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.

No points for guessing when I'll have to transfer some money to AT for paying alimony for Cornelia.

(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.

Or how else would you explain the rise of "crap" over "fuck" in the linux kernel sources?

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

"Genetic research irreversibly damaged by Excel autoformatting
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."

Hehe, tough luck. Maybe using the right tools would have been a good idea?
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".

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.

"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.
click here for the rest of the story...

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.

About 1% of this JBOD would do me fine, TYVM...
Link to the system the disks belong to

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. Almost 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.

Link to the story

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. The 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.

Elena's story

Seems her story is a little bit, ahem...embellished. Anyway.
Link to boingboing posting

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 :-)

Yes, that's a thing I'd like to have: a cheap surveillance camera zapper based on a laser pointer and a scope.
Link

nice stuff for !americans, geeks and other non-mainstream people.
Link

A fully mechanical high-precision pocket calculator, designed in the late 1930s.
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).
click here for the rest of the story...