If you happen to be taking a leasurely drive in the 3rd world today and, surprisingly enough, find yourself to be behind a large construction lo-bed truck with a teetering load of concrete foundation bricks aka. tower-of-death (not mentioning any names CY 388-902), it would be inadvisable to follow the standard procedure of hooting and flashing of lights to get him to shift over so you can overtake.
This is a simple experiment in weight redistribution:
1) Truck shifts left.
2) Intertial moment of tower-of-death prevents tower-of-death from shifting left at same speed.
3) Gravity interacts with individual consituent elements of tower-of-death.
4) Bricks interact with your car's bonnet (that's the hood for you americans) according to Newton's Laws
5) Car's bonnet interacts with panel-beater
6) Panel-beater reacts with bank balance
7) If you're married: spouse interacts with wooden spoon, which in turn reacts with your head.
An interesting perspective on the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch in this Times Online article
Long weekends. Hmmm. What better excuse than to pack a boot full of camping gear you will never use, clothes you will never wear and soap you will never touch?
This weekend was another cruise out to Montagu for some rock climbing. Owing to a strain I took my camera instead of my harness and it proved to be quite a fruitful venture (well, I haven't developed the shots yet). Some digital shots are up on my website. We got to try out some new crags with some new people and got a birds eye view of the recent flood damage.
Anyway, if the (non-digital) photos are any good, I'll scan them in.
Hmm, having my doubts about the quality of Altavista's BabelFish. Here are some of my more recent English-Spanish translations of some common phrases. Pure Poetry.
My glue is no longer sticky. Mi pegamento es un pegajoso no más largo.
My goldfish swims around and around in anticipation. Mi pescado del oro nada alrededor y alrededor en la anticipación
Don't worry, we will take the snoose-moose! No se preocupe, nosotros tomará los alces del snoose!
Put that away or I will call your mother! Puesto eso lejos o me llamará a su madre!
Why on earth is it so hard to find a Data Acquisition Card that supports interrupts on its digital inputs and has 32 bit counters? Especially one with Linux drivers.
Settled on an Eagle Technology PCI848C. It has 16 bit counters and runs on an 8MHz oscillator (which effectively gives 4MHz counter resolution). This is, in truth, the only such card that I could track down to meet these whimsy requirements. One would think such a card would be quite commonplace with modern applications.
Kudos to Eagle for the support they provided to get it up and running on newer kernels.
I recently fell in to a silly trap of not destroying my own objects in a Qt3 project and waiting in vain for the destructors to rise from the ashes. In all honesty though, this could happen to anyone (see here as well). The reason being as follows:
Qt3 has some wonderful flowery virtual destructors and methods for accessing the constructors and destructor from the Qt Designer. The Designer also helps to generate various bits of automatic code, including the main.cpp which creates your new widget/dialogue/thingy, connects it and creates a QApplication to show it. The automatically generated main.cpp does not, however, delete the widget (nor does it use automatic storage.)
The result? A brief moment of consternation as you page through your Lippman C++ Primer for exceptions to the rule before realising that you shouldn't always trust automagically generated code.
Tassie's Bagdad under friendly fire from e-mails.
133+ 4ax0rz lur3 K0.
I never knew.
Gotta love the candour and inventive grandiloquence of Michael Shermer, director of Skeptic and columnist for Scientific American. Here are some of his official retorts and replies:
"Is it against God's will to clone human beings?" - Balderdash
"Science must be regulated by firm laws to preserve humanity and its dignity." - Bunkum
"It's a horrendous crime to make a Xerox of someone. You're putting a human into a genetic straitjacket." - Baloney
On the subject of Biomagnetic Healing - Fantastic Flapdoodle and a Financial Flimflam
I tried to look up a few of these words but not even British dictionaries contain them, quite odd for an American. Mind you, "balony" MUST be an American term since only they are capable of inventing a product so singularly disgusting. Or is it German? Either way.
On a serious note, I recommend following his work. He is very thorough, eloquent and if you try and pull the wool over his eyes he'd have knitted you a jersey before you could say "Blimey! He boxed me in the Betty Harpers, the blighter!".
Hmmm, seems there is whispering of a notion of an idea of a will to make a movie out of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Mind you, they do say it's been stalled in production which means that that whisper was probably just a soft fart.
I'm not usually one in favour of movies of, what I call, cult books but if Terry Gilliam is to direct then that's an entirely different kettle of fish (presuming somebody out there also actually keeps fish in a kettle). Gilliam is the quintessential pythonesque creative genius who has been the directive force behind all the Python movies and a number of, whincing as I say it, more "serious" movies eg: The Fisher King; 12 Monkeys; Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas and, for those of you old enough to have grown hair in embarrassing places, Brazil; and Time Bandits. I sincerely doubt there is anyone else capable of transfering Good Omens onto the big screen. Certainly not an American (I consider Gilliam to be properly Anglicised in heart and deed, although accent is against me on this one).
Die naweek was my eerste uitstappie na die Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees asook die rede vir my eerste Afrikaanse "blog" (ek's jammer, ek het in die HAT gesoek maar daar's g'n vertaling vir "blog"). Moerse pret, van afval sosaties tot Koos Kombuis covers tot 'n roomys geveg voor die Pick 'n Pay (fotos binne). Let wel, die snor is terug!
Ek was darem nie die enigste soutie op Oudtshoorn nie maar ek moet se^ daar was 'n paar skewe kyke elke nou en dan as ek vergeet het met wie my Moedertaal le^. Ingels is ok 'n taal mense! Fxk!
Moet se^, van die T-shirts was skreeu snaaks. Die Klippies meisies dra almal "Steek iemand vir 'n dop" en ons Spur waiter het "Sag en Volrond" op sy bors wat 'n bietjie disturbing was maar nou ja, dis die nuwe nuwe Suid Afrika en amper almal is welkom (behalwe vir die vrou, jammer tannie, maar dis nou 'n gewone pot kak).
All in all 'n kleurvolle naweek.