Search Results: "dwarf"

29 January 2008

Christine Spang: Real Life Accessibility

I live in a cooperative living group, and during the fall semester a person who we’d invited to live with us who is a dwarf and relies on a scooter for most of his transportation decided he’d like to move in. Unfortunately, while he can get out of his scooter and come inside by himself, we had no stepless entrances such that he could bring his scooter inside to protect it from the angry Cambridge winter. Mmm, frozen batteries. So, we’re a coop and we maintain the house ourselves—so we decided to build one, of course. A ramp up to the back porch! Nevermind the fact that we need to sink four-foot foundation holes in the ground in January. We got started right away at the beginning of IAP, while people were still trickling back into town from all over the country. First we surveyed out where the posts should be sunk: Then it was time for excavating the holes where concrete would eventually be poured. This involved a power auger of DOOM: It’s advertised as a 2-man tool. Two 200-pound construction workers, that is. We had to put four people on it plus one person with a shovel clearing dirt to make it manageable, and even then it was a pain. There’s a delicate rhythm you have to get into to avoid getting the bit stuck—DOWN. UP. CLEAR. And inevitably there are rocks and roots that have to be dealt with. We lucked out with a fairly warm weekend to do the digging on, but on the first day we still had to deal with a couple inches of frozen ground: There was also some fun stuff involving having to clear away our (frozen) mulch containers and use a concrete cutter on a weird old concrete pathway that used to run through the same area: Next we mixed and poured concrete: And placed hardware in the concrete to hold the posts: Framing: Eventually it became functional, woo: And done! (except for metal handrail): This all took place over the course of about three weeks. And now our scooter-bound housemate can bring his wheels inside! The house still isn’t totally accessible to wheelchairs/scooters, but at least the first floor is. It really brings me pride to see things like this go from start to finish here. We can do it! This guy who is moving in has really influenced my life—he’s really good at making people feel comfortable talking to him, and for me it’s gone from “wow this is awkward, I have no idea what to say” to “talking to a person with different physical abilities and characteristics seems normal”. And that’s made me a better person.

24 December 2007

Thomas Girard: dwarves uploaded

We've just uploaded Dwarves. It is a set of tools that use DWARF information inserted in ELF binaries compiled with debugging symbols. See this paper for details on this set. Included in the package: Until the package reaches unstable, you can grab them from here.

11 August 2007

Alastair McKinstry: Planet 9 from Outer Space

While investigating planet formation (to justify support complement a PhD proposal on ocean planets), I found this discussion over at physicsforums following a blog entry by Dr Steinn Sigursson. (He uses Planet X in his posts but that is too frequently linked with the dwarf planet Xena Eris, and besides, Pluto has been demoted, so its Planet 9 we're looking for :-( ). The question is, how was our solar system created ?
"Looks like the outer solar system, with late heavy bombardment, would have come together nicely if there was another Neptune out there to begin with."
Basically, it appears as though there is a planet or substellar companion star out in the Oort cloud. This is not likely to be the Nemesis object of Hut's/Muller's theory, but would have been responsible for the Kuiper belt. Most of the discussion is about brown dwarfs, but following links leads to a paper by Gomes et al., simulating the possibility of outer Neptunes or Jupiters at 4000 AU or 5000 AU. The thread is all about the dynamics of such bodies, but what would they look like? Now, Hydrogen freezes solid at 14K, Helium is liquid at 4K. So we're talking about a liquid helium ocean on top, with no atmosphere worth speaking of. But Could it sustain life? Not as impossible as it seems. Ehrenreich and Cassan point out that an Ice Giant could host a liquid layer underneath an ice shell surface, heated by radiogenic energy, that could last for billions of years before freezing. So where would it be? This is the time to submit a grant proposal for more envelopes ... Tags , , , ,

20 June 2007

Paul van Tilburg: Feeding Frenzy! Uploaded

Hungry
dwarfs walk around collecting and throwing food There is some effort here at Debconf to improve Debian’s game stuff. I want to contribute to that by announcing my first upload of the game “Feeding Frenzy!” to Debian Sid. The game is about dwarfs (or sheep) that have to collect food to survive which becomes increasingly scarce during the game. Besides collecting food, the dwarfs can also can choose to throw the food at competing dwarfs to temporarily disable them. Four years ago, a group consisting of some of my friends and myself created this game as an assignment for a project in our bachelor computer science. A few weeks ago, we undusted the game, Bram fixed some compiler warnings and I fixed up the package. It is ready for Debian now and has a pretty good gameplay, though it can probably still be improved graphic- and level-wise. I uploaded it two days ago. So, if our FTP-masters are no longer busy with Debconf, I hope they can get the game through the NEW queue soon.

25 May 2007

Alastair McKinstry: Jets seen from a Brown Dwarf Star

Artists impression of Jets from Brown Dwarf
Outflows have been discovered from a Brown Dwarf star, 2MASS1207-3932, the lightest yet. Found by Emma Whelan and Tom Ray of DIAS and others , using the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), this is the first time that Jets have been seen from an astronomical object as small as this. The Brown Dwarf is 2MASS1207-3932, a 24-Jupiter mass 'near star'. Jets of material are a common feature in astrophysics, seen from Galaxies and young stars, but this is the first time they have been seen in something this small. It opens the possibility of similar outflows from smaller objects, such as giant planets. The brown dwarf 2MASS1207-3932 is full of surprises. Its companion, a 5 Jupiter-mass giant, was the first confirmed exoplanet for which astronomers could obtain an image, thereby opening a new field of research - the direct detection of alien worlds. It was then later found that the brown dwarf has a disc surrounding it, not unlike very young stars. Tags , ,

19 April 2007

Alastair McKinstry: Cool Stars: Brown dwarfs as pulsars

Super Aurora, believed to cause brown dwarf pulsations
Artist's impression of the "super-aurorae" present at the magnetic poles of these radio emitting dwarfs which are responsible for the radio pulsations. (Image thanks to Gregg Hallinan, NUI Galway).
As a followup to the talk given at Galway Astrofest 2007 by Dr. Aaron Golden on work done by the Cool Stars research Group here at NUIG, the detail of this work were announced this week at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting 2007. Other press releases can be found at Spaceflight Now, and NRAO, though the best summary is probably at the NUIG Webpage (Thanks to Ronan Newman for the links). Kudos to all involved: Gregg and Stephen are currently writing up their PhDs and should have an interesting dissertions from this. Basically, they discovered that some Brown Dwarfs can act as Pulsars, blasting out huge amounts of radio-wave energy. Brown Dwarfs are objects between 'Planet' and 'Star' in mass terms, often thought of as boring failed stars, not large enough to ignite into fusion. They were thought by most to be highly boring : this discovery was completely unexpected. As the group in Galway has a lot of pulsar experience, they were well set to explain this. It looks as though this phenomena is due to a 'coherent maser' : an effect seen in large planets such as Jupiter, where the magnetic field spins up electrons from a solar wind. Certainly, it makes Brown Dwarfs, undiscovered until 1994 but thought to be widespread across the universe, more interesting things to look at.

16 April 2007

Alastair McKinstry: Looking for Planets, by Alan Boss

Looking for Earths: The Race to Find New Solar Systems is an excellent introduction book, as a scientific story of exploration and summary of the science of planetary discovery. Alan Boss is a planetary scientist and adviser to NASA on the search for extrasolar planets. He has had a front-row seat in the revolution over the last two decades that has led to the discovery planets outside our Solar system for the first time, leading to 215 known planets at last counting. The book is written in an first-person style that reflects the race to discover the first exoplanets in the 1990s. He describes historical searches for planets in the early 20th Century: the hunt for evidence of planets around Barnards Stara and the meticulous work over decades of Peter Van de Kamp, a good summary of the challenges in proving the case for planets in Astronomy, and explains the techniques used to determine other planets. The heartbreaking difficulties of proving the discovery are well expressed, as well as documenting the leaders of the field at the time. Along the way, he describes the discovery of the first Brown Dwarfs, the border cases between Stars and Planets, and the bureaucratic and other challenges involved in setting up large observatories such as the Keck interferometers capable of doing this work. This is ironic, as the first discoveries were actually made by ground-based observatories. Boss describes the race between the main teams, Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler of Lick observatory. The race was finally won by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of Geneva Observatory, who discovered the first extrasolar planet around a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi, by looking at radial velocity measurements of nearby stars. This turned out to be a close race, as the planet they had found had a short period of 4.23 days, implying the planet was what we now call a "hot Jupiter", orbiting very close into the Sun. Most teams had been looking for copies of our Solar system, looking for large planets such as Jupiter with orbits of around a decade, and had hence not started to analyse the data they had in hand, expecting to need years of measurements: examining the data showed that, had they analysed data in hand, they could have won. Looking for Earths does a good job of explaining the field of exoplanet research as it was evolving over Boss's careeer and particularly 1995-2005, with theoretical and computer models evolving as data arrived with new puzzles. In some places, the need to give a clear explanation of a topic such as the formation of planets from solar disks slows the pace of the biography, but the book does an excellent job of describing both the science and the life lived by those doing the work. Few books I've read have offered such a good summary of the field to date, along with a good bibliography and I would heartily recommend it both as an introduction to the field and as a model for science writing.

9 February 2007

Alastair McKinstry: [astronomy] Galway Astronomy Festival, 2007.

I went to the Astronomy Festival on Jan 27 organised by Galway Astronomy Club. Worth seeing; it attracted about 100 people (the Hotel conference room was full); successful for a town like Galway, so frequently covered in Cloud. Dr. Lucie Green save a good talk on Solar Physics, describing the different methods we now have of exploring the Suns behaviour, Flares, Sunspots, etc. and the different missions such as SOHO and the new STEREO mission to observe the Sun. Prof. Chris Dainty gave a clear presentation describing the state of the Art in Adaptive Optics, and work his group has been doing, both in Astronomy and pushing AO into other fields, such as opthalmology (treating the eye as the obstacle and observing the retina behind) and productising A.O. for 'non-professional' use. He hopes in the near future to be able to provide Adaptive Optics to Amateurs (price range around Eur 5000, status: not ready yet, the first units would be for 'University Dept' observatories, costing 20-30k, in the next year or two). Of particular interest were one by Prof. Dick Butler, head of the Chemistry dept. here in NUIG; it was on Organic Chemistry and meteorites. He is a long-time amateur astronomer but professional chemist; he was particularly interested in the organic chemistry of the Murchison meteorite. After pointing out the out the false alarm of ALH 84001, he gave a convincing presentation of the extra-terrestrial origin of complex organic compounds, including amino acids, etc. in the Murchison meteorite. In particular he disputed claims that the meteorite was contaminated, pointing to the Deuterium enrichment of the compounds within; as the C-D bond is stronger that C-H, Carbon-Hydrogen compounds are more likely to be broken up by extraterrestrial radiation that their deuterium variants, leading to deuterium enrichment over terrestrial equivalents. Later he gave a nice summary of conditions on Saturn's moon Titan, pointing to its rich supply of organic compounds, showing that when hit by meteorites, lakes of water would be possible for several hundred years at a time, as the impact craters cooled, and called Titan a utopia for organic chemistry exploration. This seems to make the idea of panspermia: life originating off-Earth more plausible. For a while now I've had a book (found in the Bargain bin somewhere) by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, From Grains to Bacteria, a collection of papers documenting their belief that they've discovered bacteria in free space via spectroscopy. I must admit my spectroscopy is not up to challenging them; time to dig deeper and fish it out. Dr. Aaron Golden gave a very interesting talk on Brown Dwarfs: Planets or Pulsars that he and his students have been doing. Basically it turns out that while Brown Dwarfs have long been seen as the 'runt' of the Stellar world, stars that didn't make it, some of them it seems are Pulsars. (He's invented the acronym SPUDs: Sporadically Pulsating Ultracool Dwarfs, for them; maybe it'll help people remember that Pulars were originally discovered by an Irishwoman, too). This was first seen by Andys Postgrads Greg Hallinan and Steve Bourke - (see the papers). Kinda interesting as Aaron studied under Dr. Andy Shearer in NUIG working on Pulsars, so knew a bit about them, and had seen behaviour like this before, with a bit of a clue what might be causing it. It was wierd going to this talk; Andy hired me to work in ICHEC, and we have an office in NUIG; Greg and Steve work down the hall, and indeed, I see them occasionally working on our computers; but didn't know what they'd been working on until now. So, it appears that these Brown Dwarfs (they've seen Pulsar behaviour in several) have Starspots (details here and here; some hot-off-the-press stuff: rumour has it he was checking the results of observations from the night before to ensure they didn't disprove what he was about to say). Aaron was pointing out the coherent maser behaviour was similar to that seen at Jupiter, leading to its strong radio emissions. I didn't get to talk to him about it in detail, but the idea of an Object with both sunspots and clouds sounds fairly exotic and interesting. Beyond that, the Festival was a good opportunity to see what Irish Amateur Astronomers have been doing, and meet some interesting people. Kudos to all those who organised it.

24 January 2007

Christian Perrier: Segolene Royal: shit begins

As I was "predicting" around myself as soon as Segolene Royal was designated as the socialist party candidate for the French presidential election (and thus becoming the very first woman in position to be elected as president here), the days of shit would come. They are coming now. Todays "small sentence" was an half-stolen sentence taken ex-abrupto in a live discussion during a visit to Canada. She expressed some "support" and "sympathy" for the ideas of Quebec autonomy. Of course, this became a big pleasure for the media around to emphasize this story, with the precious help of our right-wing parties supporters, especially those of the UMP dwarf, namely Nicolas Sarkozy. Last week, the shit was about a trip to China (with many care to not interfere in internal politics...apparently, this time she should have interfered....but not when going in Canada, strange...). The week before, this was about a trip in Middle East (a place where Sarkozy will never go during the campaign, will you bet). One woman already experienced this in the past, the only woman that has ever been Prime Minister in France, namely Edith Cresson. When Segolene's popularity was raising, some said that, in these Edith Cresson days, "minds weren't ready" and the like. Minds are still not ready. Our country, with the invaluable help of most of our political staff, does not want a woman to be our international representative. It's pretty likely that she will lose the election, and lose it by far. "They" are way too much powerful. Yes, I will regret it. Yes, I will still support her and though this becomes "ringard". I do want a woman as president and I do want *this* woman (and this party, by the way). Not only because I hate these UMP guys, with a special note for Sarkozy, but also because I really think this can change things. Yep, that may sound stupid, but I sometimes believe in politics. We suck. A lot. I just only hope to be proven wrong in April. Update: M. Mouette had a point about this original blog post, so I corrected its title. Now he can answer on the content if he likes to..;-)

23 January 2007

Christian Perrier: Segolene: shit begins

As I was "predicting" around myself as soon as Segolene Royal was designated as the socialist party candidate for the French presidential election (and thus becoming the very first woman in position to be elected as president here), the days of shit would come. They are coming now. Todays "small sentence" was an half-stolen sentence taken ex-abrupto in a live discussion during a visit to Canada. She expressed some "support" and "sympathy" for the ideas of Quebec autonomy. Of course, this became a big pleasure for the media around to emphasize this story, with the precious help of our right-wing parties supporters, especially those of the UMP dwarf, namely M. Sarkozy. Last week, the shit was about a trip to China (with many care to not interfere in internal politics...apparently, this time she should have interfered....but not when going in Canada, strange...). The week before, this was about a trip in Middle East (a place where Sarkozy will never go during the campaign, will you bet). One woman already experienced this in the past, the only woman that has ever been Prime Minister in France, namely Edith Cresson. When Segolene's popularity was raising, some said that, in these Edith Cresson days, "minds weren't ready" and the like. Minds are still not ready. Our country, with the invaluable help of most of our political staff, does not want a woman to be our international representative. It's pretty likely that she will lose the election, and lose it by far. "They" are way too much powerful. Yes, I will regret it. Yes, I will still support her and though this becomes "ringard". I do want a woman as president and I do want *this* woman (and this party, by the way). Not only because I hate these UMP guys, with a special note for Sarkozy, but also because I really think this can change things. Yep, that may sound stupid, but I sometimes believe in politics. We suck. A lot. I just only hope to be proven wrong in April.

12 January 2007

Meike Reichle: Happy New Year! and some resolutions

Slightly belated, but still: Happy new year everyone! We spent the holidays with my parents, pretty relaxing, didn't do much but lie on the couch, do crosswords and watch my sisters dwarf rabbit, that my mom hat to "rabbit-sit". Christmas was as usual a three-generations celebration and quite nice. On the 4th we went to see Irie Révoltés. Absolutely great concert!! We danced our hearts out. But, you know what? The best is not only seeing a great concert, but having the next day off. Sleeping in 'til way past noon, waking up with a beep in yours ears, a smelly pile of cloths beside your bed and every muscle sore. Have a wonderful breakfast with eggs and sausage, spend half an hour under a hot shower and spend the rest of the day humming melodies and tending to your aching muscles. Wonderful! Unfortunately the new year didn't continue that great. I caught a nasty cold and spent the last four days in bed. But, oh well, it's getting better, I can almost breathe soundlessly again!. Generally, this is going to be a very important year! In the middle of December I registered my Magister (comparable to a master's) thesis. I've got six months to finish it, so the first half of this year will be used for that. Once the thesis is handed in, the final (really final this time) exams start, first a very long written one, than an oral one, this will take until October. After that ... well, we'll see. I've set my mind on a PhD, since I'd like to pursue an academic career, so the next step will probably be trying to get a PhD grant. First things first though ... Resolutions Finally this is probably the first new year I really made some new year's resolutions. I'll put them here, so I can nail myself down to it over the year:
  1. First off, there are some things that I simply hope to keep the way they are:
    • I live in a wonderful relationship that I hope will simply go on forever :)
    • Also, I have quite a cool job (several actually), that I hope I can keep for another while.
    • I changed my eating habits quite drastically during the last months. I used to love everything "Just add water": teas, soups,puddings ... RAMEN!! Luckily it didn't reflect on my weight, which is pretty constant, but still I know that stuff is 90% chemical crap and who knows what it will lead to. (I know the optimal human would have three eyes, but I am actually quite happy with my average two.)
      So, I've cut down on that quite a bit and now have a subscription with an organic farm nearby that delivers so called Abokisten (subscription boxes?) that are delivered weekly and contain different vegetables, fruit, a loaf of bread and some cheese. The boxes' content is kind of randomized, so you get something different every week. It's a pretty neat service, since the food is really great, the price is reasonable, it's delivered right to my door, and (most of all) it makes me cook! So, here's another Keep that up!
  2. So much for the keeping, now for the changes/tasks: I guess the first is, of course, my thesis and exams. I plan to do those as good as possible. I'll be something of a challenge though. This is the first time I do such a large "project" (the thesis takes six months) all on my own, and (most worrying) at home. So here's a test on self-discipline!
  3. Although I've done a lot of acting in my "younger years" (haha) I've always been rather unmusical. This has been nagging on me for quite a while, so I've taken up playing the Blues Harp last month. I picked that instrument since I love the Blues and it's also easy to learn but still very flexible (and cheap). So far it's been huge fun but the art is, as always, keeping it up.
  4. There's this little blog I'm maintaining, that has been horribly neglected over the last year, so another resolution is to post here more often. (This way posts also won't have to be so horribly long, such as this one.)
  5. I couldn't help but notice that that geek girls top ten which Erinn mentioned (congrats by the way :)) contains but one European women. So here's something to do as well. There's quite a bunch of pretty impressing ladies over here, too. (Even AFTER 1950,dear CNET) And it seems, they need a bit more visibility. Maybe there are some things that can be done about that too ...
So, lots of plans. I hope publishing them here will help sticking to them. This also concludes my "little post", I hope the next will follow in a more timely manner.

26 December 2006

Steve Kemp: Lets go dancing on the backs of the bruised

My Christmas day was primarily spent at home watching Red Dwarf. Apart from that I made new releases of xen-shell and xen-tools. I was suprised to recieve a sudden flurry of bug reports. No less than ten bugs reported by two users in one day! Still I fixed most of them and made a new release. It was nice to notice Isaac Clerencia writing about using xen-tools for automated testing. The idea has occurred to me before: Create a fresh Xen installation of Debian then run a test suite and trash the system afterwards. I even setup a test Yawns builder for a while. Are people finding interesting users for xen-tools? I’d love to have some use-cases, and more user-feedback is always appreciated. Feel free to get in touch or comment here. Personally I use a few Xen guests on my home LAN and I regularly create new Sarge images for building backported Xen packages. Only recently did I move my home cfengine setup onto a domU. In other news I recently received a copy of Programming Ruby from my Amazon wishlist, I’m learning a lot about Ruby and I think I’m in love. The only downside is the mental confusion I experience when I see “@variable” and “$variable” used. I am too wedded to Perl to stop thinking “array” and “string” respectively. I should find a toy project to write in Ruby to get used to it. Right now nothing occurs, but I’m sure it is just a matter of time.

4 September 2006

Branden Robinson: Update on Debian Security Infrastructure and Personnel

Since I got back from the Oldenburg Linux Developers' conference, I've had my attention on our security infrastructure. Despite only being there for one and a half days thanks to a badly delayed trans-Atlantic flight, I found the conversations and collaborative spirit heartening. The bad news is that what I had planned for a writeup got rendered obsolete soon after I returned to the United States. Things have been changing rapidly, but mostly for the better. We've got three machines in the DNS rotation for security.debian.org now, which is superior to the one we had before (you can use the command dig security.debian.org to inspect the DNS record). My thanks go to our security and system administration teams for recovering from the recent overload problem provoked by an xfree86 package security update. Being somewhat familiar with that package, I can understand how its large size combined with Debian's ever-growing userbase starved the security host of bandwidth. Secondly, while I was in Oldenburg, Joey Schulze gave me a lot of insight into what a challenge one particular package is — the thing sucks up at least half of his time, dwarfing all other stable security update efforts. You've probably guessed that this package is the Linux kernel. Due in part to its success, and in part due to OS kernels being inherently attractive exploitation targets, the Linux kernel is getting a significant amount of scrutiny from a security perspective. Taking Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an example, we can see two advisories in the past two weeks: one on 28 September and one on 5 October. The one on 28 September addressed eighteen (18) different vulnerabilities as catalogued by MITRE's CVE project, and the one on 5 October — that's one week later — addressed fourteen (14) vulnerabilities, of which eight (8) were distinct from the previous advisory. (There was some overlap because the earlier advisory was for Red Hat's Linux 2.4.x kernel series, and the latter was for the 2.6.x series.) Those Debian developers who have ever handled a security vulnerability in one of their own packages can likely imagine the labor burden this is. Then reflect that Debian ships and supports a lot more Linux kernel trees than Red Hat does — this only magnifies the problem. The good news is that a team of developers focused on stable kernel security updates has been established. One of its members said to me today that he has seen a "very positive increase in kernel-related security activity". It is too soon to declare this problem resolved, but I perceive no lack of talent or dedication on the part of our developers. I am there to assist them in resolving the organizational and workflow issues so that our users can see the fruits of their energy directly. Similarly, I'm interested to see how the security.debian.org round-robin arrangement holds up after a reasonable period of real-world loads, particularly since I expect kernel package updates to sock the machines about as badly as an X Window System update. These issues are not over and done with, so an announcement declaring these problems vanquished would be premature. At the same time, the developers and users at large need to know whether or not people have their attention on them. I am wary of leaders or managers who declare issues resolved too soon, or proclaim optimism that later turns out to be unfounded, and have sought to avoid this vice. I apologize if I have tacked too far in the opposite direction. I perceive progress in this area. Let me know what you think, what you need to see, and by what metrics you measure progress and accomplishment on the security front. You can reach me at leader@debian.org (the address is already blitzed with so much spam there seems little sense in obfuscating it). (After getting some feedback on this entry, it's my intention to post it with any applicable revisions to the debian-devel-announce mailing list; please take this opportunity to "patch" this "beta", if you're so inclined.)

1 June 2006

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Montreal Memorial Day 2006

Rachele and I went to Montreal for the day this past weekend. It was the longest time we’ve ever left our one year old daughter Esther—just over twelve hours with my parents. Remarkably, she survived, and didn’t even miss us. Every time I go to Montreal I’m reminded of just how much better Canada is. For example, Senzala, a Brazilian breakfast place in Mile End, served the most delicious gourmet poached eggs (pictured here with Rachele): We also had a great time visiting the Botanical Garden, a vast park that dwarfs anything Boston has to offer. Here are a few examples of the flora—click on the image to see the full size version.
Along with poached eggs, beautiful gardens, and socialized healthcare, what more could one ask for?

25 May 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: Supermarket of Components

Whilst my contributions are totally dwarfed by those of Joey Hess, I wholeheartedly agree with what he says - Debian should be more than just a large collection of readily available packages. Ubuntu is great, but Debian should be able to innovate in different ways because of its different structure and longer release cycles (which can be both a burden and a blessing). I really would like to see Debian staying relevant to end-users, otherwise many people may eventually just stop contributing. That would be a big blow for all the derivatives as well, not just Debian itself.

[Update: Fixed 'what he says' URL.]

16 April 2006

Steve Kemp: I ll be with my sisters, doing it for ourselves

I’ve spent the night watching Red Dwarf and setting up a test CFEngine installation to remotely manage a number of identical hosts. Honestly I’m not sure which I enjoyed doing the most … CFEngine rocks: And much much more!

1 February 2006

Erinn Clark: Standby passengers love me

Usually waking up an hour after your flight has left is a bad sign -- like, a sign of imminent doom, that things are about to get horribly worse. At least, that's how it usually feels and this being the third 6:25am flight I missed in 2005, I was well-accustomed to that feeling. Luckily I got re-routed through Tampa, then Los Angeles, and I finally ended up in my San Jose, CA destination with a lovely Val awaiting me. She seemed shocked; said I was far shorter than she expected, then she realized I was walking with a group of Stanford basketball players and that, though they dwarfed me, I still managed to have at least an inch on her. (Val is "5'9 and three quarters!", according to her.) A lot of the visit was a bit of a blur. After arriving, I quickly showered, and was promptly told by Val that my skater rat apparel just wouldn't do and that our New Year's Eve party was meant to be dressy. A black shirt and some funky necklace managed to placate her, luckily, as well as my excuse of having just flown in from out of town with no instructions to dress pretty. Off to the party, where I met a load of brilliant and entertaining people, including Lina who was positively heartbroken by the lack of fireworks.
Lina and me in the ballpit The next day included eating vegan duck for breakfast, visiting Google offices for fun (not profit), getting lost with Val in some frightening redwood forest, Indian food in SF with Janet, Jen, and Val. Actually, the Indian food might deserve an entry of its own -- the owner of the restaurant actually spoonfed me, which was bizarre and funny. Afterwards, we went to visit Kristal and laughed at various things, including the most hilarious website ever. "Oh yeah baby, check out my throughput." Of course, that feeling of imminent doom was not entirely wrong. I contracted some kind of California Plague while there and spent my flight back doubled over with body aches, fever, and chills. Overall, well worth it. Happy New Year, everyone!

9 January 2006

Andrew Pollock: [life] We're currently a rabbit foster home

As previously mentioned, Sarah is doing some volunteer work at a local animal shelter. Somehow a baby rabbit arrived at the shelter. Rumour has it that it was the offspring of a stray, but that still doesn't explain how it ended up there. Anyway, apparently there was a sign up in the tea room or something, asking if anyone could take it for a few weeks until it got big enough to be re-homed. So we have a rabbit for a few weeks. I don't mind rabbits, but give me a cat any day. We babysat our Canberra neighbours' pet dwarf lop on a number of occasions. Three weeks will probably be long enough for the novelty value to wear off having this one, though. Rabbits just aren't interactive enough. They don't vocalise. Being prey, they're genetically flighty at the best of times. They also tend to chew cables, so you have to supervise them when they're out of their cage. Anyway, we've named her Maybelline, because she has panda eyes, as if she's had eyeliner on and it's run. She's very small and cute. She's rapidly becoming more used to us, and tolerating being patted and handled. Maybelline the rabbit Maybelline the rabbit

6 January 2006

Erinn Clark: Standby passengers love me

Usually waking up an hour after your flight has left is a bad sign -- like, a sign of imminent doom, that things are about to get horribly worse. At least, that's how it usually feels and this being the third 6:25am flight I missed in 2005, I was well-accustomed to that feeling. Luckily I got re-routed through Tampa, then Los Angeles, and I finally ended up in my San Jose, CA destination with a lovely Val awaiting me. She seemed shocked; said I was far shorter than she expected, then she realized I was walking with a group of Stanford basketball players and that, though they dwarfed me, I still managed to have at least an inch on her. (Val is "5'9 and three quarters!", according to her.) A lot of the visit was a bit of a blur. After arriving, I quickly showered, and was promptly told by Val that my skater rat apparel just wouldn't do and that our New Year's Eve party was meant to be dressy. A black shirt and some funky necklace managed to placate her, luckily, as well as my excuse of having just flown in from out of town with no instructions to dress pretty. Off to the party, where I met a load of brilliant and entertaining people, including Lina who was positively heartbroken by the lack of fireworks.
Lina and me in the ballpit The next day included eating vegan duck for breakfast, visiting Google offices for fun (not profit), getting lost with Val in some frightening redwood forest, Indian food in SF with Janet, Jen, and Val. Actually, the Indian food might deserve an entry of its own -- the owner of the restaurant actually spoonfed me, which was bizarre and funny. Afterwards, we went to visit Kristal and laughed at various things, including the most hilarious website ever. "Oh yeah baby, check out my throughput." Of course, that feeling of imminent doom was not entirely wrong. I contracted some kind of California Plague while there and spent my flight back doubled over with body aches, fever, and chills. Overall, well worth it. Happy New Year, everyone!

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