November 2005 Archives

‘Sex and Death: Orchids, Carnivorous Plants and Us’ is coming to the Sydney Tropical Centre, that giant glass pyramid, starting Thursday 1 December 2005. The exhibition will be open for three years, but some of the orchids only bloom a few times each summer, and the flowers only last two days. "Stunning displays of orchids and carnivorous plants with humorous interpretation will tell the story of fundamental evolutionary processes. The seduction of insects by plants, their unwitting co-operation and the cruel deception leading to inevitable death will be played out using rare and unusual orchids and sinister carnivorous plants." Just my kind of thing.

Feeling a little seditious...
How to break the sedition laws in one fell swoop.

I bought a new Fisher & Paykel ActiveSmart fridge last week. I looked through the manual, and discovered that its a religious fridge!

I thought it was a bit much that the Warranty has an "Act Of God" clause - its just a fridge. But then reading further I found it has a "Sabbath mode".

How wonderfully pluralist!

Dolphins aren't just as cute and fuzzy as people like to think - Lovecraft was right.

the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study MIT study shows that they amplify US Government reserved radio frequencies.

St James Ethics Centre on Stateline NSW

Analogue hole discussion draft

MPAA and RIAA trying to ban analogue input devices in the USA

He didn't run away

No suspicious circumstances when an innocent man is shot to death.

Two wheels Good, two legs bad

British woman arrested as Terrorist suspect for walking on bike-path.

Innocent in London

This may be you in Australia by Christmas.

After trying to install MoveableType at home, I had the same problem as I had on iiNet: my own username was unknown to my blog. So it wasn't just iiNet stopping CGI scipts from writing to disk as their tech support supposed. The key was that it worked on the old iiNet server, it worked on the Solaris server, but not on the new iiNet web server or on my PC web server. It turns out that the Berkley DB database isn't backwardly compatible. My blog's database was in an older version of db than the new iiNet or my PC. I wasn't able to get the recommended fix, db_upgrade from anywhere at all. Instead I exported the db from the working version, and then used the export files to repopulate an entirely new installation of the latest MoveableType. This worked! Not all of the old templates are compatible with MT 3.2 for some reason, so I still need to tweak some pages to look good again. There are some weird characters showing up occasionally and even the tables got skewed, but I'm just happy it works again.