Category: personal

Dancing Sons of Fishermen!

Do your Mitochlorians dancing to a Flamenco rythym?

Bryan Sykes, geneticist and author of “The Seven Daughters of Eve” has found that a majority of the Celts emigrated from Spain to the British Isles 6000 years ago.

A central theme of Bryan’s research and books is that we are all more closely related to each other than we realise, and you inherit your Mitchondrial DNA from your mother.

If you have yet to read either of his books, put them on your Christmas wish list.

NASA Conspiracy Theory #475658

Atlantis Landing Delayed: Mystery Object in space. From what I can see, NASA is now dumping plastic bags in space. Let’s hope some that some hyper-intelligent inter-galactic space whales don’t accidently mistake the trash as zero-gravity squid monster and beach themselves on the dust of the moon.

Conspiracy Theory #475658. NASA wants to destroy the planet, so it’s leaving its trash behind. NASA will then be forced into working out how to populate other parts of the galaxy. This will require more budget from the US Congress.

Next time, use reusable shopping bags.

Colin Thiele. RIP

When it rains, it pours.

Colin Thiele, a South Australian author of over 80 books died recently aged 85.

ABC News report his most famous book, Storm Boy; set on the Coorong of South Australia. Another, later book made into a movie by the SA Film Corporation was Blue Fin. Set in Port Lincoln (but filmed in Streaky Bay) – it detailed the relationship between a tuna fishing father, and his son.

In fact, most of Colin’s books dealt with father-son relationships set in South Australia. Fire in the Stone, Sun on the Stubble. Set settings were a unique view of farming life; the wheat, sheep; German heritage and a time in the first half of the 20th Century.

Even when I went to school, Colin’s books were a little “non-PC”, and as such they were not a part of the books curriculum. Both Colin and I are descendents of German immigrants, and his books had a semi-autobiographical quality – a shared perspective.

A good innings, and I am sure his writings touched many.

Steve Irwin. RIP.

Sky News Australia is reporting that Steve Irwin, Australia’s world-famous Crocodile Hunter, is reported to have died at age 44.

The early reports are that he was fatally stung by a stingray. Marine Medic web site reports that 2 people in Australia have died from stringray barbs. If I remember my Cousteau, the tail whips very quickly.

ABC News web site has more details. According to reports, a stingray barb went through his chest as he was filming an underwater sequence near Port Douglas, North Queensland. (edited from Cairns, 2:52pm)

No-one should die at work. Nor does the simple phrase “he died doing what he loved” ever repair the feeling of loss to those close to him.

A typical Aussie: a larrikin, non-conformist and passionate individual. The sort of Australian we Australians were quietly proud represented our country. Many may have thought of his over-the-top expressions, including the famous “crikey” as too flippant and superficial: no-one can deny his love for animals.

A common dinner conversation for Australians overseas is about our deadly flora and fauna. Sadly, this myth only partly based on reality is now augmented.

Australia, the world, and our native animals will miss Steve.

Good on yer, mate. Your innings were over too soon.

Geotagging: Three Dimensions off our Virtual Future

Nick Hodge, Flickr.com, Geotagged: spent the greater part of today geotagging my images stored in Flickr. Geotagging is the addition of spacial or geographical metadata (that is: latitude and longitude) to my uploaded images. The four cameras I’ve used do not have GPS, so this geotagging caper is a manual post-processing effort.

The resolution of the Yahoo! Map Images for Sydney and London are excellent, the maps suck (unless you are in the US!). Even Tokyo’s map was strangely low resolution. At the time of writing, 600,000 images have a geotag according to Flickr. Microsoft’s Local Live and Google’s Google Maps are way better.

Why invest the time?

Somewhere, someday, someone is going to use this data to find out where someone was on a certain day. Or, some smart software is going to create an interesting view of our world.
Time has been a part of the EXIF camera data for many years. These two dimensions are excellent for locating on a simple 2D map, but do not give enough “resolution” to be for our Virtual Future. Apart from the height, the target, tilt and heading would provide more data: Imagine a Second Life in a fully imaged, geotagged, Microsoft PhotoSynth’d world. With the data out there in the cloud, we can live out our life in the virtualized clouds.
A most pleasant reason is to revisit your travels. Re-orienting yourself, remembering the streets of London without the 28+ hour flight. Fun. Reliving the past, virtually. The future will be more out there and immersive.

Virtually Emulating First Loves

In an effort to re-ignite my first love whilst on my leave of absence – I’ve been looking for a good TRS-80 emulator to rekindle the flames of technical desire. Also over the last 4 weeks I’ve also had a small “side project” watching the goings on in the desktop virtualization space, especially on the Mac. Parallels has been an excellent investment to get Windows XP running on the MacBook Pro; just waiting for the ACPI/Direct3D (or VMWare for the Mac) version so I can run a build of Windows Vista.

Admission #1: the first computer my dad purchased for me was a TRS-80 Model I. Not the prettiest, nor the most powerful of machines – 1.77Mhz with 16Mb Kilobytes (I even accidently put Mb!) of RAM. Welcome to 1981. That’s right, 1981. 25 years/ a quarter of a century ago.

The best emulator for the TRS-80 is written by Matthew Reed. Found thanks to
Ira Goldklang’s TRS-80 web site. So, I have TRS32 running inside Windows XP in Parallels on MacOS X. Shells within Shells.

Quest for the Key of Night Shade

Admission #2: the TRS-80 we owned stored data onto a cassette, not a floppy disk. Way-back when I was one of those computer-store kids. Thanks to the sales guys at Tandy Electronics/Radio Shack, we’d spend all day sitting on the computers typing in programs and occasionally demonstrating to prospective buyers. As floppy disks were expensive, we didn’t get access to storage – so TRSDOS was not an environment I was ever exposed to. Getting the emulator working involved remembering how to get BASIC working, and learning yet another OS.

Admission #3: I’ve watched zero minutes of Lord of the Rings. Even from DVD. Ever since the school librarian suggested I borrow The Hobbit, attempting to read a single page, and quickly returning the mush – I’ve actively avoided the fantasy genre. World of Warcraft drives me nuts. Sorry Neil and Mark!

Before this dispassion arose, I did get into one fantasy-style game on the TRS-80: “Quest for the Key of Nightshade”. It is strange how you remember names such as these for many years. Last week I found a version of the BASIC program, originally typed all the lines from a computer magazine into Basic and saved to cassette, on Ira’s website. From memory, this was written by a Canadian programmer and won “TRS-80 game of the year 1981” in some US magazine and was reprinted in 1982 by Australian Personal Computer.

The screen dump above is from this game. Ahh, the fond memories of our first loves.