What is that?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
Friday, September 29
Meet Your Maker
This is interesting:
MakeVM. It's a little shareware utility that creates virtual machines - either blank ones or clones of existing disks - for VMWare.
This is great if you're running VMWare Player (which doesn't have the ability to create new virtual machines itself), or if you're running VMWare Server and want to migrate an existing Windows server to a virtual environment.
Costs $19.95 for the full version. The free download is limited to teeny-tiny VMs, so I'll need to buy it. I have a couple of Windows servers here at work that do almost nothing but which I can't actually unplug, because they only do almost nothing. Now I can finally get rid of the buggers.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Whee!
Got my 4GB memory card. Although Canon doesn't list the Ixus 800 as supporting SDHC (which is required for SD cards larger than 2GB), Sandisk does, and I found a couple of people reporting that their cameras worked just fine with 4GB cards.
And so does mine.
Over 1400 photos at maximum resolution and image quality (well, that's JPEGs, not raws).
Now I just need to find something to take a photo of...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
How about Casa del Pixy? Or the fine ladies of the MuNu serverfarm?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, September 29 2006 01:41 AM (6YRS5)
2
Casa del Pixy is a bit of a mess right now. But I'm heading down to Melbourne in a couple of weeks so I'll be taking lots of pictures then.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 29 2006 02:35 AM (FRalS)
3
Ah. The yearly pilgramage Pixy ?
Fastest way to fill up that card is to shoot raw + jpgs at maximum res. :)
I think I'm going to have to get some bigger compact flash cards myself.
Posted by: Andrew at Friday, September 29 2006 07:59 PM (t8tOu)
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Thursday, September 28
Well, That Was Fun
Had a little excitement at work today. Apparently several blocks of Sydney's CBD went dark, including, of course, our office. Our elderly UPS valiantly struggled along for nearly a minute before expiring; the blackout itself lasted about an hour and a half.
Then I had to fix pretty much everything. Crashed databases, lost routing tables, failed NFS mounts (the systems didn't neatly reboot in the required order), unending fscks (This volume has not been checked for 562 days* so I'm now going to scan every one of your seven million files and there's nothing you can do to stop me so nyah.), broken RAID sets, misconfigured network cards...
Ugh.
Knoppix was used. It would have been even more not fun without Knoppix.
* Actual number.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
I take it that no one was able to log out properly during the 1 minute the servers were still up ...
And of course, every temp fix that could not withstand a reboot blew up at once.
Posted by: Kristopher at Thursday, September 28 2006 10:52 AM (O5Ju8)
2
Is this why your site had an odd look to it last night? Or was that something else?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, September 28 2006 11:22 AM (6YRS5)
3
If you saw the forum-looking thing, that was a glitch in the Minx caching system.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 28 2006 10:22 PM (FRalS)
4
That's what it was, yep. "Dear
Forum... I'm a student at a small midwestern college, and I never thought..."
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, September 28 2006 10:30 PM (6YRS5)
5
Wonderduck, any college student who never thinks might as well just drop out.
Posted by: triticale at Friday, September 29 2006 10:44 PM (IdwjX)
6
Hmmm... 10 points for triticale for ultimate truthiness, minus several million for completely whiffing on the joke.
To be fair, I don't know where in the world Trit is located, so it's certainly possible that he's not familiar with Penthouse magazine...
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, September 30 2006 02:37 AM (CJ5+Y)
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Wednesday, September 27
Shanatan
Just finished watching
Shakugan no Shana.
I do recommend it, though it is a little uneven. Jonathan Tappan has an interesting review of it, but it is rather spoiler-laden, so you might not want to read beyond the opening paragraphs (avoid even the synopsis!) until you've seen at least a couple of episodes.
And now I'm going to take a nap.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Tuesday, September 26
Happy Pixy Day
My copies of Macromedia Studio, Eye Candy 5000 (the complete bundle), Acid Music and Sound Forge have arrived. Vegas Video and Paint Shop Pro XI are due later this week.
And I've ordered a 4GB card for my camera, a 320GB disk for my PC, and a 16X DVD burner to replace my old CD burner - which has gotten stuck with my Neverwinter Nights CD inside. 
I start working from home on Secret Project M from the 5th of October.
Oh, and while I was at it, I upgraded my ADSL plan:
You have 58628.37 MB quota, and 59601.46 MB offpeak quota remaining until shaped at 64k
Now, nothing can stand in my way. Bwahahahaha!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Might there be a Pixy AMV in the works with that copy of Vegas, hmm?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, September 26 2006 03:20 AM (CJ5+Y)
2
Could be.
But this is all for work. As in, stuff I'm getting paid to do.
Any AMVs will be a bonus. ;)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 26 2006 03:21 AM (FRalS)
3
There are two people that I'd be incredibly interested in seeing AMVs by: you and Steven Den Beste.
I know there's no chance in seeing one by SDB (but then, he also said he'd never watch Azumanga Daioh...), so you're it, Pixy!
(note: I'd also be interested in seeing an AMV by me.)
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, September 26 2006 10:22 AM (6YRS5)
4
Pixy,
Hey, I'm having issues with Moveable Type's blacklist feature on a blog that I maintain and I see that you've been able to fix mu.nu's similar issues. Could you tell me how?
"Invalid [] range "s-c" in regex;" is the error, followed by a string from blacklist. I've deleted ALL of the strings that have ranges in them, and it still occurs, choosing the top domain name in the blacklist to error on.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Posted by: Brad` at Tuesday, September 26 2006 02:32 PM (zW21J)
5
Ok, I figured it out. She had banned something with a bracket in it and no close-bracket. I apologize for the bother. Please feel free to delete both of these comments.
Posted by: Brad at Tuesday, September 26 2006 02:43 PM (zW21J)
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In Camera
I ended up getting the Ixus 800 IS, the same model as TJ at
Riuva. Based on both specs and
sample photos it appears to be better than my
ancient Sony S85 in every way. Despite having a smaller sensor (1/2.5" vs 1/1.8") and of course a smaller lens, the sample photos from the Ixus have more detail and less noise.
More pixels, wider zoom range, much faster, much more storage (4GB vs. 128MB, same price for the respective cards), optical image stabilisation, much smaller and lighter, bigger screen (twice the screen area on a camera half the size), one-third the price. And the Sony is not a bad camera - apart from the slow auto-focus and some shutter lag, and the limitations of Memory Stick - it does take very nice photos. It's just that five years has made it completely obsolete.
One little thing: The two cameras, bought five years apart, both came with 16MB memory cards.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Congrats on the purchase.
Camera companies are really nickel and diming nowadays. The bundled memory cards are really only useful for showing off the cameras capabilities unless your willing to take tiny photos.
Posted by: Andrew at Tuesday, September 26 2006 07:41 PM (t8tOu)
2
Yep.
I can understand them not including a 4GB card, but 16MB?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 26 2006 10:19 PM (FRalS)
3
And of course, today it's cloudy and bleah here in Sydney. And me with a shiny new camera. :(
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 26 2006 10:20 PM (FRalS)
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Monday, September 25
Shakugan no Shana
Is pretty darn good.
I think it's licensed by Geneon, but doesn't seem to have been released yet. (A search of their sucky site reveals nothing.)
One thing I particularly like is that it's paced more like the first Slayers series than, say, Bleach. Dramatic rescues take one episode, not fifty. Plot points actually get resolved.
And like Slayers, you have a flame-haired flame-eyed super-powered chibi-chan.
Fear the kawaii!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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The first disc is available. (Try RightStuf or Robert's Anime Corner.) The second is scheduled for November.
Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at Monday, September 25 2006 02:16 PM (wqCJb)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 25 2006 07:55 PM (KQSjH)
3
Also the discs are very much worth buying (if this is the sort of series you like) even if you have fansubs. This seems to be very difficult material to translate and the DVD subtitles do a much better job, in my opinion.
On the other hand in the English dub they alter the text to sound more "natural", meaning "more American". Typical.
Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at Monday, September 25 2006 08:44 PM (wqCJb)
4
If one likes a show that you have on fansubs, you should ALWAYS get the series on 'official' DVDs... leastwise, that's my take on it (though I tend to wait until the entire show is available).
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, September 26 2006 03:21 AM (CJ5+Y)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 26 2006 09:45 AM (KQSjH)
6
Quite right--but even someone who is less ethical would be a fool not to get the DVDs in this case.
Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at Monday, October 02 2006 09:08 PM (C+XAe)
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Sunday, September 24
AMVs
Thanks to
Wonderduck for pointing me to two great new AMVs. Both are from artists previously featured here at Ambient Irony.
First up, Stop Watching Anime and Go Outside! by Doki Doki Productions. Music is There Is Life Outside Your Apartment from Avenue Q; video from Genshiken (which I haven't seen) and other shows, some of which you are sure to recognise. (More details at Doki Doki's site.)
Second, She's Just Oblivious by the very talented Silver Moon. Music is Sharada by Skye Sweetnam; video is the best anime of 2006.
Enjoy!
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I'm amazed every time I watch She's Just Oblivious at how well the song matches the character. It's almost as if the tune was written for Haruhi.
I'm also amazed that you didn't dig the other Haruhi AMV I have on my post, Forever. I'm actually watching it more than any other AMV in my collection these days.
Stop Watching Anime and Go Outside! might just be the best AMV I've seen this year.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, September 24 2006 01:25 PM (6YRS5)
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Footnote
The first two munu servers were named Mica and Mew.
(Well, technically there was one before that, but since it was the only server it was just called mu.nu or something like that. It was retroactively renamed Pooky when it came time to decommission it.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Saturday, September 23
Save New Scientist!
Back in the 80s, through to the mid-90s, I bought New Scientist every single week, and read it from cover to cover.
And then... Well, let's just say that I didn't leave New Scientist, New Scientist left me.
The economic illiteracy of the editors I could cope with, more or less; it's a popular science magazine, not an economics journal.
But the growing scientific illiteracy was harder to stomach. The increasing tendency to "study the controversy" and publish articles that were complete and obvious nonsense eventually drove me away.
Now it looks like I'm not alone.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
Scientific American did the same to me. I used to subscribe, and then for a while I picked up an occasional issue on the news stand. Now I don't even visit their web site for free articles. The editorial board got taken over by lefties and they began to push global warming and vast-rates-of-extinction and a lot of other idiotic anti-progress and anti-globalization issues that weren't really what Scientific American was supposed to be about -- and weren't really even very scientific.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, September 23 2006 09:18 PM (+rSRq)
2
A bit of a digression, but:
The interesting thing about the controversy over rates of extinction is that even Bjorn Lomborg, the so-called "Skeptical Environmentalist" who likes to argue that everything is fine, estimates that over the next 50 years about 0.7 percent of
all species will go extinct. This may not sound like much until you
realize how short 50 years is on a geological time scale, and how many species there are.
To put things in perspective, note that given Lomborg's
estimate that there are between 10 and 80 million species total,
a loss of .7 percent of all species would mean
between 70,000 and 560,000 extinctions in the
next 50 years. This amounts to 1,200 and 10,000 per year,
or between 4 and 30 a day. By comparison, the flaming leftie E. O. Wilson, who Lomborg loves to mock, estimates between 14 and 70 a day!
So, what's amazing is how little disagreement there actually is on this issue. Among people who've taken the trouble to study it, the two ends of the debate agree up to an order of magnitude, which is pretty darn good for such a tricky issue. They mainly just describe the problem in different ways: 14-70 extinctions per day sounds big, while .7 percent per 50 years sounds small.
Perhaps more to the point, Lomborg
says the current extinction rate is about 1500 times the natural
background rate.
References can be found on my
mass extinction webpage.
Posted by: John Baez at Sunday, September 24 2006 01:12 AM (t/5Dd)
3
I agree with you there, though that wasn't the sort of controversy that put me off New Scientist - that's a real scientific difference of opinion (whether Lomborg is right or wrong, he's not a crackpot).
What drove me nuts was seeing New Scientist giving equal time to people like
Rupert Sheldrake, who most definitely
is a crackpot.
(Oh, and though I'm no expert in the field, it seems clear to me that we are indeed in the middle of a human-induced mass-extinction event, regardless of the exact nature and degree of global warming.)
(Oh and also - HTML works, but you either need to use the buttons or click on the <> button to bring up an HTML editor instead of the WYSIWYG one.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 24 2006 04:13 AM (Zr5NU)
4
P.S. Whoa! You're
that John Baez! Hi there!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 24 2006 04:15 AM (Zr5NU)
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