Wear soft

Posted on July 1, 2009 by Arthur

A couple of thoughts that crossed my mind:

Ever since I installed Civ4 on this Vista 64-bit machine (which didn’t go all too well, if I remember correctly) I ‘ve found myself start to dislike the game: I think ever since patch 1.61 was released (or maybe it was the one before that, but 1.61 was definitely a Vista required install) the game has been behaving differently and particularly ‘less diplomatic’ so to say.

Earlier this day, I updated both IE and Firefox on my older XP machine (My 2004 Toshiba A40 machine). I figured out that since Firefox was updating to some 3.0.11 version, I might just as well do an upgrade to Firefox 3.5. Frankly, I was surprised how flawless this went. Mozilla is doing some stuff good, I guess. Talking about the A40 “Tank”: this was my second personal laptop and it ‘officially’ retired in December 2006 or so, but eventually returned back in my hands last year. I did a lot of programming on that one and indeed it made it to The Netherlands were family members more or less seem to like it only because it was blue and sturdy.

I also played ARMA2 a couple of times and I’m sort of mixed about it. I’ll probably move a review to another date, but there’s probably hundreds of people curious if the game will run on their machines: I run it in high-mode (post-processing turned off, some graphical settings set to ‘normal’) in 1280 x 800 and it’s excellent and definitely playable. My (laptop) specs are seemingly ‘old’: a 2.0 P7350, 4 gigs of RAM, 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT.

Update 1: Releasenotes Firefox. You may have noticed that 3.5 now supports the HTML 5 video/audio elements.

Update 2: Browser vendors squabble about HTML 5 audio and video elements.

Update 3: Goodbye XHTML (07/02/09).

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In Full Force

Posted on June 28, 2009 by Arthur

A couple of days ago I ran into a blog post called ‘Soviet Global Invasion Routes’, which has a collection of 80s maps showing the expected Soviet attack routes over the various continents (hyperlinks: West Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East). These were apparently maps made by American analysts and the number of comments at Reddit seem to either suggest that nobody knew about this or everybody knew this is ‘old hat’.

It is ‘old hat’: like other people who served in Western European conscription armies we were thoroughly drilled and taught about the ‘German plains tank battle’ in case of a showdown between the Red Army and NATO. We were totally aware of the armour odds (I think it was 5 to 1 or so) but our main goal was simply to delay the Red Army by targeting their supply lines.

At the end, I believe that NATO’s typical military structure (smaller semi-independent and decentralized units) would make the difference on the battlefield: that is, if no tactical nuclear missiles were going to be deployed.

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Saint John, Blues

Posted on June 20, 2009 by Arthur

Yesterday,A graduation sign I saw a drunk man hailing a cab. Eventually, he ran towards the other side of the road trying to get his two pals who were also drunk. One of them fell to the ground while trying to walk over to the cab. The last thing I saw was a crowd gathering around the men and a cab driver shrugging, too perplexed what to do about it.

A couple of days before that, a bunch of kids were walking around downtown in fancy suits and pretty dresses. Apparently, this was part of a graduation ceremony, which obviously was different from the one I attended last week.

There are giant ants swarming around the area where we buried our dog. We recently bought 5 bags of soil at a local building supplies store, which we all emptied around that spot in the woods. I tend to believe this soil was probably infested with these ants. Maybe the soil originated from a place in South America. Make that China.

And: it’s totally true that New Brunswickers only start talking to you after you’ve settled in for a year.

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Lost

Posted on June 7, 2009 by Arthur

We lost our faithful companion last Wednesday: Katy the Wunderdog was put down and life got a lot quieter around the house. If she had lasted a couple of weeks, she would have been 18 which is an excellent age for a dog her size. It’s a kind of surprising how fast it went downhill with her: last year’s photos of her tell a different story than the dog we knew for the last couple of weeks.

The other thing of note was that Air France plane disaster, last Sunday or Monday. Flight 447 was lost during a transatlantic flight from Brazil to France. The rescue efforts (or should I say, the search efforts) finally seem to have found the first bodies but there’s no word yet on the black boxes, which may have ended up in the depths of the Atlantic.

Curious: shouldn’t these boxes go with floaters for transatlantic flights? I mean, finding out what happened is crucial in these kind of disasters, instead of relying on best guesses by your local airplane and weather expert.

Update 1: Christian Science Monitor on ‘floating’ black boxes (06/03/09).

Update 2: Air France plane crashed ‘intact’ (07/02/09).

Update 3: Air France boxes search to wind down (07/10/09).

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Other than that

Posted on May 31, 2009 by Arthur

On Windows, I’ve beenClever Null solely using Google’s Chrome browser, leaving my Firefox copy at bay: Firefox only gets into action if I need to confirm that Chrome’s cache-loading-stuff has gone amuck again. Yesterday, for example we suddenly lost connection to the Internets and when Chrome decided to go into indefinite looping mode (it does that particularly when its internal cache is screwed up), I started up Firefox only to run into the pretty dialog shown above (or on the right). It seems that Firefox’s updater requires a persistent connection nowadays. What happened to ‘working offline’ if no connection was found?

On my Linux/Ubuntu desktop machine, I use a combination of browsers, of course: On Gnome, Firefox is the main browser and yes, Opera is good second. When I log into KDE, Konqueror is my default browser: Though, with all this Flash stuff (and the Konqueror hang-ups), I always have Firefox ‘on the ready’.

This reminds me that I find Firefox a lot more ‘faster’ on Ubuntu than on Windows (XP/Vista), even if you consider the fact that the Ubuntu machine runs on 2005 hardware (Centrino, 512 MB, yadda-yadda). If you recall, earlier Firefox 3 (beta) releases for Ubuntu were disasters mainly because obscure SQLite transactions happening in the background of a browsing session (earlier here). However, since Chrome for Linux is officially still Alpha (if you’ve seen the images you know what I mean), there’s no rush to switch browsers on the Linux platform.

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Now.

Posted on May 29, 2009 by Arthur

BeenNo Contents fairly busy and still am, which means that I’ve only got a bunch of left-over links I ran into the last couple weeks:

The June 2009 SA has a story about the evolution of the Housecattus Domesticus Abnormalis, or rather, the common house cat. The cat as we know it in Western Europe, did indeed originate from the Middle East. Additionally it appears that the cats/human bond started about 10,000 years ago, when humans started to establish themselves in homes, which attracted the cute little mice your cat will throw up in front of your shoes. Or in scientific lingo (if you’re religious, you may want to close your eyes):

Both these food sources [houses and trash heaps] would have encouraged cats to adapt to living with people: natural selection favored those cats that were able to cohabitate with humans and thereby gain access to the trash and mice.

Silly Europeans, the moment they start banning stuff, Canada gets in an uproar. It’s the seal hunt, again; which is when Canadian seal hunters club seals to death. While I don’t particularly care about the seal hunt, it takes some guts to eat a raw seal heart, that requires guts. Or maybe you need to be out of your mind to do that.

And last and definitely least: The malaria bugs have been slowly getting resistant to artemesinin: researchers in Cambodia have issued warnings that the drugs are taking longer to clear the blood of the parasites, which is an early warning sign of emerging resistance. The irony (a cynical one at that) is that if it wasn’t for our use of medication, there wouldn’t have been this resistance.

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Yard.works.

Posted on May 17, 2009 by Arthur

YSome Greenard work season has finally started and the routine of mowing the lawn can be described like:

  1. Start lawn mower.
  2. Decide which part of the yard to do first.
  3. Stop lawn mower.
  4. Calculate the cut height: I use a simple formula which includes several variables:
    • The number of hours of rain and sun before the next cutting day
    • The surface measurements of the yard minus the size of the cutter (me)
    • The rotating speed of the cutting blades squared and times 2
    • The speed photons hit the greens of the grass (if this number approaches light speed, you can ignore this because this may cause you to age faster than your twin brother)
    • My favourite, the acceleration of gravity.
  5. Restart lawn mower.
  6. ????

The other thing I’ve been considering is to follow a unique mowing pattern: Currently I mow straight lines (my world renown ’45 degrees cut’, which I, incidentally, have a formula for too1) but in the future I foresee a circle pattern or even a parabola cutting pattern. However, the calculation of these patterns is still ongoing.

1 Exact science, exact science…

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Onst–mig

Posted on May 8, 2009 by Arthur

The weather has beenPrincess Street, Saint John fairly mixed the last couple of weeks and the only word that correctly describes it is the Dutch word ‘onstuimig’. At least I find there is some consistency: the weather is fairly unpredictable.

Last week, I wanted to mentionthe attack on the Dutch royalty in the town Apeldoorn but ended up being too busy to even bother. I’m not sure why someone would attempt an attack on the royal family: It’s not that they’re hated nor would I say that Dutch people are proud royalists. I gleefully found out that major news outlets correctly described Apeldoorn as a ‘town’ and not as a ‘city’. If I remember correctly, the number of residents living in Apeldoorn is approximately 1,001 (+/- 153,000). I have good memories of Apeldoorn, but honestly, I don’t remember seeing a lot of the town itself: it’s not really a city with a notable past or significant landmarks, except for the royalty’s Summer residence, Palace ‘Het Loo’.

The other thing I noticed that foreign news agencies always use the city of Amsterdam as a marker whenever something serious happens in The Netherlands:

The royals, who were unharmed, watched in horror as the car ploughed into bystanders in Apeldoorn, about 90km (56 miles) east of Amsterdam.

Dutch people frown on these kind of quotes and that is mainly because the distance between Amsterdam and Apeldoorn is considered to be fairly distant (so to say). From a North American view, 90 kms is just a stone-throw away. Foreigners who have driven on the highways over here can attest to that. This brings me to a silly anecdote from 2005, when my dad visited us when we still lived in Nova Scotia. We decided to drive around, go south to Lunenberg and then hit the highway 10 to Annapolis Valley. After returning home, I jokingly asked him to point out the route we took. He was 100 percent certain that we had driven all around the Nova Scotian coast and it took me a while to convince him that we’d only seen probably half or less of it. It then finally dawned to him how small The Netherlands actually is.

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The light

Posted on May 2, 2009 by Arthur

A couple of days ago, I was thinking of mankind’s efforts to make an invisible cloak: I’m not sure why I came up to that subject, but, at one time, I remember trying to explain someone what light is and the duality of matter and energy (I guess I should link to the double-slit experiment as well). Anyway, to stay on topic, I read that researchers are getting closer to making such a cloak, and this time it doesn’t require heavy use of metals: by manipulating the optical density of an object (the ‘amount of refraction of an object’) they were able to transform the path of light.

I also read that researches have drawn up a genetic map of Africa, which shows that continent (besides being the origin of humans) is more genetic diverse than initially expected. Additionally, the study seems to confirm the location of the origin of human migration, which is in south-west Africa.

A week ago (or so, according the news sources), astronomers watched the explosion of the oldest object (for now) in the universe. The best estimations are that it exploded 13 billion years ago, which makes the object approximately ‘only’ 600 million years old or so. The gamma ray burst, detected by SWIFT (which some news sources fail to mention), confirms what most astronomers already suspected: that stars can form within 600 million years.

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Oh. So. Quiet

Posted on April 25, 2009 by Arthur

The Dandelionslast couple of days (or weeks, so you will), I have seen the weather go from cold, to mildly-cold, rainy to overly sunny and warm. This weekend we’re supposed to hit the 20 degrees, which is quite a difference from the 4 or 5 degrees it was a couple of days ago. Obviously, it does miracles to the grass on the lawn and the trees, all of them now rushing to compete for as much sun as they can get.

Before the snow started to disappear, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that a bunch of dandelions (or rather, some first generation off-spring of that stuff) had apparently been growing underneath the snow, and the warmer temperatures, of course, have also spurred their growth. This is generally signal to start the ‘dandelion’ onslaught. I mean, before you know, these things transform into triffids (The Movie!).

The return of warmer temperatures also hailed the return of the ‘morning bird noises’ outside: I never really paid attention to this, but it just struck me the other day: Spring indeed returns if the birds start to make their noises (or songs as some people call them). Particularly, the cardinals.

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The Fighting Windmills Squadron

Posted on April 11, 2009 by Arthur

News Find the 10 differences outlet AFP reported that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has accused the Netherlands of plotting to overthrow the Iranian government.

The Dutch [project] aimed to encourage sexual and moral deviation in society

I’d like to hear what kind of moral and sexual deviation they are talking about.

Alfons linked to a piece I’ve never heard of (not that I claim to be an expert in Spanish/Mexican style music..), the ‘Huapango’. Full orchestral work linked here (Berlin Philharmonic, YouTube, 9 minutes). Excellent material.

Via, uh, MetaFilter, I listened to Bonnie Bassler’s TED presentation (18 minutes) about how bacteria communicate. The thing that struck me the most was how she explained how we ended up with resistant bacteria:

“We’re running out of anti-biotics. Bacteria are getting increasingly multi-drug resistant, and that’s basically because all the anti-biotics we use kill bacteria… […] and that selects the resistant mutants.”

They have a name for that: it’s called evolution.

Update 1: Bassler’s name corrected (was ‘Bartlett’, who was actually an actress in St. Elsewhere). My bad.

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Green herbivores

Posted on April 5, 2009 by Arthur

Many types eat grass,
usually, herbivores.
Some green leafy plants.

1 See also this boring Wikipedia article on grass.
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Green as grass

Posted on April 5, 2009 by Arthur

Grass has this amazing ability to survive the most bizarre weather conditions: the yellow (but slowly turning green) grass patches on the (still) frozen ground in our yard are a testament of the species’ resilience. I find it a kind of funny that despite it being one of the longest surviving plants, Wikipedia’s entry on grass is a bit dull:

Many types of animals eat grass as their main source of food. These animals are usually called “herbivores”, although certain herbivores are more inclined to eat leafy plants, and some omnivorous or even primarily carnivorous animals have been observed eating grass on occasion. Some of the most familiar grass eaters include cows, sheep, horses and rabbits.

Oh. No really? Zzzzzzz.

I was reminded of a silly Dutch tradition: The ‘Palm pasen’ parade. I think only the first two grades (primary school) do this (@Flickr) and I can’t remember exactly what this is all about (Dutch Wikipedia to the rescue) but kids are supposed to make and decorate a cross, nail a piece of bread (the shape of a chicken, I believe) to it and then parade around the neighbourhood or school. Thinking of it, I can’t imagine why public schools would do this to their kids.

Then, somehow, I got here, “Almost Perfect”, which is a personal witness account of the rise and fall of WordPerfect. What can I say about WordPerfect? It went from de-facto standard to obscure word processor. Sure, one can blame Microsoft for aggressively throwing Word at OEMs.

And last but not least, via this (“Neither have you tasted my Jesus”), I ended up looking at this excellent series (“From Big Bang to us – Made Easy”) about the universe, evolution and mankind. If you’re scientifically inclined (and I assume you are), you may just as well subscribe to the creator’s the Youtube channel.

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