Paralipsis

Argh, ‘automated upgrade’ my ass. I hope my blog still works.

We’ve been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we've lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

via Howard Bloom: Climate Change Is Nature’s Way – WSJ.com.

If you’re running eclipse galileo SR1 on linux along with ubuntu 9.10 (karmic koala), then you MUST launch the eclipse script with GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 set.

Change blindness. One of the many ways our brain is so damned complex.

If you’re just interested in whether the currently running system is 32 or 64 bit, then ‘uname -m’ will tell you either i686 or x86_64 depending on whether you have 32 or 64 bit cpu.

Unfortunately if you want to know if the system *could* be 64 bit, you need to check the cpu flags. The flag ‘rm’ means its 16 bit, ‘tm’ means 32 bit, and ‘lm’ is 64 bit.

`grep flags /proc/cpuinfo`

rm: real mode, 16 bit

tm: transparent mode, 32 bit

lm: long mode, 64 bit

Awesome parking at the basketball game.

And baby

Now that my kind wife has reenabled my mobile internet for me, it’s time to try out mobile wordpress again.

Now that my kind wife has reenabled my mobile internet for me, it’s time to try out mobile wordpress again.

Not that we need more convincing that Microsoft is run by a bunch of pragmatic douchebags, but…

Boycott Microsoft Bing
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Microsoft apparently doesn’t want to pursue the Google solution of having separate sites – one that produces generally legitimate results (google.com) and another within China that blatantly censors (google.cn). Instead, Bing figured it would have one site and just censor all the results in simplified Chinese characters. It then compounded the problem by dissembling and disguising its policy. That’s craven and embarrassing, it betrays the integrity of Microsoft searches, and for me it’s a reason to boycott Bing.