I noticed that the pictures on Google Street View for our neighborhood were updated recently. Much to my delight, I noticed that two cats from the neighborhood, cats that we have known for at least seven years, were photographed by Google’s cameras:
Yes, my wife and I are both fond of cats. Not just our own four cats but also cats from the neighborhood.
Today, the weirdest thing happened on my main desktop computer: the right-click menu of Windows Explorer, as well as the Windows desktop, disappeared. I was also unable to bring up the Properties dialog, even through the menu bar.
The worst part of it is, I could not figure out what happened. A reboot didn’t fix things, nor did an obvious Registry hack (making sure that HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoViewContextMenu is set to 0. For some reason, it was set to 1.) Eventually, I resorted to the big guns and used System Restore (thanks to the fact that I do backups daily, I had a restore point from 2AM this morning) to fix things. Still, it bugs me that something happened that I do not understand.
In comparison with another, mostly identical system, I noted that the other system had no subkeys under the Policies key whatsoever. So I wonder exactly when and how the Explorer and System subkeys were created on this workstation.
And while I was at it, I searched the Registry a little more and found another, possibly relevant entry: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoViewContextMenu. Once again, this Registry value is missing from the other machine, so I wonder how, why and when it was created on this workstation.
This is deeply disturbing. I don’t like mysteries, especially not on a machine that I use on a daily basis. Life is short and one does not need to resolve every mystery, but occasionally, such unexpected behavior can be a sign of a security issue.
There was another reason for me to stop by in London: the possibility of meeting some old high school friends, celebrating a shared milestone in our lives as we are all turning 50 this year.
The reunion was smaller than we hoped for, as in the end, only three of us were present. But the evening went well, good food, good beer, good company and all. One of my friends was, in fact, just recently in North Korea, and the stories he shared were absolutely fascinating.
When I decided to visit London, I secretly hoped that if I am lucky, I’d spot the TARDIS, Dr. Who’s infamous “bigger on the inside than on the outside” time machine.
Thanks to Richard Bartle, my quest was not in vain. The TARDIS, as it turns out, is sitting quietly just outside one of the exits of the Earl’s Court Underground station.
Except that… well, it’s not the real TARDIS. Instead, it’s just an ordinary blue police box, just like the one the TARDIS mimics, but unlike the TARDIS, this one is decidedly not bigger on the inside than on the outside. Still, it was fun to find.
With four cats in our house, it’s easy to guess that my wife and I are both animal lovers. To be sure, we are partial to felines, but we love most other animals (with obvious exceptions such as flies or mosquitoes) and we are especially troubled when we see animal suffering.
And animals suffer a lot. Especially in wars. Which is why I find the Animals in War Memorial especially poignant.
I happened upon this memorial when I made an unplanned detour on my way to Leicester Square, where I was to meet with Richard Bartle, who was kind enough to come to London to see me. We were supposed to meet under the Shakespeare statue at Leicester Square. When I arrived, there was no Shakespeare statue. Fortunately, I eventually realized that the cordoned off area in the center of the square does, in fact, hide the statue which is currently being renovated. Shortly thereafter, I spotted Richard.
I was silent in the past ten days because I was traveling. I spent six days in Hungary, and a few more in London, England.
I’d like to say that I had a blast of a time but that is not strictly true: I had a rather nasty bout with gastroenteritis that severely interfered with my plans concerning my time in Hungary. Indeed, let this serve as my apology to all those friends I did not have time to look up: the two days I reserved for this purpose, I ended up spending mostly in my hotel bathroom. Oh well.
At least the view I had from my hotel room was enjoyable. I don’t mind trainspotting, and I was on a high enough floor that the noise was negligible, even with the window open.
The view from my London hotel room was perhaps a little less exciting. But, at least it was also a quiet room. Or would have been, were it not for some noisy neighbors next door. (Yes, dear lady, the entire floor heard you when you were loudly banging on your friend’s door at 6 AM yelling, “are you awake?” We all were, by then.)
If only my room had been a tad bigger, with a mattress a tad less worn and a TV mount a tad less broken, I’d have been entirely satisfied. But beggars can’t be choosers, and when looking for reasonably priced accommodation near Paddington station in London, we are all beggars.
And the weather in London was absolutely spectacular. Blue skies and sunshine most of the time, not too warm, with a pleasant breeze.
Now I am safely back home, though still nursing my left foot; I almost twisted my ankle getting out of a car about a week ago in Budapest, and endless walks in London did not help either. Hopefully, I’ll stop limping in a day or two.
In all the excitement (okay, I wasn’t that excited. But, I was busy) I almost forgot to celebrate an anniversary: it was 40 years ago on April 5 that Pioneer 11 was launched at Cape Canaveral.
In a recent Letter to the Editor published in the newsletter of the American Physical Society, a correspondent suggested that Pioneer 11 may still reveal some anomalous behavior. I do not believe this to be the case. While it is true that our investigation of Pioneer 11 was not as thorough as our investigation of Pioneer 10 (due, in part, to the fact that we have less Doppler data from Pioneer 11) there are no statistically significant inconsistencies.
This Letter also reveals two misconceptions about the anomaly. One is that if the anomaly is Earth directed, which would presumably be inconsistent with a thermal cause. This is not so: quite the contrary, since the spin axis and the Earth direction mostly coincide, an Earth directed anomaly is exactly what one would expect to see in case of a thermal cause. Second, I don’t think it is even relevant to say that “a new physics cause may still be possible”. Of course new physics is always possible. But before one can speculate about new physics, “old physics” must be excluded, i.e., there must be an incontrovertible demonstration that conventional physics cannot account for the observed phenomena. This is not the case for the Pioneer anomaly: conventional physics comfortably accounts for the anomalous acceleration. Sure, there are small discrepancies that are within the margin of error, but you don’t fish for new physics within the margine of error. That’s not the way science is supposed to work.
A few moments ago, my wife looked up through our skylight and lo and behold, saw a moving star.
Not just any moving star; it turned out to be the International Space Station, in all its still sunlit glory over the late evening Ottawa sky.
I once managed to capture the ISS through my cellphone; the picture turned out to be surprisingly good, even showing (I think) the somewhat rectangular shape of the station.
Anyhow, I hope Chris Hadfield is having a great time up there.
Here is a beautiful military relic, a gift from a family friend who knew that I was a sucker for old technology:
It is a very conventional compass, floating in oil in a non-magnetic brass casing. Our friend was concerned about the radiation symbol on the cover: as it turns out, this particular compass had fluorescent markings that were illuminated by the presence of small amounts of radioactive tritium.
As tritium is a low-energy beta emitter, it poses almost no health risk (unless you happen to inhale or consume some quantities of it) and thus it is safe for use as a form of “permanent illumination”. Unfortunately, tritium is also used in thermonuclear weapons, so its possession and sale are often regulated. In any case, this old compass is long past its “use before” date; I don’t know how old it actually is, but its inspection sticker dates back from 1994. The tritium appears to be long gone (not exactly a surprise, given tritium’s relatively short, 12.3 year half life), as the marking are completely dark.
Still it is a beautiful device, and I am very grateful to our friend for offering this to me as a gift. It will be cherished.
After another 550 km drive at the end of an already very long day, I finally made it home late last night, concluding a very productive 3-day visit at the Perimeter Institute.
While there, I gave another talk on the Pioneer anomaly. I felt that it went well and as far as I can tell, it was very well received.
All in all, it was time well spent.
That building behind the trees in this wintry landscape is the Perimeter Institute, where I’ll be spending a few days.
Wintry??? Sounds like an April fool’s joke but it isn’t. This really is a long winter.
Here is one of our four cats, Kifli. (Literally, his name means croissant in Hungarian. How did he get this name, you ask? Well, when we got him back in 2001, he was only a few weeks old and he and his brother Szürke actually fit on the palm of my hand, both of them together. Szürke is a gray tabby and perhaps somewhat unimaginatively, that’s exactly what his name means in Hungarian; gray, that is. Kifli has the color of a freshly baked bun, but when he was little, Kifli was very thin and did not look like a bun at all. In Hungarian bakeries, the two most common small bakery products are buns and croissants; not the puffy French type made from leavened dough, but croissants baked from the same dough that is used to make white bread and, well, buns. These croissants are long and thin, just like Kifli. Hence, his name.)
Anyhow, I was testing out an Android photo editing app (PicsArt, in case you’re wondering; seems like an excellent app, by the way) tonight when I snapped this picture of Kifli and applied one of the app’s effects. I think it’s real nice. And while it’s not so nice that Kifli jumped onto a table that he’s not supposed to be on, I certainly approve of his reading choices.
I thought my server would break some record in the coming months, perhaps running up to two years without a restart.
Alas, that will not happen: we received notice from Ottawa Hydro that they will be doing maintenance tomorrow morning and our power will be shut off for a while. The duration (3.5 hours) is way more than what my server’s UPS can handle.
Oh well. It was nice while it lasted:
$ uptime
21:30:33 up 582 days, 2:02, 4 users, load average: 0.85, 0.51, 0.55
Here are a few things I am not planning to do today:
Last but not least: I am not going to grow up. According to an Internet meme I just came across, if you haven’t grown up by age 50, you don’t have to.
I am getting close to breaking some of my records here. My main server has now been up 70 days longer than the planned trip to Mars:
There really was no need to reboot, and there won’t be any unless a) there is a critical patch to this version of the Linux kernel, b) I decide to carry out a planned upgrade to Slackware 14.0, c) the system crashes, d) the hardware fails, or perhaps most likely: e) I decide to bring down the server in order to remove a few pounds of cat hair, dust bunnies and whatever else may have accumulated in its case over the course of 19 months.
Two days ago, I received the sad news: my good friend George Olah is no longer among us.
I actually have a recent picture of him, courtesy of CBC Ottawa: during a news report last year about smoking prevention, George appeared in a bit of stock footage, standing on a sidewalk somewhere in downtown Ottawa, smoking a cigarette.
Yes, George was a smoker, which may have had something to do with the sudden heart attack that took him from us. Or not. Sometimes, perfectly healthy people with no ill habits die for no reason at all.
George fled Hungary in 1956 after the failed anti-communist revolution and eventually came to Canada. Yet his opinions were never clouded or biased by his personal experiences: he had a sober view of the current political situation in Hungary, and shared many of the concerns my wife and I have regarding the country’s future.
I’ve known George for nearly 26 years. Back in 1987, when I came to Canada, it was George who introduced me at the company where I got my first consulting contract. Thanks to George, I never had to wash dishes or fry hamburgers; within a few weeks of my arrival, I was writing C code for an application at Forestry Canada. A few years later, when I was going through a difficult time, it was again George who got me in touch with a group that hired me for a programming job; the people I worked with there remain my friends to this day.
In recent years, George was busy with a number of interesting projects that involved low power wireless technology and ad-hoc networking. He had high hopes for his inventions. Indeed, he was a true optimist, always full of plans for the future. You couldn’t really tell that he was already past his 70th birthday.
George also liked to cook. Around Christmas, he often made cabbage rolls in quantities that would feed a small army. This past Christmas was no different; and not for the first time, he offered us some, which I duly picked up at his home. It was very tasty. Yum! We have not yet returned the container.
Well, I guess that was the last batch of cabbage rolls George ever cooked. And the aspic jelly, another one of George’s wintertime favorites that he was planning to prepare, won’t be made either.
What else can I say? Thank you, George, for the help, for the memories, for the food, for all the laughs and for all the fun. Szervusz, Gyuri.
I quit smoking nearly 20 years ago.
It is reassuring to know that my quality of health is now about the same as if I never smoked in my life.
And I still occasionally crave a cigarette. Creepy.
I arrived back from Dallas late last night, after an uneventful flight.
While in Dallas, I decided to re-visit the site of Kennedy’s assassination. I had a very good reason to do so: I wanted to photograph the actual school book depository this time.
You know, when you stand on that corner, there is a very prominent red building that looks just like the place: it’s on the corner, it’s red brick, it even has a museum store at its ground floor. Nonetheless, it’s not the building you are looking for. 501 Elm Street is not the former school book depository; it is called the Dal-Tex Building, and except for some conspiracy theories, it has nothing to do with Kennedy’s murder.
No, the right building looks a lot more inconspicuous from street level, hidden by some large trees.
The place where I was standing was in fact the very spot where Kennedy was hit. Or rather, the sidewalk nearest to the spot; I didn’t think it would be a good idea to try to stand in the middle of a traffic lane. In any case, while a small white X does mark the spot on the asphalt, there is an actual plaque next to the sidewalk that is a tad more informative.
While I was walking towards the Kennedy site, I saw some strange buildings. In fact, I noticed them the previous day already, but as I was trying to hide from the occasional squalls of rain, I took no pictures then. Amidst well maintained office towers, sparkling clean streets and whatnot, I was confronted by the sight of several entire office towers that were empty and abandoned.
Weird. Is this a sign of a bad economy hitting Dallas, or just the normal fate of office buildings past their prime, waiting for orderly demolition?
And on my way back to my hotel, I saw something that made me laugh real hard. Wednesday was a cold day by Dallas standards, only about +10 degrees Centigrade, and a strong wind on top of that. The few people who braved the sidewalks looked like they were dressed for an arctic expedition. (I was just wearing an ordinary man’s jacket. I wonder what they thought of my attire.) So I was walking down this street and suddenly, I came across this bunch of flying rats, I mean city pigeons, huddling on a grating embedded in the sidewalk, which was presumably venting warm air.
A pity that there were no stray cats nearby.
Anyhow, my talks delivered, my meetings done, I was ready to fly back to Ottawa, which I did in due order, arriving home at the not altogether ungodly hour of 11 PM, allowing me to enjoy a good night’s sleep in my own bed for a change.
Travel demons were out to get me yesterday. First, my flight from Ottawa to Chicago was canceled and I was rebooked on a later flight. (At least I did get to Dallas eventually.) Next, the Dallas Sheraton was overbooked for whatever reason (maintenance, they say) and instead of being able to go to bed (finally) at 2 AM, I was shuffled over to the Hyatt. (At least it was something nearby, not all the way across town in Fort Worth.) Third, the room the Hyatt first assigned to me turned out to have been already occupied by a very morose person who quite understandably did not take it kindly that someone was trying to barge in on him in the middle of the night. (At least his door was securely locked, so I did not actually manage to barge in.) Fourth, the room I finally ended up in was rather noisy, in part because of a neighbor listening to a very loud television at 4 AM, in part because of the trains right under my window. (At least I was on a high floor.)
Yet if things didn’t turn out this way, I would not have woken up to a very unexpected, deeply historic sight through my window.
Yes, the infamous Book Depository building. The very place from which Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly fired his fatal bullet, when I was just a few months old.
Amazing.
I may be sitting on board a decidedly 20th century airplane but I suddenly feel like I arrived in the 21st at last… being able to check my email and post to my blog from 30,000 feet.
