pdf).
An interesting read - if not exactly aligned with any career path ideas I might have...
Apropos big boys and their toys: I now have a new circular saw ($48 for
this Chinese GMC-"brand" one) and a dishwasher. The dishwasher is boring
but useful, while the saw is exciting and dangerous.
Looks like I won't update this blog anymore. The rest of the site
might stay, don't know yet if I want to keep anything at all or not.
Yesterday the christmas gift from my family in .at arrived.
Christmas as in "Christmas 2005".
After a measly 6 months enroute and with the outside paper-and-plastic tube in a battered and fucked up state, but it arrived. From the looks of it, the postal idiots took the 'fragile!' note as an encouragement first to pack a few tons of junk on top of the tube and then to route it via Mars...
One up, one down, one up, one down.
The weather cleared up by about 1530, but I was too busy
then to rush to the hills.
Drove to the shops for some more wood, woodworking tools and beer and vodka; I noted some odd piece of bent broken metal lying on the car floor near the pedals. On further inspection it looks like a piece of spring steel belonging to a large-diameter bushing or something like that....Ha, I'm pretty sure that's the reason why the steering doesn't lock up anymore, very good...guess I drove about 2000km with the occasional Hhhummmph!-moment when you suddenly needed all your upper arm strenght to turn the fucking wheel, so knowing that the problem is...well, gone - counts as an up. (it's not just my car that's slightly bent.)
One the way back I noted that the odometer is frozen; must have been so at least since yesterday when I reset it after refuelling. Sweet! No more need for services and oil changes as it'll always be at 258504km! *giggle* (it's not just my car that's slightly bent.)
Time: Saturday. Weather: some drizzle, clouds, occasional patches of sun which
have increased over the last half an hour.
I didn't go flying; Rob and others had a quick wet sleddie last I heard.
Instead I rediscovered how sweet sounding (and full of grace) ancient analog
audio gear can be.
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How to make perfectionists like me happy:
I found a sharpening stone in a thrift shop today ($2), and already
happily honed all my dull kitchen knives to new sharp splendor.
Horracle buys Sleepycat.
"In fact, 100% of Sleepycat's employees are expected to transition to Oracle, so we retain all our deep technical expertise and community relationships."Yeah, right. R.I.P., dear cat.
"Yet year after year, it's the same routinesays Jack Skellington in one of my most loved movies, The Nightmare before Christmas, but I don't.
And I grow so weary of the sound of screams"
This gal is soon to discover that it is not safe to inline-link to pictures on my server without asking me (as another spaced girlie had to learn recently). Maybe the same old same old will help... To say it with Jack's words:
"That's all right. I have a special present for you anyway. There you go sonny. Hohohohehehe!"
I'm over two weeks late with that posting but I wanted to mention
that The Quiet Room is
a very interesting movie. I watched it two weeks ago on SBS,
from 0030 to 0230 or so...any paid for staying up late on the next day.
Liked it a lot: not silly saccharine-sweet but low-key, touching, funny at times and quite profound: Rolf de Heer must have been listening to his kids very very well. An adult kids movie, maybe. My recommendation.
These folks make an instant translator for English to Arabic,
Darpa-sponsored, for the military. I'm so waiting for the
news of what happens when the first of the gadgets goes to la-la land and hands
out something Pythonesque...
analog has shown a curiously large
amount of accesses to the killarney site with myspace.com
Referer headers.
Looked at the actual logs, and found out that a stupid girl
had simply included my logo on her
(hideous! eye-cancer alert!) page.
Sweet. No clickable link, not a private copy, nope: just sourced in
my image from my server. Without asking, of course (which would have been
courteous and she'd have gotten permission easily).
I can't contact the silly fool since she has no email address on her site and I'm definitely not going to sign up to myspace (not even using an ephemeral throw-away address from Trash Mail).
mod_setenvif and mod_access to the rescue! Dear sweetblonde247: Your accesses to logo.png are now denied. Learn some manners (and web design, too). HTH, HAND.
Melbourne is nice to visit, going to interesting conferences is cool, too. But that's about it.
If you ever consider submitting anything to an event that uses CG Publisher - don't! or you will be trapped in its maze
of annoying disfunctional crap, missing announcements, illogical user interface
and so on.
Tried it for the third time tonight but ended up wiping all the crap off again and throwing the cartridge across the room in disgust.
Now if you had read this in a call for papers,
"Submissions are limited to 5 A4 pages of 11-point type with reasonable margins excluding bibliography (if any) and appendices. Appropriate file formats include PDF, plain text, or any file that can be read with Open Office."and that in an email from the organisers after (an odyssey of a) final submission
"Could you please submit your final paper in something other than a PDF please? Original file, HTML or Open Office are acceptable. Unfortunately, a PDF is not, as we can't integrate it into the rest of the proceedings document."and if you know me then you will not be overly surprised that my response ran along the lines of
"You can have LaTeX, Postscript or PDF. I won't use Openoffice and I won't write papers in HTML - the same as you won't write real software in GW-BASIC."In other news it becomes not just likely but absolutely certain that I suck at using a caulking gun. Even with latex-based sealant (which is heaps easier to use than silicon) I can't get a straight-lined wedge of goo done :-(
Tried it for the third time tonight but ended up wiping all the crap off again and throwing the cartridge across the room in disgust.
Enrico Zini notes under a heading of "Spam is useful":
Really. I just realized that. In the past, if you wanted to test mail delivery on your mail server, you had to bother logging to a remote server and sending yourself a mail. Now that's not needed anymore: as soon as the server works, spam messages start coming in. So it's not spam, it's PING mails.He's got a point there. I've been doing the same with my recent spam/virus reduction setup changes (switched to mimedefang and love it; more on that in another post).
Scientists have engineered a molecule that "walks in a straight line"
when fed (thermal) energy. They call it a nano-walker.
Now why am I so reminded of the "imp" of the immortal core war game? Molecule Wars, anyone?
The chipboard industry is collapsing!
Particleboard prices soar! Widespread disruptions affect building
industries, housing and interest rates! The End of the World is near!
Save Your Homes!
That's how I felt on Tuesday, after having read &rw's note of two weeks ago: Ikea Brisbane was out of The One Billy bookshelf (White, 202x60). "They've arrived at the port, will be on the shelves in a day or two". *sigh* They need an public stock inventory. I very much dislike driving 60km one way to see only brown, black, ugly Billys.
One of the reasons I bought this Siemens S55 is that it has infrared,
the same power/comms connector as the elder models and that I have software
for my palm pilot to sync address books and do SMS.
One out of these three proved to be correct: it talks via infrared. The connector is not entirely unlike the old one, just sufficiently different to prevent working. And the software? The software relies on the magics of ITU standards and Siemens' previously established+documented AT command set...which the German Bastards decided to not follow for this model.
So, what do you do if your trusty software barfs all the time with errors about "AT+CPBS=ME" failing, and the software of course hasn't been maintained since at least three years ago? Right: first you curse (doesn't help but relieves the anger). Then you look for alternatives (to no avail, they all suck worse). Finally, you take up the heavy duty tools and kludge together a bloody mess of a fix.
First I found out what exactly goes wrong. The software wants to look at both possible sources for addressbooks, the sim card and the phone. It can access the sim card but not the phone (that's the AT+CPBS=ME operation which Siemens decided not to support in this model anymore. Idiots.).
Then the messy fix. RsrcEdit is a very useful if ugly tool to edit palm objects on the fly; I didn't want to wade through the m68k machine code to yank out the references to the second storage location, so I decided to have it look at some working addressbook instead: of the few other accessible areas only ON (own numbers) is writable. So I simply replaced the strings in the data segment of the program suitably so that the ON addressbook is used instead of the ME addressbook. Works. Done.
The result of a quip by one of the cow-orkers today, after a very
useless meeting with some minion of the Evil Overlords. Sigh.
Once Upon A Time, Polaroid made a nice simple elegant model of sunglasses.
I had two sets of these over the years; of course they broke and no matching
replacement was to be found. Grief struck Yours Truly.
But even such pricey high-quality gear has a definite best-before date,
and so the sunnies went south a few months ago (metal fatigue near the hinge).
Naturally this happened just before the trip to AT and I was stuck with
my flying sunnies (which one of my sisters said remind her of
"Puck die Stubenfliege"). I didn't find any nice sunnies in Austria.
Maybe it's the weather or
the people scowling from birth that render
sunnies unnecessary, I don't know.
I do occasionally browse Crazy Clark's and similar junk shops, and one day about four years ago they had a near-copy of said model sunnies for the unbearable price of $1. All hail the junk shop! Didn't I look great? *bruahaha* *snif*
Back here I embarked on another quest for gear (my brain wasn't good for anything useful after the long flights anyway) - and found another reasonable model in Yet Another junk shop (The Reject Shop, IIRC). I was content, and the sunnies cost a reasonable $6. True to the shop's name the sunnies developed a crack through one glass after 15 minutes of wearing. Of course the shop had exactly one single set of this model so it was back to square one.
But finally some (likely) Chinese knock-off artists came to the rescue: in a "Cheap Designer Sunnies" shop (oh the irony!) I found a near-perfect "Armani" model among the tons of gargoyle-style stuff. $30 is a bit much but they fit, look like I want it and I'm happy. End of Story.
Seems like the recent problems with my DAT changer are SCSI related;
it's taken out
heffalump three times in the last two days.
There goes my hope of making a SCSI chain work which consists of a wide controller, two SCA drives internally, a Sun 68-to-50 cable followed by the narrow changer+tape unit and a narrow terminator at the end of the mess. (I don't have any wide cables, sockets etc. to fix up the narrow tape changer...)
Of course this is -as SCSI goes- not a big surprise; everybody knows that termination issues can only be resolved with judicious application of candles, knives and goats. The fact that my setup has worked fine for a few weeks only reaffirms the Magic SCSI Properties.
One or the other silly Waste The Day student club/association/bunch
at work has recently run an annoying ad campaign all over
the place; 2m x 1m display stands everywhere with Shiny Stuff on them and
so on.
Most memorable (for its tackiness) slogan:
"Be Not Afraid of Sudden Fear" (Book of Proverbs)He. Come to one of my exams unprepared and you'll get some sudden fear to be afraid of! Bloody dimwits.
The campaign was centered around their "free exam pack" which exceeded all levels of shite I've seen before (despite being printed on glossy paper): a list of common sense exam "tips" (ala "bring a pen") and on the bottom of the shiny flyer some discount vouchers for various entertainment in Surfers. *blink* Ah, that's where the money for this junk came from...
...and this
(brilliant) scientific paper generator; I'll have to borrow
some of their phrasing (and the diagram generator) for my
own future papers. Because obviously only frilly hot air accomplishes
anything on this stinking planet.
Disgruntled Cynic? Me? Where do you get that impression?
I've got a perl CGI thing that needs to check in data files with ci,
because of child-safety and Tracking Revisions Is Good.
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this will do.
After all the bloody murkins confiscated the "art exhibit" these were
part of.
State of Sabotage, Now!
When I read that I thought they'd salted him, or stuffed His Vileness
or smoked him down to a shrivelled piece of dead meat...but dammit, he's still
breathing.
Along those lines: see what rone cooked up about stupid old Karol (*giggle*).
Seen on a delivery truck the other day: "Pallet Express - too forking easy"
Hear, hear: "Kudzu is not without disadvantages." More on Kudzu and Kudzu-covered $foo here. Almost Zen-like.
I'm rereading Feersum Endjinn. Ah, what fun.
There is just not enough Dada in today's world right now, so I think I'll be posting some Absurdly Silly Useless Weird Thing of the Day for the next while or so.
This is number 1: jakt-wif-lotza-pokits. I like that term, but it's too hot to wear a jacket in this place so I do s/jakt/shurz/.
Just finished packaging the newest version of Exmh for Debian: most of my debianism-patches were accepted upstream, pretty
nice. Upload done, the package
should become available in a few hours.
This release speeds up things considerably; 2.6 and 2.7.0 had suffered badly from a crawling flist and sequences implementation. 2.7.2 finally takes care of that issue and seems to work fine here (I did pull in a few patches from CVS when minor problem reports popped up just after the release).
Only tweak I had to make relates to Edit_Done which now expects a third (dummy) argument. In my setup (don't ask, here be tentacles) emacs's mh-e lisp code handles composing emails and MIME and then tells exmh to send the resulting thing (by forcefeeding a "send exmh Edit_Done..." command to wish *cough* via *cough* echo *coughcough* and a *UCHHHU* shell pipe. Protecting the required "{}" arg from emacs and the shell was less than elegant, but stinking wish only runs commands coming from files, not the command line). All this is so that exmh can do the nifty annotation stuff but cannot commit any MIME mutilations (as mhn sucks plenty). Do you really want to know more? I don't think so.
Or is it just the ones who do movies? I really adore Finnish movies, they're
all barking mad, sick and gaga. Just the right thing for me.
This film was no different: just saw Raid on SBS, and absolutely loved it. Great humour, dark and nasty at times, superb dialogue (even without grokking Finnish, subtitles do work here), just terriffic! Felt a bit like a more modern Kottan.
And I felt reminded of that dislike when I helped rho and Anitta do some
new cables in their house last year.
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Now that isn't new. New are some manifestations I've been dealing with
recently.
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The ABC broadcasts Baraka
tonight. Ahh, lotsa goodness. Not that I haven't
got a copy of the movie anyway, but still: always good to see the
public telly stations make a good non-mainstream program decision.
Last time I saw the movie I started pestering my family for CDs of the Rustavi Choir, David Hykes and The Harmonic Choir and Keith Jarrett; two out of those three should be almost in the mail by now...
Hijacking an airplane: 25 years of Special Lodging.
Beating somebody to death: 13 years.
Raping a child: 11 years.
Selling marijuana while posessing a gun: 55 years.
Beating somebody to death: 13 years.
Raping a child: 11 years.
Selling marijuana while posessing a gun: 55 years.
Welcome to the home of the brave, land of the free, bulwark of proportionate measures...
...wird sehr schön illustriert von dieser Österreichisches Deutsch DB.
they've bolted a "yahoo groups" hump <*barf*> onto the usenet
archive, also adding "features" like email hiding
in the message, body as well as headers - which means that
whatever their stupid robot thinks is an email - ie. anything before and
after an at sign anywhere is replaced by
x...@yourdomain.tld. message ids are obfuckated, too.
all your postings are belong to them (they think). you can't respond (without signing up for "google groups" - yeah right...) and you can't see the email addys anywhere at all.
an interesting thing that came up during the obligatory /. discussion of this stupid move:
apparently the berne convention (which seems to have been ratified even by the silly murkins) states the the author has the right "...to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation."
well, displaying my posts to usenet mangled, with an email address that is invalid and not mine, and without my message ids, breaking all the MIDs or email addresses i may have included in the posting certainly is damaging my reputation as a nerd, nitpicker and Bastard. THEREFORE I OBJECT! <sfx:manic cackle, caused by the realisation that no one cares anyway>
so far most of the country TLD google portals still use the old useful dejagoogle interface, so not all is lost just yet.
for a reputedly tech-savvy and insightful company like google this is an insultingly stupid move earning them a center place in the front row against that wall when the revolution comes.
Grad im Leiberl-Stapel gesehen, und als hinreichend antik erkannt:
Tja, lang ists her *snif*. Beide Leiberln sind - wie üblich bei mir -
nicht gebügelt, aber auch nach 7 Jahren durchaus noch anziehbar
(B-Cat: nicht mehr perfekt aber noch nicht C-Cat: untilgbare Lack-,
Dreck- oder Falschfarben-Flecke; Proto-Putzfetzen).
Well, nowaday's news certainly are good for meteor showers. And ulcers, lots of
ulcers - or don't you feel a little powerless whenever you look at what the
bastards in power do to this planet and the human race?
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Some weeks ago I happened to be up and about still when Rage ran on
the idiotbox (ie. some time after midnight). And there, I think, I saw this
trio doing real funky stuff.
The only thing I remembered was the name: John Butler Trio. No song title. Nothing else, except that the song some kind of drive and a nice beat.
Today I spent some time digging up info on these fellows. Turns out they're actually aussies, and they also have a very nice policy on taping live concerts: do it, but don't sell it. Non-profit trading is fine.
As a matter of fact, they even link to the archive.org pages for all the taped performances from their main commercial website. Now that's pretty cool! Thank You, RBT!
From the few I've sampled, this recording is the one I like best. The quality - see title- is not bad at all, but I can very much understand why the guy wanted to dance around like a fool :-)
Ah, yeah? the song that introduced me to RBT? Zebra (VBR MP3). My recommendation.
(source: UBC exchange rate plotter)
Which War Is This, a very interesting article on media doublethink, labelling of rebels vs.
insurgents etc.
Also very much recommended (but depressing) is Orwell Today, as is Riverbend's blog from hell.
I'm really bad at chess (understatement alert; haven't touched it in
about a decade) but I do appreciatete the geekfactor of this seriously cool chess set.
A hilarious posting by Ed Felten.
The kernel programmers are getting
- old
- bored
- too polite to lousy hardware
- other.
The Swiss Fourmi Lab has nice images (and a few weirdish mpgs)
of what to expect when you're travelling at speeds near c.
Ah, dreaming...
Link to the goodies
Link to the goodies
"Genetic research irreversibly damaged by Excel autoformattingHehe, tough luck. Maybe using the right tools would have been a good idea?
The Autocorrect feature in Excel ... has introduced irreversible errors into genetic research that is tabulated in spreadsheets, because Except autocorrects some identifiers to be dates."
Link to the boingboing article
"Name: W32/Bagle.ad@MM ... Note: The worm carries its source code (assembler) in its body, encrypted. When mass-mailing itself, the worm may also include a copy of the source code (within a ZIP archive, SOURCES.ZIP). It is not unlikely therefore that we will see further trivial variants based on this source."People on the debian mailinglists are already joking whether the thing is DFSG-free.
Link to mcaffee's info
...with his assessement of today's pervasive 'murkin "security theatre".
Link to the Reuters article
Doesn't anyone else remember, back during the Cold War, when we used to laugh at the Soviets for barring photography of bridges, dams, trains, and other items of "strategic importance"? It made no sense as a security countermeasure then, and it makes no sense as one now.That's him on the New York subway planning to ban photography in the tunnels and stations as "aiding terrorists". Idiots.
As always, his CRYPTO-GRAM monthly is a scaringly good read.
Update 30.06.2004:
"The United States has expelled two Iranian security guards employed by Tehran's United Nations offices after the mission was repeatedly warned against allowing its guards to videotape bridges, the Statue of Liberty and New York's subway, U.S. officials said on Tuesday."The explanation seems to be limited to this:
"These individuals were moving around New York City and essentially taking photographs of a variety of New York landmarks and infrastructure and the rest," U.S. envoy Stuart Holliday told reporters at U.N. headquarters."
Link to the Reuters article
My (lack of) luck with ISPs in this place is a bit odd, but then
people call Oz a developing country wrt Internet access and pricing.
The following account of the last 3 years may be boring.
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Jun 9 02:03:04 elephant kernel: Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 809c4000
Jun 9 02:03:04 elephant kernel: tsk->{mm,active_mm}->context = 0000001f
Jun 9 02:03:04 elephant kernel: tsk->{mm,active_mm}->pgd = fc028800
Jun 9 02:03:04 elephant kernel: \|/ ____ \|/
Jun 9 02:03:04 elephant kernel: "@'/ ,. \`@"
Jun 9 02:03:04 elephant kernel: /_| \__/ |_\
Jun 9 02:03:04 elephant kernel: \__U_/
Jun 9 02:03:04 elephant kernel: dumper(11972): Oops
Jun 9 02:03:04 elephant kernel: PSR: 04800fc7 PC: f0030448 NPC: f003044c Y: 00000000 Not tainted
This is what you don't want to see in the logs of a remote box.
Sigh, Linux 2.4.x on sun4m does leave a bit of stability to be desired...
Coldcalling bastards. I got three of the suckers yesterday, but nowadays I'm
about as happy to waste their time as they like to waste mine: I simply
answer their initial "greeting" and put the handset down besides the phone.
(another way of sucking their time is to
interject "please hold a second" and then putting down the handset,
works about as well.)
...
About two or three minutes later they've usually given up givin their spiel to thin air and I hang up. That at least gives me the illusion of them losing valuable time for other coldcalls and thus tones down my murderous anger about those assholes^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^Wmakes me happy.
Apparently something died somewhere in the kitchen walls or the space
behind the oven; whatever it is, it smells. Badly. And with the Aussie
tradition of tiling shoddily (only the visible surfaces, abutting to
the kitchen cabinets), I can't remove the plinth even if I
wanted to find out more about the stink. FSCK. Guess I'll be
moving the kitchen renovation plans forward a little bit :-(
...not that i'd need any, but independent scientific support
is nice to have.
"The researchers, at the New York Hospital Medical Centre of Queens led by Dr Steven Nurkin, looked at ties worn by doctors, their assistants and medical students at a teaching hospital in New York and compared them with ties worn by the hospital security staff.Link to the storyAlmost half the ties (47.6%) worn by clinicians were found to harbour potential disease-causing bacteria. "Studies such as this remind us about what we may bring to our patients' bedside," Dr Nurkin said. "By increasing our awareness and making simple behavioural changes we may be able to provide a better quality of healthcare."
The researcher said their study questioned whether wearing a tie was in the best interests of patients.
Now who is surprised by the indications that the beheading of that american
was staged and likely not committed by the all-encompassing "terrorists" but
by fatso murkins? Inquiring minds want to know...
Link to the story
Recently read K.W.
Jeter's "Noir" - apart from his views about IP and copyright a very
interesting book.
Baen makes a lot of their SF books available as ebooks for free, and they occasionally do anthology/theme CDs. Thanks, Baen! (I'm not buying their webscription stuff, because the free material is good enough for my palm pilot and otherwise I mostly prefer dead-tree books, so I'm still a supporting customer.)
This guy here offers most Baen CDs via Bittorrent, and the stuff works great :-)
I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations leads North from Kiev, towards so called Chernobyl "dead zone", which is 130kms from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there on empty roads.Elena's storyThe people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes.
In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago - except for an occasional blade of grass that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again........ a few centuries from now.
Update 27.05.2004:
Seems her story is a little bit, ahem...embellished. Anyway.Link to boingboing posting
Yes, that's a thing I'd like to have: a cheap surveillance camera
zapper based on a laser pointer and a scope.
Link
Link
A fully mechanical high-precision pocket calculator, designed in the
late 1930s.
Link
Link
i love blosxom's static rendering mode, my hardware is ancient and slow.
the available plugins are quite borken, though: in the last 36hrs i've
submitted about 4 bug reports and rewritten two modules from scratch
(think positive: that is possible at all).
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