Denniblog

Flickr is part of Yahoo, and Yahoo is about to be swallowed up by Microsoft.

I’m one of several hundred users who are preparing to up sticks and remove their photostream from Flickr if that happens.

However, it’s not as simple as backing up the entire stream on a bunch of CDs, or even on my website. I have a lot of photos, a basic hosting package and no CD burner (no, really!) I also don’t believe in hard drives, which is why I just bought an EeePC with a 4 (four) GB solid state drive.

As you can probably tell, I believe that the future is in online storage and web-based applications. Even if that means putting my trust in Google, for now.

But this makes it difficult to export my Flickr photostream to another photo sharing site.

Until I discovered the Flickr Importer Tool on Ipernity.com (via the Microsoft: keep your evil grubby hands off of our Flickr pool, natch).

This smart little script imports 200 of your photos at a time, starting at the beginning and keeps right on going.
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This is the summer that never was. We must have had at least 3 days of sunshine last week. And this morning I was in the kitchen, making sandwiches for John’s lunch, when I realised that I wasn’t wearing my dressing gown.

The downstairs of the house isn’t heated.

On Sunday, we arrived home from shopping to the sound of birds chirping in the bushes.

There is something wrong with this image, of course. The branches are still bare. It’s only January. And birds don’t sing to celebrate the sunshine; they sing to establish breeding territories.

Might be a lot of frozen little chicks out there, come February.

In other news: we are still house hunting. We almost found a place, but the landlord was pushing his luck, then bailed out and put the place on the market. Shame that he couldn’t have waited a year or so until the housing market has slumped more. But seriously, things are turning around in our favour, only the timing’s off. One or two years down the road, we might consider buying. Maybe Brown will deliver on his promise to develop housing on brownfield sites and put an end to this madness once and for all. There’s plenty of space, even in London.

The EeePC has left customs and—as of 7:04 this morning—is on its way. Now I’m just crossing my fingers that the thing isn’t damaged or the international bueraucratic merry-go-round will start up yet again. Honestly, stick to local markets.

I still wonder whether I should have bought a machine with twice the specs (1 GB RAM, 8 GB SDD) for a measly 68$ more. Probably, but it doesn’t come in light blue. Still, my little machine has 8 times the flash memory of the OLPC. And I’ve just seen a 2GB RAM upgrade for the 701 EeePC from a local Ebay seller

Have you noticed how brats are always the first to get access to decent computers? I bet that back in 1997 there were more laptops per primary school child than per postdoc, by about an order of magnitude. That’s not to say that I don’t think the OLPC project isn’t a great initiative (even if I would like to see it go out to older children first).

But it does mean that I’m (lime-)green with envy.

Harumph.

Having missed out on the buy one-give one campaign, I had a look at Ebay and I must say that the XO looks—well—childish.

However, it’s obviously an idea whose time has come, because my prayers from years ago seem to have been answered. An ultralight, mobile, capable laptop—for adults

Roll on the Asus EeePC (Easy to work, easy to learn, easy to play).

Watch this space.

Photo by luisramirezuchile

You may not think it from our backgrounds, but both John and I are late adapters. Dating from our poor student days, our attitude has always been ‘why fix (replace) it if it ain’t broken’, which is why John’s anno 1997 desktop is still standing next to mine (complete with dial-up modem, a new-ish DVD reader and hard drive upgraded to 12 GB. I think it still runs on 124 MB RAM, but the point is, it still runs.)

When the TV we inherited from John’s parents gave out after a quarter-century’s reliable service, he opened it up and took a look inside before declaring it buggered.

We opted for a new model from the same company. It came with a built-in video recorder and gave out about one week after the warranty expired. The picture just stopped, leaving the screen covered with grey snow.
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(Cross-posted to LJ.)

You may not have been able to contact/PM me over the last couple of days or weeks, because Yahoo Mail constantly goes down.

With the company being as bloated as it is, there are no easy explanations, and I couldn’t read the helpdesk reply if there was one since I can’t access my account.

In an attempt to shed light on the problem, I have even joined Yahoo! Answers, but of course it won’t allow me to post a question from either Firefox or IE. I have the option to ‘preview’ or go to ‘previous’ in a never-ending loop.

I have two options open to me: use my Gmail account as my primary account (however reluctantly, after six years on Yahoo) and change over all my contacts/links/sites, or activate my website’s email option and ditto.

Having a personalized email address may actually be cute in an age of universal Gmail/Yahoo. My current host is reliable—dare I say even more so than Yahoo (they deal with actual financial transactions, and I reckon that reliability is in direct correlation with the amount of money that is at stake).

(cross-posted to LJ)

I’ve ranted about Google’s intent at world domination before, and now Cory Doctorow has written a story about it (CC licenced, natch). It’s called ‘Scroogled’, and I quite like it, because it’s written from an insider perspective rather than being a paranoid account of Geek-Mages Conspiring To Do Evil, which I would probably have ended up writing.

In his Wall Street interview, Cory is defensive about Google, and he has a point. It’s difficult not to love them. Or as he put it succinctly: “I think one of the most heartbreaking things that any of us can live through is for an institution that we love to change in a way that makes us hate it…”.

There is no mention of China in that interview (although there is in the story). Of course Google are far from the only offenders in this regard. But they are the most heartbreaking.

Anyway, this wasn’t meant to be just another review of the story. Through one of my blogs’ referrer trackers, I’ve come across a site which is now the new homepage for my browser. You see, the name ‘Scroogle’ is real. Scroogle allows you to search Google anonymously, by taking cookies into their own servers, trashing them and deleting logs within 48 hours.

I’ve already set my browser to delete cookies after each session, but not only is that inconvenient, it’s probably not enough. So initiatives like Scroogle are to be welcomed.

Naturally, Microsoft doesn’t like it. So get Firefox or—better still—install Ubuntu on your machine (I’m due for an upgrade soon).

Google didn’t like it either at first (2003). But Scroogle seems to have resurfaced unscathed and is attracting quite a bit of attention this year. Just try Scroogling Scroogle for Google

By about 30 teraflops!

03/09/2007

I have already raved about JAMSTEC. Well, not only do they have a ship that can drill 7km beneath the sea floor into the Earth mantle, they also have the world’s biggest supercomputer, the Earth Simulator System. It outperforms the then Number 2 (the ASCI White system in the US) by a cool 30 teraflops.

Today we went to have a look at the thing (and the rather cool JAMSTEC facility, which includes a nice garden, tennis courts and a social room with a bar and BBQ-barrels out front; just in case you’re looking for a job…).

It’s not at all what I expected. The Worldcon-special tour was limited to 14 members, so I thought we’d get a look inside the labs or at the aquarium or something, but it soon transpired that I was the only biologist. And when we approached the icerink-like building in which the real beast was housed, the geeks in the group (i.e. all but me) started to salivate.

Here we have a building that is shielded against all sources of electromagnetic radiation (internal light is channeled through fibre-optic cables), radio waves, lightning and seismic vibration (believe it or not, the thing is built on rubber mats) and which houses a computer system that spans 4 tennis courts, connected by 1,800 miles of cables (83,000 in all).

In the main building, adjacent to the icerink, there is a museum and lecture hall. Our guide showed us a presentation of the Earth Simulator being put through its paces, running a climate simulation over the next eighty years. The changing colours made the hairs on my neck stand up. I don’t know whether this was one of the consensus models, but temperatures at the North Pole rose by over twelve degrees.

Visiting JAMSTEC was a fitting end to NIPPON2007, the 65th Science Fiction Worldcon and 46th Japan Science Fiction Convention. When we got back, they were already in the process of packing up. Boxes were stacked high, cables unthreaded and people were milling around various props as I made my way towards the bustling organisers’ offices and the Green Room at the end of the corridor, holding up my badge with the red ribbon at the entrance desk.

The atmosphere in the Green Room was different. An refuge from the frantic activity outside, people were clustering around long tables laden with plates and a long bar lined the wall, stacked with bottles and flanked by barrels full of cans of beer and chilled soft drinks. The Dead Dog Party is traditionally where the remaining booze is drunk down to the last drop: a final cheer raised to the organisers and volunteers, participants and fans who make worldcon what it is.

A cheer to past and future worldcons.

Did I just bow when leaving the shop?

I’m going through a period of cultural readjustment. Earlier, struggling with my ailing hardware and seeing that John works for an internet company, I snapped at him: “I don’t know why I have to put up with this crap. You do realize we’re living in the twenty-second century—”

I think I can be forgiven, having just returned from Worldcon in Japan…

At long last, I have a brand-new website, with a brand-new (stolen) template and sleek, sexy look No more elephants! (But Easyspace wheedled 15 quid ‘transfer fee’ out of me.)

For FTP-in-your-sleep, FlashFXP is a work of art. After my very first upload (OK, all the index files and two directories—took about 30 seconds) I wanted to shower them with money for the shareware version, a mere $25. But why do they make it so difficult? I can’t pay them until I register, so that they can shower me with newsletters in return.

Doh!