Category Archives: Writing

Writing

McCain versus the Universe

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I can’t tell which of these three things is worse about John McCain:

  1. He can’t tell (or is willing to mislead) when Federal money hasn’t been spent on a project
  2. He can’t tell an overhead projector from a planetarium display projector
  3. He thinks that the idea of spending taxpayer money on aiding scientific education is a bad thing

This is all down to his repeated denigration of a request for US$3M federal funding from the Adler Planetarium in Chicago (which has bipartisan support) with comments such as planetariums being “foolish”. As New Scientist says:

What may be most troubling to science educators is the fact that McCain clearly presumed that the wastefulness of spending money on a planetarium would be self-evident without any further explanation or context.

Given that the planetarium were after US$3M to replace a 40 year old projector (which they can no longer get spare parts for), and the cost of the Iraq war is over US$300M per day, it seems churlish to refuse their paltry request.

Update: Maybe McCain should see this XKCD.. 🙂

Victoria has Driest September on Record

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Sigh, our 12 year drought continues ever onwards..

With 12 mm for the month, Melbourne has recorded it driest September since records began in 1855. The previous driest was September 1907 when 13.4 mm of rain fell. Historically September is one of Melbourne’s wetter months averaging 57.9 mm.

Looks like we’re also set to record 12 consecutive years of below average rainfall, the previous record was just 6 years. and ss I write Melbourne’s water storages are still under 35% full as we come out of winter.

All of this makes me wonder if some of the concerns about the drought affecting electricity generation last year will start to actually happen this year.

Google Chrome

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Oops..

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome.

The Wikipedia page has more info, apparently it’s based on WebKit. Expect the Windows beta in the next day or so, with Linux and OSX to come. Open source of course.

IPv6

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Glen Turner has a nice blog on th what was going on at AusNOG, well worth a read if you’re a fan of the end-to-end connectivity model.

Back from AusNOG. It’s now clear that allocations of new IPv4 addresses will cease in 2010, so a lot of the conference was about NAT and IPv6. […] So it’s going to be “carrier-class network address translation”. That is, your ISP will run NAT (and if you are the average customer, you will run NAT on your ADSL router too).

This will give the ISP’s far more control than they have now (forget net neutrality) and so if you want to escape from these potential walled gardens you’re going to be needing IPv6 to continue to enjoy what you currently have access to now..

MythTV Electronic Program Guide HOWTO for Australia

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Chris Smart has written an excellent little guide for getting a decent program guide into MythTV in Australia. It walks you through how to go from scratch through installing and configuring Shepherd to getting the data into the MythTV database. I’ve just used it on my Mythbuntu box and it’s looking good!

Next step – get it to record Time Team every time it appears.. 😉

Are you sure you want to take a laptop to the USA ? (Updated)

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From the Washington Post:

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed. Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption, or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, US Customs and Border Protection and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The full policy is available and it says that they have to destroy the information retained unless there is “probable cause“, except..

Copies may be retained by an assisting Federal agency or entity only if and to the extent that it has the independent legal authority to do so – for example, when the information is of national security or intelligence value.

So if you’re working for a company that competes with a US one you should probably be careful..

(Via)

Update: Steve Bellovin points out that this applies when you leave America, too..