OneAndOneIs2

Fri, Nov 30, 2007

Highly trained scientists

It's Friday, that means there are cakes brought in. On other days too, but Friday it's definite. (Somewhat bizarrely, I'm still losing weight tho...)

Occasionally, people bring in a token "healthy option" and today this role was fulfilled by a bag of sunflower seeds.

I heard an occasional muttering of displeasure, but I was busy with A-level chemistry research so I wasn't paying much attention. After a while, I turned around and joined in the conversation, and was invited to try the sunflower seeds. Apparently, they were revolting.

I've eaten seeds before and generally found them fairly inoffensive, so I was told to try them for myself if I doubted them. "Go on, take a big handful."

I declined, on the grounds that sunflower seeds take too long to shell to take a large number.

"To what?"

I blinked, and demonstrated with the seed in my hand how to crack off the outer shell and remove the edible kernel, which I then ate without issue. Cue a chorus of "Oh, is THAT why they were so woody? I didn't know that!" and quite a few embarrassed grins from people who had earlier been spitting into the rubbish bins..

Sigh.

Be Christmas soon. I wonder if I should bring in and demonstrate the correct use of a nutcracker on walnuts? Just to be safe? [Smiley]

3 comments • Categories: Omni, My Life

Mon, Nov 26, 2007

Damage, and routing round it

There's a phrase that's been around for some time: The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

Firewalls have been really, REALLY hacking me off lately. Heavy-handed "lock down everything" attitudes have always gotten on my nerves. Today, I couldn't take any more: There was a page I *had* to get a look at, and the bloody firewall refused point-blank to let it.

So.. The problem: Direct access of a page is impossible

Resources: A webserver that can be accessed only via FTP, a certain amount of geeky knowledge

Limitations: Too damn busy to learn any programming languages properly

The solution: FTP a bit of PHP that uses wget to grab the web page you're after and save it as a new page on your own webserver. Simple, crude, primitive, etc. But what the hell, it worked. I got a huge sense of triumph as I watched the blocked page appear on my screen :)

<head>
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;
url=http://www.oneandoneis2.org/file.html">
<title>Mirror, Mirror</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" vlink="#0000ff" alink="#ff0000">

<?php
$foo = system('wget webpage -O ~/public_html/file.html',$output);
echo "<p>Working on it</p>";

?>


</body>

Somebody with more time to learn PHP than me could make this much more all-singing and all-dancing. And I daresay that setting up a proper proxy server on my web page could make the whole thing redundant. But for ten minutes work with nothing but a text editor and the default Windows FTP client, I reckon that's not bad :)

11 comments • Categories: Omni, Rant, Technology, My Life

Sun, Nov 25, 2007

Naughty but nice..

I had a sudden craving for an old favourite, and since I happened to have the ingredients I went out and cooked it.

The recipe is on a scrap of paper I keep expecting to lose, so I'm going to shove it up here. That way I can't misplace it and the rest of the world can use it if they know any weight-watchers they want to taunt ;)

It's not the most exact recipe you'll ever see, but given that most of my cooking is done more along the lines of "Add some butter, heat for a while, stir in some flour" I reckon it's pretty good.

1 tin condensed milk
3oz butter
5oz sugar
1 tablespoon golden syrup
A good 3oz rice crispies

As you can see, the ingredients are basically fat and sugar mixed with a bit of cereal. This really isn't a health food...

So: Melt butter in saucepan. Add sugar, syrup, and condensed milk. Stir and heat until sugar is dissolved and the mix is burning to the pan (it always does this). Stir constantly to stop it burning more than the bare minimum, until it goes a nice toffee-brown.

Add rice crispies, stir well, pour into tin. Leave to cool, refrigerate, cut into squares, eat.

I can never eat more than two squares in one go, it's VERY sickly stuff. But it's VERY nice, too...

[Sinful]

3 comments • Categories: Omni, My Life, Cooking

Thu, Nov 22, 2007

Yes, it's a meme..

I don't usually do memes.. but what the hell... I was asked to on the strength of that photo of my room's clutter, so: The closest I can come to "What's in your handbag?"

[Bags]

These are the two rather heavy bags I take to 'work' every day...

[Bags]

The laptop bag contains (amazingly enough) a laptop. Plus my USB hard drive (40gig), the power brick, two folders packed with vital paperwork, and a load of loose paperwork - mostly schemes of work to plan lessons from.

[Bags]

The other bag contains another folder, yet more loose paperwork, my university course handbooks, and yet more schemes of work. It also has my all-important planner (and pen), a water bottle, some pens, my green laser pointer, some batteries, my other laptop's PCMCIA WiFi card, and my combination ID card and photocopier card.

When I leave in the mornings, it would usually have my lunch in it too..

I could go into more detail, as others did but I'd be here all night... and it'd be even longer if I hadn't had a clearout recently.. and I'm just glad I don't have to include all the stuff in my jacket pockets as well..

1 comment • Categories: Omni, My Life

Tue, Nov 20, 2007

Ahhhh

Not a bad day, all-round. The two classes I was taking were the first two periods, so I got them out of the way right at the start, and they went fairly OK. There are no more stressful classes this week, and we have Friday off to go back to Uni. and bitch about... I mean, share useful and constructive information with our peers.

I got some feedback from my mentor and the teacher I work most with, both of whom have said I'm improving noticeably with every lesson. And I got a "yay" when I told my A-level group that I was taking their lesson, which was nice, considering how much work goes into planning their lessons..

Got back home and showered & shaved. The shower's crap because we lost water pressure recently, but on the plus side, it meant that I had plenty of hot water, and I finally got a decent shave!

It's actually surprising how much of a difference getting a good shave makes to your mood. Due to lack of hot water and the fact that the water is hard enough to make getting a decent lather difficult, today is the first non-crap shave I've had since I moved in here. It just needs me to leave a lot more water in the brush than usual and work it a bit longer..

So now I just have to spend the rest of my evening planning tomorrow's lessons and I'll be all done..

All that, and there's a review of the Firefox 3 beta that sounds very promising as well. Life just doesn't get any better, does it? :o)

3 comments • Categories: Omni, FOSS, My Life, Shaving

Sat, Nov 17, 2007

No time like the present

My flatmate's bathroom is being redecorated over the weekend, so she's staying somewhere else until Monday. I haven't seen her since Thursday.

So when I got back from shopping earlier today and couldn't find my breadknife, I was baffled. I knew I'd used it on Friday, flatmate's not around, and I hadn't taken it out of the kitchen. It was really odd.

I went into the kitchen just now, and there it was, magically re-appeared in the sink, where I knew it hadn't been earlier. So I flicked the light on and had a closer look. Suddenly, all became clear.

The decorator who's doing the bathroom work had apparently borrowed it to hack open his bags of tile adhesive. Having finished for the day, he thoughtfully dumped it in the sink so I could wash all the adhesive residue off.

I really don't like living in this flat. I'm sick of the crap internet connection. I'm sick of the lack of hot water in the evenings. I'm sick of spending most of my life in my bedroom just because it's the only warm room in the place. I'm sick of the crap TV reception, the lack of space, the fact that every appliance is turned off at the wall, and the flatmate who I speak to for about ten minutes a day if that. I'll be glad to move out next year.

And there's the whole problem in a nutshell: I'm sick of waiting.

Around two years ago, I decided that it was career-change time and that I would retrain as a teacher. Naturally, that meant I'd have to wait until September. In fact, since it would involve a year off work, it would be best to wait until NEXT September, to save up a decent amount to cover any sudden emergencies.

So I waited. The job I was doing, which had never been that enthralling to begin with, went steadily downhill in this time, as my team leader retired, the company started to enforce a hiring freeze, and placed mutually-exclusive goals of higher quality and faster processing times on us as the workforce dwindles slowly away. But we got occasional "The company is doing really well, with record profits!" emails to cheer us up.

I consoled myself with the thought that it didn't matter: Come August 2007, I'd be out of there. It helped, and after a long old wait, I did indeed get out.

And now I'm a student teacher. I'm in one of the most difficult schools in the area, and though it's a superb place to learn, it's also very hard work and I admit I'm looking forward to it finishing next month. I'm looking forward to finishing the course and becoming a proper teacher next year.

Only I won't be a fully-qualified teacher next year. I'll have a very tough year still to come, as I start at a new school and have to spend the whole time familiarizing myself with existing learning plans, or creating my own. Only after THAT year will I be a 'real' teacher, and things will start to get easier as I can start to re-use lesson plans instead of having to create/learn new ones for every lesson.

There's a bunch of books I want to get through, such as K&R's book on the C programming language and the Blender foundation's book on their 3D animation software. Neither of which I can spare the time or energy on whilst I'm so busy learning teaching. So they're another year or two away, too.

There are projects I'd like to start on, such as the Gingery metalworking series and the Freestyle and/or Locost kit cars. Neither of which can be even thought about whilst living in a second storey flat without so much as a garage. So they'll have to wait until I move home. A year or two, then.

There are people I'd like to visit, but they live too far away for a casual drop-in - friends from university; an old friend from school I've only just gotten back into touch with courtesy of Facebook - or have other barriers that stop me from being able to just hop in the car and go say hello. So it'll be months before I get to see them.

I'm sick of living on the promise of "jam tomorrow". "Always jam tomorrow, never jam today" is a miserable way to live. Over the last few weeks in particular, the thought of the months it's going to be before it feels like my life is taken off "hold" has been really getting to me.

You could accuse me of wishing my life away, and maybe I am. But only this part of it. If, as they say, good things come to those who wait, then I must have a really, really bright future ahead of me...

8 comments • Categories: Omni, Rant, My Life

Fri, Nov 16, 2007

"We'll fix that in the next version"

There are a number of classic lies. "The cheque is in the post" for instance. The promise of the upgrade fixing all ills is, IMHO, a modern-day addition.

But sometimes you DO get a big improvement when you get the new version. I seemed to achieve that when, some time ago, I re-wrote what's possibly the most notorious of my articles ever, Linux is not Windows

The history of this article is long and complex, and it begins with my hobby of scuba diving. There are many and varied "holy wars" within the world of diving, that rival even "vi or emacs?", and many topics recur on the forums with dull monotony. Questions about some bit of dive gear, or about some methodology or other...

I got sick of posting replies to the same tired old questions, so I wrote a bunch of web pages and started linking to them when needed. It seemed to work. A complete buying guide was moderately popular, but the most linked-to article was on a bit of equipment I never liked at all, called the HUB

So when I stopped reading those forums so much and started dwelling instead on places like LinuxQuestions, I carried the habit over and wrote rebuttal articles to the repeated questions.

And one time, there were a whole load of posts in one go where people were complaining that Linux was crap because they'd had trouble using it, and they'd had trouble using it because it didn't do everything the same way that Windows does.

So they'd spent hours scouring the web for drivers, only to be told that a couple of clicks on the package manager would have done it all for them. And then they'd gotten angry with the concept of package managers because Windows doesn't have one. And then they'd called it a flaw of Linux that it has package managers to automate software installation.

So I wrote a short article gently pointing out that actually, holding up examples of differences between the two OSes as evidence that one is crap is a non-argument. It explained that the two were different, that they were MEANT to be different, and that nobody was interested in being told about a load of problems that were in fact just differences.

So I wrote the article and linked it in a few places where these threads had started. And sadly, instead of accepting the concept it tried to explain, the trolls (for such they were, IMHO) started nitpicking and inventing arguments that proved why the article was wrong or stupid.

So in a genuine attempt to make the article as clear and comprehensive as possible, I started adding to it and editing it to address their misperceptions and deliberate mistakes.

And so it began to deteriorate, as it grew ever larger and less cohesive. In attempting to refute trollish statements, it began to sound abrasive and elitist. It became a total mess.

Worse, it became a mess that was so firmly-established that I couldn't even try to tidy it up: Apart from anything else, it had been translated by then into TEN other languages. (Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, German, Hungarian, Portugese, Finnish, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Dutch) and it was such a sprawling mess that there was nowhere to really begin.

And its poorly constructed, elitist, arrogant, condescending style won me a huge amount of hate-mail and derogatory comments. I started to hate the article almost as much as the people who wrote to me about it, and the only reason I didn't just wipe it off the face of the Web was that I also got a few emails from people who said they'd found it useful.

But it was an itch that I just HAD to scratch. Eventually, I could stand it no longer. It HAD to be fixed! And there was only the Gordian Knot solution.

I went through the whole messy article and made a note of the worthwhile points it contained. I worked out all the other points it should contain but didn't. And then I planned out what I wanted it to say, and how I wanted to say it.

Only then, when I had the whole article sketched out from start to finish, did I start to write the replacement for the unplanned, mutated, evolution-gone-mad original. I wrote it, I read and re-wrote it, and I polished it here and there for several weeks. Only when I was sure that it was as good as I could get it and nothing remained that I could do to it did I pull the old version 1.9.9.9, and on May 24 2006, the new and improved version 2.0 went online.

As a reflection of how successful the rewrite process had been, there's been no need for a 2.1 since, and the feedback I've had from this version has been almost universally positive. Such as the most recent comment left today, the latest in a line of more than two hundred other commenters.

If only the upgrade from XP to Vista had been such a noticeable improvement, eh? [Smiley]

3 comments • Categories: Omni, FOSS, My Life

Thu, Nov 15, 2007

You're a serious blogger when...

1. You have your own domain name

I didn't used to consider this one THAT important, until I started spending a lot of time in places that have unreasonable firewalls that lock out anything with "wordpress" or "blogger" in the URL.

2. You host your own blog

Kind of an extension of point 1, but when I first started out, I was using blogger to create the blog, even though it was hosted on my own server. Naturally, this meant that if blogger went down, my blog was still available, but not update-able. Having all the PHP and SQL sitting on your own webhost might seem like overkill, but it puts you into full control of every aspect of your blog.

3. You have a favicon

This is still one of those thing I think every website should have. If you look at the address bar when you're looking at the average wordpress.com blog, it will have the [Wordpress] icon in it.

*yawn*

If you look at mine, it has my own personal icon in it. Far more distinctive :o)

...

A bit of a pointless post, really.. it was inspired by my inability to read some blogs, except via their RSS feeds aggregated by MagpieRSS onto my own website, during the day. A nifty feature of b2evolution that would be nice on some other blogs is an RSS feed for comments as well...

Until I can figure out a way to get SSH through the firewalls, anyway ;o)

5 comments • Categories: Omni, Technology

Tue, Nov 13, 2007

Context: In and out

Alo, salut
sînt eu, un haiduc
Şi te rog, iubirea mea,
primeşte fericirea

Alo, alo
sînt eu, Picasso
ţi-am dat bip
şi sînt voinic
dar, să ştii, nu-ţi cer nimic

So begins a song I heard many times when I went on holiday in France some years ago. I was somewhat embarrassed by my inability to understand more than the first line, considering how many times I heard it.

Until I got home, Googled it, and eventually tracked down a ROMANIAN song named "Dragostea din tei" covered by a singer/group named "Haiducci" and quite popular in Europe at the time.

Suddenly I stopped feeling bad for not having done a better job of understanding it.

Today I had two classes to take: One was my lovely year 7 class, who I was doing yet more solar system work with. The main criticism from yesterday was that it had been too long spent on teaching-time: Attention spans for 11 year olds don't stretch much past 15-20 minutes. Thus today, a more chop&change method was wanted, with lots of variety.

It took me till half ten last night, but I got the lesson prepared eventually: Wordsearches, a video, a mnemonic-writing exercise, fill-in-the-blanks, etc.

The little so-and-sos still got it all done so fast I was in danger of having too much time left at the end, so I had them talk about the planets they designed last lesson, and that padded it out nicely.

The other class was the one I have with my mentor, year 9. In a very nice & tactful way, she had basically told me that my lesson last week had basically rated as a "fail" - which I agreed with, I should add, I'd made plenty of mistakes.

So since my university tutor is in tomorrow, I was under a certain amount of pressure to do a lot better today. And since the lesson in the scheme of work was pants, I gave myself the added burden of inventing a lesson from scratch for them.

It didn't go all that well..

I had to shout more than I'd like. I did things in a less-than-ideal order. I had to repeatedly clarify their instructions. I was pushed for time. I had to send out for more indicator solution.

I wasn't expecting particularly great things from the feedback. I was somewhat surprised when my mentor said that she was quite pleased, there had been a lot of positive things in the lesson.

I'd insisted on quiet when it was called for. I'd called out unacceptable behaviour. I'd given good demonstrations of what they were doing and what safety hazards there were. I'd stopped staying behind the desk. I'd circulated well during the practical. I'd used the seating plan effectively. I'd gotten through all the work. I'd referred back to earlier lessons.

I'd forgotten, again, to think in terms of being a novice student teacher. It hadn't been a stunningly good lesson, but it had been a hell of a lot better than the last one, and that's what counted.

Suddenly I stopped feeling bad for not having done a better job of taking the lesson.

It's amazing how much different context makes to how you feel about something...

5 comments • Categories: Omni, My Life

Mon, Nov 12, 2007

Strange new worlds

This morning was a bit of a challenge: A two-hour lesson on the solar system, to follow on from Friday's one hour on the Earth.

Again, it went quite well, and I was fairly happy with it. The main challenge, again, was getting & keeping the kids involved, as you can't easily bring the solar system into the lab...

So although it wasn't really relevant to the lesson, I spent quite a while on the opposition effect - not something the average biochemist is familiar with, but as you may have gathered.. I'm a geek.

Moon dust, when heated by meteor impacts, forms molten droplets, which cool to form pretty good glass beads. Glass beads are retro-reflective: They reflect light back the way it came from, as opposed to mirrors, which reflect them in the opposite direction.

So when the moon is full, and thus in a straight line with the Earth and Sun, retro-reflection kicks in and reflects more light than usual back at us, making the full moon much brighter than it would otherwise be.

The stripes on those yellow safety jackets are also retro-reflective, so I put one on and passed a torch around, and they thought it was really cool the way the strips suddenly seemed to glow when they brought the torch right up to their eyes :o)

After I covered spin, rotation, axial tilt, and some interesting things about all the planets in our solar system, I then handed over to them for the rest of it and had them design their own planet.

Luckily the cast of Star Trek never encountered some of these designs.. cubic and heart-shaped planets were popular, and polka-dot continents featured heavily. One planet had perpetual summer and Christmas every other day, plus bubble-gum flavoured swimming pools. One was a long, round-ended cylinder *cough* with lots of rings around it. And one was inhabited solely by people with the same first name as its creator.

A few people created spherical worlds, but I don't think they'll ever catch on...

2 comments • Categories: Omni, My Life

Fri, Nov 09, 2007

Ahhh, Friday

At last, a genuinely good lesson!

In fact, a fairly good day all-round. Two classes at either end of the day, almost polar opposites. The first one, a low-ability high-year group; the second a high-ability low-year group.

The first class is quite challenging because they're not easy to keep them on-track, but because of the way they're doing the course, you basically spend a couple minutes at the start telling them what to do, then wander round the room helping them do it. Which I've done for weeks anyway, so the only difference today was that I talked for a couple minutes. No worries.

The end of the day was a year 7 class - and my main worry with them turned out to be fully-justified. Talk about precocious... In other classes, pupils have spent weeks working on one topic, and then when I tell them to look something up, they just stand around helplessly because I didn't give them the page number to look at. This bunch I was all ready to lead them gradually up to a point that they leapt effortlessly to as soon as I started. Quite a contrast!

But they're a nice bunch and I kept them on-topic and involved. And dizzy.

(I had to get them interested in spin and orbits, so I had them act it out - The 'sun' stood in the middle holding a torch and 'earth' walked around her spinning as he 'orbited')

I had, however, run out of things to tell them about Earth and the Moon about ten minutes too soon. Time to panic..

Or it would have been, if I hadn't prepared for the eventuality!

Good old Xplanet - I remember it from its "xearth" roots and my, hasn't it come a long way since...

I had thoughtfully prepared a bunch of images using xplanet's -output option, so I passed the time showing them images such as "This is the Earth and Moon as they look right now from space" and "This is the second planet from the Sun, can anyone tell me its name?"

They could. Of course. As easily as they could explain phases of the moon and axial rotation.

The lesson ended, and the feedback I got from the teacher who'd been observing was "We'll go through it properly next week, but I enjoyed that" and I have to say, I'd enjoyed it too. It was a nice way to end the week.

Except I have them again on Monday. First thing. For two hours. More time spent on the solar system.

And that's all well and good, but I'm a biochemist! Two hours of physics with that bunch??

I've got some planning to do!!

Thank God I was born a geek... otherwise I'd be completely stuffed ;o)

2 comments • Categories: Omni, FOSS, My Life

Thu, Nov 08, 2007

Wear sunscreen

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

So runs part of the advice in Mary Schmich's infamous "commencement address" article, which was subsequently put to music by Baz Luhrmann and released as "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)"

Yesterday.. was a tough day. Having only just started to really get into proper teaching of classes, I had a bit of an "in at the deep end" time after I was told to take the toughest class I'm with, and to disregard the existing lesson plan.

In other words, make up a completely new lesson to deliver to a class that really isn't interested. And I did my best. It was, to put it succinctly, a disaster.

Okay, I did get everything I'd wanted to done. So it was, technically, a success. But it had been one long, difficult battle, and I knew even as I was giving it that I was doing a lot of things wrong. The teacher gave me a big, long list of feedback, told me that I'd been handicapped by not being able to confer with her about what I had planned, and then told me to plan & take the whole lesson the next day.

NNnnng...

I could say a lot more on the whole situation, but given that this isn't an anonymous blog, I shan't..

I got home from school around 4pm. After showering, eating, and so forth, I got on with lesson planning. At half ten, I finally packed away. I woke up around 4am, worrying about the fact that I was taking two lessons from start to finish, and had severe doubts about both of them.

All in all, not a happy time. Most people I know on this course have mentioned being "that close" to quitting it already, and this was about as close as I'd come to being one of them...

Managed to doze off a bit for a while, then got up and got on with the usual routine. The lack of ability to have a lie-in meant I was a bit ahead of time, so I logged on and took a look at Facebook, amongst other places. I had a message waiting.

A week ago, I received an out-of-the-blue message from my best friend from school, whom I hadn't seen or spoken to in around 14 years. We're now in the slightly odd process of catching up on what changes over a decade has wrought in us both.

Anyway, the whole point being, I'd mentioned that life was, shall we say, throwing me some major ups and downs right now. (Or downs and further downs..?) and his reply (quoted verbatim) was:

I reckon you'll be fine tho, you always seemed to be so cheery in our younger days - i can honestly say i don;t think i ever saw u get mad once!?! you'll haveta tell me the secret of your innate calm!

Just as Ms. Schmich said, sometimes you really do need other people to remind you who you were. In all the upheavals of recent life, I'd almost forgotten that there was a time when I was like that. It was an amazing timely reminder, and by remembering that calm and relaxed way of thinking, I managed to regain at least some of it.

So I took the class and although it was still full of my screwups, they didn't get to me like they had the day before. I'm still a student, only just starting out, of course I'm making lots of mistakes. That's almost the whole point. Mistakes should only worry me if I don't learn from them. And today was, although not great, a definite improvement on yesterday, and that's what counts.

And the payoff? I went to hunt down one of my fellow students at lunchtime to sort out an admin. issue, and as I crossed the playing fields, I got yelled at by a couple of the girls from that class. They wanted to know if I'd be taking their next class as well, because they preferred my lessons to the normal teacher's.

And that, it must be said, was nice.

2 comments • Categories: Omni, My Life

Floyd on the iPhone

If you know all the background, today's user friendly is sheer genius.

3 comments • Categories: Omni

British birds

You probably won't get this if you haven't spent quite a bit of time in England lately...

When I went to the Natural History Museum a while ago with my follow science-teachers-in-training, we came across an exhibit of an ostrich skeleton. I have no idea why it was there, but one of my companions said he thought it looked a bit like a chav girl.

I came back with "Well, it is a bird with a tiny brain and enormous thighs..." and there was a sudden outbreak of giggles.

But in fairness, ostriches aren't nearly as thick as my most-hated bird. Which is the pheasant.

I used to encounter a lot of these when I was driving 20 miles to work every day a few years ago. Or rather, my front bumper did, because I ran quite a few of them over.

Not deliberately. Unless they were suicidal, in which case it was deliberate on their part. But rather, Darwinism in action.

I had almost forgotten them, until I came across one this morning as I drove to school.

It was on the pavement. I was (oddly enough) on the road. So far so good.

In order to escape from the terrible big red thing coming towards it, the stupid creature decided to hop out into the road.

So far, so not good. So I swerved out a bit to the right, as there was no oncoming traffic. At this point, the moronic bird clearly felt that its only hope of safety was to make a run for it, and it made a break for the other side of the road.

This was, you may have noticed, the SECOND time it had tried to get to safety by going from being OUT of my way to being IN it.

So I slammed on the brakes, swerved BACK to the left, and saw with a sinking feeling that it was about to go under my tyres. And that always makes such an unpleasant noise.

Only at this point, having suicidally put itself into ever-increasing levels of danger TWICE, did the bloody thing actually make an intelligent move: It flapped its wings and got out of my way at last. It lost a few tail feathers, but landed otherwise-unharmed back on the pavement it had started out from.

In my rear view mirror, I saw it give me a dirty look for coming so close to doing it serious harm. Doubtless, it would have been thinking "I don't know how many drivers like that live with themselves" if only its microscopically puny brain had been capable of holding such a thought. Or any thought at all, for that matter.

On the plus side, I can always console myself with the sure and certain knowledge that he, like all his brother and sister pheasants, will shortly be hunted down, rounded up, and shot by hungry meat-eaters in abundance.

5 comments • Categories: Omni, My Life

Sun, Nov 04, 2007

The real "Beyond LFS"?

Some years ago, as a learning experience, I made my way through the Linux From Scratch book. This is, simply put, a book that tells you how to manually download, compile, and install all the software that goes into a basic GNU/Linux operating system. No copying of pre-compiled binaries, no live CDs, nothing. You take your source code and roll your own OS with it.

It's well worth doing, if you're interested in such things. Use a fast PC tho, there's a LOT of compiling. They're up to version 6.3 now, with the 2.6.22 kernel.

Of course, it's only a very basic system that you get at the end: You're basically on a CLI-only machine without much modern functionality. No X11, no WM, no browser, nothing like that. So there's also the BLFS project: Beyond Linux From Scratch, which helps you to get the extra functionality installed. In my LFS days, I got as far as getting Firefox running within FVWM2.5 on an X.org install. Having achieved this level of functionality... I gave up. It was just a hard-to-manage Linux OS at this point: No package manager, no dependency checking, no automatic security updates. Everything was done by hand, and I got a bit tired of it.

So I switched to Gentoo, and that was fun.

But anyway. LFS is pretty much THE distro to install if you're a DIY-fanatic. It gives you more insight into & understanding of what your PC is running than just about anything else.

But Linux Devices has a project that may well take the crown: He's running Linux's ancestor, Minix, on a minicomputer he built himself, with his own homebrew CPU, made out of 74 Series TTL chips.

You can get more details on how it was done here, and when it's connected, the minicomputer itself serves web pages here.

I'm impressed by his dedication, but I must say, I think I'd have gone the FPGA route if I wanted to invent my own CPU. Maybe I'm just lazy...

1 comment • Categories: Omni, FOSS, In The News, Technology

Sat, Nov 03, 2007

Chromosome structure in one hour

There was a time when I'd have thought you'd struggle to spend more than five minutes on the topic. You've got your chromosome, right, which is made out of one really long piece of DNA, all folded up small.

That was before I spent my final year at university creating a tutorial on the structure of the nucleus, and realized just how highly-organized and complex it really was. (That tutorial is, incidentally, online here)

So on the plus side, I've got instant access to lots of information on the subject. On the down side, I'm not nearly convinced that I can get through it all in the space of an hour...

6 comments • Categories: Omni, My Life

Thu, Nov 01, 2007

The latest 419 scam?

If you've been online long, you've probably had at least one email from a foreign country, usually Nigeria, asking you to give them your bank details so they can transfer millions out of their country. These are called 419 scams.

The latest bit of news on the ever-popular MS vs. Linux war is that the Nigerian government, having ordered and paid for a bunch of PCs with Mandriva Linux on them, will now be installing Windows on them once it gets hold of them. It (almost) outright accuses Ballmer of bribing the government.

I can't help but wonder how the alleged email would have gone:

"Dear friend,

I am a high-placed executive for a large corporation and I need your help in transferring a very valuable number of operating system licenses into your country. I am willing to pay a large sum of money in order to secure your aid with this transfer. Please reply with your bank account details."

Poetic justice? Only you can decide...

;o)

Leave a comment • Categories: Omni, In The News, Technology