Spinor Info

UFO

Jul 282009

We have a genuine no-kidding UFO mystery in Ottawa today: in what sounds like a Doctor Who plot (just replace London with Ottawa), according to many eyewitnesses on both sides of the Ottawa river, a flying object fell into the river around 10 PM last night. Yet no small planes are missing from any airports in the vicinity, and no pilot is known to be missing either. Now police have found an object underwater, and it’s reported to be about 9 meters long… but it turned out to be a bunch of rocks or logs, not an airplane. Hence, the FO that fell into the river last night remains firmly U for the time being. Curious.

Rainy season

Weather and Climate No Responses »

Jul 282009

Finch Avenue W.

This July has been the rainy season here in Ottawa. Indeed, we may yet break the all-time record for July rainfall. In some parts of Ottawa, homes and streets have been flooded, and yet we can consider ourselves lucky: unlike the folks in Toronto, we have not yet had to cope with a giant sinkhole in the middle of a major city road.

Kitchen debate

History, Politics No Responses »

Jul 252009

Amidst all the excitement, I almost forgot: Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the unforgettable Kitchen Debate between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev.

Why no Nortel bailout?

Economy, Politics No Responses »

Jul 222009

There is an interesting article in The Globe and Mail this morning that asks a very curious question: given the amounts of money spent in Canada to help save GM and Chrysler (who do most of their research and engineering outside of Canada), why was there not a similar government effort to save Nortel from bankruptcy, even though this company was by far Canada’s largest contributor to private research?

Smelloscope

Technology No Responses »

Jul 212009

In one of my favorite cartoon series of television, Futurama, there is an aging science professor with many fictitious inventions. One of them is the smelloscope: a device used to detect, amplify, and measure smells.

Except that this device is not fictitious. They might not call it a smelloscope, but CBC News was using it nonetheless to measure that unpleasant consequences of Toronto’s ongoing municipal strike:

Smelloscope in Toronto

Ah, the wonders of modern science. Is there nothing in fiction that does not eventually get turned into reality?

A message from Rogers

Internet No Responses »

Jul 212009

In addition to my primary Internet connection, I also use a cable modem for backup, and also for large downloads. Earlier month, I downloaded a fair amount of data. Today, when I visited Wikipedia (using the Rogers connection), I was confronted with a rather strange message:

Rogers warning

I suppose I should appreciate the warning. I feel a little more ambiguous about the method in which it was delivered: my Web page request was intercepted by a transparent proxy, which then wrapped the page in question inside a frame. Apart from potentially breaking the page (indeed, as a result all links that I clicked on in this page afterward appeared with the Wikipedia URL showing on top) it also raises a whole host of privacy and other issues.

Now in my case, it’s a matter of seconds to switch back to my primary connection, which is straight to a backbone provider (MCI), with no ISP acting as an intermediary. But others may not enjoy the same luxury.

40 years

Space No Responses »

Jul 202009

I was 6 years old 40 years ago today, visiting family in Romania with my parents. I did not really appreciate this moment (hey, I already read Jules Verne, isn’t going to the Moon a perfectly natural thing to do?) but I did see the first landing of a human being on another celestial body on television.

Footsteps on the Moon

Space No Responses »

Jul 192009

As Larry Kellogg said in his lunar-update newsletter, people who didn’t believe before that the Moon landing happened are unlikely to be convinced by this, but it’s still darn nice to be able to see nearly 40-year old footsteps on the Moon from orbit:

Apollo 14 footsteps

WPBS and Rogers

Television 1 Response »

Jul 162009

I received a notice from Rogers Cable in the mail this morning, about their decision to shuffle some channels about in the cable lineup. The notice is a little confusing: two stations are moved from channels 61 and 69 to 95 and 96, but does this mean that they are becoming digital-only stations? 95-96 do exist as analog cable channels, but Rogers never used these high channel numbers in the analog lineup, so I am not sure. I am concerned because I am not a fan of proliferating set-top boxes and remotes, so I remain a happy analog cable customer for now… but I fear that the beginning of the end is near, and set-top boxes will soon be inevitable.

But I am even more concerned about another change: the station on channel 64, WPBS from Watertown, is altogether being removed from the lineup, to be replaced by a PBS channel from Detroit. Rogers has done this in the past, replacing US network channels that were coming to us from Watertown with their Detroit equivalents, and I can’t say that we are better off with that change. However, WPBS is special: it has many supporters, even many volunteers in the Ottawa area, and the channel has been serving the Ottawa valley faithfully for many decades.

Rogers claims that they’re doing what they’re doing in response to customer demand. Forgive my French but… piss off, will ya? Months ago I phoned Rogers about a simple problem, namely that the audio on several analog channels (including music channels) is missing either the left or the right channel (yes, I checked, it’s not my equipment.) You’d think that a company concerned about their customers would fix such a simple and embarrassing technical issue. But they didn’t. So I can perhaps be forgiven if I call their sad little excuse a flat out, unadulterated, shameless lie.

Forty years

History, Space No Responses »

Jul 162009

Forty years ago this morning, Apollo 11 was launched: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on their way to land at Mare Tranquilitatis, in the most significant journey in human history to this date.

The scary part is that this year also marks the 37th anniversary of the last trip to the Moon, indeed the last voyage by a human being beyond low Earth orbit.

I was only 6 when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon, and I had no doubt in my mind that by the time I turn 46, there would be people on the Moon, on Mars, possibly on select satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, perhaps even on their way to the stars.

Now that I am 46, I am doubtful that I will live long enough to see another human fly beyond low Earth orbit. This is not a pleasant thought. Perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to live another 40 years in good physical and mental health, and get a chance to be proven wrong.

Until then, I keep dwelling on the irony of the fact that nowadays, most of the documentaries you can find on manned deep space missions and exploration of the Moon are aired on the History Channel.

New visa rules: A manufactured crisis?

Canada, Politics, Transportation No Responses »

Jul 152009

When I heard yesterday that the government of Canada was about to impose visa requirements for Czech and Mexican citizens visiting Canada, my first thought was to wonder just how inept Harper’s government really is: imposing a visa requirement smack in the middle of the summer tourist season, with no warning and no preparation, is just plain stupid, it will inconvenience tens of thousands of legitimate visitors, and will cost the Canadian tourism industry millions of dollars.

But today, there are comments from the immigration minister that the Canadian immigration system is in need of a serious revision. What a wonderful country we live in, with all those rocket scientists working for the government who figured this out. But if this ever so clever minister of ours actually knows this, then why the visa requirements? Why not spend his efforts instead on these supposedly much needed revisions of the immigration system itself?

Ah, I got it. Now that the whole thing is on the national news, which wouldn’t have happened without seriously pissing off the Czechs and the Mexicans, he can claim urgency, and perhaps even get credit in the end for a decisive solution. That the urgency is a result of his own ineptness, I guess he hopes it will be quickly forgotten.

0xC0190001 error during VISTA SP2 install

Computers No Responses »

Jul 142009

I have to thank a fellow blogger (ouch, does that make me a blogger, too? I still can’t stand this word, but I suppose it’s now inevitably part of the English vocabulary) for an excellent post that helped me out: during the install of VISTA SP2 on my laptop, the machine failed with the error code 0xC0190001 associated with explorer.exe. The first thing I did was to try Google, and the first Google hit I found was the above-mentioned blog entry, advising me to reboot into Safe Mode, allow Windows to do its thing and reboot again, and presto: VISTA is back, with SP2 properly (I hope) installed, and I saved myself a significant amount of unpleasantness associated with a system reinstall.

Or maybe I’ll have to reinstall something in the end… because although SP2 came up just fine, for some reason I lost the Aero desktop altogether, and I am back to a standard Windows 2000 style theme, the Aero theme nowhere to be found. Curious. Good thing that laptop is not mission critical, except when I am traveling, which I am not planning to do anytime soon.

Ah. Stupid service pack upgrade disabled the Themes service. It also monkeyed with one of the VMWare services, but now that I started everything that needed starting, things seem to be working fine.

Weird

Computers No Responses »

Jul 132009

I have this hard drive. Two hard drives, actually, two out of many, these two being distinguished by the fact that at one time or another, they’ve been used in my old Fujitsu laptop.

The original drive was a 40 GB drive, which I replaced with an 80 GB drive years ago. I’ve since used the 40 GB drive in an external enclosure as a backup drive. I have several other drives of varying sizes in similar/identical enclosures.

Then there is the 80 GB drive, which has been the drive in this laptop for the last couple of years. But now that I no longer use this laptop myself, I figured I’d set it up for my wife. And since she doesn’t need an 80 GB drive, and the 40 GB drive was proving to be rather small for my backup needs, I decided to swap the drives back.

But then, the 80 GB drive that I took out of the laptop refused to function properly in the external enclosure. It was recognized alright, but no data could be read off it, not even the partition table. Same behavior on several computers running different operating systems (various Windows versions and Linux.)

Oops, I said, and swapped the drives back. Lo and behold, the 80 GB drive was again working fine, inside the laptop. But when I put the 40 GB drive back into the enclosure, I was in for a surprise: it was no longer working!

What the… I swapped the drives back and forth, they were both working fine in the laptop, but not working in the enclosure. Perhaps the enclosure is faulty? A logical thought, except that when I swapped enclosures using one of my several other backup drives, the enclosure was working just fine… but neither the 40 GB nor the 80 GB drive works in any of the three enclosures that I tested them with so far. Yet they both work fine in the laptop.

I must say I am stumped. I’ve never encountered a problem like this. Why would a drive work fine in a laptop but not in an external enclosure? Why would another drive, which used to work fine in the enclosure, fail after it has been inside a laptop (with, I should hasten to add, no operating system booted, so it’s not like there was a chance for a virus to affect the drive or anything like.) Modern drives do have persistent memory, but surely there are no persistent settings that would affect a drive like this? In any case, the 40 GB drive used to live in this laptop for years, and worked fine afterwards in the enclosure for years. But now, after it has been in the laptop again, it fails in the enclosure. Why?

Weird.

And I am supposed to be an expert at this.

Unintentional humor

Television No Responses »

Jul 122009

Discovery Canada advertises its lineup of programs for next week. On several occasions now they announced the following:

“Destroyed in Seconds… right after How It’s Made.”

I could be wrong but I don’t think that the humor was intentional.

Cleeseblog

Pop culture No Responses »

Jul 112009

Hah! I just happened upon the blog site of my favorite British writer, actor, and tall person: John Cleese.

I especially enjoyed the video interview with him made shortly before last year’s American presidential elections.

Peter principle

Society No Responses »

Jul 092009

Ever since I first read about the Peter principle, named after the late Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter, it always made sense to me: promoting people based on their competence likely lands them in jobs that exceed their competence level, lowering the overall effectiveness of the organization.

Now we have proof: a new paper on ArXiv (which works fine today, thankfully) shows the results of a computer simulation demonstrating a rapid decrease in efficiency as a result of a competence-based promotion system.

Harper’s communion wafer

Politics, Religion No Responses »

Jul 092009

The big news on Canadian news channels today comes in the form of a question: did Prime Minister Harper eat his communion wafer?

Harper, who’s not a Catholic, accepted a communion wafer anyway during the funeral service of the late Roméo Leblanc. Unfortunately, the camera cut away before he was seen actually eating it. So people are upset: not treating the body of Christ with the proper respect is a grave insult to Catholics, it appears.

As to why actually eating something that symbolizes the body of Christ is not a grave insult, well, I suppose people have pondered this question ever since Roman times. And here, I thought we live in the bleeping twenty-first century…

Massive ArXiv failure?

Astronomy, Internet, Physics No Responses »

Jul 082009

The premier Internet physics and astronomy preprint archive, ArXiv, seems to be having some serious problems tonight. I used the catchup interface to check for new papers, only to find messages like this:

Problem displaying entry for arXiv:0907.1079

Apparently all new papers are unavailable, and many older papers, too… I checked briefly and found papers dating back to last October that appear to have vanished. Including some half a dozen or so papers of my own.

I sure hope they keep backups!

Tinkering with Radio 2

Canada, Radio No Responses »

Jul 042009

The CBC is tinkering with Radio 2 again. After the devastation last year, they may have made some tentative steps in the right direction for a change. VERY small steps, to be sure.

But there are also some bad news: Jurgen Gothe is no longer on Radio 2 anymore. I admit I didn’t listen much to his Sunday program Farrago this past year, as the time slot was just too inconvenient. But, I still shake my head in disbelief at the CBC’s decision last year to cancel Disc Drive, arguably one of the best damn radio shows ever made.

So I’ve been reading some comments on the CBC Web site. There is near universal condemnation of Radio 2’s management: nearly all who posted comments believe that Radio 2 lost its direction, that taxpayer money is wasted on a radio station that is sounding ever more like commercial radio, that the station got rid of its knowledgeable hosts, and that its choice of music is just awful.

I think one big misunderstanding is the notion the listeners of the old Radio 2 only wanted classical music. That’s nonsense. Jurgen’s program was great not because it was classical, but because it had the right mix of classical, jazz, folk, and yes, even pop music. This eclecticism is now lost, and they cannot bring it back easily because the hosts who made it possible are gone, too.

Here are two comments, in particular, that I rather agree with, typos notwithstanding:

“Separating the genres works for people who only like clasical [sic!] or only like pop or only like jazz but a very large part of the population quite like an eclectic mix. It is possible to like both Beethoven and Michael Jackson, De Bussy [sic!] and Salsa.”

“Now that Jurgen has totally left the CBC, when will some bright adventure capitalist start up a private subscription radio or Internet station with Jurgen Goth, Danielle Charboneau, Rick Phillips et al. My subscription is ready.”

What can I say. My subscription is ready, too. Where do I sign up?

End of an era

Computers, Internet No Responses »

Jul 022009

Long before there was a commercial Internet, there were dial-up service providers, bulletin board systems, and the like. At one time, the largest among these was CompuServe, offering a comprehensive range of services including hundreds (if not thousands) of forums, online chat, downloads, and games. Indeed there was a time when no self-respecting computer company existed without a support forum on CompuServe.

I became a CompuServe subscriber in 1991 I believe. Soon after, I discovered a wonderful game hosted by CompuServe: Richard Bartle’s original Multi-User Dungeon, running under the name British Legends. Ten years ago, CompuServe discontinued British Legends using the bogus excuse that the game is not Y2K compatible; I have been running a faithfully ported version of this game on my server ever since.

But the CompuServe service remained. Under the brand name CompuServe Classic, the original service stayed in operation in all these years. Its value was greatly diminished, but it was still usable as a reliable international dial-up Internet service provider (indeed, this is the reason why I kept my CompuServe subscription active.) That is, until now.

A few months ago, they sent out an e-mail informing users that the Classic service will be discontinued on June 30.

Out of curiosity, I tried logging on to CompuServe moments ago. Yes, the old text-based services were still available until recently. But today, this is what I am greeted with:

$ telnet gateway.compuserve.com
Trying 209.154.35.102...
Connected to gateway.compuserve.com.
Escape character is '^]'.

User ID: 70674,3414

?? LOGSTU - System BHC is temporarily unavailable

Well, what can I say? So long, and thanks for all the fun.

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