Soft-ice-wear

Posted on July 13, 2008 by Arthur

I had troubles with a patched up version of the Flashplayer 10 plugin (Ubuntu-non-free) this weekend and I wasn’t surprised to see a new patch being applied just a couple of hours ago. Additionally, it looks like a Firefox patch made it through too. OK: this still means that the WordPress media uploader is broken. It uses Flash, you see, and it appears to have put in place new security measures, which haven’t been taken care by the WordPress developers. So, if you see that silly error when trying to upload files (the browse files thing seems to disappear everytime you open the upload box), you may want to check out a plugin to force WordPress to ignore the internal Flash uploader. Or you can wait out for WordPress 2.6. I may consider moving to another ‘platform’ before that hits the streets.

So, yeah: talking about software, I saw this application demoed the other day and it purports to be a Universe Sandbox (that’s also the name of the software). I think it allows you to smash galaxies and that: if you’re in a destructive god-like mood, you may like it (Windows only, though, so not really a help for me here).

There’s a great interview with a NASA developer about the software for their missions and landers. This quote stuck out (on the premise that software produced by the government should be released to the public domain):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean even though these are not military spacecraft, the technology used in them is space technology. And so the State Department does not allow us to release anything that we’ve done in terms of technical details to foreign scrutiny. Now, in fact as I said, we have a team of Canadians. The Canadians delivered our meteorology instruments, and we had to be very careful about our relationship with them and how much we could disclose to them.

And the very last item: I noticed the Pencil project, a sketching and prototyping plug-in for Firefox. Yeah: it really works too, so if you’re in dire need of making application mock-ups, it might actually be useful (without a doubt, it will also probably run via ‘xul-runner’).

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Marburg

Posted on July 13, 2008 by Arthur

Via Aetiology, I found out that the Marburg virus was discovered in a Dutch woman: According to Dutch reports, Friday (or Thursday night) she didn’t survive (Dutch language alert, see also WHO report about the individual case). That same article at nu.nl reports that around 100 people that were in close contact with her have been put under medical observation, which I presume means that they probably regularly have to contact their family doctor about their physical condition.

The Marburg virus hit Europe before in 1967 when 30 or some people became infected with the virus: the primary infections were lab workers who did experiments on monkeys, which were imported from Africa. Technically, the virus is part of the filovirusses group, which also includes the Ebola virus.

Talking about Ebola: Just this week a report came in that researchers may have found the virus’ ‘Achilles heel’:

“The structure of the glycoprotein shows us the very few sites on its surface that are not cloaked by carbohydrate,” Ollmann Saphire explains. “These [sites] are the chink in the armor, or the Achilles’ heel, that we can target antibodies against.

“We now have a much better handle on how in the world this virus gets into cells,” Ollmann Saphire says. “We also have new maps we can use to develop strategies to fight against it.”

The article reads like a report from a war-zone, but then, this kind of research is like a nuclear arms race.

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Universal Fog

Posted on July 12, 2008 by Arthur

W henWhat can you say I was younger, I always associated (morning) fog with pending clear weather and sunny periods, which is definitely not true for Saint John: the question here is not when it will clear up but actually, when the next fog patch is going to hit the streets.

The fog has its advantages though: people seem to care less about other people making photos of them, as they try to rush their way through the grey stuff. Additionally, you’ll get free bokeh when you make pictures of them using a cruiseship as a backdrop.

Update Saint John Port Authority maintains a list of cruise ships that are expected to come to town.

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Speed

Posted on July 5, 2008 by Arthur

I thoughtA blue boat Mark’s posting about the new Adobe Acrobat 9 was the hilarious. If you’re into more snark, try the Adobe Acrobat 9 installation guide as done by the MicroPledge site.

After the unpacking, the install process itself took 10 minutes. I could only thank Adobe’s engineers, presuming they were filling up my hard drive with yummy icons, tasty DLLs, and amazing 3D JavaScript add-ons. No matter — the 210 MB it required was there to be used.

I was doing some Delphi coding earlier this week and was reminded of the fact that the Borland Inprise Borland Codegear… OK, let me try that again. I was doing some Delphi coding earlier this week and I had noticed (before) that the former Borland tools were bought up by Embarcadero Technologies. I could say this nicely, but lets keep it friendly for now1: at least the designer of Delphi (and earlier Pascal compilers) ended up designing the C# language and .Net Framework (see also The Borland Conspiracy Theory). I only wished that the Pascal language designers had done away with the silly ‘assignment’ syntax (:=): you know, with this emerging emoticons craze on these Internets I could say it slightly resembles a guy growing a thick beard. Oh wait, this just came through my earpiece: the emoticons craze is so early 90s.

1 Though, programming in Delphi taught me to write solid leak-free code, I guess. Oh the joys of freeing up objects yourself

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A suffering object

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Arthur

An assortmentA feeling that something is weird of links, or as my English-speaking portion of my brain prefers to call them: a ‘whole bunch of I-forgets’.

A while ago, a Dutch teacher discovered a weird object in the constellation of ‘Leo Minor’. Thanks to the discovery, it looks like that the Dutch word ‘Voorwerp’ is going to be the next famous Dutch word (The other word of course being ‘apartheid’). The word itself reminds me of long and repetitive Dutch grammar classes and yes that particular part, ‘lijdend’ voorwerp.

Talking about ‘suffering objects’, what can I say about the Conservapedia vs. Lenski spat? Not much, considering ArsTechnica‘s excellent breakdown of, well, the breakdown of Conservapedia? Too much spare time. Additional bonus: Reddit thread.

Slashdot reports that Microsoft released the specifications for pre-2007 Office file formats. And here I was thinking that I’ve read about this before (earlier on xsamplex). On the good side, that is if you feel obliged, go hack at the fileformat. This also reminds me of a website that discusses several other well-known binary formats, including PDF.

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Unused icons.

Posted on June 23, 2008 by Arthur

When I was playing Call of Duty 4 online (earlier on xsamplex), I used to have a running joke when fellow PC players always asked me about my favourite mouse configuration: I said I was actually playing the game on a touch screen.

That was almost a year ago, and I just noticed that HP is (soon) to be releasing their newest touch based PC, probably well ahead of Apple. This is an exciting development, of course. But watching the demos on the HP site, this quote from one of the Flash movies which showcases HP’s Touch software (built on top of Windows Vista, it appears), makes me laugh:

Use the top row for programs you use everyday. Use the bottom row for your other programs.

For some kind of reason, I foresee a bright future for a ‘There are unused icons on the bottom row’-application.

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Ready to go

Posted on June 22, 2008 by Arthur

ARepublica couple of weeks ago, I was humming the tune of Republica’s “Ready To Go” (mp3, +30 seconds): earlier I had found an excellent live performance of the song at VH1 Loudly Fashionable (or something like that), which led to a search for the original European version of the song.

Apparently, the band (or rather their record company) released two versions of the song: A US version (which sounds a bit more rock-like and is probably the one everybody is familiar with) and a European one (which sounds a bit more ‘techno-like’). Adding to the confusion, the band also produced two different videos for each continent. Whichever version you fancy, the song became a hit on both continents: in Europe the band got mainly positive reviews and was branded as one of the most promising UK bands. That was until the members decided to disband the band and go their own ways. Saffron, the band’s vocalist, ended up contributing to various other artists’ recordings (The Cure, Junkie XL) and even sang in a London musical called ‘Starlight Express’. In between, there was an incident about a record company releasing an unauthorized ‘Best Of Republica’ CD, which prompted a swift statement from Saffron and her fellow members to their fans not to buy this CD.

What surprises me is that the song is popular with the YouTube crowd: from people who make machinima movies to aspiring musicians who prefer to create ‘unplugged’ versions of any hit-song mankind has ever produced. I’d be the last person in the world to say that this song doesn’t have a catchy chorus.

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Same old. Same old.

Posted on June 22, 2008 by Arthur

This week, the New England Journal of Medicine reported about a small success in the fight against (skin) cancer: An Oregon man diagnosed with skin cancer, was injected with a couple of billion of cloned T-cells of his own and saw his cancer go into complete remission.

Via Slashdot (thread), it appears the old adagio holds true: Bad boys get all the girls. I also hear that thrill-seeking male humans have a shorter lifespan, or, eventually shut themselves out of the mating process because of a lack of other useful skills needed in societies driven by the sciences. This is old news: your mom (and dad) warned you to stay clear from people like these. Also: what about bad girls?

The best part is last: CNN has a whole bunch of sections dedicated to ‘busy moms and parenting’. The one article that attracted my eye was the one about mothers with twins, which reads as a proof that humans have lost the ability to provide and care for twins. Hey: In general, twins can perfectly take care of themselves, particularly when they’ve figured out how to communicate with each other.

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Whirl

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Arthur

So, Obama has become the Democrats’ presidential candidate, which reminds me of his best moment of his campaign, a rebuttal to laughter from Hillary Clinton on the question why there are so many Clinton advisers on his team:

Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me as well.

It also appears that Obama is highly favoured in countries outside of North America. It’s the economy, stupid!

During my brother’s visit here, we didn’t have much time to watch the Euro 2008 (Soccer/Football). Later this afternoon, I found out that the Dutch team is doing very well. It’s their second win in the “Pool of Death”, which means that they’re literally going to the quarter-finals. I was able to watch the tail-end of Supersport’s coverage of the win and watch the commentators discuss the Dutch coach’s (Van Basten) options for their last (pool) game against Romania: sent in his best players or have a ‘B’ team play.

Not that I’ll be able to watch the next games, or lets say, summaries of the older games: the EUFA (the European soccer association) has complete control over who is allowed to broadcast their games, how it’s being sent to soccer fans and the amount of money they charge to them. Watch for a crackdown on YouTube the next couple of weeks.

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Evil Twin

Posted on June 8, 2008 by Arthur

Birthday

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Missing: 2 Milky Way arms.

Posted on June 4, 2008 by Arthur

I found thisWhere are we at? map of the Milky Way (warning HUGE [5000×5000]) via Reddit (thread). The picture comes from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and (ofcourse), comes with a brief press release about the actual point of the map: Two of Milky Way’s arms have gone missing! And you thought the announcement that mrs. Clinton was going to suspend her campaign was important news. Uh, no. Maybe.

Apparently, the researchers at Caltech are talking about the fact that previous models and maps suggested that the Milky Way had 4 arms:

“For years, people created maps of the whole galaxy based on studying just one section of it, or using only one method,” said Benjamin. “Unfortunately, when the models from various groups were compared, they didn’t always agree. It’s a bit like studying an elephant blind-folded.”

If you’re curious where we are at, click the image above. If you like spoilers, or, worst, in case you get kidnapped by a bunch of Space Invaders who look slightly similar to Mork from Ork: Our small sun is located near an arm called the Orion Arm, or Orion Spur, which is located between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms.

Update 1: These kinds of maps remind me a bit of the earliest ones of our planet.

Update 2: Oh dear, you may want to have this webpage ready (constellations, constellations!) on your iPod Touch in case you really get abducted by Mork.

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Dontknowsaurus

Posted on June 1, 2008 by Arthur

After seeing a picture at Reddit (a biblical person riding a dinosaur) with a long winding comment thread, I found myself looking for statistics about fossil finds. More or less, I’m looking for the answer to the question of “Which continent has the most fossil finds?”.

The web is not particularly helpful: Enchanted Learning has a couple of pages dedicated to specific dinosaur finds per continent: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and Antartica.

Looking (skirmishly) at the Asia page (above), it seems to tell me that hardly any gigantic dinosaurs were found in that Middle East region, but, I guess, maybe this explains why there’s so much oil overthere (reminder: how oil forms). Additionally, it appears that most of the dino fossils appear to have been found in North America. You can make up your own mind about that.

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En. Ix.

Posted on May 31, 2008 by Arthur

I haven’t touched my (personal) Windows laptop for a while: mainly because, I’ve been (primarily) using Ubuntu for things I normally did on Windows. This is both a good and bad sign: First of all, I’ve settled on using specific Linux tools to process my RAW photos (using UFRaw and The Gimp). Yes, I noticed RawStudio (don’t get me started on F-Spot), but while close to what I’m looking for, it misses features like cropping and that. On the bad side: I’ve not been doing a lot of side-programming, so things I’ve been working on have been lingering around, so to say.

This brings me to a couple of notes of note:

If you’re into making your own (Debian) based Live distribution, you may want to check into the Debian Live Project: I only mention it here because I keep losing the link and whenever I keep thinking of it, I end up looking for it on Google.

Way earlier, I was reminded that people actually buy (Windows) software to help them recover data from (accidentally) erased or formatted hard disks. You can also use the tools on the Knoppix CD for this. Or even better, the Knoppix Security Tools Disk.

And, if you really want to nuke your harddrive, because you’re being chased by a bunch of aliens, you may just as well do it the right way. DBAN, is a self-contained boot disk that can format your drive securely and thoroughly.

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