March 07, 2006
All good things come to an end
After a good two years, my Macintosh retires today (as a result of both the screen slowly failing and the office reducing inventory). Pitty, really. It was a very nice little machine that completely changed my mind about Macs.
Does this mean I need to make another avatar?
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 12:18 PM
October 07, 2005
Control of the Internet.
BRAIN: Come, Pinky, we must prepare for tomorrow night.
PINKY: Why, Brain? What are we going to do tomorrow night?
BRAIN: The same thing we do every night, Pinky. TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!
The UN and the EU are both fighting to have a larger slice of the pie that is known as 'control of the internet'. They currently have none. The US, which invested, developed and created the internet through research and expenditure own the 'root servers', controlling it all. The Guardian reports:
The EU had decided to end the US government's unilateral control of the internet and put in place a new body that would now run this revolutionary communications medium ... [The US refused] ... But the refusal to budge only strengthened opposition, and now the world's governments are expected to agree a deal to award themselves ultimate control. It will be officially raised at a UN summit of world leaders next month and, faced with international consensus, there is little the US government can do but acquiesce.
Incidentally, the UN does have an International Telecomunications Union (ITU), and had a chance to develop their own network standards and implementations. I should like a show of hands of people who use X.25 (not the hypersonic rocket plane) over TCP/IP. Thought so.
Which countries were insisting?
Brazil, China, Cuba, Iran, Syria, Russia and several African states.
I cant wait for Fidel, Mugabe, Xiang and Hosni (where's Jaques? He's usually good for a bit of this kind of tomfoolery) to decide what I can read on the internet. China's Ambassador, Sha Zukang, said "This situation is very undemocratic, unfair and unreasonable" - which sounds a salient point, unless you're aware that this week China imposed new rules that allow only "healthy and civilized" news to be read by the mainland's 100 million Web users.
But, above and beyond that, countries exercise complete authority over their own ccTLD servers. Brazil, China, Cuba, Iran control .br, .cn, .cu, and .ir respectively. The root servers see to that. So what control issues do they have?
There is, however, good news. It will be officially raised at... a UN sumit. When was the last time that was actually effectual?
And the US does have a large ace up the sleeve, called "VETO".
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 12:04 PM
And the IgNominee is...
Once more, it is the time of year when prizes are awarded to those who advance science, culture and art. The Ig®Nobel prize was created by the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) and acknowledges actual scientific "achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced."
Some of this years winners include:
MEDICINE: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, USA. For inventing Neuticles - artificial replacement dog testicles, which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness.
PEACE: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, UK. For electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie "Star Wars."
FLUID DYNAMICS: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu , Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Loránd Eötvös University, Hungary. For using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation."
And those are simply some of the many. The complete list of recipients and reasons are available here.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 10:39 AM
September 14, 2005
Great Googly Moogly.
Google has introduced (another) new service. Blog searching! It's in Beta testing, but looks rather good.
It's also not restricted to the Google owned "Blogger".
Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you're looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.
http://www.google.com/blogsearch
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 03:55 PM
September 13, 2005
Sail away, sail away, sail away.
There isn't no call to go talking of pushing and pulling. Boats are quite tricky enough for those that sit still without looking further for the cause of trouble.Sam Gamgee, J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
The forty foot long bronze-age technology boat, pains takingly constructed of reed, date-palm fibres, pitch and tar was manned by an eight man crew, (two Americans, an Australian sailing master, two Omani seamen, two Italian graduate students and an Indian archaeologist). She was dubbed the Magan, and was intended to prove that such a ship could have plied the 600 mile voyage from Oman to Mandvi (India).
Several miles off shore, it was hit by a moderate wave. This tilted the boat "more than expected". 30 minutes later, it was at the bottom of the ocean. Everyone was rescued by a naval vessel that was shadowing them in case of such an event.
“Everyone was very saddened by the sinking of the boat on the first day,” Possehl told The Associated Press by telephone from Oman. “It was a tragedy, especially after it had gotten off to a good start.”
I don't know that 'several miles and sink' in the first day is a terribly good start, but they are undaunted.
Researchers had hoped the voyage would help them learn about Bronze Age boat construction techniques, plus how well such vessels worked, how to sail them, and what life aboard them might have been like.
Not quite like that, not all that well, avoiding waves, brief.
I still find it an interesting project however, there have been a series of curious postulations and recreations about how things might have been done (most notably Egyptian based) and now...
Omani Culture Minister Saeed Haithem told the members of the boat project Saturday that his government will back the rebuilding and testing of another boat, Possehl said.
they're rebuilding. Perhaps the strangest point is that they won't call it a 'replica' of a 4500 year old boat, as there is not enough information about how such a boat was contructed. It's a series of best guesses. Still, best of luck to the bronze age submarine recreationists. And remember the life vests.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 12:03 PM
August 19, 2005
Why? Because we can.
Messing about inside Windows XP and I noticed an unusual .ini file lurking in the WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 directory called oeminfo.ini, and a corresponding bitmap file, oemlogo.bmp
So I edited it as follows:
[General]
Manufacturer=Insane Seal Enterprises
Model=Alpha
And stuck in a new oemlogo.bmp (the size, after measuring is 140x114). Lo and behold, the System Information panel changes.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 03:45 PM
July 15, 2005
Lifegem. When you want your lost loved ones to shine.
Here you will find everything you need to know about this wonderful memorial. The LifeGem is a certified, high quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one as a memorial to their unique and wonderful life.
And they're not joking. They do pets, too.
And of course, as the LifeGem is a one-of-a-kind diamond, it will be a treasured heirloom in your family for generations to come.
"So in this ring is Aunt Mabel, she's the orange-red one, offset with Grandma, Pa, Cousin George and Uncle Fred, they're all blue. And the little yellow ones are Rex, Fluffy, Mugsy and Spot. I'm leaving this to you when I go. You might have to have it enlarged so I'll fit. Why are you running away?"
Amazing what you can do with carbon.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 11:55 AM
July 12, 2005
How to: Transparencies in webpages
This wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus make it a bright transparency...Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
As some have noted, I like transparencies in web pages. Quite possibly too much, as all my pages appear to have them, from Layil to the Time of Darkness Bugtracker and this blog.
This is not purely for Movable Type, it can easily be added to any page that uses stylesheets. If you're not comfortable editing stylesheets, this is not a complex project. Honest.
Inside the stylesheet, usually right at the top, there is a body tag, which will look somewhat like this:
body {
margin: 0px 0px 20px 0px;
background-color: #8FABBE;
text-align: center;
}
This is a simple body tag, taken from the default Gettysburg CSS, offered by SixApart. Yours may be more complex.
To this is added a background image (so you actaully see the opacity setting work), and the opacity settings themselves.
background-image: url(http://www.layil.org/images/MTBackgrounds/rotator.php);
background-repeat: no-repeat ;
background-position: bottom left ;
background-attachment: fixed;
filter: Alpha(Opacity=75);
-moz-opacity: .75;
The background image and it's position are set (fixed on the lower left so it won't scroll, does not reapeat the image to fill up the screen) and, more importantly, where the (two) opacity filters are configured. These two values are the more or less the same thing, they simply target different browsers so that it should work with IE and Firefox/Mozilla. Safari does not work with these. May I suggest using Firefox or Camino instead?
Increasing the number will make it less transparent, lowering it will make it more so. I find 75 (and .75) pleasant, your mileage may vary.
Combining them, the result is:
body {
margin: 0px 0px 20px 0px;
background-color: #8FABBE;
text-align: center;
background-image: url(http://www.layil.org/images/MTBackgrounds/rotator.php);
background-repeat: no-repeat ;
background-position: bottom left ;
background-attachment: fixed;
filter: Alpha(Opacity=75);
-moz-opacity: .75;
}
After saving and rebuilding the stylesheet, you now have a page that you can see through.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 12:41 PM
July 11, 2005
Todays nifty toy
"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."Neil Armstrong
For the moment, I seek distraction. The engine of today's distraction is earth.google.com
A broadband, 3D application that lets you zoom in to an address. using satellite imagery. Which is not so interesting, except that it can also provide you the location of every bar in the area, or if you feel like a night out and away, driving directions can be superimposed.
I don't think I'd use it for that so much, as the images are a little grainy and roads mostly unmarked. However, if a large storm happens to brew, I now know where I can track the progress.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 04:30 PM
June 29, 2005
Switch all power to front deflector shields
The Cat: Why don't we raise the defensive shields?
Kryten: A superlative suggestion, sir. With just two minor flaws. One, we don't have any defensive shields. And two, we don't have any defensive shields. Now I realise that technically speaking that's only one flaw but I thought that it was such a big one that it was worth mentioning twice.
The Cat: Good point, well made.
Holoship, Red Dwarf, Series V
NASA has pulled an old idea out of mothballs, dusted it off and presented it as a rather funky solution to radiation past low-earth orbit. Force fields.
In essence, you need to stop or repel these things as they are very bad for people. The planet has various layers of atmosphere that does the same thing for us, and we tend to wrap our reactors in heavy shielding material, like concrete and lead (or duct tape, depending on funding). Of course, when you need to spend a significant dollar amount per pound of payload, lead and concrete is not an ideal solution for space travel.
Most of the dangerous radiation in space consists of electrically charged particles: high-speed electrons and protons from the Sun, and massive, positively charged atomic nuclei from distant supernovas.
So, the idea goes, why not have a like charge around the astronauts and deflect it all, after all, opposites attract, likes repel. These spheres would have a high charge, 100 mega-volts, which is perfect for all sorts of practical jokes. They do say "most of the dangerous radiation", and I wonder what plans are afoot for the 'other' radiation. And it's not without critics. All research is being done at NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts, which is variously thought of as 'Boffin Nirvana' or 'A Senseless Money Pit'.
All very preliminary and impractical. But more fun to think about than zombie dogs. Ah, progress.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 08:51 PM
June 20, 2005
My introduction to computers and MUDs.
This document describes the usage and input syntax of the Unix Vax-11 assembler As. As is designed for assembling code produced by the "C" compiler; certain concessions have been made to handle code written directly by people, but in general little sympathy has been extended. Berkeley Vax/Unix Assembler Reference Manual (1983)
Code is a strange place to visit. Many things lurk there, and the terrors can be great.
So, how does one get into this stuff?
I always loved computers. Eve before I had one, I loved the idea of them, the things that made them tick. I blame a combination of Wargames, Star Wars and the general mystery that surrounded them. Shall we play a game?
In the second grade, my school obtained a Vic 20, a monster of a machine, which included a tape drive. There was nothing but a few skimpy manuals and some educational games. And a simplistic guide that offered no information about how to actually making this thing work as I wanted.
Intreguing, but... Nothing you could learn anything with.
A few years later, the school introduced a TRS-80. There was a little more documentation, and BASIC entered my life. And you could actually make these machines do something you wanted them to do. And I was hooked.
Of course, games must come into it, and my family was always good at making games and cheap entertainment. My cousin, four years my senior, was making pen and paper sci-fi rpgs before I hit 8. We travelled in super-hyper speeders to the Medusa galaxy, comandeered Transit Shuttles and journeyed to the limits of the galaxy, through wormholes and into alternate worlds. And then my uncle gave me a copy of Dungeons and Dragons for my tenth birthday - and worlds changed for me. Any time I had spare, I read, reread, memorised the books. Played the Fighting Fantasy novels when there was no one else to game with.
Eventually, I scrimped, saved, and hoarded enough money to get myself a Commodore 64. At the age of 13, I learned everything I could about it. When I stretched BASIC to breaking point, and knowing of PEEKs and POKEs, I wondered what the PEEKs and POKEs actually hooked into to do the magic they did. And I discovered assembly for the MOS 6510. I never did figure out the SID chip completely. The C64 also introduced me to Zork, the almost-grandaddy of text-based rpgs.
High school introduced the Apple ][e, already obsolete when I started and still in service when I finished. I was never terribly impressed with it. My apologies to the Apple nuts. And there met and converted several people to role playing games.
What to do after high school? Well, math and physics grades were a little better than passably good. Flight seemed what I wanted to do. I applied to become a pilot in the air force. Most everything was up to par - but the eyesight was not.
By this time, it was a little late to apply for University. I dither a lot, and had pegged hopes on passing the eye exam. I did, however, make it into a TAFE (which is Australian-speak for "You couldn't make university, this is the next best thing"), and I began to study computers in earnest.
Pascal, logic, desktop publishing. I applied to transfer as soon as I could, and did. Monash University beckoned, and a strange hybrid degree, mixed Computer Science/Electrical Engineering/Mechanical Engineering. Digital logic. Data communications. C. Assembly. C++. SQL. What else can we make it do? Study bridge building. Quite honestly, the mechanical engineering part I paid enough attention to for a pass. Stresses and sheer forces in beams? CAD/CAM was the most interesting part, and it wasn't all that interesting. My thesis was on data compression, both voice and images, and I spent hundreds of hours trying to squeeze more voice into less space. Eventually, we ended up with about a 4:1 compression ratio for voice - in real time - on a 386-33.
Then I started working, and accepted the first position I was offered. A jack-of-all trades position, requiring a broad knowledge, but sadly little in the way of coding oportunities.
I'd also kept playing Dungeons and Dragons with some of the guys from high school, who introduced new friends. One of these was Rob. Rob is probably easiest to describe physically as a rugged Tom Cruise, who also sings. Well. And is a nice guy to boot.
Rob is also the guy who insisted I sit down in my computer chair for a few hours and try this MUD thing, which he'd been playing since before the Dwarven Kingdom - Copper, and played back when equipment from the Dwarven kingdom was the hottest stuff in the game. What? I liked Zork, but how does this work? Twenty minutes in, I was ready to quit. An hour in, and I cursed the day I'd met him. Two hours in, and I'd never leave again.
And then, wonderously, I was offered an administrative position on one. And eventually was offered a coding spot. It is amazing how skills become rusty when disused for a decade, and similarily, (after a thousand hours of coding), amazing how quickly they return.
Having brushed off the knowledge in play, it was noticed in my current place of employ. C# (C Sharp, not C Pound) and more code looms large.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 08:10 PM
May 23, 2005
My computer never cras
"But his doom
Reserv'd him to more wrath; for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes
That witness'd huge affliction and dismay"Milton, Paradise Lost.
Yesterday, my computer glitched. A lot of folders went missing - notably my documents and the few things I had on my desktop. Thankfully, by working on several computers, I did have copies of most things, and all the code on the server was more-or-less up to date. I'd thought that this ad-hoc system would actually serve me well in the event of disaster. To an extent, it did. But not well enough. A more systematic approach would have been much better.
Yes. Backups. We've all heard the sermon before. I should have backed up more often. Backups are a chore, and one that's easily put off until later. Or later. Or maybe next week. And, of course, it's only things that I've been working on and I can recreate that readily enough, can't I?
Quite often, it's not until you have a glitch that eats files or a hard drive crash that you appreciate the true value of a backup. And now that almost everyone has a CD burner, backups aren't really expensive. The expensive part in the equation is time, and the little time it takes weekly to burn off a CD is really quite miniscule compared to the time it'll take to repair or recreate everything. Even some things you might not consider. How long did it take to get that MP3 collection near complete? What about your emails, especially if you have registrations codes there? Your internet bookmarks?
Today, the system gets a wipe and all things reinstalled, and what I have left will be put back where it was. So all I've really lost is a handfull of notes, a couple of lists of books that I was looking for, a voicemail and about a day of reinstallations.
Save your data. Even a well behaved computer can become truculent and spiteful.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 11:13 AM