Ape::Tracks

A/UX

Apple Unix (A/UX) is Apple's port of Unix to the original Macintosh. Specifically, it's a port of AT&T Unix System V.2.2 (with a handful of BSD-extensions) to Macintosh systems that were based on the Motorola 680x0 line of processors. You might be asking, "Another port of Unix... What's so special about that?" Well, A/UX combines the stability of Unix System V with the friendly graphical-user-interface (GUI) of the Macintosh Operating system. This hybrid-environment allows you to run both Macintosh and Unix programs on a single system. Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it?

Everything you ever wanted to know about Apple's first UNIX I might give this a try if it'll run on my old LC475.

Hypoxia Blues

Looks like '2001' and got it right, and 'Total Recall' got it wrong. This should not surprise anyone.

Exposure to space

Apart from the maths and physics involved, yes, they are the same.

Judith Davies, who has a daughter at the school, said: “Many people campaign against mobile phone masts near schools, but there is a great deal of ignorance about wireless computer networks. Yet they are like having a phone mast in the classroom and the transmitters are placed very close to the children.”

Health fears lead schools to dismantle wireless networks

Scientific evidence is inconclusive, but some researchers think that children are vulnerable because of their thinner skulls and developing nervous systems.

Wifi uses the same signal as baby monitors but unlike baby monitors the signal is not constant. The wifi units are also further away from users than baby monitors are from babies (I believe baby monitors are usually fixed to cots). Babies have very thin skulls. As far as I know the "Exposing Large Numbers Of Babies To 2.4Ghz Microwave Radiation" experiment puts us all in the clear so far.

Given the almighty faff I've been having with wireless networks recently they should go with a wired network because it's going to work.

If there's one thing worse than people who can't discriminate between different forms of radiation it's Netgear wifi bridges that kill TCP connections and Linux wifi drivers that have a mind of their own. :-) Unfortunately A. isn't keen on me taping cable over the walls or pulling up the new flat's floor yet, and she has a point.

Never mind the bollards

Some antisocial drivers are trying to sneak past Manchester's new automatic bollards and are getting pranged as a result. The bollards block access to almost pedestrianised areas but lower to allow delivery vehicles and buses to pass. Trying to get past by following a bus doesn't work.*

I agree with the Council and hope the bollards stay. This is a case of dangerous drivers damaging their cars and risking injury.

Also the prangs are very funny when they're shown on the local news. This is all good.

• The BBC don't make it easy to link to their video reports

New BBC TV

The BBC have launched two new TV series recently.

Robin Hood - Utter rubbish. Not one redeeming feature, even the political references are heavy-handed and dull. Somehow manages to be less believable than Maid Marian and Her Merry Men. Avoid.

Torchwood - Take Angel, Ultraviolet, maybe bits of Highlander, flavour with Doctor Who, and set in Cardiff. It isn't great. It somehow isn't terrible either, despite often looking as if it's actually trying to be crap. Torchwood is absolutely not a British 'X Files', but it might well become a British 'Angel'.

One episode involves a cyberman that slowly chases people around in circles, trying to grab them with its sparky-hands-of-death. Avoid that one.

Ruby On Everything

There's been a lot of hype this year about Ruby 'replacing' other programing languages and seducing their developers. I think this has masked something far more interesting and much less confrontational: different programing languages are getting much better at working together.

Ruby runs on its own dedicated interpreter but recently there's been a lot of activity on porting the language to run on VMs predominantly used by other languages, specifically the Java JVM, .Net's CLR and Perl6's Parrot. There are also 'bridges' that let a non-Ruby application embed a traditional Ruby interpreter. Either method allows developers to mix and match other languages with Ruby.

The main JVM effort (JRuby) is going well:

Sun hires JRuby developers

Ruby running in a Java applet

Ruby on Rails almost running properly within Java

Deploying Ruby on Rails inside Glassfish

And the Ruby Java Bridge lets you use Java classes from within traditionaly executed Ruby apps.

It's even possible to extend Java classes using Ruby

Microsoft's .Net developers can join in the Ruby fun too:

Microsoft hires Ruby .Net developers

There are at least two working .Net compilers for Ruby: Ruby.Net and Iron Ruby.

There's a Ruby bridge for .Net too, called Ruby CLR

Perl's Parrot VM was the first to talk about re-implementing Ruby and promises great things but sadly has made relatively little progress. Of course, Perl6 itself is taking its time too.

The current Parrotised Ruby is Cardinal. One day Parrot will allow you to build an application from a mix of various languages, including Perl 6 and Ruby, all snuggled up together.

Perl being Perl, there is of course a Ruby bridge for Perl 5.

Wisesam

One blog I'd like to match in quantity and quality is the same one I cruelly kicked off my web account last year. It's since gone from strength to strength so I'm plugging it again.

Samwise Rides Again

It's the world's top blog in the Yorkshireman Moves To Hawaii To Program Big Telescopes category.

You are held in a queue

This weblog has been very busy in the last three months, but sadly that mainly involves hundreds and hundreds of spam comments stacked up in a moderation queue. Don't they even bother to check if the comments are being blocked? Grrr. Anyway, as a result, if you did post a comment it's in the list somewhere, and I'll tidy things up eventually. I'm going to either add some sort of fancy Bayesian filtering/blacklist plugin thing or just make the comments "member-only".

The same problem applies to email. I managed to get a backlog of 14,000 emails at my ISP, again mostly spam.

UCLA cops publicly torture student

Now that things are getting settled after all the overtime, the September crunch at work, the house move, and the exploding home server, I've been meaning to start posting again with one of those traditional Why I've Not Updated My Blog excuses. Later today. Maybe tomorrow. Just after I've finished what I'm doing.

Today I read this disturbing account of what can happen at UCLA if you don't have a student card with you when using a PC. The embedded video didn't play, but I'm used to that.

Then I saw this horrifying video of the event on the front page of YouTube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyvrqcxNIFs]

The police repeatedly tazer a screaming student because he can't stand up after being tazered. Cops threaten to tazer other students who ask for their details.

I hope the staff and students at UCLA stand up and make sure this doesn't happen again.