Blog & White

Published in 1930.

Jeeves and the Impending Doom Aunt Agatha has invited Bertie to her country house where he meets Mr Filmer, a very strict and important fellow. Bingo Little is there too, tutoring Agatha's son Thomas. This job is very important for Bingo who gambled and lost all the money his wife left him before travelling, and he asks Bertie to prevent Thomas to harm Filmer. But Thomas strands Filmer on an island during a rain shower, and Bertie makes a fool of himself trying to save him. They are eventually saved by Jeeves who claims this was all Bertie's fault, thus saving Bingo's position. Jeeves had learned that Agatha wanted to convince Filmer to take Bertie as his personal secretary, which saves Bertie the trouble of having to work.

The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy Sippy is editor of The Mayfair Gazette, and in love with Gwendolen Moon who writes poems for the paper. But he's too shy to aks her, and also he's too intimidated to refuse boring articles from his former headmaster. Bertie's idea is to get the headmaster covered in flour in Sippy's office to make him laugh at his Nemesis, which in turn would give him courage to ask Gwendolen, but Jeeves quietly implements his own idea. He invites Sippy and Gwendolen at Bertie's place and smacks Sippy on the head just before Gwendolen arrives. Because of the emotion, they then declare their mutual love, which gives Sippy the energy to reject the headmaster's last paper.

Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit Bertie is sent for Christmas by Aunt Agatha to Lady Wickham's, where Sir Roderick and Tuppy Glossop are also staying. Aunt Agatha hopes to get Sir Roderick to reconsider his diagnostic of lunacy on Bertie. Bertie wants to get back at Tuppy for a prank the latter played on him recently. On Roberta's idea, Layd Wickham's daughter's with whom Bertie is in love, Bertie is to enter Tuppy's room by night and puncture his hot water bottle. But Tuppy and his uncle Roderick had swapped rooms and Bertie is caught by the loony doctor who goes to Bertie's room for the rest of the night. But Roberta had given the same idea to Tuppy, who punctures his uncle's bottle thinking it was Bertie's. Jeeves had also learned that Agatha was hoping Sir Roderick would reconsider his opinion on Bertie and that he could get engaged to Honoria Glossop, Sir Roderick's daughter.

Jeeves and the Song of Songs Tuppy, more or less engaged to Bertie's cousin Angela, is in love with an opera singer, Cora Bellinger. To impress her, he wants to sing “Sonny Boy” at a concert where she is also to sing. But Angela's mother, Aunt Dahlia, wants the scheme to fail. Jeeves then induces Bertie to sing “Sonny Boy” before Tuppy. Since other people had already sung the same song before, the audience is pretty annoyed and Tuppy is thrown vegetables at. Jeeves then tells Cora Bellinger, who arrived late, that Tuppy wants her to sing the same song as well, and she is booed as well, ending their relationship.

Episode of the Dog McIntosh Aunt Agatha left her dog McIntosh with Bertie while she was away. Roberta Wickham then pops in and invites at Bertie's place an american theatre producer and his son (who actually decides which plays are good) because she wants to sell him a play by her mother. While Bertie is away (he had met the son in New York and doesn't want to see him again), Roberta gives McIntosh to the son to convince him to accept the play. Bertie manages to get the dog back but he is noticed, and when the the producer comes to his flat to reclaim the dog, Jeeves gives him another specimen of the same breed.

The Spot of Art Bertie is in love with Gwladis Pendlebury, a painter who had drawn Bertie's portrait. When she runs over Pim, her other admirer and breaks his leg, the latter ends up in Bertie's guest bedroom with doctor's orders not to move. Pim telegraphs his sister who is to arrive soon, but in order to sweeten her (Pim has claimed Bertie had run him over, since his sister wouldn't approve of Gwlady if she knew she did it) he advises to send her roses. But this makes her husband, an american soup magnate, very jealous, and forces Bertie to flee to France for a couple of weeks. When he comes back, his portrait is all over the city for a soup advertisement.

Jeeves and the Kid Clementina Bertie invites Roberta Wickham to dinner, but she brings her 13-year old cousin Clementina with her, since it's her birthday. She then leaves to Bertie the task to take her back to her shcool, from which she's away without leave. She gives instructions to Bertie as how to make a diversion that would allow Clementina to go in unnoticed. Bertie is caught by a policeman, but Jeeves manages to let Clementina in through the back door and to convince the headmistress (a friend of Aunt Agatha's met in Bertie Changes his mind) that he was actually chasing a marauder.

The Love that Purifies Bertie is at Brinkley Court with his Aunt Dahlia. Mr Ansruther, an elderly guest, is counting points to decide which one of the two cousins Thomas (Agatha's son) or Bonzo (Dahlia's son) will behave the best and win a five-pound prize. The Snettisham, the other guests, have taken bets on Thomas and are trying to induce Bonzo to behave badly. Bertie is given the task to subvert Thomas because Dahlia wants her son to win. The two kids are refusing bribes because they are in love with Holywood actors and want to behave best in their honor. Jeeves then invites Sippy's son, who admires another actress and speaks ill of Thomas' love, inducing him in behaving badly.

Jeeves and the Old School Chum Bingo's wife Rosie has invited Laura Pyke an old school friend whom she admired very much. Laura is convincing Rosie that they should stop eating like pigs and concentrate on vitamins and vegetables amd so on. While at a picnic at a horse race ground, Jeeves removes the sandwich basket from Bingo's car. Rosie and Laura jump luncheon without trouble, and want to go home for tea. While Bertie is driving them back (Bingo and Jeeves stay a bit longer) the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and hungry Rosie starts thinking that Laura's ideas are not that good). Bingo then arrives and “repairs” the car (Jeeves had simply emptied the petrol tank) and becomes Rosie's hero again.

Indian Summer of an Uncle Bertie's Uncle George wants to marry a waitress. George already wanted to marry a barmaid years ago, and Agatha had managed to buy her off. She wants Bertie to do the same with the young waitress. But the waitress' aunt happens to be the old barmaid, and Jeeves invites them both at Bertie's place, and they finally are engaged to get marrie. Since the woman is of the same age as Agatha and she doesn't know who she is, she doesn't object.

The Ordeal of Young Tuppy Tuppy Glossop is again in love, this time with a dog enthousiast. To impress her, he wants to play in the yearly rugby football game where the village and the neighbour village players fight very hard. He manages to survive the game, but discovers that the girl had been lured to London by Jeeves who has made her belive she could there acquire the irish water-spaniel she is longing for, and hadn't seen the game at all. Tuppy then decides this kind of girl is not for him.

J'ai trouvé une recette de tortillas au blé sur le site de Jim Peyton, accompagnée d'explications sur les différentes variantes.

Ingrédients

• 4,5 dL farine de blé (soit 320 g)
• 3 c. à soupe huile
• 1/2 c. à café levure chimique
• 1 pincée de sel
• 1,8 dL eau tiède (environ 40 °C)

Préparation

Mélanger la farine avec le sel et la levure chimique. Ajouter l'huile et mélanger un peu. Ajouter l'eau peu à peu en mélangeant. Pétrir la pâte qui doit être souple et non collante. Séparer en 8 boules, fariner et laisser reposer 30 – 60 min sous un linge (voire plus longtemps).

Pétrir une boule de pâte afin qu'elle soit à nouveau souple. La fariner et l'étaler au rouleau jusqu'à obtenir un disque de 23cm de diamètre (la taille du fond de la poêle). Cuire dans une poêle en fonte à sec jusqu'à l'apparition de bulles à la surface (environ 30 secondes), retourner et cuire de même sur l'autre coté.

Commentaires

• Pas facile de faire un disque vraiment rond quand on n'a pas le coup de main avec le rouleau
• Si le disque est plus grand que le fond de la poêle, il risque de se froisser et la tortilla ne cuira pas dans les plis.
• Si la tortilla est trop fine ou cuit trop longtemps, elle deviendra dure et cassante, si elle est d'épaisseur irrégulière, elle sera cassante d'un coté mais pas de l'autre.
• Si les boules de pâte ont reposé longtemps (plus d'1h), il n'est pas nécessaire de les repétrir, bien les fariner suffit à faire de beaux ronds

For some reason, the xterm on the Nokia N900 sends KP_Enter instead of simply Enter when pressing the Enter key. The result is that ViM inserts an “M” in addition to starting a new line. Maemo bug #6009 discusses the problem, and thankfully there's a fix (because the problem was identified in December 2009 and nobody is actually taking care of it, so it probably won't be corrected any time soon).

In the .screenrc file, add the line bindkey -a -k fe stuff ˆM. You can also fix a currently running screen by pressing C-a : and typing the same bindkey command.

Published in 1949.

Bertie is sent by his aunt Agatha to Deverill Hall to sing during the local concert. The Hall is inhabited by Esmond Haddock, his cousin Gertrude and his five aunts. Madeline being the goddaughter of one of the aunts should have gone there with Gussie, but when a friend of her called her for moral support after having broken with her fiance, she lets Gussie go alone. Unfortunately, Gussie is arrested by the police for being drunk and wading in the fountain on Trafalgar Square, Bertie goes to Deverill Hall and pretends to be Gussie. He befriends Esmond Haddock who explains he is in love with Corky Pirbright, a Hollywood star and sister of Catsmeat Pribright (a friend of Bertie who also happens to be in love with Gertrude; the aunts however don't like him because he's in the theatre business). Corky however won't accept to mary him if he doesn't start to stand up to his aunts. Bertie suggests him to sing a hunting song at the concert, abd plans to pay the public to cheer him, which should give hin enough self-confidence to defy his aunts. Soon after, Jeeves arrives with Gussie, who then pretends to be Bertie. They are soon followed by Catsmeat, disguised as Meadowes, posing as Bertie's manservant. Corky, who lives at the village with her uncle, the vicar, is the one organising the concert. She enrols Catsmeat and Gussie to play a Pat and Mike duetto. The problem is that Gussie falls in love with Corky and doesn't want to write any love letter to Madeline (who of course expects to receive one every day). He even writes her to announce he is breaking up with her. Bertie then takes the milk train at night to go to Wimbledon where Madeline is staying and steal the letter. He manages to do so but is caught when trying to leave. Madeline believes he came to see her because she thinks he's in love with her, and let him go back to Deverill Hall. There, Corky refuses to tell Gussie she's not interested in him, because she wants him to steal her dog from the local police constable who took it into custody after it bit him. Gussie accepts, but since he got nearly arrested, he comes back to his senses. The concert has the expected effect on Esmond, which allows Gertrude and Catsmeat to go back to London and get married and Esmond to ask Corky to marry him. Gussie has left already to go and visit Madeline, and Bertie flees when he hears that aunt Agatha has just arrived.

“The tayberry is a cross betwen a raspberry and a blackberry, originally grown in the Tay valley region of Scotland. Roisin (pronounced Rosheen)… distinct, delicate fruit aroma”

Tastes of raspberries, not much of malt or hops. Contains malted barley.

Williams Bros Brewing Co., Alloa, Scotland. 4.2% alcohol.

Plutôt bon.

Replicants are artificial human beings with special abilities and used as slave labour on space colonies. They are illegal on Earth since they rebelled and killed humans. Blade runners are police officers who specialized in killing replicants. Rick Deckard is a retired blade runner who is called back to duty to kill four replicants who arrived recently on Earth. One of them, Leon, was caught and escaped after killing the policeman who administered him a test to determinate whether he is a replicant (they can be easily identified post-mortem, but otherwise only their lack of feelings and short lifespan can distinguish them from humans). Deckard first meets with Tyrell, the head of the corporation maufacturing the replicants, and with Tyrell's assistant Rachael who is a prototype replicant built with feelings and implanted memories. Clues at Leon's hotel room lead Deckard to a second replicant, Zhora, a female cabaret dancer whom he kills too after a street chase. Deckard is then caught by Leon, but the latter is killed by Rachael who just appeared in the nick of time. Rachael and Deckard eventually become lovers. Deckard additionally has a dream about a unicorn. The two other replicants, Batty and Pris, are trying to meet with Tyrell and eventually befriend Sebastian, one of Tyrell's engineers who plays chess with his boss. They eventually coerce Sebastian into taking Batty to Tyrell, whom Batty asks for an extension of their lifetime, which is almost at an end. When Tyrell explains that it is impossible, Batty kills him and Sebastian. Deckard eventually arrives at Sebastian's appartment in an abandonned building, where he kills Pris. He is then chased by Batty who chases him to the building's roof, but just when Deckard is about to fall to the ground, Batty saves him and then dies, his short life having come to its end. Deckard then returns to his place where Rachael is sleeping, and leaves the city with her. A paper unicorn left on the floor by Deckard's fellow police officer hints that Deckard is a replicant himself, that the officer knows (he has read his file containing the implanted memories and knows about the unicorn dream) and that he let them live.

I use a shell script wrapper around MPlayer for recording TV programs in my Leffakone, the problem being that when TV reception is too bad, MPlayer crashes or freezes, so the wrapper restarts it when needed. Since MPlayer doesn't output anything while recording, I use a loop that checks every second that the recorded file is actually growing. Whem it stops growing (and there is still some recording time left), it means that MPlayer stopped working and that it needs to be restarted. Until now, I did this in a loop like this:

while [ $(stat -c %s $filename) -gt $last_size ]
do
  last_size=$(stat -c %s $filename)
  sleep 1
done

I then noticed that all recordings exceeding one hour (there aren't that many, that's why it took so long to notice it) where cut in two even though the picture doesn't show hints of bad reception. More peculiar, the size of the first part is slightly over 2 GB in size (therefore the problem is not related to a 2 GB size limit, right?). An experiment conducted yesterday show that it actually is: the test program (used here in its |[| form) handling the -gt comparison actually doesn't like values greater that 2ˆ31, which caused the loop to be interrupted and the recording to be split into two parts.

The solution is then (for Bash at least) to use the following syntax:

while [[ `stat -c %s $filename` -gt $last_size ]]

which seems to be working with values greater than 2ˆ31 (and than 2ˆ32, I just checked).

“First brewed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the MG car factory and affectionately named after an old MG car used as a factory runaround: The Owld Speckled Un.”

Just another ale, not bad. Contains malted barley.

Morland Brewing, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England. 3.5% alcohol.

Published in 1953.

While Bertie Wooster is attending a school where he learns to darn his own socks (in the 1950s, the rich are not that rich anymore, and Bertie is preparing for a potentially less bright future), Jeeves is employed by Lord Bill Rowcester who is in desperate need for money if he wants to marry Jill, the girl he's engaged to. With Jeeves' help, he has become a bookmaker at a horse racing field, but because of two horses who won against all odds, he now owes three thousand pounds to a Captain Biggar. He and Jeeves manage to escape him and go back to Lord Rowcester's home, an old abbey he cannot afford to maintain and that his sister Monica, who is staying there too, hopes to sell to a rich American widow, Mrs Spottsworth. As it happens, Mrs Spottsworth knows Captain Biggar from her past, and since Biggar arrived at the abbey (in search for the owner of the car the bookmaker had fled in) and was recognized by Mrs Spottsworth, Monica invites him to stay. Additionally, Bill had met the widow in Cannes years ago and knows her too (which make Jill terribly jealous). Biggar eventually identifies Bill as the bookmaker and is distressed to learned that he is unable to pay him. Biggar needs the money to bet on a horse in the coming Derby in order to become wealthy enough to propose to Mrs Spottsworth (they are in love with each other, but Biggar doesn't want to be accused of marrying her for her money). Biggar then manages to convince Bill to steal Mrs Spottsworth's pendant, which Bill does successfully. Biggar disappears on the morning of the Derby, but the theft is dicovered and the local police is called. Biggar's horse comes second, but Biggar comes back and returns the jewel (he didn't dare pawning it). Mrs Spottsworth claims it doesn't matter if he's poor and they get engaged. She also buys the Abbey (to be taken appart and moved to California where the climat is not so damp), allowing Bill and Jill to get married.

Ari mentioned this afternoon that “reliable”, in an expression such as “a reliable politician” means “able to lie again”. Makes perfect sense to me.

L'antenne d'intérieur active pour la télé fonctionne relativement bien, sauf quand des conditions indéterminées (en général l'après midi) font que la reception est vraiment mauvaise et que MPlayer plante lors de l'enregistrement. Après avoir lu je sais plus où (probablement dans Make), j'ai étudié la possibilité de construire une meilleure antenne. Je ne suis pas sûr d'y être parvenu, mais celle que j'ai fini par construire fonctionne plutôt bien. En fait le problème principal est que le mur situé entre le salon et la chambre à coucher augmente considérablement le bruit (le rapport signal/bruit donné par la carte DVB est nettement plus bas lorsque l'antenne est dans le salon que dans la chambre à coucher, et le taux d'erreur est plus élevé).

Après une première expérience avec un simple dipôle de 22 cm (prendre un câble d'antenne de 75 ohms, dénuder 11 cm, séparer le blindage de l'âme, torsader le blindage et le replier d'un coté, replier l'âme de l'autre coté pour obtenir un T) où j'ai découvert l'effet du mur, j'ai voulu développer une antenne qui soit adaptée aux fréquences des deux bouquets TNT que je regarde (YLE à 546 MHz et MTV3/Nelonen à 786 MHz).

Les deux fréquences étant éloignées l'une de l'autre, ce n'est pas une tâche facile. J'ai fini par obtenir un résultat théorique plutôt bon avec une biquad munie d'un réflecteur plan (voir le fichier NEC2).

J'ai alors construit la biquad avec une tige d'acier plaquée de cuivre (destinée à la soudure) de 2 mm de diamètre. Le coté d'un petit carré mesure 122 mm.

Je l'ai soudée à 10 m de câble d'antenne 75 ohms. Je comptais mettre l'antenne derrière la porte de la chambre où elle aurait été invisible, mais la réception était bien meilleure à coté de la fenêtre. J'ai donc dû rajouter une rallonge de 3 m.

Je me suis rendu compte qu'installer l'antenne dans la chambre à coucher avec son réflecteur situé 10 cm en arrière n'allait pas être facile (comprendre : ça va dépasser du mur et ça va être très moche). Mais les performances pratiques de cette antenne sans son reflecteur sont semble-t-il suffisamment bonnes (on n'est pas très loin de l'émetteur) : le taux d'erreur a été divisé par 16, et j'espère que ça évitera à la réception de devenir tellement mauvaise que MPlayer plante.

Les performances théoriques (meilleur gain net dans la partie haute de la bande de fréquences que dans la partie basse) contredisent les valeur (qui valent ce qu'elles valent) renvoyées par la carte DVB (taux d'erreur plus faible dans la partie basse de la bande). Je suppose qu'il existe une source de bruit externe plus forte dans la partie haute que dans la partie basse qui explique cette différence.

In Abusing Amazon images you learn how to abuse Amazon images, creating images of an Amazon product with whatever tag overlaid on it (such as a “99% off” bullet).

But the interesting part is that you can get images in any format with the following syntax: http://ecw.images-amazon.com/images/P/ASIN.01.size_info.jpg .

Useful values for size info are:

• THUMBZZZ for thumbnail
• TZZZZZZZ for medium-size
• nothing for default size
• L, LZ or LZZ for large
• AAxx, xx is the size of the largest dimension
• SXxx, xx is the width
• XYxx, xx is the height
• SSxx, xx is the size of width and height (image is padded with white)

Plenty of other features are available, I now use SSxx for the blog so that I can add size/height attributes to the IMG elements in the HTML and WAP 2.0 versions.

After CookWise, another very interesting summary of current (2005) knowledge on food and cooking sciences, this time focusing on baking. Compared to CookWise, the recipes are measured both in exotic and metric units, but it contains some amount of repetition from its parent volume (especially the bread part in the end).

Two parallel story lines: World War II and modern times.

World War II: Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is an american geek of maths, who befriends Alan Turing and Rudolf von Hacklheber at Princeton and joins the very small circle of code breakers after the attack on Perl Harbour. Along with Bobby Shaftoe, a Marines sergeant, and the mysterious, former-priest Enoch Root, they lead Detachment 2702 which is performing tactical deception operations to hide the fact that the allies are able to break many german codes. During one mission that Waterhouse did not take part in, Shaftoe and Root are made prisoner by Günter Bischoff, a U-boat captain, who although he is a German, doesn't approve of the Nazi's politics, and who eventually becomes their friend. They are all three stranded in Sweden for a several months where they meet von Hacklheber who is trying to escape from Goering's clutches, before Bischoff returns to the Kriegsmarine and is given command of a new, advanced submarine (because he blackmailed Dönitz, Großadmiral of the Kriegsmarine, to reveal information about hidden war gold). Shaftoe then tries to rejoin the US Army in the Philippines, where he befriends General MacArthur; Shaftoe has a girlfriend and a son he has never seen in Manila and wants to find them. He eventually dies in a commando mission while taking a japanese fortress where human computers are generating random streams for a not-yet-broken japanese cipher nicknamed Arethusa. Waterhouse, who built the world's first digital computer using valves, manages to break the code. He discovers that the Japanese have been hoarding gold in a secret cache on an island in the Philippines. Their plan was to create a new currency backed by gold, to be used after they have invaded the whole South-East Asia. Goto Dengo, the japanese officer who designed the cache, was, with a Chinese slave named Wing, one of the few survivors among the people who worked there, since the Japanese officers where to kill all the Chinese slave workers before commiting suicide. Since Arethusa was used for rallying Bischoff, von Hacklheber, Root and Goto to Shaftoe's funeral, Waterhouse manages to go there and has a discussion with Root who convinces him that the gold best remains hidden forever. A later discussion with his superior, Earl Comstock, who is convinced Arethusa is a sovietic code and later founds the NSA to do so, decides Waterhouse to steal the punch cards containing the Arethusa messages and to replace them whith pure random data. Bischoff and von Hacklheber eventually die when their submarine, loaded with Japanese gold from a less-secure cache meant to fund the dig for the main one, is sunk by the americans.

Modern times: Randy Waterhouse, grandson of Lawrence Waterhouse, is working in the Philippines at laying telecommunication cables between the Sultanate of Kinakuta and Manila. He's working with his friend Avi Halaby for Epiphyte(2), a startup aiming at creating in Kinakuta a data haven named the Crypt, and eventually the first electronic money based on cryptography. The startup uses the services of Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, Bobby Shaftoe's son, to do the underwater work. They find Bischoff's submarine and its gold, which leads to Epiphyte(2) being sued by the Dentist, one of its investors, for not-strong-enough contract with Shaftoe's company, which would prevent the investor to get his hands on the gold. The Dentist has no proof there actually is gold, this attack is only a way to force Epiphyte(s)'s members to give him a majority of shares. Shaftoe then works hard to get the gold out of the submarine before The Dentist's goons can investigate the area. While on a trip back to Manila, drug is planted in Waterhouse's bags and he's sent to prison, but “someone” interceded in his favor and he's assigned a decent cell and allowed to keep his laptop. Since a digital copy of his grandfather's Arethusa messages are stored on his encrypted hard-drive, Randy suspect that he will be spied upon in his cell. At first he suspect the Dentist to be behind his emprisonment, but after a conversation with the latter he starts to rather suspect the Chinese general Wing who was also interested in the Crypt. He therefore works on Arethusa without ever displaying its ciphertext on-screen. At some point, a mysterious man with whom he had had e-mail conversations about cryptography and the Crypt appears in the cell next to his; the man is Enoch Root. When he eventually manages to break it, he displays faked information on his screen about the location of the gold, and is “magically” released from prison. When Avi learns about the gold, he wants to acquire it to back Epiphyte(2)'s electronic currency. They meet in Tokyo with Goto Dengo, whose company is already bulding the Crypt, to convince him to help them dig the gold. With Shaftoe, Root and a few men, they go to the island, where they manage to find the entrance. By injecting huge amounts of gasoline and air into the tunnels, they melt the gold and extract it in its liquid form, while Wing is digging at the wrong location.

“Continental hops from Slovenia and Czechoslovakia hops… bottled to celebrate Concorde's final flight back home to Filton, Bristol… Citrus, floral hop”

Bitter, just another ale. Contains wheat and malted barley.

Butcombe Brewery, Bristol, England. 4.5% alcohol.

Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont form a famous silent-movie duo. When the first talking movie is released, their studio must produce one as well. Lina has however a horrible voice, and the test projection is a failure. Don's friend Cosmo Brown then suggests to turn the failed movie into a musical, which would require little supplemental footage, and hire Kathy Selden, Don's girlfriend, for dubbing Lina. The latter must of course know nothing of the procedure, especially since she is in love with Don and is convinced he is in love with her. Lina of course discovers that her voice had been dubbed and that Kathy is going to be credited for it, so she threatens to sue the studio if Kathy's name appears in the movie. After the premiere, which was a big success, Lina wants to make a speech, and the audience presses her to sing. Kathy is hidden behind the curtain and dubs Lina, but in the middle of the song, Cosmo and the movie's producer lift the curtain, and the audience can see that Kathy is really the voice behind Lina.

“English Fuggles hops…”

Flowery and fruity smell, bitter and with that strong, unidentified taste I've often found in Lagers. Contains malted barley.

Butcombe Brewery, Bristol, England. 4.7% alcohol.

Summary on Wikipedia.

“A light ale from a mix of barley and wheat malts and English hops. Pale Crystal and Amber malts, malted wheat; Fuggle, Progress, Challenger and Cascade hops with Styrian added late.”

Quite bitter, very flowery, I found a hint of strawberry when emtpying the glass. Contains malted barley and wheat.

Highgate Brewery, Walsall, England. 3.8% alcohol.

“full bodied, golden ale… malt and hop flavour complemented with a bitter sweet finish with distinctive hop aroma”

Very flowery, reasonably bitter. Very good. Contains barley malt.

Frederic Robinson Ltd, Stockport, Greater Manchester, England. 4.3% alcohol.

I went to see Alice in Wonderland in 3D this afternoon. When there is a real depth in the shot, 3D actually adds something to the picture; in many cases however, when the view is focused on a charater's head, the depth is barely noticeable. More disturbing is when the director wants to play with the depth of field and have blurry foreground or background: this doesn't look natural at all. 3D pictures should look more real than 2D, but at the same time the depth of field and the aperture used for shooting the scenes (part of the art in making movies) are not the ones equivalent to a human eye, and those shots just look weird, verging on making my eyes water. Fast moving elements are disturbing as well, I suppose it's because of the relatively low framerate of movies not able to render properly the fast movement.

Even more annoying, subtitles sometimes are inside of an object (subtitles are set at a fixed depth, but the objects in the picture might be closer to the viewer than the subtitles), making an impossible perspective which looks very disturbing.

And the 3D goggle are a bit heavy and hurt my nose.

While being proposed in front of an audiance by a man she is not interested in, Alice notices a white rabbit and uses the excuse to interrupt the ceremony. She follows it into its hole and falls down into the Underland, where she is told that she is the chosen one who will slay the Jabberwocky and free the land from the evil queen of hearts. After escaping an attack by the troops of the queen, Alice meets the mad hatter at a tea party. He wants to take Alice to the white queen's castle, but they are again attacked by the red queen's men and Alice again barely escapes. She then decides to go and free the mad hatter from the queen's castle. The queen doesn't recognize her as Alice, and the latter manages to steal the sword with which she is supposed to kill the Jabberwocky before fleeing to the white queen's castle. The red and white queen eventually meet and their champions fight. Alice kills the Jabberwocky and the white queen banishes the red one. Alice comes back from Underland and refuses the marriage proposal, but rather becomes a business partner of the would-have-been groom's father.

“chocolate, liquoice, roast malt and fruit notes. Pale, Crystal and Black malts, Fuggle and Progress hops.”

Neither sweet nor bitter. Not bad, but just another dark ale.

Highgate Brewery, Walsall, England. 4.0% alcohol.

“Brewed with Marris Otter barley, English Goldings & Fuggles hops using the unique Brakspear Double Drop system that provides a robust second fermentation stage”

It's definitely a bitter, quite light in alcohol. Contains barley malt.

Brakspear Brewing Co., Oxfordshire, England. 3.4% alcohol.

After losing his wife, Sam moved to Seattle with his son Jonah, who is eight years old. One Christmas evening, Jonah calls a radio show and tells his Christmas wish would be for his father to get a new wife. Sam receives hundreds of letters from women all over the country, but the one from Annie catche's Jonah's attention; in the letter she suggests to meet on Valentine's Day on the top of the Empire State Building, since her fiance suggested to spend that day in New York. Annie lives in Baltimore and has a fiance, but has doubts about her coming wedding. She manages to find out Sam's address and under the pretense of a business trip, traveles to Seattle. She doesn't dare contacting Sam, but he notices her on two occasions. Annie flies back to Baltimore. When his father starts dating a woman who laughs like a hyena (and whom he doesn't find suitable for his father) and doesn't seem willing to visit the Empire State's Building on Valentine's Day, he flies alone to New York (thanks to his girlfriend who uses her mother's, a travel agent's, computer to get him a plane ticket). Jonah spends the day on top of the building when his father, who has discovered his disappearance on the morning and has immediately flown from Seattle to New York, finds him. When they are about to live, they finally meet Annie, who just had just broken up with her fiance in order to honor the appointment she had given Sam.

Shaun spends all his time with his best friend Ed. Ed even lives at Shaun's place, playing video games all day long. He even accompanies Shaun to the pub when the latter meets his girlfriend Liz. The day after Liz had broken up with Shaun because of Ed's omnipresence and Shaun's inability to imagine any other kind of entertainment than an evening at the pub, a mysterious plague starts turning people into zombies, and the disease can be transmitted by a bite. Being surrounded by zombies, Shaun decides he must take his loves one to safety, and somehow concludes that the pub is the safest place. He first goes to her parent's place, then take his parents to Liz's. She agrees to accompany him, but her two flatmates want to come along. Together they cross multiple backyards, fighting zombies, and finally arrive near the pub, which is surrounded by zombies. Pretending to be zombies themselves, they manage to enter the pub through a window and keep the zombies out. But they soon are under attack, and only Shaun and Liz escape, saved by the military who just arrived on the spot. Six months later, the city is quiet again and remaining zombies have been turned into harmless slave workers. Shaun visits zombie-Ed in the garden's shed, and plays video games with him.

Rodney, a young robot and an inventor, lives in a small town and dreams of meeting Bigweld, the founder of the company that produces replacement parts for all the robots and who welcomes all inventors. But when Rodney finally arrives in RobotCity, he discovers that Bigweld has disappeared and that the company, under the lead of Ratchet, is changing its policy, discontinuing replacement parts for far more expensive upgrades that most robots cannot afford. Ratchet's goal is to harvest on the street old robots who cannot afford upgrades and turn them into cheap-to-get scrap metal for his mother's Chop Shop. Rodney then takes on repairing old robots with what is available in the low city. He also convinces his friends to try and find out what happened to Bigweld. At Bigweld's yearly bal, where they had hoped to meet him, they only attract Ratchet's attention and barely escape alive. But Rodney finds help in one of the company's executives, Cappy, who doesn't like Ratchet's style. Together they go and explore Bigweld's house, who seems to have retired, because he's been told by Ratchet that his management style is outdated. But Bigweld eventually changes his mind and helps Rodney and his friends to stop Ratchet's plans, and restores the production of replacement parts.

“We have matured this specially brewed Innis & Gunn beer for for 107 days, with every single drop spending equal times in both American oak barrels and barrles which previously contained rum. the result is a beer with a fruity, spicy character”

Very soft taste, that reminds of nuts and cake. Delicious. Made of barley malt.

Innis & Gunn, Edinburgh, Scotland. 7.4% alcohol.

Aware Dark Chocolate, Perou 70% : pas d'arôme reconaissable, mais très bon. Très surprenant pour un produit Fairtrade sans marque (produit en France, sans autre mention).

I found las year that 33 bits are enough to uniquely identify someone.

Now I just read that the browser's User-Agent field provides 5 to 15 bits of identification (10.5 bits on average). If you add zip code, geolocation, it becomes nearly enough to track people perfectly.

With EFF's Panopticlick, I know that my browser provides at least 16.12 bits of identification. The identifying criteria are the User-Agent and HTTP_Accept fields, available plugins, time zone, screen size, system fonts, cookies enabled/disabled and so-called super-cookies. The most scary part of the report is the statement that “Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 71,157 tested so far.”

Without Javascript, my browser still provides 16.13 bits, due to the HTTP_Accept header and User-Agent.

« Dès qu'il s'agit de Pu Er et autre chinoiserie … tu peux être sûr qu'il y a un truc pas très net quelque part !!! Jamais très clair tout ça ;-) »

Ainsi s'exprimait un amateur éclairé de pu er (qui tient à rester anonyme). Il avait mis son expertise à mon service pour goûter mon pu er mystère (voir tout au bas de l'article). Il confirme qu'il s'agit du pu er « cuit », mais qu'à son avis il ne date ni de 2005 (comme la date de production sur l'emballage le laissait penser) ni probablement de 1990 comme le vendeur me l'avait annoncé:

« Un cru de 2005 serait plus incisif, moins rond, nettement moins moelleux. De même s'il datait de 1990, il aurait en théorie plus de charpente, plus de corps avec des notes plus camphrées. Il est donc probable que cette galette ait été fabriquée en 2005 mais avec des feuilles d'une dizaines d'années, guère plus. … En fait, il me rappelle curieusement une galette de la Maison des Trois Thés qui date de 1994. Une année qui pourrait tout compte fait assez bien lui correspondre ! »

Mais suite à une question de ma part, il avoue que « 4 années de vieillissement supplémentaire n'influent pas trop sauf en cas de stockage humide », ce dont je déduis que le thé pourrait dater de 1990 mais qu'il ne s'est pas bonifié de manière notable durant ses quatre dernières années de vieillissement.

En conclusion, je vais essayer de suivre son conseil, même si je sens mon esprit analytique se rebeller à cette idée : « Profite simplement de tes Pu Er et ne te pose pas trop de questions, de toute façon c'est un monde tellement complexe et opaque qu'il vaut mieux se contenter d'apprécier ce que l'on a sans en savoir plus car on risque toujours d'être déçu. » En d'autres termes, si c'est bon, c'est bon, et si c'est pas bon, c'est pas bon. Lapalisse n'aurait pas dit mieux.

End of the new ADSL modem story. I sat on my principles and bought last Saturday an A-Link RR24AP(d) at Gigantti, even though it runs Linux (yes!) without publishing the source code (boo!). It cost me 20 EUR more than what it would have cost at Multitronic.fi, but I guess that's what it cost to get it immediately.

The RR24AP(d) is not perfect either: its DynDNS client is updating its DNS record even though the IP address doesn't change (I got banned temporarily by DynDNS for that; I restarted the DynDNS daemon running on minikone and disabled the one in the router).

Moreover, I wanted to use its telnet/ssh menu-based interface for enabling/disabling the WLAN from the desktop (I wrote a docklet for that with a wrapper script for hiding the protocol stuff), but although enabling works, disabling doesn't work. I had to use the Web interface instead. An additional nice discovery is that although the main menu offers choices numbered 1 to 10, when you choose 0, you get a root shell. I haven't found a way to enable/disable the WLAN from the shell, hence the wrapper script for the Web interface.

A collection of six short stories edited by Catherine Asaro published in 2004.

Winterfair Gifts (Lois McMaster Bujold): Miles Vorkosigan is getting married in a few days and Ekaterin, his bride, is nervous has hell. Guests and gifts are pouring from all corners of Space, and Roic, Miles' footman is very impressed by Taura, the bioengineered femal super-soldier. When Ekaterin suddenly becomes ill, Taura notices that a pearl necklace Ekaterin tried for a few seconds the night before is actually covered in poison. Had she worn it for longer time, as she planned to do it on her wedding day, she would have died. Although the pearls seemd to have been sent by Admiral Quinn, Miles' former girlfriend, ImpSec finds out they were sent by a Vor that Miles had been investigating recently. The wedding eventually takes place without more incident, and Roic ends up making out with Taura.

The Alchemical Marriage (Mary Jo Putney): 1588. Sir Adam Macrae, a sorcerer, is a prisoner in the Tower of London for having threatened Queen Elisabeth's life after she killed Mary Stuart. Master Dee, the Queen's sorcerer, asks him to join forces with Isabel de Cortes, another sorceress, in order to repell the Spanish Armada which is about to invade Britain. Reluctant at first, scrying into the future convinces him to accept and he accompanies Isabel to her manor on the coast. There, they try to combine their powers to create a storm that will force the Armada to give up their plans. They fail at first, but after Sir Adam recovers, they perform the Alchemical Marriage that bonds forever two opposite forces (that is, they have sex together in the rain) in order to combine their powers and repell the invaders. They eventually get married since, although they are complete opposites, they are meant for each other.

Stained Glass Heart (Catherine Asaro): On Lyshriol, a remote, agricultural planet, Vyrl and Lily are in love with each other, but Vyrl is meant to marry Devon Majda, a woman much older than him, from another powerful family, in order to tighten the bonds between them in the Assembly. Vyrl then flees with Lily and they get married in secret. They are caught some days later by their parents and separated, with a threat of they marriage being canceled since they are both underaged. Some time later, Vyrl tells Devon that she too should marry the man she loves instead of making a political marriage. Later again, Majda announces at the assembly that she abdicates as Matriarch of the Majda family in favor to her sister. Vyrl is then free to stay married to Lily.

Skin Deep (Deb Stover): Since he died in a car accident two years before, Nick has been working in Heaven in the Mortal Watch Division, where he occasionaly keeps an I on his widow, Margo, who can't get over him. Nick is then sent back to the world of the Living, this time as a woman named Raquel, to help Margo find her True Love, Jared, she was supposed to marry when Nick interfered (he planted a girl in Jared's bed and got Margo to witness). Taken to a male strip club by her friend, Margo notices the main attraction is actually Jared, whom she hadn't seen in years. She eventually learns he is a DEA agent working undercover, trying to find how the strip club is involved in drug dealing. A few days later, Margo and Raquel are at the club. They witness the drug delivery and are made prisoner by the club's owner. The DEA assaults the building but Raquel gets mortally wounded. Temporarily transformed as Nick again, the latter confesses tricking Jared in order to get Margo, and also that Jared and him are actually brothers. Nick/Raquel then dies and goes back to Heaven.

The Trouble with Heroes (Jo Beverley): On Gaia, a remote Earth colony, Jenny and Dan have been friends since childhood. Dan is a fixer, having kind of magical powers caused by the planet, and he can mend all kinds of things. Moreover, he's able to sense and destroy indigenous, pure-energy entities who reduce humans and cattle to ashed in an instant. The entities seem to be growing in numbers near the equator and refugees are pouring into the city of Anglia. The fixers are all called to the front and Dan leaves after Jenny and him have at last acknowledged their love for each other. Some time later, the situation seems to have returned to normal, but the fixers seem to have all disappeared. One man looking like Dan is camping outside of the gates of Anglia. Nobody dares letting him in, since he looks so changed. Jenny sneaks out at night to meet him. She learns that he organized the fixers in groups, using one of them as bait to lure thousands of entities at the same time and destroy them in batches using wild magic. But the baits were always killed and at the end of the war there was only a handful of fixers left. Jenny and Dan agree to become partners in life, and according to the laws of Anglia, the city has to let Dan in with her.

Shadows in the Wood (Jennifer Roberson): In the forest of Sherwood in 1202, Robin Hood and Marian are injured while fighting Normans. They flee and stop to catch their breath in a very old part of the forest. Accoring to the stories Marian's mother had told her daughter, the oaks in these parts have human faces. When she touches one of them to show Robin, a man suddenly comes out of the tree. He happens to be Merlin, who was under a spell of Nimüe and he requests their help to retrieve Arthur's sword and return it to the lake. Merlin guides them to the island of Avalon (the lake has now disappeared, replaced by grass). Only women were allowed to the island, and men were only tolerated. But Merlin tells them that both of them need to go. On the “island”, Marian communicates with the spirit of the women who lived there and indicate her the location of the sword. They retrieve the sword, take it to Merlin, who throws it back into the lake (which reappears for the occasion). Then Merlin leaves forever for the island.

Part 2 of the new ADSL modem story.

This is how it goes: reboot the modem, connect to its telnet server. The TCP window is 2048 bytes long. Everything works fine. Telnet again: the TCP window is now 1024. Actually, it shrunk to 1024 already on the FIN/ACK packet sent by the router when closing this first telnet session and stays like this for all the subsequent connections. During those connection, each ACK packet it sends is followed by a second ACK where it resets the window size to 1024 bytes. After some time (this is the tricky part, I have no idea how time or idleness affects it), when telneting again, some TCP packets are lost, the client side has to retransmit them. Insist a bit more, and there are more and more packets which don't get acknowledged. Eventually, the telnet server may become non-responsive and the whole device stops responding to pings. Reboot the modem.

Whether using the forwarded port from the WAN to the client machine on the LAN is involved or not in prooking this behaviour is not known, more investigation needs to be done.

I contacted ZyXEL, they asked me to return the device. Let's see if they are able to reproduce the problem.

The old A-Link RR64, Linux 2.4-based ADSL modem and router has been dying slowly for the past eight months or so, and when the “alarm” LED went suddenly on, I decided it was time to get a new piece of hardware before that one broke down completely. Since it had a hard time booting up after the power had been down, it was a good idea anyway.

After long discussions with my colleagues, I decided to buy a ZyXEL Prestige 660WP-D1, with an integrated WLAN base station. It's not based on free software, but the equivalent linux-based model by A-Link doesn't respect the GPL regarding the distributon of the source code (it actually doesn't even mention it's based on Linux), so I wasn't going to give my money to those people anymore.

I spent the whole evening and half the night yesterday trying to set it up so that it replaces the old device in the network. First thing, the ZyXEL does't have a DNS server for the local network, so I had to setup one on the server there using dnsmasq (merci tontonth :) ). This means I cannot get the outside DNS server's address from the ISP anymore (the router is unwilling to serve as a DNS proxy while at the same time propagating the dnsmasq's address through the DHCP configuration) but I have to set it up statically in dnsmasq. I hope it doesn't change its address every two weeks…

The second problem was that the NAS I use for backups is unable to get its IP address from the ZyXEL, so I had to set a static one.

But the weirdest of the weirdest, is that the machines connected through the WLAN were not able to connect to the ones on the LAN, which is a bit of a problem since the dnsmasq is on the LAN. After a long time reading the docs, I found in the latest firmware's changelog that the following bug had been fixed: 22. WLAN and LAN can not communicate with each other when the admin password is changed in the GUI. The new firmware indeed fixed the problem, but what screwy software design makes the bridging between two networks dependent on the admin's password and the GUI? This is bound to be a problem for any user who knows that default passwords must be changed, since the first time you connect to the Web interface as admin, it forces you to change the password.

Well, it seems to be working now. Let's cross fingers.

Ça fait un certain temps que je me tâtais pour préparer un pizza-burger. Voila qui est fait.

Ingrédients

• 1,1kg hachis de b½uf
• 250g lard en tranches
• 300g emmenthal
• 2 pizzas tomate-mozarella

Préparation

Tasser la viande dans un cercle à tarte et recouvrir de fromage rapé. Cuire au four à 200 °C jusqu'à ce que le c½ur de la viande atteigne 70 °C.

Faire frire le lard jusqu'à ce qu'il soit complètement grillé, puis le hacher grossièrement.

Une fois cuit, recouvrir du lard grillé haché. Cuire les 2 pizzas.

Déposer la viande sur une pizza, et recouvrir de la deuxième posée à l'envers.

Commentaires

• La viande seule est trop sèche et un peu fade. Essayer de la mélanger à de l'½uf et de la chapelure, des herbes.

Fruity smell, maybe peach or something. Only slightly bitter, not bad. Contains malted barley and malted wheat.

Williams Bros Brewing Co., Alloa, Scotland. 3.9% alcohol.

We have two kinds of printers at work: old HP LaserJets and newer Ricoh multifunction photocopiers connected to the same Windows-based print server (accepting the LPD protocol).

While no particular option in /etc/printcap is required to print with LPRng on the HP printers, the bq_format=l option is needed for printing to the Ricoh ones. This tells Windows that the data must be printed as is, as explained on the LPRng mailing list. But why does it work without this option on the HP printers then?

The story takes place on an alternative Earth in the mid-18th century. While Mau is returning from the island where he performed alone his ritual to become a man, a tsunami kills everyone on his own island, while crashing a ship on the same island. The only survivor of the ship is a 13 years old girl, Daphne, who was traveling to rejoin with her father, governor of some British colony. Daphne invites Mau for a tea party in the wreckage of the ship, and eventually become friends and learn each other's languages. Refugees from nearby islands are coming in; Mau learns to be the chief of an island, while Daphne learns the ways of the women in those parts. The voices of the ancestors speak into the heads of the two children, the Grandfathers ordering Mau to restore the altars of the gods which where washed into the sea, while the Grandmothers ask Daphne to open the cave where the bodies of the island's greatest soldiers are burried and free their souls (or something like that). In the cave, the children discover that Mau's ancestors had a wide knowledge of science and technology (they knew about Jupiter and Saturn's satellites and had probably built a telescope) and the legends hint that they had travelled around the world. People on the island live in the fear of the Raiders, cannibals who worship the god of Death. When two mutineers of Daphne's ship, who were thrown out on a small skiff, arrive, they manage to get rid of them and prepare for the coming of the Raiders, who have joined forces with the chief of the mutineers, former first mate Cox. When Cox finally arrives, the islanders frighten the Raiders enough that they accept a duel between Mau and Cox, which Cox looses. Some time later, Daphne's father finally finds his daughter, and is soon joined by another ship, bringing him news that he has become king of England, since an epidemic has killed all of the royal family and plenty of potential heirs. Daphne convices her father not to consider the islanders as savages and to acceed to their demand to become not a part of the Empire, but of the Royal Society of Sciences. One year later, Daphne comes back to the island to bring all the tools the islanders had asked in exchange for the golden door of the Grandfather's cave (8 tons of gold). The world's best scientists are also coming to study the cave and give the islanders lectures about everything.