Gerald the cuddly duck's Journal

Subject:	Vaccination?
Time:	12:22 am.
Mood:	Indecisive.

So… swine 'flu vaccinations are now out and about. As someone with asthma — mild though it be — I'm eligible to get the early batch.

So should I?

The big reason not to get the vaccine is Guillain–Barré syndrome, which is a whole heap of no fun at the best of times, perhaps fatal. Even in cases where one can recover (95%), a long spell in intensive care might be required… which is a bit of a problem if intensive care is having to switch people off because they're in the middle of a pandemic.

Infamously, in the 1978 outbreak in the USA, they abandoned vaccination because it was causing more deaths than it prevented: 25 from Guillain–Barré syndrome attributed to the vaccine, versus just one from the swine 'flu itself. Back then, the US population was about 200 million and about 25% of them, fifty million, got the vaccine. 500 got Guillain–Barré syndrome — that's 1 in 100,000.

Nowadays, the seasonal 'flu vaccine appears to cause the syndrome in more like 1 in 1,000,000 recipients — and this appears to be a consequence of improved manufacturing techniques that ought to pertain to swine 'flu vaccines as well.

Conversely, swine 'flu itself appears to cause death in something between 0.1% and 2.5% of people who catch it, depending on which estimate one runs with. Two in a million UK residents have died of swine 'flu thus far. Maybe, by the bitter end, 30% of unvaccinated people will have caught it.

By the back of my envelope that means the risk of the vaccine killing me is somewhere between 5×10^-8 and 1×10^-5, the risk of swine 'flu killing me between 2×10^-6 and 1×10^-2. So that's a factor of 200 uncertainty in the former and 5,000 in the latter, the downside risk of the vaccine being five times greater than the upside risk of the swine 'flu itself.

…but, overall, getting the vaccine seems to make sense?

Comments: Read 24 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Ubuntu upgrade revisited
Time:	1:59 pm.
Mood:	Vexed.

So how did I get on fixing the mess upgrading Ubuntu made of my primary home linux desktop?

I did nothing. It just-about worked and I couldn't face the aggro of sorting out the rest — which only creates hassle at bootup.

I switched to a high-res CRT; now I can see what's happening during boot-up again.

This morning, following a power cut, I dared another foray into WTF has happened to Xsession. I plonked set -x and exec >>/tmp/foo 2>&1 all over /etc/X11/Xsession. What did I see?

It processes (via shell ".") the contents of /etc/X11/Xsession.d and gets as far as /etc/X11/Xsession.d/50x11-common_determine-startup, which begins:

if [ -z "$STARTUP" ]; then
  1
  if grep -qs ^allow-user-xsession "$OPTIONFILE"; then
    2
    for STARTUPFILE in "$USERXSESSION" "$ALTUSERXSESSION"; do
      if [ -e "$STARTUPFILE" ]; then
        if [ -x "$STARTUPFILE" ]; then
          STARTUP="$STARTUPFILE"
        else
          STARTUP="sh $STARTUPFILE"
        fi
        break
      fi
    done
  else 3
  fi
fi
4

Judicious insertion of echos at the points indicated in red reveals that the code reaches point 1, but not point 2, an else clause inserted at 3 or point 4. allow-user-xsession does appear in $OPTIONFILE and that grep tried at the command line succeeds. There is nothing emitted to stdout or stderr that indicates any problem, let alone a problem that would make the entire X session startup bomb out and dump one unceremoniously back at the xdm login prompt. The last three lines of ~/.xsession-errors are:

+ . /etc/X11/Xsession.d/50x11-common_determine-startup
+ [ -z  ]
+ grep -qs ^allow-user-xsession /etc/X11/Xsession.options

I'm now even more baffled. What's the obvious thing I'm missing? Increasingly, my suspicion is that traditional Xsession doesn't work at all under Ubuntu Hardy; significantly, things still bomb out if I move my ~/.xsession to one side.

*sob*

Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Epic fail
Time:	9:53 pm.
Mood:	Incompetent.

The trouble with buying wholesale is that you screw up wholesale.

A while ago — probably a year or two, now — I thought I needed more shampoo. So the next time I went to Booker, I bought a six-pack, took it hope and stashed it safely… in… the… cupboard… next to the six-pack of shampoo. And the empty space where spare shower gel ought to be.

Given the rate at which my hairline is receding, I may now have enough shampoo to last a lifetime.

So why, why, why have I just written "shampoo" on this shopping list when I meant "shower gel"? )-8

Comments: Read 14 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	sniff sob
Time:	2:04 pm.
Mood:	Valedictory.

I've just watched M436SNP drive out of the company car park at the hands of its new owner.

I took less than I was asking for it — £250 rather than £500 — but I knew full well £500 was deeply optimistic for a car in that state. And the new owner is using it to participate in some kind of charity rally thing where they buy a cheap car then drive it around the Isle of Man. At least, that's their story, but I probed a little and they kept sounding completely plausible. If so, I'm willing to let them have it a little cheaper than intended for the sake of it not getting scrapped just yet. There's life left in the car.

And at least it's not been stolen from my driveway, like the last one.

What there wasn't was any battery power. Before sitting outside the office for two or three weeks, the car had had a couple of very short journeys to get the mobile phone car kit removed, so this was no surprise; I'd brought along some jump leads specially.

The Shell garage in Newnham had sold me dud jump leads. In fact, given they looked burned out, I suspect they sold me ones someone had mangled then returned already. (My bet would be connecting positive to negative rather than positive to positive.) The guy was very good about giving me an immediate refund, but, well, if you happen to be buying jump leads there, make sure you don't get the now-third-hand ones. (-8

So I traipsed over to Halfords, who fortunately had some mildly more expensive but extremely nice jump leads. And then I discovered the hard way that it's the Folk Festival this weekend, when I tried to get back to the office via Cherry Hinton Road.

Fortunately, the buyers had used their time wisely while I was away, checking everything over to their satisfaction and pulling out the dent a little so the wheel no longer scrapes when turning left. They paid; we did the paperwork; they left; they were happy; I was happy.

Well, except for the bit where I no longer own the car I've driven for an average of an hour a day these past 7½ years. I'm a bit sad about that.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Unix command-line tools for fun and profit
Time:	12:44 pm.
Mood:	Hacky.

Someone asked before the weekend about words that have the same predictive-text "spelling" as one another, but I can't remember who it was.

And I'm also sure I posted about this myself many years ago, but I can't find that posting either.

So I'll post, perhaps again.

The magic command line:

tr A-Z a-z < /usr/share/dict/words | sort -u | \
sed -e 's/^/^/; s/$/$/; \
        s/[abc]/[abc]/g; s/[def]/[def]/g; s/[ghi]/[ghi]/g; s/[jkl]/[jkl]/g; \
        s/[mno]/[mno]/g; s/[pqrs]/[pqrs]/g; s/[tuv]/[tuv]/g; s/[wxyz]/[wxyz]/g' | \
sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head

…flattens the standard dictionary to lower-case, removes duplicates (such as "Homer" and "homer"), squashes each word into a regular expression that matches all words which are entered the same way in predictive text, sorts those regular expressions, produces a count of how many of each occur then sorts the result in reverse numerical order, displaying just the first ten entries.

The result (with my dictionary) is:

     12 ^[abc][abc][pqrs][def][pqrs]$
     10 ^[ghi][mno][mno][def][pqrs]$
      9 ^[abc][mno][wxyz]$
      9 ^[abc][abc][pqrs][def]$
      8 ^[pqrs][tuv][mno][pqrs]$
      8 ^[pqrs][mno][pqrs][def][pqrs]$
      8 ^[pqrs][ghi][pqrs][def][pqrs]$
      8 ^[pqrs][ghi][def][def][pqrs]$
      8 ^[pqrs][def][def][pqrs]$
      8 ^[pqrs][abc][tuv][def][pqrs]$

This means the largest groups of SMS homographs are:

acres bards barer bares barfs baser bases caper capes cards cares cases
goner goods goofs homer homes honer hones hoods hoofs inner
Amy any BMW bow box boy cow cox coy
acre bard bare barf base cape card care case

Fascinating, eh?

No, thought not. )-8

Comments: Read 24 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Pisspot
Time:	5:27 pm.
Mood:	Flustered.

A short time ago, my passport expired.

Before it expired, I applied for a new one. I need to travel tomorrow. The Monday I wanted to apply was 14 working days earlier but I was ill and it had to wait until the Wednesday: 12 working days.

So I submitted my application at the Post Office, which meant I could expect the new passport within a fortnight — tight, but tolerable.

It didn't arrive.

Yesterday, I phoned the passport office at 9am to see how things were going. The passport had got past preliminary checks, but hadn't yet been finally approved by a rubber-stamping expert, nor sent for printing. Did I want to get the accelerated service? Yes? … Oh, the office was engaged. No, I couldn't hold for it, call back in a couple of hours.

At 11am, I called and they said they'd used up all their urgent slots for the day, call back the following morning. When I complained about the redo from start (and especially about the out of cheese error) they suggested I should actually have called at 8am rather than 9am.

So this morning I called at 8am. The guy I spoke to said the relevant computer system was down and I should call back in an hour. I pointed out the cyclic nature of the advice various people were giving me and he emitted the auditory equivalent of an apathetic shrug.

I called again at 8:10am. Computer systems were still down, but at least the person on the other end of the line was sympathetic and apologetic.

At 8:20am, I finally got through. They'd ring me back.

They did ring me back. My passport is approved and sent off for printing. It's arriving tomorrow morning by before-9am Special Delivery. Now I just have to hope Royal Mail doesn't screw up — never a good thing to have to rely on.

Annoyingly, I needed my passport shortly before it expired, otherwise I'd have applied sooner. More annoyingly, I'm fifty pounds poorer. If I'd used their one-week service at the outset I'd only have paid £25 extra, and saved the £6.85 Check-and-Send fee from the Post Office. I'd also have saved a lot of stress. )-8

One amusing silver lining was the conversation I had this morning when the Passport Office rang me back. They confirmed that the passport could be issued and said they needed to take payment for the urgency fee.

Them: OK, could I have your card number, please?
Me: 1607 9672 2126 0596
Them: And the three-digit verification code?
Me: 241
Them: And the cardholder's name?
Me: Mr G Gutfright
Them: And is the card registered to your home address?
Me: Yes
Them: What's the expiry date?
Me: 08/11
Them: And the valid-from date?
Me: Sorry, I can't remember. Can you hold for a moment? I'll need to pull into a layby and take a look.
Them: …

Surely I can't be the only person who remembers the details of their usual payment card?

Comments: Read 30 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Appalachian twilight
Time:	12:52 pm.
Mood:	Unhappy.

Who here remembers View-Master? Those viewers that took circular discs and gave you a stereoscopic image of something or other.

I haven't used one in years, but I clearly remember being fascinated by them as a young child. One of the discs was of the Appalachian mountains.

The Appalachian mountains are beautiful. They extend as a band 1,500 miles long and several hundred miles wide down almost the entire eastern flank of North America. I've only ever visited the southern end of the range, where Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama meet, but I'd like to see more.

There's something about them. Yes, the Rockies are the more obvious mountain range, but the Appalachians seem more ingrained in the soul of America. They keep cropping up in music: Copland's Appalachian Spring, Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads even Laurel and Hardy singing In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. In Bill Bryson's excellent A Walk in the Woods he discovers the Appalachian Trail on his doorstep up in New Hampshire and sees where it might take him. The Appalachians span the original Thirteen States. They're the home of the hillbillies, of moonshine, of Country Music.

For all these reasons, and quite apart from completely obvious environmental considerations, I would submit that mountaintop removal mining is self-evidently an appalling idea. The name is uncharacteristically literal and uneuphemistic: using high explosives, they blow the top off a mountain, reducing its height by 300 metres, dump the granulated beauty-spot in the leafy valley next door and scrape out the coal. It's like licking the centre out of a Cadbury's Creme Egg, except that (a) we can easily make more of those once you've eaten them all and (b) nobody minds much when you get the chocolate all over your fingers and the tabletop.

They've already dismantled the equivalent of two Lake Districts.

Comments: Read 10 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Bloody asides
Time:	10:27 am.
Mood:	Boggled.

A farmer's just been banned for doing 108mph on the A141.

Sentencing, the magistrate said "The roads might be different in Devon but our Fen roads are lethal. The speed you were travelling at made them even more so."

Er… right.

A141 at Gaunt Fen	Roads in Devon (to same scale)

For a Range Rover, 108mph is basically flat-out top speed, and the high centre of gravity would play extremely badly with the heavy camber on the A141. The guy was clearly going far, far too fast.

But while 108mph might be ill-advised in a Range Rover on the A141, anywhere in Devon except the A30 or A38 it'd be well nigh impossible.

Comments: Read 14 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Justice for all
Time:	12:01 am.
Mood:	Happier.

Two years ago, I was not having a good day. Part of my hassle was my phone line getting stolen.

Earlier today,

captain_aj pointed me at this news story: they caught the bastard and sent him down for three years.

But, only twelve months of that was for stealing copper — he did plenty else besides, including intentionally and repeatedly ramming a police car.

That Solly Smith bastard stole half a ton of copper wire, severing phone lines to seven thousand homes. Had he got away with it, he'd have made £1,500, but the loss to BT was two orders of magnitude higher.

So. Assuming he gets out after serving half his time, as is usual, he's doing 25 waking minutes for each phone line he cut. Now, I know that being put in prison is a big deal and am normally fairly liberal and lenient, but that doesn't sound like sufficient punishment for screwing up my telephony and internet connectivity for a fortnight, quite apart from the time I wasted trying to diagnose the problem. Say the overall bill for his copper theft came to £500,000 (BT's costs, customers' costs, the cost of extra policing while 999 was out of order for entire villages at a time), he should be doing something approximating a lifetime of community service in penance.

Hohum.

Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	A security-engineering perspective
Time:	10:21 am.
Mood:	Prospective.

There's a lot of hoohah from a lot of angles about the announcement that scientists have managed to create human sperm from stem cells. Almost certainly not viable sperm, yet, but they'll get better. It's an important step towards something-or-other.

One consequence I've not seen mentioned before, however: this is also a step towards being able to turn someone into a father without their prior knowledge or consent. Or frame them with a sexual offence, for that matter.

Comments: Read 14 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	The brave, the bold, the battered heart of Chevrolet
Time:	1:30 pm.

So… the US automotive industry is in a bit of a fix, mainly because they've spent the last fifty years producing huge, crass, inefficient, unreliable monsters. Yes, there have been a handful of brilliant — or at least iconic — classics (Model T, Mustang, the '59 Cadillac Convertible, Trans Am, the Jeep), but they are the exceptions, not the rule.

So where do they go from here, if not into bankruptcy and the history books?

The USA can still build cars. Several European and Japanese models are built in the USA for the US market and some (the BMW X5, for example) are made there and exported for all markets.

The USA can still design cars. The big American car companies have owned the likes of Saab, Volvo, Jaguar and Aston Martin in recent years. Besides, the cars Ford sells under its own badge in Europe are a world apart from its efforts in America: only the Focus is shared, being a "compact" car in the USA.

What seems to be missing is the general image and ethos of making clever, innovative products. US marques are selling to an ever-dwindling market that wants chrome with everything, the "there ain't no substitute for cubes" bunker mentality that makes people think the Northstar engine (275hp from 4.6 litres) is a good idea.

There are clearly US consumers who want to buy clever, innovative products; they're buying Toyotas (Lexuses, Scions) and Volkswagens (Audis, Prsches, Bugattis). What would it take to make them buy an American car again?

I think it's time for Apple to make a car.

Comments: Read 13 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Products that don't exist but should
Time:	6:38 pm.
Mood:	Inventive.

While discussing long sessions in machine rooms, I realised there's a significant market niche that's not currently filled: rack-mount espresso makers. Canford Audio can supply you a 13U 'fridge or a 3U wine rack, but not a 2U Gaggia. Lots of techies and geeks need their coffee.

But then I mentioned the idea to

frithonthehills and he immediately pointed out that what people really want is rack-mounted beer. Maybe Milton Brewery should start doing specialist kegs?

Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.

LiveJournal for Gerald the cuddly duck.

View:	User Info.
View:	Friends.
View:	Calendar.
View:	Memories.
You're looking at the latest 20 entries. Missed some entries? Then simply jump back 20 entries.