dave: October 2003 Archives

We just got back from a few days in China, near Shantou. I made a lot of observations about the place, which I'll put up later, but for now I would just like to say that Shenzen is putrid festering sore of a city. The beggars and the rampant theft need to be cleaned up straight away. Also, any taxi driver who attempts to drop you off in a crowd of beggars should be shot on sight.

We had a taxi attempt to do this to us tonight. Instead of Lo Wu Station, the border crossing point, he wanted to put us out in a dark side street full of beggars trying to open the doors. We locked the doors and started screaming at the taxi driver to get us out of there. It was only when Sanley started mentioning his taxi number on the phone to someone (not the police, but he didn't know that) that he started moving. All the while beforehand, he'd been talking some northern dialect. Many of the beggars are also from the North and the West.

What I want to know is, if Shenzen is supposed to have controlled borders, why are there so many beggars there? Can they apply for a begging license? Why on earth does the Shenzen government think it's acceptable for a supposedly flagship city to be filled with deformed beggars? Why do they allow the lawlessness? I know it's endemic to China, but you'd think they could try and make a special case with a city bordering Hong Kong.

Check out KWMap.com a keyword map. Looks a little strange, but somewhat interesting.

Phil nailed it. The HarbourFest is really a ClusterFest.

Heads really need to roll over this. Unfortunately Jim Thompson of AmCham is probably immune and Mike Rowse is Mr. Teflon. We can probably expect to see some junior flunkies sacked for agreeing with their bosses.

I'm sad now. There is no chance I'll ever fly on the Concorde. It flew it's last flight today.

I don't often post about where I'm from, but here's a little slice of Corkonia:

Cork's oldest Jew Reflects in Sadness being a short interview/bio of Gerald Goldberg, former Lord Mayor of Cork. My mother worked for him long ago. It's uplifting and rather sad at the same time.

There's a good article about the worst aspects of Fundamentalist Christian Theology over at Slacktivist: http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2003/10/left_behind_is_.html.

Fixed a clock silliness. I wonder why the Bogomips are different for the cpus?

Right now I feel good. I've fixed a blown motherboard with a soldering iron!

My ECS D6VAA dual PIII motherboard was languishing in the box with no power to CPU#1, and some blown capacitors. I chanced across http://www.vp6-board.com/caps1.htm a while back, and today changed the blown capacitors. The board came straight back to life! HKD 29 on some capacitors and I've resurrected about $3k worth of computer!

Later on tonight, I'm going to put the dual mobo in to Gizmo, my linux box and web/mail/everything server.

Having perused many websites about the topic of motherboard repair, I am going to attempt replacing the capacitors on my ECS D6VAA. I have two reasons for doing this. The first is that it may well resurrect the board at quite a small cost to me. The second reason is that dual processor boards are now stupidly expensive, and even if I have to pay a few hundred bucks for capacitors, it's still much less than $3k for a dual Xeon board and $4k for the processors.

Intel are screwing us really - I was able to put a dual PIII machine together for about $3k a few years ago, but there seems to be no budget SMP option available now at all. This is a crying shame - Intel are making a big long term mistake by making SMP so expensive. The end result will be that no one has any experience with multiple processor machines and the usual run of MCSE idiots (with apologies to anyone who has one of these useless qualifications and who isn't an idiot) will have no experience with anything other than single processor machines. All company networks will have very fast processors and slow down or stop on the first high priority task they come across.

One of my favourite SMP machines was a Compaq DL580. Four PIII Xeons at 700 MHz. Not the fastest machine ever, but it never stopped responding. You could load that thing out the Wazoo and it would still be there for another bit of work.

I'm sure you've all seen in the new how the Chinese Space Program has put a man in space. Looking at a log of American sites, I see comments like "but we did that forty years ago!". Well, that's true, however, the American space program has been in decline for thirty years. What's been done seriously since men walked on the moon? Pissing about in low Earth orbit with an unwieldy craft and no vision, that's what.

My prediction: The next time an American walks on the moon, he'll be able to go somewhere there to have Chinese food.

I just finished To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. It's a great read, combining time travel, messing about in boats, cats, dogs and a Bishop's Bird Stump. Excellent fun - highly recommended.

OK, well, the site was down for about a day or so thanks to some lingering incompatibilities between the configuration files for Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.0. (That's the software which powers the webserver.) I guess that's what I guess for converting the config files in a hurry.

Update: looks like I spoke too soon - more problems - Here goes for a full blown reconfig of the entire site to 2.0 guidelines.

"It's strangely comforting that, after all these years, and despite being a millionaire several times over, Geldof still manages to give the impression that he sleeps in a skip with a family of badgers."

There's a great interview with Bob Geldof here.

Oops! The webserver was misbehaving for a bit while I was trying to sort out SSL under apache 2.0.40. Apparently you can't have two virtual hosts with the same name but different ports. I had this working on older versions of apache, but the new directory based configuration system seems to confuse things.

A friend of mine rang me today with a worried sounding voice. "Are you still in Hong Kong, or is this call costing me a fortune?"

Me: "Yep, I'm still here. I'm going down to Carnegies in about two hours after work if you want to make sure of that fact. Why on earth would you think I'm not in Hong Kong?"

Him: "well, people have told me you've left..."

Strange stuff indeed. There seems to be a lot of gossip around at the moment.

Ever had an Excel Spreadsheet suddenly refuse to load? Got the error message on the right? I had that today, and after quite a bit of research I managed to recover a file.

After reading page after page about how to recover formulas and data by referring obliquely to them in formulas, I saw a comment that often, opening the spreadsheet in a later version would do the trick, or failling that OpenOffice.org would work.

I put the spreadsheet on a floppy and brought it home. Excel 2000 at home was no good. Finally I transferred the file to my main Linux workstation and Voila! It opened straight away with OpenOffice.org, a free office software suite. There is a version of this for Windows too, so you don't have to have a Linux box to rescue your files.

Well, what can you say? I mean, who needs politicians who might actually know what they're doing? American Politics just seems to get dumber and dumber.

Next Saturday at the Globe on Hollywood Road there's a Folk Society musical night. It's free to get in and it starts about 7:30pm-ish. Music will be provided by:

• Chris Hoskins
• Dave O'Brien
• David Dudgeon
• Pete and Iris Benzie
• July Levy (back from Australia for a while)
• Atlantic Bridge

Yep, that's my name up there. It'll be the first time I've played in public since Wanchai Live back in June, so I'd better practice!

Don't worry about the 'Folk' aspect - it's not all woolly jumpers and fingers stuck in ears. These nights are a good night of live music which isn't blasting your ears off. Anything and everything from Jazz through Beatles through Richard Thompson to Pop songs, and even the occasional Diddly-Aye.

Also, the beer's good in the Globe, and the prices are usually reasonable. The Globe is under the Escalator on Hollywood Road, Central.

Fantasy Characters: http://www.rain-street.org/fightcrime.htm

Found on Charlie Strosses Diary

It never fails to amaze me how right-wing Americans will ignore the facts in a given situation and insist that Bill or Hillary Clinton did much worse. It's like some sort of collective brain disease.

Let's see. Currently, someone in the White House betrayed the cover of an undercover operative, Valerie Plame. This is not a rumour, this is a fact. Even Bush has admitted it. This is a criminal offence, with a ten year jail term attached. Meanwhile they're being investigated by an Attorney General appointed by the Bush Administration; they're submitting their documents, but they'll be reviewed by their own counsel for two weeks before being handed over. This is the same party who screamed blue murder until an independent investigator was appointed for Clinton? (Who was guilty of having an affair, not leading his country to war and alienating almost every single ally.)

Let's see - a summary of the Kay report is that the Iraqi's had some dirt, which they could possibly have cultivated to make something nasty. What's next? Evidence of large and pointed sticks?

Right now I'm watching "The Road To Wellville", the story of Dr. Kellogs Battle Creek Sanatorium and Corn Flakes. I'm very impressed. It's quirky, silly and thoroughly weird. It's the sort of movie you'd expect from British Film makers, or maybe a French director. It's certainly not what you'd expect from a thoroughly American production.

It's well worth checking out.

When I first got broadband, I spent lots of time at the Apple.com Movie Trailers Site. It needs quicktime, so I have to power up the Windows box to watch them, but there's usually some great stuff on there.