Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2007

  • The Land of the Free?

    Well, not if you happen to be a transsexual, it would appear. A friend of ours has emailed me news of what has just happened in Largo, in Florida, where she lives. The City Manager, Steve Stanton, has been removed from his post. His crime? He is a transsexual who wishes to proceed to become female. And for that, the bigots in Largo have been out in force. People such as Peggy Schaefer and Ron Sanders. Over to Peggy:
    "I don’t want that man in office," she said. "I don’t think we should be paying him $150,000 a year when he’s not been truthful. We have to speak up. Of course, we don’t believe in sex changes or lesbianism. They have their rights, but we do, too." 
    And Ron:
    "Mr. Stanton is not a role model. He’s proven that. I think for the sake of our young people today, you need to do what’s right, and that’s terminate him. … If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he’d want him terminated. Make no mistake about it." 
    While there have been voices of moderation – such as the Reverend Abhi Janamanchi:
    "Do not give in to extreme pressure, because there is such a thing as the tyranny of the majority. … Make this judgment based on sound ethics, compassion, humanity, and truly show commitment to diversity."
    – the end result is that the City Commissioners voted 5-2 to remove Stanton from his post. Another victory for bigotry and intolerance. God bless America?

  • Miscommunication

    Sometimes, words evoke quite a different image from what is intended…
     
     

  • Reflections on a Mote of Dust

    Carl Sagan wrote Reflections on a Mote of Dust in 1996. His words remain as true today as they were then.
    Icecorescientist has set the words to images and music…
     
     
     
    (hat tip to the Bad Astronomer for the link)

  • Hell On Earth

    Hilzoy, over at Obsidian Wings, draws our attention to the situation in Northern Uganda. Heartrending.

  • Another Two Data Points

     
     
    An open and shut case – ineffably sad and a terrible waste of human potential of all concerned.

  • Windows Home Server Hiccups

    Amongst other things, I’m currently testing the beta software of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. Along with about 10,000 other people, apparently.

    It is only the second beta, so one should expect bugs; and in that I’ve not been disappointed.

    I’ve had a couple of problems with the Connector software. On one machine (which was running Vista at the time), it failed to find the server machine, even though it sits on the same subnet of my home network. That machine has now had Windows XP re-installed on it for other reasons, and now it is happily sending backups through to the server.

    But far more seriously, on another machine (also running Vista) the Connector service will lock up the machine completely after some time has elapsed. The only way to deal with it once it locks up is to boot into Safe Mode, and disable the Connector service. I suspect that it is conflicting with one, or even worse, a combination of the 73 other services that the machine happens to be running. I see from the bug reports that I’m not the only person suffering from this, so hopefully Microsoft will get around to looking at it at some point.

    Another bug that has started ringing alarm bells with me is that someone has reported that moving his 26,000 photos onto the server has corrupted the photos’ metadata. This would be a disaster for any photographer who uses metadata for digital asset management. I’m certainly not going to entrust my 24,000 photos to the current beta – at least not until Microsoft have identified and corrected this particular bug.

    Apart from real showstoppers such as these, there are the usual raft of niggles, which while they may be somewhat irritating, don’t cause active harm. One example I’ve got is the fact that each time I reinstall the Connector software on a client machine, the previous examples live on like ghosts in the administration console. Take a look at this to see what I mean.

    Home Server Console with Ghosts

    Those greyed-out icons cannot be got rid of, and represent previous instances of the Connector software on client machines.

    So, on we slog…

  • Be Rational – Read “Irrationality”

    Another book for the library, I think.

  • Alice B. Sheldon

    Oooh – I see that there’s a new biography of the science fiction author James Tiptree Jr. – who turned out to be, in real life, not a man at all, but Alice B. Sheldon. She was a fascinating woman, who wrote extraordinary stories. The biography gets a thumbs-up from Nicholas Whyte, so I’ve just ordered it with confidence.

  • Bowling With The Buurt

    We went bowling with the neighbourhood (the buurt) last night. Organised by three of our neighbours, about forty of us descended on the bowling alley in the local village. It was a great evening, but it only served to confirm that I am a terrible bowler…
     
    20070223-2222-44 
     
    20070223-2107-22 
     
    Working out the scores…
     
    20070223-2313-24 
     
    More photos here.

  • Nature’s Wonders

  • Fun With Computers

    I have a definite love/hate relationship with computers. My working life was centred around them, and inevitably at parties I was asked advice on PCs. But they usually put me in mind of the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

    There was a little girl,
    Who had a little curl,
    Right in the middle of her forehead.
    When she was good, She was very good indeed,
    But when she was bad she was horrid.

    When PCs go bad, they can be really horrid. I’ve just spent a fun day working on Martin’s PC. It all began last week, when I decided to upgrade our home systems to Windows Vista. I had run the Microsoft Vista Advisor on the three systems, and it had suggested that Martin’s PC should have more memory, and that the graphics capability would not be capable of the Aero interface, but would be suitable for the basic Vista interface. OK, I thought, that’s no problem, I’ll just add in more memory, the Aero interface is icing on the cake, but not essential.

    So more memory was installed, I took backups and installed Vista Home Premium. There was a slight panic when I found out that Vista was only able to drive the onboard graphics chip (Intel 845G) at the minimum resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. However, Intel’s Vista Graphics Support FAQ claimed that Vista would support the 845G shipset using XPDM (XP Display Model) drivers. Off I went to the Intel site and downloaded the latest version of these drivers. Well, I say latest version – some alarm bells rang when I read that the 845G chipset had reached the end of their support life. The key phrase being "nor will Intel provide any future software updates to support new operating systems or improve compatibility with third party devices and software products". Still, if Vista would support the XPDM drivers, then I should be OK, shouldn’t I?

    Well, at first, all seemed hunky-dory. The resolution went up to 1024 x 768, which is what the monitor wanted, and Vista Home Premium seemed to be behaving normally. I then spent several hours transferring across Martin’s data, installing applications and reconstructing his environment. Everything seemed fine until I decided, rather than logging off from one account and logging onto another, to simply switch users. Blam – a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death). It was repeatable – every time I switched users I got a BSOD – but logging off and logging on was OK. So I decided to follow the apocryphal doctor’s advice (patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this". Doctor: "then don’t do that"), and not ever switch users. Martin was unlikely to do it, so I thought that he would be unlikely to trigger the BSOD.

    I was somewhat amused to find that after rebooting the system, Vista helpfully told me that the BSOD was caused by the Intel graphics adaptor, and advised me to go to the Intel web site to download the latest driver. Obviously, no-one at Microsoft had been reading the Intel web site: "nor will Intel provide any future software updates to support new operating systems". Ho-hum.

    Still, Vista seemed to be running, and Martin started to use the system. All went well for the first few days, but then he decided to use the attached Logitech webcam for a video call with a friend. The performance was awful – like trying to do it over a dial-up connection. And – horror of horrors, the dreaded BSOD started showing up. There seemed to be no way to stop it, or to improve the situation – and of course the other shoe dropped as I remembered the second part of Intel’s fateful words: "nor will Intel provide any future software updates to … improve compatibility with third party devices and software products".   

    Martin’s PC is a Dell Dimension 4500s; long out of production, of course. I bought it for him because it was nice and compact and whisper-quiet. The downside of its compactness is that it only has two PCI expansion slots available. It was at this point that I realised that the days of PCI graphics expansion cards are also long since passed – graphics cards today require AGP or PCIexpress slots – neither of which the Dell possesses. So there would be no possiblility of bypassing the problem by using a graphics expansion card. Really, the only way forward was to take three steps back, and reinstall Windows XP again.

    And that’s what I spent yesterday doing. Naturally, the Windows XP re-installation CD dated from years back, so multiple trips to Windows Update were called for to bootstrap XP into the latest version. Well over 100 critical updates – including SP2 – were involved. Finally, this morning I finished reconstructing Martin’s environment and got all his data back just as it was. Computers, eh, doncha just love them?

  • Voices From Nigeria

    That’s the title of a new report from the IGLHRC (International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission). It documents some of the stories of LGBT Nigerians who are attempting to speak out against proposals for a new law prohibiting same-sex marriage in Nigeria. It makes for heart-rending reading. Meanwhile, the flames of hate are being assiduously fanned by the vile Peter Akinola and others of his ilk.

  • The Prayer

    An extraordinary video – and I think that the song could grow on me as well.
     
     
     
    (hat tip to Obscene Desserts)

  • The Smell of Old Books

    Here’s something quite bizarre – a perfume called "In The Library". It smells, well, like old books. While I love musty old bookshops, I don’t think I’d really like to smell like one…

  • Who Do You Think You Are?

    My brother has been trying to piece together our family history for some time now. He started long before it became fashionable. Unfortunately, the trail back through time peters out fairly quickly – the curse of having common family names, I suppose. We would like to know more about our mother’s side of the family in particular, because we have Indian ancestry via our great-great grandmother.

    The story goes that our great-great-great grandfather was serving in the British Army in India in the 1820s-1830s. We’re not even sure of his name and rank – family folklore calls him Colonel Murray Holmes, but we’ve drawn a blank on that name in the army records so far. Apparently he married an Indian, but after the birth of a daughter in 1833(?) (our great-great-grandmother) she died. The child was brought back to England by a Major Penrice, who became her guardian. What happened to Colonel Holmes, we don’t know. Did he go mad with grief over the death of his wife? Did he get killed? Did he go AWOL? We are unlikely to find out. In any event, the child grew up and in due course married into a farming family – the Johnsons – in Cumbria. The only photograph we have of her was taken in about 1900, we think. Our mother remembered her visiting the family in about 1910 – as an imposing old lady who arrived in a pony and trap. Our mother would have been about six years old at the time. This is the photograph.

    g-g-Grandmother Johnson, 1900

    The photographs that we have of our great-aunts (Corra, Annie, Ethel and Emily) and our great-uncle George are even more striking, as they clearly show our Indian roots. These were taken in 1915.

    G-Aunts Cora, Annie, Ethel, Emily, G Uncle George Johnson circa 1915
    G Aunts Cora & Annie, G uncle George Johnson circa 1915

    Of course, by the time you get to our generation, mongrelisation has well and truly taken over, and I suppose that all that’s left is my Lamarckian fondness for curry… My Desi roots are all but lost.

    Update 16 December 2007: Well thanks to Shelly, we’ve now gleaned a little more of the family history. It turns out that we didn’t have the correct name for our great-great-great grandfather. He turns out to have been Lieutenant Colonel George Home Murray in the 16th Lancers. He died in Cawnpore, India on the 15th December 1833 after a few days illness. It was possibly cholera, since in August of that year there was a cholera epidemic in the Regiment. 364 men out of a total strength of 580 were admitted to hospital during the period of 22nd August to 24th September, and 60 men died of the disease. Colonel Murray was buried in the Cawnpore cemetary, where a monument was erected to his memory by the officers of the Regiment. I wonder whether it still stands?

    My brother has also been busy. He’s engaged a genealogist, who, amongst other things, has turned up the last will and testament of Colonel Murray. It turns out that while he acknowledges our great-great grandmother as an heir, she is named in the will as “the daughter of an Asian woman”. Whether she was his flesh and blood or not (and the probability seems high that she was), she took the name of Corra Home. Another piece of the jigsaw fell into place when we saw that the executor of Colonel Murray’s will was a Thomas Penrice. Could this be the “Major Penrice” who became Corra’s guardian? In any case, we now know that Corra was apparently born in 1827 (not 1833) in Calcutta, and she married John Johnson, a soldier in the 2nd Life Guards. He was born in about 1821 in Macclesfield. Further digging is afoot…

    Update 17 December 2007: Shelly turned up trumps again – she’s found a photo of the monument to Colonel Murray. The internet is amazing…

  • A Science Project

    This, I feel sure, is a science project that I will not be attempting. The thought of the hacksaw at the end is enough to put me off.
     
    (hat tip to Pharyngula)

  • Windows Home Server

    I mentioned the forthcoming Windows Home Server product last month. It’s currently in beta test, and Microsoft have recently widened the scope of testing. There have been over 25,000 people asking to participate in the test. Last Saturday, yours truly received an email from the Windows Home Server team to say that my request to be included in the test had been accepted. So I’m currently kicking the tyres.
    It has promise, but it’s still clearly at an early beta stage. And I’d still like to see what I pointed out last month – there’s no facility to be able to take backups for offsite storage. It’s all very well having a central server in the home, but if your home goes up in flames, you’ve still lost all your data…
    I see that the marketing wing of Microsoft are already busy with their Stop Digital Amnesia campaign. Fairly toecurling stuff – and a very poor ripoff of the far superior campaign that John Cleese did for Livevault.

  • Still Missing

    I see that Jim Gray is still missing. I’m afraid I fear the worst, although it seems that his family has not yet given up hope.

  • Clearing Up

    After the storm on the 18th January, we had a number of trees that were blown down, and some more that were left in a perilous state. Last week, the lumberjacks came to deal with them…
     
    20070215-1216-41 
     
    20070215-1729-30 
     
    20070215-1724-08 
     
    20070215-1217-37 
     
    While the bigger pieces were stored away to be used in the wood stove, most of the branches were fed into a woodchip machine, and the resulting mountain will be used to make paths in the garden…
     
    20070215-1725-41 

  • Carnaval 2007

    Carnaval is Dutch for Carnival. In the Catholic areas of The Netherlands, Carnaval is celebrated with great gusto. See the Wikipedia article for more background. Yesterday we went with friends to the little town of ‘s-Heerenberg to see the carnival parade. This is organised by citizens who belong to an organisation that glories in the name of d’ Olde Waskupen (the Old Washtubs). The whole town – and indeed the whole region – throws themselves into celebrating Carnaval. If they are not in the parade, then they are watching it – and usually in fancy dress themselves.
     
    After the parade was over, we retired to a cafe for a beer. The place was already packed when we got there, but shortly after we arrived, the last of the parade passed by and the doors opened and a further deluge of people poured in from the street. I could not help fail to notice that out of this great mass of humanity, I was the only one not in fancy dress. I made my excuses and left, pursued by the quizzical glances of those left behind. I finished my beer out on the street, being eyed at by a man dressed entirely in black, with a black top hat and a stuffed raven perched on his shoulder. I couldn’t help but feel that I was breaking some sort of rule by being dressed in my everyday clothes. OK, next year, I’ll go with the flow…
     
    Here’s some of the pictures from the parade, more are up on Flickr.
     
    20070218-1429-39 
     
    These clowns were scary – I can see why some people have coulrophobia…
     
    20070218-1445-16 
     
    20070218-1515-11 
     
    20070218-1520-12 
     
    Even the onlookers were in fancy dress… 
    20070218-1359-41 
     
    20070218-1402-45