The Western World has been fretting about SARS and Avian Influenza for some time now, but all the while there’s been another bug that we thought we had previously conquered sitting in the wings evolving drug resistance, and it could be far deadlier.
Category Archives: Writing
Book meme from Mark Greenaway
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the next three sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
- Don’t dig for your favourite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
- Tag five other people to do the same.
Here we go..
The mainboard connector provides a standard PS/2 keyboard connector for attaching a PS/2 keyboard. You can plug a PS/2 keyboard directly into this connector. PS/2 Keyboard (6-pin Female)
That’s from the VIA EPIA Mini-ITX (“Dream Catalyst”) mainboard manual that happened to be sitting in front of me. Extra boring points for me I think!
People can work out themselves if they wish to be infected by this meme.. 🙂
It’s the wrong leech, Gromit!
Oops, it looks like there’s been a bit of a mix up with the humble leech in medical research!
In the slimiest and perhaps costliest case of mistaken identity in modern biology, hundreds of scientific papers and years of research could be thrown into doubt, for they may have been based on experiments carried out on the wrong leech
It’s the wrong leech Gromit, and they’ve gone wrong! (Apologies to The Wrong Trousers)
“What has been sold and used as Hirudo medicinalis is usually another species, Hirudo verbana,” said Dr Siddall, who led an international team of researchers in examining dozens of specimens procured from leech farms in Europe and the United States. “Indeed, we have never received a true medicinalis from a commercial supplier,” he said, adding a few leeches from a third species, H. orientalis, from Turkey or Azerbaijan, may also have crept into the mix.
There is an upside to this (asides from the increasing volume of medical papers as they try and correct their previous research and try and work out what compound came from which species):
“With three species rather than one, there may three times as many interesting compounds to be discovered and harnessed,” he said.
Open Source for Business
If you are a business person who is new to the world of Open Source, or you need to introduce business people to Open Source and what it can do for you then the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA, an automobile speciality parts trade association) has a very good introduction to Open Source called Open Source Explained : What it is — What it isn’t — and How SEMA Members Can Benefit From It.
Using open source is like owning a 1960s musclecar. You can drive it just as it is, or you can tweak and modify it to the limits of your (or a friend’s) time and talents. On the other hand, a closed source program is quite the opposite. The work of the people who create the software is not available for tweaking or performance enhancements by the general public. It’s like getting a car with the hood welded shut by the manufacturer. “Here are the keys. Put gas in it, and call us if it breaks.†Closed source has its place, and it might be the only choice in certain instances.
As well as being a gentle introduction to what Open Source is it covers all the sorts of things that businesses care about, servers, oeprating systems, databases, word processing, desktop publishing, CRM, ERP, etc. Well worth a read even if you are involved in Open Source because you’re almost certain to come across something you’d not heard of before.
The author ? Well he’s not a professional geek, he is:
Walter D. Vaughan, Jr. is a vice president at Steele Rubber Products. He is a current member of SEMA’s Business Technology Committee, an ARMO Select Committee member and a recipient of ARMO’s 1998 Industry Person of the Year Award. He also uses or has tested extensively all the software mentioned in this article.
OpenOffice.org to get Business Reporting Capabilities
Now this looks like it might be rather an interesting extension to the capabilities of OpenOffice.org, it appears Sun and Pentaho are planning to integrate the business reporting engine from Pentaho into OpenOffice.org 2.3, tentatively due for September this year.
With the integration of Pentaho’s reporting engine and the new OpenOffice.org Report Designer, developed by Sun, OpenOffice.org users will be able to create reports with content from the OpenOffice.org Base database as well as a wide range of proprietary and open source relational databases, OLAP and XML sources. For example, users will be able to generate customer invoices by creating a customer invoice template and then pulling customer names, addresses, and current due balances from an accounts receivable application or database. They can then produce the invoices as OpenOffice.org Writer documents.
Given that this is only at the thinking about stage at the moment there’s precious little real information asides many rewordings of the press release (including this), the best real information I could find was from Ocke Janssen’s blog at Sun which has real information, including a couple of very early screenshots!
The new report designer will extend the database application. You then have the possibility to create reports not only with the famous wizard, but also manually. As output format you have the choice between text documents or spreadsheets. (OASIS Open Document Format). The designer uses the classical way of presenting reports. To navigate through the components of your report, you’ll have a navigator as you for sure already know from forms. Each repeating section of the report has its own area where text can be inserted. In the first release you’ll be able to create groups (with header and footer), functions, page header/footer, report header/footer. The best way to find all features is to try it when a stable version is available;-)
Must. Have. Patience! 🙂
33 Dead in Virginia Tech Shooting Spree
RIP Kurt Vonnegut – 1922 to 2007
So it goes.. 🙁
American literary idol Kurt Vonnegut, best known for such classic novels as Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, has died on Tuesday in Manhattan at age 84, The New York Times has reported. Longtime family friend, Morgan Entrekin, who reported Vonnegut’s death, said the writer had suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, the newspaper reported.
Man Arrested for Feeding Homeless People
The ABC is reporting that a man has been arrested in Orlando, Florida, for feeding “30 unidentified persons food from a large pot utilising a ladle” (according to the arrest warrant).
The Orlando law, which is supported by local business owners who say the homeless drive away customers, has been challenged in court by civil rights groups. It allows charities to feed more than 25 people at a time within 3.2 kilometres of the Orlando City Hall only if they have a special permit. They are able to receive two permits a year.
Police mounted a surveillance operation to catch him and even took a sample of the food to use as evidence against him in court.
The sort of prejudice against homeless people that seems to have lead to this law getting passed is pretty typical, there was an interesting story in New Scientist recently talking about the neural side of prejudice, and a surprising way of breaking the freezing out of such people in the mind:
Psychologist Susan Fiske from Princeton University and colleagues got students to view photos of individuals from a range of social groups, while using functional MRI to monitor activity in their medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a brain region known to light up in response to socially significant stimuli. The researchers were shocked to discover that photos of people belonging to “extreme” out-groups, such as drug addicts, stimulated no activity in this region at all, suggesting that the viewers considered them to be less than human. “It is just what you see with homeless people or beggars in the street,” says Fiske, “people treat them like piles of garbage.” In new experiments, however, she was able to reverse this response. After replicating the earlier results, the researchers asked simple, personal questions about the people in the pictures, such as, “What kind of vegetable do you think this beggar would like?” Just one such question was enough to significantly raise activity in the mPFC. “The question has the effect of making the person back into a person,” says Fiske, “and the prejudiced response is much weaker.”
You will need to be a subscriber to New Scientist to be able to read the whole thing online.
VPAC publishes RFP’s for a new Linux cluster and additional storage
Well I’m happy to say that today I got the Request For Proposals (RFPs) out of the door for the proposed replacement of VPACs ageing Linux cluster Brecca (180 cores of 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 Xeon) and a significant amount of additional storage. Needless to say the new cluster must run Linux!
Please see the announcement on the VPAC systems blog for more information and copies of the RFPs.
This has been keeping my very busy recently and so I’m looking forward to a nice quiet break over Easter!
SCO Move Against Groklaw
If you thought SCO couldn’t stoop any lower, think again. They have filed a motion in SCO versus IBM saying they wish to depose PJ, the creator of Groklaw.
I can say this: SCO in its wisdom has just guaranteed that the judges in SCO v. IBM and SCO v. Novell will have to read Groklaw. So, welcome Judge Kimball. Welcome, Judge Wells. We’ve enjoyed very much learning about the law by watching you at work. SCO told you something that isn’t true. No one tried to serve me that I knew about. No one informed me of any deposition date. That is true. It doesn’t feel so nice to be smeared like this, I can tell you that, and to have to pay a lawyer to deal with this harassment. I view it as such, as a kind of SLAPP suit, a vendetta to pay me back for blowing the whistle, and to shut Groklaw up. SCO wants to put a pin on a map and point to it and say, “Here’s PJ.” Then someone drops by and shoots me, I suppose. I certainly have nothing to tell them that is relevant to this litigation.
Basically SCO have gotten so fed up with PJ and the various other Groklaw contributors poking huge holes in the farcical SCO law suit that they have convinced themselves that the site is a front for IBM and that PJ doesn’t exist and now want to prove it. Sadly for them their fear-induced paranoia can’t change fact into fiction and so, as usual, they’ll loose eventually but they want to make life as painful as possible for anyone who dares to laugh at the emperors new clothes.
I do hope that this motion doesn’t succeed, but I feel that SCO will find it rather painful for their reality if it does.