Not Quite so Pedestrian

This is the first, and potentially last, in a series about the ways of Australia. This is so that visitors to this interesting country can be prepared…

In some places in Australia there are a different kind of pedestrian crossing. These are crossings where pedestrians give way to vehicles. That’s right. You stand at the side of the pedestrian crossing and wait there until there are no cars, and then you can cross.

Now the first thing you might wonder is, “well how is that different to any other stretch of road? What makes it a pedestrian crossing?”.

Well first of all the road is raised slightly. This is primarily to catch out newcomers, hence this post. The crossing are signposted of course, with the rules stating you should wait, but most people already know how a crossing works.

So they will stand at the side and expect the cars to slow and let them cross. The great thing about this system is that the cars do slow, but because there is a raised patch of road. This suggests to the unwary that the car intends to stop, and so they step out. And get run down.

It is even better when you are a driver new to a town where these crossings are. Because you will already know that pedestrians get right of way on a pedestrian crossing – hence the name. So you will approach, see people are getting ready to cross, and slow down to stop.

Of course, those people standing there will now believe that you are simply lying in wait. That your intention is to encourage them to cross so that you get pile into them. So you end up with a kind of Mexican stand off until someone gives in.

It is inspirational.

Windows Symbolic Links

Just found out about “junctions” which is NTFS speak for linux style symbolic links.

There is always a battle with Windows with getting stuff installed where you want it.

Documents and Settings, and Program Files, default to the system partition. This is exactly where they shouldn’t be. The system should be on the system partition, and the rest of your stuff should be elsewhere, partitioned off sensibly.

And where is the “advanced” button in Windows to specify where you want the default locations? Doesn’t exist. The best you can do is modify the setup.inf on the cd – which means burning it of course. I must do this at some point, but several installs later I cannot be bothered fixing something that should not be broken.

So after each install it is a case of moving stuff and hacking the registry to make it all work. And does it all work? No. Moving Documents and Setting is *hard*. My last install I caved. 2004 was my last rant about it. So right now it is sitting on the system partition.

But now I find that auto-updates don’t work. And this is because I have moved Program Files, along with the contents, and fixed the registry so it knows. And yet Windows Update insists that it cannot do what it has to because it has moved. Why? WHY?

So what if there was something like symbolic links for Windows? Then you can move stuff wherever you like and just link it, and windows will think everything is where it is “supposed” to be.

Well, of course, there is. Called “junctions”. There is a utility over at sysinternals to allow you to create them, and it works a treat.

I consider this a compromise rather than a solution.

Optical Illusion as Web Design Technique

Look at this website. It is an Australian company that sells and ERP product. Whatever.

But look at the way the graphic above the main menu makes the menu itself look as though it is thicker at one end rather than the other.

I imagine this was entirely unintentional by the company web designers, and the end result looks a bit disconcerting.

However, it did lead me to wonder if there might be some room for using optical illusions to create subtle design elements on a web page.

I’ll add it to my list of millions of things to consider…

Firefox Proxy – Yahoo.com

I have firefox configured to use my proxy server. I do this using Foxyproxy.

I have just discovered that if my proxy server is out of commisssion, Firefox attempts to make a connection to yahoo.com on port 65535.

Now why would this be?

Technocrati

Technorati Profile

Jalapeno

Most food can be thought of as a jalapeno delivery system. However, there are some food types that are not suited to being a vehicle for jalapeno consumption.

It is quite likely that these foodstuffs are not good for you.

Compiz XGL

This took a bit of getting going, but it works now. This is on Ubuntu on a laptop with an ATI X600 onboard.

The error I was getting referred to “Support for non power of two textures missing”

This suggests that the driver I am using cannot handle anything other than square textures, and googling showed that I should be using the fglrx driver rather than the standard ati driver.

Thats great, but I was already using the fglrx driver, so something else must be afoot. I tried a bunch of things, even AIXGL, but couldn’t get passed this error – which was coming from compiz.

So I gave up and went back to X vanilla. But back in X I found that ordinary GL apps were running slow – max 5 fps.

That is when I discovered that dri – direct rendering – wasn’t being loaded. So no 3D acceleration. And it was simple enough, the composite option was enabled in xorg.conf:

Section “Extensions”
Option “Composite” “Enable”
EndSection

Composite cannot coexist with dri – and once disabled, GL apps sped up. glxgears went from 100 fps (which I actually thought wasn’t a problem – that is a high frame rate in the scheme of things) to 1400 fps.

So I fired up XGL again, and bam, my windows are now wobbling around my cubic desktop just like they should.

I hope someone else lands here and this helps….

Wired? Forget it.

Okay, it is a little bit disappointing – the progress that we are seeing today with technology. For example, there are no flying cars; manned space travel is… not exactly progressing. We don’t have foldaway screens, we don’t have a decent method of inputing data into handheld device. Batteries are rubbish; mobile data seems to be as good now as wide data was two decades ago. In some areas it is as good now as it has ever been – absent.

So it would be great if the technologists would pull their finger out and get some these things working. Working like all the technologies we currently take the granted. However, I would almost prefer that every single person currently working on a technology project would stop. And they wouldall get together and solve the one problem that plagues technology today.

Wires. One of the main problems in overcoming the wires problem is the fact that batteries don’t work very well. It makes Bluetooth as a wireless solution – well – crap. However, I am not necesserily saying that the solution to the problem of wiress necessarily has to be wireless – it could be more intelligent wires. Wires that whatever you do, can’t tangle up with themselves and other wires. Memory metal may be.

Just some solution where I can put my headphones on, take them off and put them in my pocket. And when I take them back out of my pocket, it doesn’t take several hours to untangle before I can use them again.

We’ve achieved many things, as a species, but we have had wires for many decades and been untangling them and tripping over them for all of that time. And it needs to end.

Save the Sharks – for now

New Scientist reports that the Cronulla Fisheries Centre in New South Wales has a new plan to save the endangered Grey Nurse Shark.

Grey Nurse Sharks start with around 40 embryos per pregnancy. However the embryos have a tendency to eat each other in the womb, meaning that only a couple make it to term.

CFC are building a series of artificial uterus’ so that each embryo can be removed from the mother and brought to term. “No eating your brothers and sisters now!”

Ok.. this sounds like a good plan on the face of it – except for a couple of things. An artificial uterus? Pregnancies are hard to pull off even using the original equipment, so it will be interesting to see how successful an artificial womb is.

But aside from that, nature rarely does things without reason. Not mindful reason of course, but billions years of trial and error reason. Forty embryos are fertilised each with the capability of coming to term, so what is the evolutionary benefit of wasting this energy in a cannabalistic feeding frenzy?

Nutrition? Why convert energy into an embryonic shark only to then use it as a food source? Efficiencies are lost in this process.

Many animals “stress test” embryos for suitability before allowing them coming to term. Even in humans as many as one in three embryos don’t make it. It would seem that the most likely explanation what is happening is that the world that these sharks will be entering is a harsh one, particularly when they are young, and this process helps weed out all but the strongest of the pups to be – those with that have the greatest edge.

So while interfering with this process may increase the quantity of sharks born, surely the quality will be diminished.

These sharks are near extinct, so while the idea of bringing as many into the world as possible would seem a good strategy, the consequences of releasing so many sharks that would not normally be brought into the world could have longer term detrimental effects – the gene pool quality is reduced and this would surely have an impact on the long term survivability of the species.

It’s getting hot in here

The Register reports that CO2 levels are at their highest ever in nearly a million years:

Ice cores reveal historic heights of CO2

Deep ice cores from Antarctica reveal there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than at any time in the last 800,000 years.

The data comes from analysis of tiny air bubbles buried 3.2km down in the Antarctic ice sheets. These provide a record of the ancient atmosphere and give insight into how climate was affected by CO2 levels in the past.

I am sure there will be those that come out and say this could still be a natural cycle and human activity isn’t the cause of the “hockey stick” hike in all things warm.

But my question is this: “So what?”

Take away the causative and the problem still remains. If it does turn out that humans are not the cause of the changes in our environment that are inevitably leading to climate catastrophe, does that mean that we should sit by and do nothing and let it all happen?

It has been a while since humans have accepted what nature has to offer, and not to meddle, so this would be a refreshing change. But what would be the outcome? C02 rises, and the temperature increases. Greenland melts. The sea rises – perhaps by 6.5 meters. Historically, severe climate change always occurs in response to high CO2 levels.

And billions of people lose the means to survive.

Clearly something would need to be done to avoid this no matter what the cause is. And the first thing to do to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is to stop dumping more of it in there – ie cut emissions, and to stop removing the planets capability to sink the carbon that is there. By not chopping down the plantlife that achieves this.

Get on with it.