All things Bulgarian world news.

Posted on July 24, 2007 by Arthur

This morning, I read that the 6 Bulgarian medical workers who were imprisoned in Libya, were released after being jailed for 8 years. If you’re not familiar with the story, the BBC’s Q&A and the workers’ profiles should get you up to speed fast. To summarize (and since we all like happy-ends), the EU paid a lot for this (there’s still a lot of confusion about what amount was paid) and will start normalizing their trade relations with the once-pariah-for-life-country.

The other thing that surprised was that the Bulgarians were flown to Bulgaria in the French presidential plane accompanied by no-one else than Mrs. Sarkozy, which has European (and particularly French) papers wonder if this was ‘a presidential scoop’ or that she actually played a role. It should be no surprise that mr. Sarkozy has planned a visit to Libya tomorrow.

Most of the North American news, however, concentrated on the Democratic candidates debate, which (for a change) included the First Ever Video Comments And Questions Section, featuring all your favourite YouTube stars. Oh Noes! It wasn’t as dramatic or bad: but I wonder which (American) demographic these YouTube users actually represent.

Giving your kids a laptop is not good, according to this Canada.com article: It distracts. According to a fellow student:

In the classrooms itself, you’ll see students who are on it procrastinating, not paying attention. But I don’t see the Internet as any more of a distraction as doodling notes with a paper and pen. Before the laptop, some people would play games on cell phones or text message.”

I read an article about the upcoming quad-core processors that generally run on lower speed but (theoretically) surpass the current single core processors because they handle things more efficiently: Note that efficiently is the correct term here. The article raised some concerns about the implications of multi-core programming (threading) and the state of that kind of programming in the current popular OSses. For now, you should do with Intel’s comments about multi-cores and programming techniques.

And last but not least, with all these flash floods in Great Britain, a study that (unequivocally) shows that humans are responsible for the change in global rain patterns. And, what can I say about that heatwave in Hungary?

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Back to X3

Posted on July 20, 2007 by Arthur

With X3 Reunionthe intermittent (or rather lack of) Internet connectivity earlier this week, I decided to copy my savegame data back to the X3 game directory and play a couple of rounds.

Fun: it took a while to get used to the controls, but after an hour my trade routes were set-up and running again (2 Mercuries and 2 other medium freighters), safely [I hope] guarded by a fleet of small to medium fighters. I ended up going after the Nova in the 2nd Unknown Territory: apparently one of my savegames was geared to get that one. I had given up, I guess. The only way to get there unharmed is to get a fast fighter (Discoverer or the Boron M5 class ship I forget the name of) with a jump device, go in, change ships (while exchanging freight) and jump out in the Nova to Grand Exchange. The Discoverer I considered ‘scrap’, but apparently made it out unscathed too.

I’m not sure if EgoSoft (the maker of X3) is planning to create a succesor to the game: it doesn’t look like it. Their website only lists 2 extra bonus packs (including XTM, which I might try) and for the rest, the forums seem to be geared to modding only.

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Oh, yeah

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Arthur

There’s this excellent BBC documentary about Titan (the moon) and Huygens (you may remember the successful Huygens touchdown). If you’re a movie aficionado, pay attention to the music that accompanies many scenes. You may recognize some of them.

There’s a myth out there that you can’t run Disk Defrag and MediaPlayer at the same time. Or that you need at least 2 Gig to have MediaPlayer play smoothly. This is bullocks.

National Geographic has a great article about malaria and mosquitoes (more on malaria at the WHO).

I’m not sure if this one fits in this posting, but, remarkably, a couple of developers announced Sylph-Searcher, a program that promises fast searching through (Sylpheed) MH folders. Wait: the announcement was made in the Postgres developers mailing-list. Apparently, you can use a database to store all your important e-mails from within Sylpheed. This makes perfectly sense: I mean, do you remember your very first e-mail? 100 to 1 that you don’t have that one anymore and that you wished you saved it somewhere safely into a database.

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Spoof attacks

Posted on July 13, 2007 by Arthur

Earlier, when logging on normally I discovered that my Internet connection had literally come to a crawl: simple pings to google.com took over 3000 ms. Then I remembered that I may have mentioned it here before (or earlier), but I can’t find that particular entry:

Some (fixed/reserved) Aliant IP-addresses are frequently under attack. I’m not sure why or which IPs, but the the one allotted to me this morning was literally under fire every each second. The firewall held up good, but came (as said) almost to a standstill.

Next time, I should remind myself to collect those ‘dirty’ IP addresses and forward them to Aliant: not that I expect them to be able to something about it.

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In science today…

Posted on July 11, 2007 by Arthur

I readSo many lights ago… that astronomers have read detected light from the earliest stars in the galaxy. To be exact: Light that shone 13 Billion years ago. The astronomers used a technique called ‘gravitational lensing’ (using gravity of nearby objects to magnify the light from distant objects) to zoom in on 6 galaxies.

The BBC article has some amazing photos of those galaxies. However, the picture above shows and tells the complex story of galaxies that are far away: in a historical sense, or say, past tense. I find this fascinating and I’m not sure why I do. Earlier, I mentioned Eta Carinae: the 7,500 light year away star is about to ‘super nova anytime’ in the past (Or as the Register so appropriately says ‘New Pics of an Old explosion’1).

Related: Astronomers detect water (vapour) on exo-planet

1 This could be a great name for a movie…

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You, bug

Posted on July 11, 2007 by Arthur

I get a kick out of hardware bugs: unexpected (but consistent) behaviour in normal electronic devices. Maybe electronic devices were a bit more foolproof back in the early 80s, basically because they probably had a couple of simple transistors that were easy to program. Nowadays, everything seems to come with (some sort of) operating system.

  • My very first MD Player (Sony, I can’t remember the modelnumber, but it’s not listed here, and it was one of the very first models released in Europe) had such a crappy ‘randomizer’ that I could predict which track it was going to play next. Now, I know that writing a good randomizer is a true art, but I wonder if Sony’s engineers were in a time crunch to get the first players out.
  • My DVD player (which does run some kind of custom OS) goes in complete lock-down mode whenever there’s an unreadable disk in it. I expect the player to say ‘Uh-Oh. I can’t read this’ and then barf at me.
  • My laptop’s fan is running on high whenever the computer comes out of hibernation. It does not quit. This can be quite funny when it’s running on batteries. The only way to get it to stop is to restart the computer.
  • Pressing the snooze button on my alarm-clock always seems to turn on the radio (naturally, it has a button for that too and it’s called ‘Radio On’). The worst part is that there’s no way turn the radio off after that, except for pulling the plug.

Maybe we should go back to ‘Made in Taiwan’ devices.

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Virtualization

Posted on July 5, 2007 by Arthur

Yesterday, the VM Player and UbuntuBBC had an article about the data ticking timebomb: the problem that old digital files are getting less accessible because these files can’t be read by newer versions of software. This particularly happens with proprietary binary file formats:

The pace of software and hardware developments means we are living in the world of a ticking time bomb when it comes to digital preservation

The article goes (indepth) about the two XML document formats (Microsoft’s OpenXML and the independent ODF) that could solve the data problems. Interestingly, the article contains a video with a demo of Microsoft’s Virtual PC which (finally) convinced me to try out both Virtual PC and VMPlayer (VMWare). To make it short: VMPlayer obviously wins. Well, half-and-half.

The difference is evident: Virtual PC emulates a standard stock PC: you can assign more memory, diskspace but there’s nothing you can do about the video. Apparently, Virtual PC emulates a ‘stock’ S3 VGA card. On the other hand: In Virtual PC it’s easy to create a virtual machine: in no time I had a Debian Sarge server running using the regular installation disks. This is absolutely educational: However, as said before, don’t count on using ‘fancy-smancy’ KDE or Gnome on Virtual PC.

VMWare’s VM Player, a huge install with many additional components, takes a different approach: you can’t create ‘Appliances’ (virtual machines) from the Player itself (you need the VM Server and the VM converter tool for that I think) but you can try many of the pre-made appliances at the ‘Appliance marketplace’. You can literally find hundreds of ‘appliances’; ranging from snapshots of complete Linux OSes to firewalls (most of them naturally based on Linux or BSD). For example, how about a Zimbra virtual machine, a WordPress Jumpbox, (working) Postgres appliances (~14 MB), backup servers, firewalls and what not. If you run VM Server, imagine the devices you can run and actually use. This is, as they say in ‘nerd land’ “Good Stuff”.

In a couple of hours, I expect the download of the desktop version of Ubuntu to be finished. More on this later, I hope.

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LCD screens (and savings)

Posted on July 4, 2007 by Arthur

I was LCD vs. CRT vs. Projection TVsreading this article at BBC’s (Gadget threaten energy savings) and was not really surprised about the finding that the larger the LCD screen, the more power they use, eventually, topping regular CRT screens (at and around 24 or 25 inches). This is basically because each pixel on an LCD screen requires power. With larger resolutions, LCD manufacturers use ‘multiplexing’ to power LCD screens.

I am surprised to see that projection TVs actually do good. If you want the read the whole report yourself, here you go (if that link goes dead in the future, try here: look for ‘The Ampere strikes back’ article).

Talking about LCD screens: I discovered my first dead pixel on my laptop screen.

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The ban

Posted on July 2, 2007 by Arthur

Via the BBC, I read that the EU has published the last version of the airlines blacklist. The list includes all 51 carriers from Indonesia, 8 from Moldava, 6 from Bulgaria and a handful from Africa. Banned means (according to a EU official)

“European citizens should avoid flying with these carriers. They are really unsafe.”

A surprising addition to the list is Indonesia’s national carrier, Garuda Airlines. Just last week, the Indonesian government cleared all their airlines so that they could continue flying. Garuda (at that time) was promoted to the top safety category, three months after one of its planes crashed (killing 21 passengers).

A complete list can be found at the EU Transport Agency’s site (PDF file).

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Power2

Posted on July 1, 2007 by Arthur

I woke up late this morning to notice that the alarm-clock was blinking. It had been blinking for 22 minutes already: which means that we had a power outage around 9:00 AM. This is not spectacular news, albeit that today’s it’s Canada Day. I assume this is Nova Scotia Power’s way to say ‘Happy Canada Day’.

This reminds me that a couple of months ago, I sent NS Power an e-mail regarding the early DST this year and the power savings thanks to that in the US (hint: bar none). I quote:

Two years ago, the US congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which included an extension to Daylight Savings Time for 2007. According to US Congress, extending Daylight Savings Time was going to conserve energy.
With Canada following suit this year, my question is, was there a noticable change in electricity usage in March?

Thanks,
Arthur

The reply from NS Power was short and brief:

Thank you for contacting us online. Usage for March 2007 has been consistent with other years usage and as a result we have not noticed a significant decrease in electricity.

So, there you have it.

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Golden Brown

Posted on June 29, 2007 by Arthur

And Stranglers - Golden Brownthen I was humming The Stranglers’ ‘Golden Brown’ out of the blue (sample, 30+ sec, or Daily Motion video).

If you’re not familiar with the song, in short, it’s the only hit I know that has a 6/8 time signature, which is one good reason to like the song. Actually, the instrumental adds another extra beat so once in while which makes this song the only (popular) song I know with a 13/8 time signature making it hard to grasp at times. I was in my early teens when I heard this song first: in a later part of my life this song (when played in an out-of-town club) frequently served as a reminder to get the last train back to my home city.

I’m (for the rest) not familiar with the rest of the band’s repertoire: Wikipedia calls the music of the band a mix of ‘intellectual absurd punk new wave’ and (briefly) mentions that the band players were classical/jazz music-trained. Additionally, the members had different opinions about musical directions, eventually leading to the (inevitable split) in the early 90s.

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Freaky Thunder

Posted on June 28, 2007 by Arthur

Last night and this morning, we had some freak thunderstorm: I’m probably not the only person who had a hard time sleeping. Additionally, the storm brought several power outages: I hear that there are still people without power this PM. Having no power this morning meant lugging around one of the water bottles, playing around with bowls and lots of improvising. And lots of cold instant coffee.

The local radio says that another thunderstorm is heading this way. You wouldn’t say that if you’d look outside the window right now: it’s sunny, quiet but yes, extremely muggy.

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Is it safe?

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Arthur

Last weekend, I was looking up the Numberwang videos at YouTube (earlier) and discovered that I missed one, the German Numberwang’. That one comes with the most hilarious imitation of a scene from a movie starring Dustin Hoffman. It’s at and around 1:10, if you’re in a rush.

This also reminds me of an announcement that the EU and the US have agreed on sharing information of passengers on transatlantic flights. From each passenger the US security agencies will get 34 pieces of information. This information will be kept for 15 years1. I bet this is safe too.

So, Tony Blair is out and Gordon Brown is in. The Prime minister is out and his finance minister is in. This sounds like a familiar scenario. Oh, I remember: when Chretien stepped down, his former finance minister Paul Martin took over. We all know what happened after that.

Not related: everytime I hear or think of the Safari browser, I keep hearing the themesong of Daktari.

1 06/29/07: EU states back accord.

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