This is why I still avidly read Slashdot :)
“A wind-powered car has been clocked in the US traveling downwind 2.85 times faster than the 13.5 mph wind. The definitive research by Rick Cavallaro of FasterThanTheWind.org is being funded by Google and Joby Energy.
And thoughtsatthemoment's response:
Let me know when you have a solar powered car traveling faster than light.
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Another post I thought was only going to be one line long, but it turned into a mini saga!
Wishing all the Swedish people of the world a happy National Day! In true cliché fashion I'm eating Swedish meatballs, potatoes and gravy on my IKEA table while listening to Abba, and for lunch I had a dill and smoked salmon sandwich from the… Norwegian bakery down the street. We'll pretend it's Swedish though, but don't tell anyone!
I've always wanted to go to Stockholm; Malaysia Airlines inexplicably has a regular service to it from Kuala Lumpur, not sure about Singapore Airlines. I suppose I should be going with SAS though, right?
WIth the mini-obsession I've had with Sweden for so long, I'm surprised I've only blogged about them once before. That's okay though, because with this post the Sweden tag will have two entries which is double what it had before.
And as for the photo, it's Kallen Stadtfeld from Code Geass holding a bunch of Swedish flags that came with some food from IKEA when I was still in Adelaide. This is my favourite photo of her I took, but she wasn't carrying Swedish flags in that one!
I had no idea why I gave the flags to her to use, perhaps it's because in the story Sweden was annexed into Britannia too and she's showing solidarity. Yeah, that must be it.
Usually I wouldn't dignify the likes of The Australian with my readership, but someone on Twitter linked to this article by John Black about how us Greenies are destroying his party and figured it was work a look-see. I thought I was only destroying the Internets by clogging all them tubes with my words and whatnot.
Greens 07 were very well-paid inner-urban renters who made extensive use of public transport and had few religious convictions. They tend not to have children until their late 30s, if at all, which makes them even richer and gives them lots of spare time to organise local political activities and annoy the rest of us.
That's right, The Greens are only taking votes away from your [formerly left leaning] Labor party because they annoy people. Yeah, that must be it! I've also read those greenies tend to get angrier at those calling themselves journalists who make broad, sweeping generalisations to attack them as if they're the only reason people are becoming bored with Labor's talk and no action.
For what it's worth, I am an inner-urban renter who makes extensive use of public transport and have no religious convictions, at least he got that bit right. Stick to reporting facts Mr Black, and you may have a shot at this here journalism thingy!
Oh crap, I didn't leave it lit ON the John Lennon record, did I? I am so friggen high, bro! Eh, my mum was a hippie, but I can't pull it off.
With the (continuing) disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, in true technocratic style Dmitry Medvedev has proposed a pragmatic, logical idea: an international environment fund. So it probably won't ever happen.
From his official Kremlin blog:
"The environment and the economy do not contradict each other. A properly functioning economy is an environmentally friendly economy."
Yes! Spasiba! That's what people like me have been saying for years!
"Perhaps we should consider setting up a global fund for insuring or re-insuring against these sorts of [environmental] risks. I think I will raise this subject at the G20 summit in Canada later this month."
Sounds like a brilliant idea to me.
I'm still frustrated and bitterly disappointed with world leaders for their combined abject failure to rise above their shallow, short term self interests to ensure the future of our planet at the Copenhagen summit earlier this year. Even if the whole event was just a token effort as some environmentalists claimed, it would have at least sent a message that they were willing to start taking the issue seriously. They couldn't even do that.
Medvedev's proposal sounds like an excellent way to let these world leaders regain some of our trust by committing funds to help in the wake (and hopefully in the prevention) of future environmental disasters that affect all of us.
I could spend paragraphs elaborating on these questions, but I'll leave them short and sweet:
As I say, Medvedev's idea is f-ing brilliant, I can't wait to hear how other world leaders spin the idea to justify why they won't support it. Hey, they've got to be doing something with all our tax dollars, and those PR folk have families to feed too, you know. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Why is Medvedev saying this and nobody else?
Even if this were true (and it clearly isn't)… so what? It's high time we start tacking these issues outside political borders, because they affect all of us.
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I got tweet from Cory Doctorow!
It's amazing how such a [tiny] tip of the hat can make my evening :)
Allegedly hotlinking makes Mikuru so upset she starts blurting out Français! From http://mikuru.haruhi.fr/, surprising though it may seem.
Imagine if I hotlinked this image. "Dawg, I heard you like hotlinking, so I hotlinked the hotlink image you can hotlink while you hotlink!"
Add Xzibit to the list of celebrity based memes I fail at.
I've been running Fedora 13 Goddard on my ThinkPad X40 for the last few days. Aside from some rendering and install issues, things are pretty smooth sailing.
Fedora 13 is the latest version of the Fedora operating system sponsored by Red Hat that I switched over to from Slackware as my Linux of choice last year. On the whole I prefer it to Ubuntu because they keep more of the original Gnome interface in tact, and I've grown to like YUM for installing packages. Pkgsrc works great on Slackware, but being able to simply enter "yum update" is a real boon.
Since toying with Red Hat Linux 5.0 in the bad old days, for some reason the Anaconda installer and my computer hardware have generally not played nicely. I remember wanting to use Red Hat's then-new Bluecurve theme back in the day but I couldn't get past the timezone screen without it crashing, despite the BSDs and Mandrake Linux installing without any issues.
Fortunately Anaconda has worked reasonably well for me since Fedora 12, and aside from the internal ThinkPad TrackPoint mouse not being detected throughout the entire install process (necessitating a ton of [TAB]-ing) things went fairly smoothly.
Of note, I like to configure my own partition layout but for those who just want it installed fresh or to have it overwrite an existing Linux install, Anaconda's new layout was very slick. I also noticed Joe was available as a pre-installed editor option on the software screen; not sure whether that's always been there but throwing that out there for what it's worth :).
A fresh install and a yum update later, Fedora 13 was booting just fine on my ThinkPad X40, the mouse had even been detected which Anaconda couldn't do. The document icons look suspiciously Mac-like, but that's okay because I'm also a Mac user and find them rather fetching!
Now for the bad news. I'm not sure whether it's the new open intel X11 video drivers (with otherwise work beautifully), but unfortunately the interface looks terrible. Icons displayed in menus and toolbars are either poorly rendered with jaggered, ill defined edges or in some cases not even existent. All the default Gnome icon sets and icon sets I've installed myself (I like Nimbus and Tango) look this way.
On a Windows machine I would diagnose this problem as being caused by a low colour depth, but photos and Metacity render gradients and colour just fine, so I'm thinking it must be a GTK issue. Lending support to this theory is that icons in Firefox look the way they should too, which means (I'm assuming) Cairo is okay but plain GTK isn't.
These visual artefacts are not present on the FreeBSD 8.0 partition on this machine, nor were they there in Fedora 12. To make sure the installer didn't do anything funky or forget to install a package, I reinstalled Fedora 13 from a DVD and a USB key from different sources with the same results.
Oh yeah, and Metacity still can't handle double width characters in window titles. I suppose this is an issue with the Gnome folks and not Fedora though, so I'll leave it at that.
As Stewie Griffin would do, I thought I'd structure this review as a compliment sandwich, with positive things on the outside and the negative things in the middle so we end on a high note :).
Firstly, kudos to the Fedora team for continuing to reduce their dependency on Mono! Fedora 12 implemented the beautiful Gnote in place of Tomboy, and with 13 they replaced F-Spot with Shotwell. I have to admit I'd never heard of the Vala language until I read up about Shotwell, it looks really interesting and the perfect antidote to Mono which has always made me feel uneasy. Could Gnome finally be able to compete with KDE and Qt in this regard now?
And of course I'm delighted that a fully featured Python 3.0 stack is now available in the default install! Granted my primary Python haunt is Django, but my personal scripts have been running on 3.0 on my Mac for a long while now, so it'll be great to port them over.
Overall aside from a couple of glitches on my specific hardware, Fedora 13 looks like a solid release.
