Durable clothing
Everyone likes a clean, neatly folded t-shirt. These ones will last you a good while too, but won’t be all that comfortable since they’re made from marble by an astoundingly good sculptor by the name of Hirotoshi Ito.
(Image taken from Hirotoshi’s DeviantArt page.)
November 29, 2011
Tags:
art 
No Comments
eplanet updated
eplanet has been sadly neglected for some time. On the plus side, e17 is stable enough that it rarely has issues large enough to affect the module. On the down side, there’s still a lot of features to be added.
Today there’s a couple of small updates to make the module play nicely with the very latest code from svn. In the last few weeks or months some of the multi-screen stuff has been improved, which actually makes eplanet work better on those systems. I love it when my code gets better without me having to do anything!
As always, full details and installation instructions are on the eplanet page.
November 27, 2011
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eplanet No Comments
It’s a good thing Sesame Street never used this font
The BBC News website is running a story about an illegal immigrant who worked as an actor on Sesame Street, with the entirely appropriate headline ‘I is for Illegal’. Unfortunately their headline font leads to the wonderful irony that a child trying to learn how to spell the key word wouldn’t have a chance.
November 25, 2011
Tags:
design No Comments
When ltsp-update-image stops working
Today I have a cautionary tale to tell of LTSP machines and Synaptic’s automatic package management features.
The other day I updated the packages on my LTSP server. I did it the way I always do: update the server itself, then enter the chroot environment for the client image and update the packages there. During the update process, Synaptic told me that there were a bunch of packages that it could auto-remove since they were no longer required – this would save me some 133Mb of space in my client image. Since I always take any opportunity I can to reduce the client image size, I thought ‘yippee’ and consented to the package removal. Everything updated as normal, so I exited the chroot environment and proceeded to update the image:
sudo ltsp-update-image
The result? Nothing. No output, no error, and no updated image. I ran the command three more times just in case a miracle was due to me, but apparently not. After a bit of head-scratching, I headed over to the #ltsp IRC channel, and asked for advice. After explaining what I’d been doing, a nice person by the name of Gadi asked me to check whether or not I had either the ltsp-client or ltsp-client core packages installed in the chroot environment. It turns out that I hadn’t – Synaptic’s auto-remove had deleted them, which meant ltsp-update-image didn’t recognise an LTSP environment and sulked. (It would have been nice if it told me that, but never mind.) I re-installed both (which in turn reinstated half the packages that Synaptic said it could remove in the first place), and all was well – ltsp-update-image could do its thing.
The moral of the story is, don’t believe anything Synaptic tells you about auto-removing packages on an LTSP client image.
As a side note, somewhere in this mess my NBD server config got trashed – the /etc/nbd-server/config file had disappeared completely. No NBD config = no NBD server = unhappy LTSP clients. However, a bit of quick reading around some documentation meant that I could quickly reinstate it. For the sake of completeness I thought I’d post it here. I tailored the file to my specific setup, but since I accepted all the defaults when I first installed LTSP it should work for most people. In any case, it’s a good starting point.
[generic]
user = nbd
group = nbd[export]
port = 2002
exportname = /opt/ltsp/images/i386.img
As server configs go, that’s a nice one.
November 24, 2011
Tags:
computing, linux/ubuntu No Comments
ClimateGate 2.0? No, it’s a repeat
Today’s release of more emails from the archives of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia promises yet more revelations of shady dealings and corruption within the community of scientists investigating climate change. Unfortunately, what these ‘new’ emails actually contains is anything but new.
The UEA’s computers were hacked sometime in 2009, and over 200,000 emails and other documents were obtained illegally. In late 2009, just before the UN conference in Copenhagen, a small portion of these emails were released onto the Web, causing no small measure of havoc.
In the wake of the release, the UEA and CRU were investigated under claims of misleading and fraudulent science. While some of their practices in sharing data and general transparency were found to be less than ideal, they were exonerated of all serious charges of misconduct in multiple investigations. Indeed, a completely new, independent temperature record was created to see how well CRU’s results held up, and there were more or less identical. In fact, the temperature increases seen in the new record were slightly higher than those published by CRU.
So what new details will this second release of stolen emails and documents release? In a word, none. Many people will use this to show that the people at CRU and their colleagues are still up to their same old tricks. But these documents were obtained at the same time as those from the original set in 2009, and cover the same time period. They involve the same people, doing the same work, in the same manner. Therefore it follows that the flaws in the working practices – those which have already been examined multiple times – will still be there to be seen.
So what can we say about the whole ClimateGate affair? From the first release, we know that during 1997-2009 CRU produced a robust and reliable global temperature record. There were a few less-than-ideal working practices in play, but nothing that came even close to requiring serious censure. And guess what? These new emails show exactly the same thing.
Yes folks, it’s a repeat – it’s the climate skeptics’ equivalent of Channel Dave. And since the person holding the stolen emails still has plenty in hand, we can look forward to many more repeats to come.
November 22, 2011
Tags:
climate-change, science No Comments
