* Minx System Blog *

June 11, 2003

Nor Any Drop To Drink

This week's New Scientist also has an article on the latest in mega-engineering trends, the same trend that Mapchic wrote about recently on Geographica: dirty great big dams. New Scientist refers to them as "megawater" projects. And the Three Gorges Dam that Mapchic spoke of is only the beginning. Try this for size:

The third, western, arm is the biggest and most complex. It will capture the headwaters of the Yangtze in a 300-metre-high dam [That's as tall as an 80-storey building. — Pixy] downstream from the melting glaciers of Tibet. Every year, it will lift a volume of water equivalent to a quaerter of the annual flow of the river Nile through a 100-kilometre tunnel into the upper reaches of the Yellow river.

The article gives some grim statistics on just why China feels forced to undertake such huge projects:

Five times in the last decade, the Yellow river has failed to reach the sea for part of the year because every drop of water has been diverted.
The aquifers [underground water] of northern China are being depleted by a staggering 30 cubic kilometres a year.
The water table beneath Beijing has fallen 59 metres in the past 40 years.

The north of China, the article tells us, has two thirds of the nation's farmland and only one fifth the water; in the south the figures are reversed. So there are sound reasons for these projects, but the history of similar works - the Aswan Dam beaing a prime example - raise doubts about their long-term prospects.

The article also refers to an (admittedly speculative) Australian plan to "drought-proof" the country by diverting northern rivers such as the Clarence (which is actually in the southern half of Australia) and the Ord, inland in the general direction of Adelaide. Now, I'll grant that Adelaide needs all the water it can get, but the problem with trying to drought-proof Australia is that it's a frigging desert.

Ahem. Sorry. It's not a question of there being more water than needed in some places and a shortage in others, as in China; even in principle there's not enough water to go around. The recent drought affected pretty much the entire country; in Sydney, which is where it is because of the high local rainfall (and the harbour, of course), it didn't rain at all for months. If you want to drought-proof Australia, you have two choices: either fix the world in a permanent La Niña cycle (perhaps by dropping enormous ice cubes in the Pacific) - which really doesn't do that much and will probably piss off every country in the world except Australia - or increase the water supply in the interior of the continent, perhaps by building a mountain range stretching from Ayers Rock to Adelaide. This idea (which was actually floated about twenty years ago) would give real meaning to the term mega-engineering.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:46 PM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

ROT F, L

This week's New Scientist notes that the Alpha Five database package (I've heard of Meta 4, but not of Alpha Five) uses the extension .sex for its files:

As a result, the template directory of this program included filenames such as: "Gift entry.sex, Invited guests.sex, Party budget.sex, Classes to instructors.sex, Classes to students.sex, Recipes.sex, People - Activities.sex, Employees.sex" and much more.

The Motorola 6809 microprocessor, as used in the Tandy Color Computer (my first computer!), had a sign extend instruction; the assembly language mnemonic for which was, reasonably enough, SEX. Sign extend extended a signed 8-bit number to a signed 16-bit number. Due to the way twos-complement arithmetic works, this involves filling the leading byte with either zeroes or ones depending on whether the number was positive or negative. Which is probably more than you wanted to know about the subject, so lets get on with story:

DEC's engineers nearly got a PDP-11 assembler that used the SEX mnemonic out the door at one time, but (for once) marketing wasn't asleep and forced a change. That wasn't the last time this happened, either. The author of "The Intel 8086 Primer", who was one of the original designers of the 8086, noted that there was originally a SEX instruction on that processor, too. He says that Intel management got cold feet and decreed that it be changed, and thus the instruction was renamed CBW and CWD (depending on what was being extended). Amusingly, the Intel 8048 (the microcontroller used in IBM PC keyboards) is also missing straight SEX but has logical-or and logical-and instructions ORL and ANL.

That's just one of about a squillion little bits of geek humour to be found in the Jargon File, including the wonderful tales Robin Hood and Friar Tuck and The Story of Mel:

A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming
made the bald and unvarnished statement:

        Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.

Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly'' software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term "software'' sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.

If you are a geek, or love a geek, or just want to understand geeks better, you really need to read The Story of Mel. The jargon file describes it thus:

This is one of hackerdom's great heroic epics, free verse or no. In a few spare images it captures more about the esthetics and psychology of hacking than all the scholarly volumes on the subject put together.

And also notes that:

The original submission to the net was not in free verse, nor any approximation to it -- it was straight prose style, in non-justified paragraphs. In bouncing around the net it apparently got modified into the "free verse" form now popular. In other words, it got hacked on the net. That seems appropriate, somehow.

Go forth and read, while I scour the net for new irony.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:37 PM | Comments (76) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Tribes 2

Have you ever wondered how the different European nations view one another? Well, you need wonder no more, now that you have this handy chart!

(Thanks to headscratcher4 on the JREF Forums for this gem.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:20 AM | Comments (76) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 10, 2003

Rocking the Casbah

Reason Online has a fascinating article up titled Look Who’s Rocking the Casbah:

Eroticism like this, which seems to emerge from the pages of a Victoria’s Secret catalog, isn’t usually very noteworthy. Indeed, the video’s assumption that there’s something "forbidden" about its subject matter that must be approached in an "artistic" fashion may seem outdated. But in this case it is exactly such elements that make the production compelling. The reason is the video’s cultural context: This is not an American or European or Japanese video; it is an Arab artifact. The woman is a singer named Elissa; her song, which has made her a leading celebrity in the Mideast, is entitled "Aychaylak" ("I Live for You"); and both her song and her video were among last year’s biggest music hits in the Arabic-speaking world.

Exactly what the broader implications of this trend are is beyond me, but it's bound to have an impact on the Arab world.

(via Motley Cow, who comments Peace on Earth through Arab pop sex kittens?)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:15 PM | Comments (73) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geographica

Blog of the Day is Geographica, hosted by Mapchic:

Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me
I’m still unemployed
And I have no money.

Oops, that was five days ago. Sorry, Mapchic!

I have to admit that I am a bit sad that I did not get a chance to go to China and see the Yangtze before the gorges were flooded. I understand that it was a lovely region.

What I do know for certain is that this dam will render all previous physical maps of China obsolete.

The changes wrought by this dam go way beyond those of a simple new roadway – instead there will be a new physical map of China. A new lake (no name has been released) will be created it is expected to stretch for almost 400 miles upstream along the Yangtze. The flooded area will cover 2 cities, 11 counties and 116 towns.

Yes, and I wish they'd stop moving borders around and changing names and stuff like that! I just bought a new atlas and I'd like it to last at least a little while, thank you!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:56 PM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Useless Motherboard Features

The Useless Motherboard Feature of the Day Award goes to Gigabyte for their GA-7NNXP, GA-8PENXP, and GA-8KNXP. Why's that?, you ask. I'll tell you. The GA-7NNXP has four memory sockets. How many memory modules do you think you can use with it?

Wrong. Guess again. That's right, three.

Similarly, the GA-8KNXP has six memory sockets. How many can you use? Yes, that's right. Four.

The 8KNXP's problem is actually understandable: The chipset supports two channels, and each channel supports four banks of memory. A double sided module - and almost all modules are double-sided - has two banks. Which means you can only use two modules. Unless you happen to have single-sided modules lying around. There's no point in buying single-sided modules, because they have half the capacity of the double-sided ones but cost rather more than half as much.

The 7NNXP also has two channels. One channel can apparently support four banks of memory, and the other... Well, the 7NNXP (and the five other boards in the same family) is the only Nforce motherboard I've seen with four memory sockets; all the others have three. It would seem that the second channel can only support two banks. If you plug three 512MB double-sided modules into a 7NNXP, you get the expected 1.5GB, but because the memory isn't balanced across the channels, it doesn't work in dual channel mode. If you add a fourth module, you still have 1.5GB of memory - it disables one side on each of the third and fourth modules - and it still doesn't work in dual-channel mode.

Gah. What's the point? Apart from the four people in the world who happen to already have DDR400 single-sided modules that they aren't using, who needs this? And why isn't there a big notice on Gigabyte's site saying "extra memory sockets will not work for most users"?

Grumble. I'm upset mostly because these looked like really nice boards. As it stands, there's nothing really to set them apart from boards from the other manufactures like AOpen, Asus, Abit, Albatron, Asrock... Except that Gigabyte starts with a 'G'.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:53 PM | Comments (74) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Peripatetic

Word of the day is peripatetic. (Yes, and I assume it will be gone by tomorrow? — Ed.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:57 PM | Comments (77) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

We're the Phone Company

I've always loved this Lily Tomlin sketch from Saturday Night Live, perhaps because I've worked in the industry for (mumble) years. Every so often I'll trot it out when the opportunity arises - or indeed for no reason at all.

Here at the Phone Company we handle eighty-four billion calls a year, serving everyone from presidents and kings to scum of the earth. We realize that every so often you can't get an operator, for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order, or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make. We don't care. Watch this -- just lost Peoria. You see, this phone system consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of space-age technology that is so sophisticated, even we can't handle it. But that's your problem, isn't it? Next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string. We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:53 AM | Comments (80) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 09, 2003

Rob is Still in Japan

Blog of the Day is Rob's Still in Japan:

As we got into the elevator to go to our hotel room, a Japanese family got in with us. The kindergarten-aged girl took one look at us, marched up to me and insistently held out her nametag. We weren't quite sure how to react.

I looked at her nametag, and blurted out the first thing that came to mind: Aa, Minako-chan, hajimemashite! The young girl's face broke out into a huge grin, and she danced back to her equally happy parents.

Make sure you check out his photo album too.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:53 PM | Comments (71) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Squirrels and Snakes and Kittens, Oh My!

I have to admit, these are good photos. (The snake is number 7 and the kitten number 11.) You can vote for your favourite, too.

(via The International Squirrel Conspiracy)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:29 PM | Comments (74) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

So, This is W.Bloggar?

Hey, it got my categories! Neat. Now let's see if it works...

It does indeed. Cool, very cool. w.bloggar: recommended by Pixy Misa. On the basis of three whole minutes of experience.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:55 AM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ow! Said the Blogger

Ow! Ow ow!

Last night my back was a bit stiff, which I put down to a long day at the computer fiddling with stylesheets. This morning when I woke up, it was OW.

Whoever designed the human spine needs a darn good kicking, that's what I say. I also say, OW.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:00 AM | Comments (74) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 08, 2003

One Shoe Off...

Susie of Practical Penumbra asks the question that's been on all our minds:

Ever tried to manage a movie theater on a Saturday night with only one concession register open and one of your employees stuck on the roof?

Nooo... No, I must say that I haven't.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:20 PM | Comments (74) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

How's It Look?

Ambient Irony should look rather like this:

(Click for larger image.)

If it doesn't look like that, please leave a comment to let me know. Make sure you say what browser and operating system you are using.

Thanks!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:26 PM | Comments (76) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Postman Pat Vs. The Internet

Over at Gweilo Diaries, Conrad points us to an article on the evils of spam, and a possible solution, running in The Weekly Standard. Conrad concludes:

Something needs to be done and, in the end, the only solution may be an e-mail "postage fee".

This suggestion has been floated before, and has been largely ignored because, for a variety of reasons, it is completely impractical.

First off, the Internet is global. Unless every country in the world charges an email postage fee, any country that doesn't charge such a fee will become an instant spam-haven. So the spammers will relocate their servers at minimal cost, and spam will continue unabated.

Second, no-one runs the email system. Anyone can run an email server; I run three myself. Indeed, I've written an email server myself. How are you going to enforce this postage fee, when the way email actually works is one (privately owned) server passing the message to another, with no "post office" of any sort involved?

Third, even if you passed legislation that all SMTP (the Internet mail protocol) transactions on the public internet incur a fee, and enabled law-inforcement agencies to go after the free-email offenders, the immediate result would be that people stop using SMTP and start using something else. It's quite easy to send email over an SSL-encrypted HTTP connection so that it looks just like a web page. Tax that.

Fourth, there are many, many useful public mailing lists that send out thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of messages a day. An email tax would kill them instantly to no good end.

Finally, the technological solutions do work. I have 600 spam emails in my Junk folder, trapped there by Mozilla's Bayesian filtering. Christopher Caldwell's article shows a basic lack of understanding of how Bayesian filters work:

The primary tool that exists today is the "Bayesian" filter, which seeks out words like "Viagra" and phrases like "online gambling." Spammers have long been able to evade such filters with subtle misspellings (TURN HER ON WITH HERBAL VIARGA!).

In fact, this is precisely the problem that existed before Bayesian filtering, and which Bayesian filtering is designed to solve.

The key here is that spam looks like spam. With Mozilla, there's a training period where you need to tell the program this is spam and this is not spam. It quickly learns to recognise the characteristics of spam; not just individual words, but all the patterns found in both the headers and the body of the message, the same things that let you tell at a glance that a message is spam.

Which is not to say that I don't favour anti-spam legislation. Even when it's filtered out automatically, I'm still paying to download the spam in the first place. The right legislation would let spammer's internet connections be blocked promptly, preventing the flood of messages going out in the first place... And leading us back to my first point. But at least we won't have some ghostly beaureacracy monitoring our emails and extracting a penny a piece.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:24 PM | Comments (70) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

We've Got Movable Type!

It's up! I just made a tarball of my MT test site, scp'd it up to my server, unpacked it, fiddled with permissions and Apache options a bit, and viola!

If you're reading this in IE, though, it's not my fault!

Update: Then I ran into errors in MT, ended up deleting the whole thing, installing 2.64, reimporting all my entries, re-adding my plugins, fiddling with my templates and stylesheets to get them working again... It could have gone smoother.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:09 PM | Comments (77) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Blogger is Back

Joy. A three hour outage doesn't even earn a mention on Status.Blogger.Com, it seems.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:42 AM | Comments (67) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hooray for England

Steven den Beste points to an "opinion piece" by Tom Utley in The Telegraph (the English one, not Sydney's Daily Terror):

"You know, Tom," this sage said to me, glancing up from his well thumbed copy of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, "we really ought to make Prince William Governor-General of Australia."

There are a number of problems with this ill-conceived attempt at humour, not least of which is that it's not funny. The one I choose to point out, though, is that the Brits can't make anyone our Governor-General. We send the Queen a list, and she approves one of our choices. I believe that the last list we sent only had one name on it - not a particularly good choice, in my opinion; in any case, it's rather strongly hinted which of the names is to be approved.

Oh, and as for Tom's lady friend who failed to find love in the Land Down Under: There certainly are heterosexual males even in Sydney, but most of them are already hooked up with beautiful Australian women. If you can't find a man in England, dear, you're not going to do any better down here.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:41 AM | Comments (71) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Theatre of the Absurd

Tonight in Pixy Misa's Theatre of the Absurd we have a very special double feature: Big Trouble (Barry Sonnenfeld, 2002) and Big Trouble in Little China (John Carpenter, 1986).

Big Trouble takes its story from the book of the same name by Dave Barry. Tim Allen stars as Eliot Arnold, formerly a Pulitzer prize-winning humour columnist for the Miami Herald (I wonder where they got that idea from), now divorced and trying to make a living in advertising. He also narrates the film, a necessary conceit given the complex and curious nature of the story. Oh, and there's also an opening narration by Puggy (Jason Lee), who lives in a tree and wins the love of Nina the maid (Sofia Vergara), the lucky bastard.

By the end of the film, Eliot has saved the world, remarried, and won the respect of his teenage son (in order of increasing difficulty). In between, things happen. These things involve guns, goats, bufo marinus, and the worlds most valuable garbage disposal unit.

Basically, this film is a farce, a screwball comedy, with elements of action thrown in. And the one thing you can't do with either a farce or an action flick is slow down. Never ever slow down, never give your audience a chance to stop laughing or let the adrenalin go cold. Unfortunately, Big Trouble doesn't manage this; there are many fine scenes, some wonderful ones, even, but the pacing is inconsistent. Perhaps this is because they were trying to shove the whole book into an 85-minute movie (and it is a faithful translation; I don't recall anything significant that was missing or changed from the novel). Perhaps its just hard to translate this sort of insanity onto the screen; Striptease, the movie of Carl Hiaasen's marvellous book, certainly suffered when it was turned into cellulite. [That's celluloid. — Ed. Says you. Have you seen the film?]

Which is not to say that Big Trouble is a bad film. One reviewer on IMDB called it "the worst comedy of the year", apparently because he couldn't follow the story. What's so hard? There's this guy (Tim Allen), you see, and his son (Ben Foster) is trying to kill this girl (Zooey Deschanel) [What sort of a name is "Zooey"? — Ed.], only not like kill her, it's just this game they're playing, Killer, which if I recall correctly was released by Steve Jackson Games, and there's this toad (Rick Lazzarini) which has taken over the dog's (Martha Stewart. No, really, Martha Stewart.) food dish and these Russians and this annoying guy that makes Fishhook Beer and then the world gets saved.

Well, maybe it helps to read the book first. Or maybe not. I did read the book first, and the movie being the faithful adaptation that it is, I knew what was coming. This works fine with, say, The Princess Bride, where it doesn't matter if you read the book or watch the film first, because then you can go right ahead and watch the film or read the book, and it adds to the experience rather than taking away. So, I wasn't confused at all watching Big Trouble, but I wasn't surprised either. Except for the goat; I laughed out loud at the goat.

Which is just my way of saying, no, it's not a bad film, much less the worst comedy of the year. Didn't The Animal come out in 2002? No, apparently 2001. Anyway, Big Trouble is a fun film, enjoyable and amusing, a bit cheesy, perhaps, but well worth the hour-and-a-half. Pixy Misa gives it a 7.

Big Trouble in Little China most certainly does not have the pacing problems of Big Trouble. It starts off nice and easy, setting the scene, establishing the characters... And then it hits full throttle and never lets up. This is Hollywood's take on the Wuxia film, and it's a good one. If you're not familiar with this school of film, or the stories and legends it draws upon, then you can't expect it to make much sense, and you'll just have to hang on and enjoy the ride. If you are familiar with the genre, you should enjoy the Western reaction to the various mythic elements, which can be summed up as What is this shit?

Our guide to this exploration of Chinese legend is Jack Burton (Kurt Russell), a truck driver with friends in San Francisco's Chinatown. When Wang Chi's (Dennis Dun) newly arrived fiancee Miao Yin (Suzee Pai) is abducted from the airport by Chinese thugs, Jack and Wang go to rescue her. Their encounters move swiftly from rival gangs to flying men in bamboo hats (Thunder, Rain and Lightning, played by Carter Wong, Peter Kwong and James Pax) and a two-thousand year old Chinese sorceror who shoots beams of light from his eyes and mouth (Lo Pan, played by James Hong).

It's comic book stuff, but it's good comic book stuff. There are love interests for all our heroes (Kim Cattrall as Gracie Law, the aforementioned Miao Yin (Miao Miao), and Kate Burton as Margo the reporter), there are fights, monsters, dark sorcery, bright magic (Victor Wong as Egg Shen), temples, weddings, guns, knives, good men, bad men, ninja girls (can't go wrong with ninja girls)... It doesn't have a car chase, not really, but apart from that the movie is complete.

Will Jack win through despite the odds, defeat the evil sorceror and save the girl? Well, duh, of course he will. It's not so important how it ends, because you know that going in; what's important is that it's done with style, with humour, with panache. And indeed it is. Pixy Misa gives it an 8.

Meanwhile, Blogger is down again. I'm not stupid, not totally; I can learn from painful experience; I did the Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Post&Publish dance, and I didn't lose my article. It's still down, and I still can't post; what do you expect from Microsoft SQL Server? Pixy Misa gives Blogger a 4. Catch it on TV.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:03 AM | Comments (70) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 07, 2003

I'm in Big Trouble

Nina, the maid in Big Trouble, is played by Sofia Vergara. I think I'm in love.

And you know those security seals they put on DVDs? I hate those things! Particularly when they put them on all three sides. Not naming any particular companies (Viz Video).

Oh, and in case anyone was still planning to invade Australia, we have lots of cane toads. Lots and lots of cane toads

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:34 PM | Comments (68) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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