Misc.

Posted on November 18, 2005 by Arthur

Assorted thoughts:

  • calendar?Google Base was released earlier this week. It’s a bit of everything, but mostly it’s supposed to be a ‘database’ (base) for everything or something. All, nice and well until the spammers come out. I honestly expected Google Base to be something like a ‘database’ front-end for stuff you wanted to save alongside your Gmail e-mails. Sort of like, users define their own fields and that, like an Access online. Something to store quick notes in. Thinking of it, heck, where is that calendar for Gmail? (yes, even Google search says it’s coming).
  • Hey. SourceForge has changed their looks. It reminds of uh-like-uh, C-Net!
  • It’s secret memo month! Huzzah! What’s that you say?
  • Cenotaph vs. Epitaph.
  • Related to above (as in this week’s word finds): The Big House is really big, I suppose.

  • Today, I learned that I can make printed copies of everything on the Internet. Or rather in it, if you think of the Internet as a book. How many people read books? Apparently, the Dutch can’t live without the Internet (in Dutch):

    Over 51 percent of the people questioned, absolutely agreed on the statement that ‘the Internet is a crucial part of their life’. The rest of the people questioned is divided over ‘sort of agree’ (22 percent) and ‘not at all’ (10 percent).

    Somewhat related to this: we need more power outages to learn to appreciate idle conversation. There’s truth in that.

  • I found out that I mumble a lot after I’ve stared too many hours at the screen, programming or analysing data. I put in a ticket for that. Soon on your local radiostation: “Help Arthur Talk Through It” – drives.
  • Knowing everything about computers is the latest macho-craze nowadays:

    – ‘Are you the/a Programmer??’
    * ‘What did you expect me to look like? Hugh Jackman?

    Related: Geek Calendar!. More related: worst dressed people are ‘IT people’.

  • ‘Wir tragen der Usenet zu Grabe!’. Maybe more on that later.
    • Posted in Hyperlinks | Comments Off on Misc.

    Civilization 4 (VII)

    Posted on November 17, 2005 by Arthur

    More good news: The Civ IV patch is supposed to come out really soon. Says someone at Civ 4:

    Some of the highlights include multiple AI improvements and tweaks, worker behavior tweaks, MANY game play improvements (ex Animal Husbandry reveals horses), promotion tweaks, a softer pillage sound (requested by many, many people), fixed diplomatic exploits (gold for gold, peace treaty exploit), multiplayer tweaks (Hot seat, Lobby, etc.), memory, caching and performance improvements, etc. There were also a number of video card specific fixes.

    Let’s hope they’re the right fixes. And if they have fixed the black terrain bug, I expect them to give a full (technical) explanation. This is obviously the page that is going to be watch by many Civ4 players.

    Posted in Civilization | Comments Off on Civilization 4 (VII)

    The Star (Toronto)

    Posted on November 17, 2005 by Arthur

    Earlier, reading (and watching video) Crooks and Liars, I found out about the Toronto Star blogs via this item and the one with video of mrs. Zerbisias adequatly fending off O’Reilly’s daily whine.

    Good stuff: a newspaper that lets its columnist blog. I’ve seen that somewhere before.

    Posted in Hyperlinks | Comments Off on The Star (Toronto)

    Yikes

    Posted on November 17, 2005 by Arthur

    Look! The day It’s a 21st century disaster movie1 wrecking havoc in Nova Scotia!

    Wait. Are those palm trees?

    The Day After Tomorrow (2004) (Frame around 00:43:41 )

    1 Reference to the 70s Hollywood disaster movies.

    Posted in NS in movies, The Chest Desire | Comments Off on Yikes

    Tourism down: Arthur revving up campaign

    Posted on November 15, 2005 by Arthur

    Right in wo_oopstime for a thorough op-ed here at xsamplex: Nova Scotia’s tourism is down. Apparently, it’s gasoline and the Iraq war to blame. Like -uh-:

     [The Tourism minister, MacDonald] says the province will concentrate on attracting new visitors from Europe, and from emerging tourist markets in China.

    We could always take the New York approach by begging people to come over to our violently quiet province.

    1 This is almost too funny: I was actually thinking of the Dutch word ‘geweldig’ (amazing) before penning down ‘violently’. One portion of my brain was thinking ‘geweldadig’ (violence/violently), hence the ‘violently’, which now turns out to be a Freudian slip.

    Posted in Tourism Canada | Comments Off on Tourism down: Arthur revving up campaign

    Posting from Ubuntu’s LiveCD

    Posted on November 14, 2005 by Arthur

    IHar-har wouldn’t be a computer freak, if I didn’t try that Ubuntu LiveCD. I’m posting from Ubuntu right now, as you probably figured out. See? Nothing wrong with Linux.

    A couple of years ago, Alfons brought in my first ever copy of a Knoppix, just to convince about the state of Linux. After all, what is important, Linux does work out of the box (We used Knoppix that day to rescue some data after the kitty struck her claws on a wire).

    On the Ubuntu disk, there’s those couple of words that make me think of good times when I read:

    Legally free to copy, modify, share and redistribute.

    Good work from the Ubuntu guys (and the Debian team, naturally): the LiveCD just detected about everything.

    Disks go in my CD binder for everyday use.

    Posted in Ordinateurs | Comments Off on Posting from Ubuntu’s LiveCD

    Ha!

    Posted on November 14, 2005 by Arthur

    Har! I ub_untugot meself a free copy of Ubuntu Linux. A not-named store in the center of the town had them in a small carton display/box. I made sure to ask if they were for free, which they were: one of the workers in the store said that they received loads of those disks. As someone used to Debian, I was pleasantly surprised to see Ubuntu in a regular store. Not that I’m sure of if the store workers are aware of any other Linux. But free as in speech (and beer) is always good. (Note the nice sleeve contained two disks: one the Live Disk, one the actual install disk. My debian collection of 13 disks beats that! [or was that 14?])

    Additionally, I decided to take on the (Daily) Su-Do-ku puzzle in the newspaper. I managed to solve it (also shown above). The idea is to have all rows, columns and 3×3 grids have the numbers 1 to 9 filled in. One clue: start with the row/column/grid that has at least 5 numbers filled out. If I’m not wrong, there should always be two of them.

    Posted in Truro NS | Comments Off on Ha!

    To upgrade or not to…

    Posted on November 13, 2005 by Arthur

    Fwp_16or a couple of weeks I’ve been toying with the idea to upgrade to the latest WordPress version or to move to a different blogging platform. I’ve been playing with NucleusCMS. Actually, I’ve been making ‘plug-ins’ for that one.

    Anyways, I decided to check out the WP trunk on my local server behind me (svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/). Needed to do many more steps though:

    1. Grab a copy of my current data at hoogervorst.ca (mysqldump).
    2. Make a backup of the current WP data (particularly the changes I made)
    3. Copy the trunk data to /var/www/arthur (the test directory).
    4. Copy the original WP-config.php file to this directory.
    5. Copy the original content data to /var/www/arthur/wp-content.
    6. Ensure that new themes data is copied to that directory.
    7. Set the owner of the directories to www-data (Debian)
    8. Set some dirs to write enabled (wp-content)
    9. Load the mysql dump. Several errors: Dreamhost’s MySQL server is outpacing the one here. Needed to delete MyISAM/local data from Create Table scripts. Plus remove the ‘macros’. They appear to be part of MySQL 4 (and higher). Funny that: they must have moved to MySQL 4.0 recently.
    10. Load the index page. Oops. Blank.
    11. Run correction script on wp_options table. Options ‘siteurl’, ‘fileupload_realpath’ and ‘home’ needed to set to the local 192.x.x.x paths.
    12. Load index page. Oops. Error with categories. Missing column. Browse through wp-admin directory. Ah. Run wp-admin/upgrade.php
    13. Done.

    That’s version ‘1.6-ALPHA-2-still-dont-use’, you see above. I’m pleasantly surprised. I don’t care about fancy colours, nor do I care about the ‘visual’ editor. Changes I noticed (+ comments):

    • Changes to ‘Write Post’ page (see picture)
    • Changed to ‘Select Theme’ (preview)
    • Added: Current theme options. Select colours of fonts from within WordPress. Not sure why that’s needed.
    • Uh: Going to links still loads up all the links. Import Links appears to be new: allows import of ‘OPML’.
    • Changes to User/Users pages. Should be moved in to Manage page, no?
    • Changed: Options page. Plenty of option pages plus the rhetorical question stuck there ‘We should really figure out what else to put here’. I’m not kidding!
    • Plus an ‘Import’ page (which could also be moved into ‘manage’).

    I should roll up my sleeves.

    Posted in Wordpress | Comments Off on To upgrade or not to…

    Yoekels!

    Posted on November 13, 2005 by Arthur

    Tlalaalking about upgrading: I’ve been promoted to the status of ‘ouwe zeurkous’ (link goes to Dutch only site). That’s because I prefer that people not hotlink to my images, rather that they host it theirselves. Niels (appears to be down at this moment), for example, got the idea when I asked him to host a picture I did on XS4all (Safe for work. May be offensive if you’ve got something against protesting people). Hey: the whole world is ‘ons ben zuunig’.

    To the very nice (Dutch) lady who called me an ‘ouwe zeurkous’, thanks for making me laugh. The last time I called somebody the same, must have been 20 years ago. When you grow older, there will be payback day for you too, ma’am.

    OOpsie. Correction in link

    Posted in Hyperlinks | 2 Comments

    All evil people go to NS

    Posted on November 12, 2005 by Arthur

    JNS1ust so you know: Evil people who do naughty things in New York always first go to Nova Scotia. I can think of many reasons why that is so:

    1. It’s in Canada
    2. It sounds like an exotic place
    3. It’d be the last place people would think of

    So, hop on to Nova Scotia and have a great time!

    Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

    Posted in NS in movies, The Chest Desire | 2 Comments

    Eats, leaves

    Posted on November 12, 2005 by Arthur

    We cle_an_fall cleaned up the leafs in the frontyard. One of the maple trees finally decided to let go and fill our driveway with bright yellow coloured celluloid.

    Great timing too. Last year, it happened also on a Saturday morning.

    Posted in Truro NS | Comments Off on Eats, leaves

    Xenotaph

    Posted on November 11, 2005 by Arthur

    The A xenotaphnomost often heard word this week was ‘cenotaph’. A word I thought was supposed to be spelled as xenotaph: I already associated the word cenotaph with a monument for the unknown soldier. Hence the xeno. Misheard that one.

    Other thing that stuck this week: ’eminent gris’. It’s often used in Dutch (it’s actually French of course) to describe a person of great stature. I like ’eminent gris’, because the first word comes close to the pronunciation of the English word iminent. A droit!

    Talking about grey, we had some flurries today. The inevitable has started. We are doomed. There’s a bright side to that, naturally: Weather Canada’s seasonal forecasts1 look good for Nova Scotia. We’re above normal temperatures! Good bye snow, hello Fundy palm trees!

    1 Weather Canada’s Seasonal forecast site is without doubt an amazing site for statistics fans. Their one year animation is simply amazing. Or their pages on El Nino.

    Posted in Truro NS | Comments Off on Xenotaph

    A low point

    Posted on November 11, 2005 by Arthur

    I‘m probably the only person in the world who thinks Bush’s purely political speech on Veterans Day was another low in American politics.

    “Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war”

    I bet that this is exactly what veterans want to hear.

    Posted in We-reflect-news | Comments Off on A low point