cahill.net.au » Personal

The re-digested read

mjc — Sun, 23 May 2010 23:22:13 +0000

My nearly eight year old son’s summary of my summary of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum: “Honesty is writing true history”.

Rain == “bad weather”

mjc — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:20:15 +0000

What’s with the persistent glass-half-full coverage of weather in the media (particularly when it comes to covering glass-filling rain)?

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/water-issues/heavy-rain-eases–but-not-for-long-20100208-nl54.html

Sure, flooding and danger are important and newsworthy, but people, we’ve been in drought for years. Sydney’s water storage was literally half-full last week. This rain will mean we can drink, wash, keep gardens growing, and yes, flush. Maybe for a year or two, until the next big downfall.

It’s really not a bad thing, and it would be nice if the news coverage at least mentioned that rather than accentuating the negative.

Rent-free smart home in NSW up for grabs

mjc — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:03:46 +0000

This seems tempting:

Rent-free smart home in NSW up for grabs

Rachel could almost walk to work (or ride a bike), next door to the Armoury, Bicentennial park around the corner, flying electric car included. If only I could write…

Yes they did!

mjc — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:58:16 +0000

What a great 24 hours! Votes were counted, exit poll (mostly) matched the polls leading up to the election, and most importantly, the American people voted decisively for change:

Election Unleashes a Flood of Hope Worldwide

Now it’s going to be much harder to convince my American friends and colleagues to move to Australia, even if the world’s best bagels have emigrated down under.

CR2032, or, how to lose a day for $1.75

mjc — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:29:56 +0000

Anyone who has looked inside a computer has probably noticed that PC motherboards have a battery plugged into them. This battery is responsible for keeping alive the memory that holds the BIOS settings. When the battery goes flat, those settings are lost, and the next time the computer boots, it has forgotten about things like what hard disks are connected, or the frequency at which the clock should run.

In most of the PCs I have worked with over the years, that’s about all that happens — it’s annoying, but each time the computer boots it has lost its settings. In servers, which don’t reboot often, a flat battery could go unnoticed for months.

Yesterday, I discovered that some PCs are far less predictable when the motherboard battery is flat. I have four ~5-year-old Shuttle PCs, and some of them haven’t been turned on for a year or so. What *they* do is not start at all once the battery is flat. But if you leave the mains power connected for a while, eventually something gets enough charge that the motherboard decides it can boot after all.

In addition, with a battery on the way out, the PCs would get part way through booting and then freeze in random places. This took some time to discover — I was initially suspicious of a recent operating system upgrade, and then that a disk might be on the way out.

To keep a long story from getting any longer, the lesson learned was that it’s worth spending $1.75 every 2-3 years to keep a charge in that battery. Once it goes flat, odd things can happen.

Favourite WYD response

mjc — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:27:28 +0000

I have nothing against Catholics: some of my closest family are Catholic. But I don’t see the need to override civil liberties in order for Sydney to host their event. What are the organisers afraid of?

Maybe this…