The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.

After All...

You can't expect a lowly 2.6GHz processor to copy files across the network and burn a DVD at the same time, can you?

Bah.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Quick Update

I hate computers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:02 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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And They're Probably Sour Too

My DVD-Rs turn out not to be printable. At least not with my printer, which I did not buy for the express purpose of printing on said DVD-Rs.

Although the disks have a clean white surface, they have a gloss finish. The ink won't stick to this, and in fact the disks wash clean even if they've been left to dry for a few minutes. The sample printable CD-R that came with the printer worked perfectly and now bears a likeness of Sofia Vergara.

The supplier who supplied my DVD-Rs now also supplies the same brand in a printable version. They are $20 more expensive per spindle of 50 than the non-printable type - which still makes them $20 cheaper than when I bought mine.

As usual, the technical problem will have to be fixed by the judicious application of money.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:52 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Not Scientist

These days, I get almost all of my news from the Net. The only print magazine I still read regularly is New Scientist. (I buy Newtype every month, but they just pile up in the corner...)

Most weeks New Scientist is a great reminder that we really are living in the 21st century. It regularly reports on research and findings, not to mention feats of engineering, that would have been world-shaking just twenty years ago. It's at its strongest reporting new findings in the hard sciences, particularly in under-reported fields like materials science, and at its weakest reporting on political issues.*

This week's issue has a special report on Parapsychology. This should be a case of dynamiting fish in a barrel. But both articles - The power of belief and Opposites detract - soft-peddle scientific argument and overstate the support for ESP.

In the first case, the writer is simply taking pains to be fair, reporting both sides as though they are equal, both acting in good faith. We've all seen that before, and know where it leads. The two sides aren't equal:

After years of rancour in which the sceptics and believers stood on opposite sides of the divide, it was agreed that the only way forward was to establish some mututally agreeable standards. Sceptics agreed to ditch their presumption of artefact or fraud whenever a positive result came in;

- Not that there was any such universal assumption -

in return, parapsychologists agreed to drop all forms of special pleading

- Which they instead took to new heights -

and concentrate on getting replicable results.

- Which attempt met with singular failure, and resulted in yet more special pleading. Here's a fine example:

As we pondered this paradox, we became cognizant of a number of subtler, less quantifiable factors that also might have had an inhibitory effect on the experiments, such as the laboratory ambience in which the experiments were being conducted. For example, during the period in which the FIDO data were being generated, we were distracted by the need to invest a major effort in preparing a rebuttal to an article critical of PEAR’s PRP program. Most of the issues raised therein were irrelevant, incorrect, or already had been dealt with comprehensively elsewhere, and had been shown to be inadequate to account for the observed effects. Notwithstanding, preparation of a systematic refutation deflected a disproportionate amount of attention from, and dampened the enthusiasm for, the experiments being carried out during that time. Beyond this, in order to forestall further such specious challenges, it led to the imposition of additional unnecessary constraints in the design of the subsequent distributive protocol. Although it is not possible to quantify the influence of such intangible factors, in the study of consciousness-related anomalies where unknown psychological factors appear to be at the heart of the phenomena under study, they cannot be dismissed casually. Neither can they be interpreted easily.

Those darn skeptics! Every time they ask their nasty questions, our experiments fail! It's all their fault!

That's from a paper by PEAR - the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Resarch group. Their papers are filled with special pleading - and also with evidence for poor experimental control, misuse of statistics, and truly lousy writing style.

The second piece, however, just goes for the big lie.

What's more, ESP experiments have been replicated and their results are as consistent as many medical trials. .... In short, by all the normal rules for assessing scientific evidence, the case for ESP has been made.

This utterly untrue.

Every ESP experiment that has produced positive results has, upon closer inspection, been shown to be seriously flawed. Except in the many cases where the researchers have refused to have their experimental design reviewed by a third party.

Every experiment that has been redone with tighter experimental controls has shown a marked reduction in the strength of the result. More often that not, positive findings disappear or are reduced below the level of statistical significance.

What does Robert Matthews, writer of Opposites detract, have to say?

Despite this relentless rejection of their work, parapsychologists such as those at the Koestler unit have ploughed on in search of clinching evidence they hope will convince the scientific community. Some believe it is a waste of time because the reality of ESP has now been been put beyond reasonable doubt. Sceptics agree it is fruitless, but on the grounds that since ESP cannot exist, all positive results must be spurious. [My italics.]

This is a deliberate distortion of the sceptical position.

Skeptics are skeptical of ESP for a number of reasons. First of all, it doesn't seem to happen. That is, if you look for examples of the paranormal in everday life, you never find a clear example, only slightly odd events and strange coincidences.**

Second, almost every effect claimed for ESP contradicts established scientific laws. Now, we call the laws of science that becuase they work. They work every time, without exception. The parapsychologists are claiming exception from those laws when no such exception has been found in any other field of study.

And finally, there is the chequered history of the field itself. Well, it's not chequered so much as solid black. Matthews:

Over and over again, reputable researchers have found strong evidence for the existence of ESP in tightly controlled experiments.

This is a lie.

The entire history of ESP research has been a study in bad experimental design. Parapsychologists simply do not follow the basic rules of eliminating outside influence in their experiments.

When experiments are redesigned properly, the effects disappear.

Every time.

And since this has been the case for decades, we have to come to another conclusion: Not only is there no good evidence for ESP, but there are no reputable researchers in the field. If they were reputable, they would by now be designing effective experiments.

They're not.

So either they are staggeringly incompetent, or they are frauds. Or a combination of the two. Matthews again:

More than any other scientific discipline [Hah!] parapsychology pushes the scientific process to its limits, and reveals where its faults lie. In particular, it has highlighted that, contrary to the insistence of many scientists, data alone can never settle this or any other issue.

The blame lies not with the scientific process, but with the way parapsychologists have misconstrued it and manipulated it to their own ends. If your experiments are not conducted properly, the data from those experiments will not support your case. It is not evidence of anything.

And if you conduct poorly controlled experiments for decades, real scientists will simply dismiss your efforts as worthless.

James Randi has a prize of a million dollars open to anyone who can demonstrate any paranormal effect. Quite a number of people have tried. None of them have even passed the preliminary tests, conducted informally and with much less rigorous controls than would be used by any serious experimenter.

And what do we see from those who fail?

Well, apart from the dowsers - who seem to be a friendly bunch, suffering from just a minor case of self-delusion (something that is hardly restricted to dowsers) - apart from them, we find special pleading. Either the test design - mutually agreed upon well in advance - was wrong, or their powers - guaranteed to work under the agreed conditions - would in fact not work under the agreed conditions - or it was all the fault of those darned skeptics.

I leave it to my readers to draw the parallels between these individuals, who never let a nasty fact impinge upon their worldview, with certain political groupings.

* The editors are, frankly, a bunch of commies.

** And a lot of anecdotes. I love anecdotes. I have a special container by my desk in which I store them.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:51 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Not Only, But Also...

If you forget to permanently save your new NAT rules, and then reset your modem, the new NAT rules wil go away. Once they go away, they will not work as expected.

Also, if you reboot your server, and it turns out that you never got around to saving the new network settings to the appropriate config files, those new network settings will also go away. If this means that the server is now looking for a default gateway that is on the wrong subnet, routing to the outside world will become something of a hit-and-miss affair.

Mostly miss, really.

And it looks like I may have been unfair to my D-Link modem. When entering a NAT rule, it asks for from and to local addresses (invariably one machine), from and to remote addresses (invariably your external IP, but you could have more than one of those), from and to port numbers... And a single to port for the final destination. So it looks like after typing everything in twice, you are restricted to only handling one port per rule. And you can only have twelve rules, so...

But no! If you leave the destination port as zero, it seems that the port number is passed through unchanged. So I can handle the standard BitTorrent ports (6881-6889) with a single rule! Hurrah!

I have absolutely no idea how I managed to enter the number 7 for that final port, but I can tell you that it did not work.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:06 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Progress

I'm now getting a GRUB hard disk error.

Well, it's better than "LI".

Also, my air conditioner is much quieter now that I have piled six large computer books and a ream of 100 gsm inkjet paper on it. It doesn't make that nasty vibratey sound any more.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:48 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Whee!

Before I left for work this morning afternoon* I told my computer to download 5GB of anime - E's Otherwise episodes 16 through 20 and all of Star Ocean EX. Okay, so it hadn't quite finished by the time I got home. But before, it would have taken a day and a half.

I should probably have time to actually watch these shows some time in May.

May 2006.

* Yes, my working hours are somewhat flexible.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:07 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wile E. Pixy

Heh.

I've mentioned before my shiny DVD burner, and the 112 DVDs I've burnt backing up all my irrecoverable treasures* and how some of those backups have turned out to be, well, irrecoverable.

Which is particularly annoying because I verified every disk after writing it, doing a byte-for-byte comparison to the original files.**

So I thinks to myself, my DVD-ROM drive won't read some of these disks, but Nero could read them fine on the DVD burner. So what if, I thinks, what if I tell Nero to make a copy of the dud disk? And make it single-session rather than multi-session just to make sure?

What if?

It worked! And I have my copy of MST3K: The Movie back, safe and sound.

* Like MST3K, for example.

** Well, I told Nero to do it for me.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:01 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Getting It Right

I really like my new ISP's AUP.* It boils down to exactly two points:

Don't spam.

Illegal activities are still illegal when you do them on the Internet.

Want to run servers? Play games? Have 15 people sharing the same connection?

No problem.

* Acceptable Usage Policy.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:19 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Return of the Hard Drive Destruction Bunny

Guess who paid a little visit to Pixy Central in the small hours of the morning?

Yes! None other than that relentless hopping devourer of data, Hard Drive Destruction Bunny!

Of course, I'm running RAID-5, so my data is safe. Unless, of course, the bunny decides to make it a twofer.

And I have most of the files backed up on DVD-R. I can't actually read many of the DVDs, but it's comforting to know that they are there, and at least in theory I have a backup.

So, I did what I had been planning for this weekend: I threw all my spare parts together in one big messy server-shaped bundle, and installed Linux on it. All went well until it came time to reboot, whereupon the server came up with the dreaded

LI

Which means that although you've installed GRUB as your boot loader, BIOS has somehow found half of an ancient copy of LILO, attempted to boot that instead, and locked up.

Oh, and the Fedora installer won't let you do a quick fix on the boot loader. It will ask you exactly what changes you want to make - and then not do them.

So, I left it re-installing in the hope that this time (I limited the mirrored boot volume to the first two IDE drives) it will be able to find GRUB.

I've ordered another 200GB SATA drive. At least Linux knows what to do with them. (Huh. I tried to install WinXP on my Linux box so I could dual boot, but I couldn't get it to work. Maybe that's why.)

I've also got a 200GB drive here at work. It's destined to replace the pathetically overcrowded 20GB drive in my workstation here, but it's going on a little detour first. You see, I have 580GB of files on my new Linux box, but the parts-bin server only has 440GB... Which would make backing up one onto the other kind of tricky. (We have spare disks all over the place at work, because every time we build a server we make sure we have a spare disk of the exact same model in case we need to replace a failed drive in a hurry. Which is great if you need to borrow a disk for a day or two... Not so good if someone else has borrowed the disk you need right now.)

Oh, and while I was building the parts-bin server I managed to knock out both the power cord for my mail server and the phone line for my ADSL. I blame that on lack of sleep, which is another story entirely.

So, all I need to do is:

Get Linux installed and working on the server of many names (for historical reasons, the parts-bin server will be called Lina Kodachi Akane Shampoo Mughi Pixy Misa Dot Kicks-Ass Dot Net).

Copy all the little fiddly files (millions of them - literally) from Yuri to the main RAID array on Lina.

Install the borrowed 200GB drive in Kei.

Copy the anime from Yuri to the borrowed drive in Kei until I run out of room.

Copy any remaining files to the other RAID array on Lina.

Install the new 200GB drive in Yuri.

Reinstall Yuri from scratch, only with a spare volume for the raidset.

Copy all the anime and other critical files back to Yuri.

Bask in the glow of all the happy disk drives.

The funny thing is, the drive isn't actually dead. Not as such. It doesn't seem to be performing up to spec, but I can read from it. But Linux has decided it's bad, and won't be told otherwise.

Now, I probably could just reimport that disk into the raidset somehow, but I've never done that before, and it is very much one slip, you're dead territory, which is not a place I care to go while juggling 580GB of data.

I may have come up with a way to read those unreadable DVD-Rs too. More details tonight - one way or the other.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:02 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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