I’m too lazy to write a post for this week and I can’t even do a “Best of” since there’s so little good material on this blog… so I’ll link you to a town cross from a while back and throw in some new content. Namely, a bunny. It’s pink. Continue reading “Happy Easter”
The crabs I have to put up with
On Tuesday, while at the end of my office hours at UT Scarborough campus, I noticed the computer lab workstations I was using had some educational software for biology installed. I fired up the unit on Darwinian evolution. This involved a simulator depicting snails with different shell thicknesses and crabs.
Continue reading “The crabs I have to put up with”
Spring like a bunny
This might be my most Canadian post, yet…
Toronto normally has four seasons: spring, summer, colourful, and blah. But this year, blah wasn’t terribly cold and spring seems to have made like a bunny and just hopped away. We went from blah to summer over night (Friday night to Saturday morning). We can’t pin this on climate change (after all, this is just the weather for one year — although it seems to be part of a climate trend). So what is it? I call weather witchcraft.
Encyclopaedia Britannica goes out of print
I was going to write a supportive blog about Quebec’s resistance against the crime bill that the government has tried to ram down the province’s gullets, but I’m afraid of being put on some terrorist watch list along with the environmentalists and being tracked down by Mr. Toews. Instead, I will write about an equally timely (if more mundane) topic…
Encyclopædia Britannica is going out of print and will soon be available only in its on-line version. I haven’t even seriously thought about print encylopædias since the late 1990s and the last time I used one was around 2002. While they may become collectible items a few years down the line from now, I certainly won’t miss them.
Continue reading “Encyclopaedia Britannica goes out of print”
Unreadable file formats and bit rot: Novel problems in the digital age… or not?
If you’ve been using computers for long enough, you’ve probably faced unreadable file formats or changes in distribution media: How do I open this old WordPerfect document? How am I going to read those files stored on a ZIP disk? Photographic prints and print editions of books have much less demanding requirements for seeing their contents. You found a box of slides from the 1960s? No problem; just hold them up to a light. In fact, if you have a good slide scanner or projector, despite their age, the pictures might still be of higher quality than images produced by your compact digital camera! The problems of unreadable file formats and changes in physical media are unique to the digital age. Or so some might have you believe (especially those pushing cloud services).
Continue reading “Unreadable file formats and bit rot: Novel problems in the digital age… or not?”
TA business as usual
With CUPE 3902 Unit 1 on the brink of a strike last week, a new proposal was put forth that will be voted upon by the general membership tomorrow, next Monday, and next Tuesday. If you’re part of Unit 1, visit http://cupe3902.org/ and read the full memorandum of settlement.
A priest walks into a car…
Priests should be allowed to drive in high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes on Sundays. We are trying to promote mass transit, right? Har har.
Going west
Air travel is really quite astounding. In the wee hours of the morning of Friday, I hopped on a plane bound for Vancouver and arrived at my destination before the start of the business day. Some people have jitters about flying but not I. Get on ((No hop ons, though)) and, after zipping through the air in a flying Pringles can, step into an new airport that is at once familiar and foreign.
Continue reading “Going west”
Ultrabook fad (follow up)
A few months ago, I disagreed with comments made by Acer’s founder, Stan Shih. I suggested that netbooks and ultra books would merge (or face extinction). It looks like at least some people at Acer now share the same view publicly. Their estimate is for 18-24 months from now; my original prediction would have been for about 30 months from now, but considering their new aggressive pricing strategy for ultrabooks, the disappearance of netbooks will likely sooner rather than later.
Recovering from hard drive woes — Part III
I woke my computer up from sleep and tried to run ssh. Surprise alligators! I encountered the odd error message “You don’t exist! go away!” It turns out that my dying hard drive had trashed some very important system files containing my computer login and password information. Trying to start up Terminal, I got the error “The administrator has set your shell to an illegal value”. I couldn’t access a large chunk of my files (due to lack of permissions) and my Dock was totally trashed. Solution? Start X11 from your utilities folder.