Roy Zimmerman is a genius. Via Retrospectacle:
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My added value? The lyrics are here.
I’ve got proof, ’cause I believe
New phone, new content
I just got my N95 today. I’ve set up the blog to automatically put up photos and videos I send it. Look out for some more multimedia in the future.
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Who needs Occam when you have Jesus’ razor?
Halfway There provides a wonderful commentary on the Research Challenge Contest ‘winners’. My favourite quote from one of the papers:
Many evolutionists are recognizing the problems with these theories that attempt to explain cells’ irreducible complexity. An infinitely intelligent Designer must have created these cells. That Creator and Designer is Jesus.
Let me paraphrase.
- I don’t know how a cell has developed to its current form.
- Therefore, it hasn’t. It was created.
- Therefore, it was created by the same guy who performed magic tricks about two kiloyears ago around the Mediterranean.
Bloody marvellous.
Mrs Postie is an idiot
You know how on the telly everyone in the village knows their postman by name?
I’m getting really fed up with the Royal Mail. These days (and it’s not just after the strikes) I often get my mail delivered once or twice a week. On several occasions I have received domestic letters three weeks after they were sent. On other occasions my mail just never arrives. A few weeks back I got two copies of the Economist on the same day, the new one and previous week’s. I just had NatWest send a letter to me three times before one (the last one sent) actually got through.
Also, the postwoman is an idiot. She’s actually written to me (on an envelope addressed to me, signed as ‘Mrs Postie’) asking if we could install a mailbox at the bottom of the stairs (I live on the 3rd floor). I can only assume that it’s Royal Mail’s policy that the placement of maiboxes be decided between a tenant in a block of flats and an individual mailman. According to the building porter, ’she’s a bit stupid’. I couldn’t have put it better.
Am I unlucky to have a lazy and/or dishonest postwoman/sorter or is it really this bad throughout Royal Mail?
Rise and fly ye English language
I was going to ask why the word exply doesn’t exist but, apparently, it does. Well, almost anyway.
P.S. The title actually happens to be in trochaic tetrameter. That’s just as well as it’s a rough translation from Finnish.
Ralink and The Linux Emporium: highly recommended!
A common complaint about Linux is that it doesn’t support all hardware. Of course it doesn’t. Neither would Windows if Microsoft had to write drivers for all hardware devices. Most manufacturers still see Linux as too small a market to bother, so writing drivers is often left to users and volunteers, not the hardware vendors. Not only that, many vendors won’t even release their specifications to the driver developers so many drivers require a considerable amount of reverse-engineering.
I’m not too bothered. The selection of hardware available in shops is so large that I can always find something that is well supported in Linux, either because the vendor has followed standards, written their own drivers, or made specifications available to the public. Ralink, which makes wireless network chips, is one of the better vendors. So, when I was looking for a secondary, well supported USB-based wifi adapter, I ordered the Ralink RT2571-based Edimax USB wireless adapter from The Linux Emporium.
I’d like to recommend this company to anyone using Linux. Not only was the shipping fast (and included in the price!), the product was one of the best I’ve had to configure under Linux. Linux Emporium must’ve spent quite a while getting everything together. The shop has put together their own CD to bundle with the adaptor, with drivers and firmware. They also included printed instructions for a number of distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora). As a Gentoo user I didn’t actually need the CD, as emerging net-wireless/rt2x00 (with USE=rt73usb) worked fine, as soon as I had manually downloaded the firmware from the Ralink website. Monitor mode also works, and it seems well supported in Kismet.
I’m sure with a lot of searching one could find the adaptor for a couple of pounds less somewhere else. But I’m happy to support a company that not only sells Linux-compatible hardware but actually actively develops installation scripts and help documentation for Linux. They can’t make much money selling a low-value product such as this, which makes it even more commendable.
I think this is the first time I’ve been impressed enough about a web store that I wanted to promote them. Anyway, go spend your cash there instead of eBay.
Her name was Lola
According to Wikipedia Copacabana may refer to:
- Copacabana, Bolivia, a town on the shores of Lake Titicaca.
- Copacabana, a district of Rio de Janeiro, named after the Bolivian town.
- Copacabana (nightclub), named after the district in Rio.
- Copacabana (song), by Barry Manilow, named after the nightclub.
- Copacabana (musical), by Barry Manilow, named after the song.
Now, if we get the Bolivian town to drop its old name of Copacabana and instead name itself after the musical called Copacabana, we might be able to create a nice case of mutual recursion.
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Marcus Brigstocke’s take on religion
I know I’m hopelessly — like a couple of months — late to post these things, so I won’t even try to come up with a clever excuse. Just treat them as my private bookmarks.
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