Entries by Danté Jones

Now there has been many a wise old sage in times past going by the name of Danté, but this is a result I didn't expect.

According to the "Which sci-fi character are you?" online survey, it appears I'm most like the little green champion of the light.

Hrrmmm, flood me not with your comments all ... Yes?

In one of the more geologically diverse and interesting parts of rural Australia is a small town that's responsible for more than it's fair share of history.

Stanthorpe and it's surrounding district known as the "Granite Belt", of not much more than ten thousand people, is responsible for famous singers and film directors, politicians, sporting hero's and even a current Archbishop.

Now, a suitably timeless honor has been bestowed on this beautiful and surprisingly productive part of the world - a celestial body has been named after it.

Stanthorpe resident Eiji Kato was given the opportunity to name Asteroid 10078 after working with renowned Japanese astronomer Tsutomu Seki.

The official citation issued by the Minor Planet Centre at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in the US reads not only that the Asteroid Stanthorpe was discovered by Mr Seki in 1981, but that;

"Stanthorpe, known as Queensland's wine capital, is a town nestled in national parks on the highlands in the southeastern part of the Australian state. It is also known for fruit production and beautiful night skies."

Linux is everywhere and knowingly or not, most people depend on it for many things. Web, database, file, auth and print servers to embedded firmware in routers, cameras, game consoles and phones, to name a few. Linux already touches our lives daily.

Poor Microsoft have fought Linux hard for many years, first with invincible ignorance, then with FUD attacks that continue to this day. However, somewhat secretly, they also are blessed by the penguin and use it to keep themselves alive.

The Halo movie, based on the Xbox game by Microsoft will directed by Peter Jackson. Weta Digital will do all the effects - on 1000 dual-processor IBM blade servers running the Fedora distro of Linux. Most of Hollywood use this kind of Linux based renderfarm.

This certainly isn't the first time Microsoft have had to run to the penguin for assistance. In 2003 Microsoft were in turmoil after weeks of significant and intense worm and virus attacks directed squarely at them. In their need for a cure, they turned to Akamai to hide behind.

A few months ago an attempt was made to upgrade this humble blog and remove the 2000+ spam comments. No, really, I'm NOT interested in poker...

And now, all is done!

Life to the Full is back, ready to be filled with all the highly opinionated and slightly insightful prose that we've delivered in the past.

Keep an eye out for a few retrospective posts that may appear soon.

Feel free to leave a comment - as long as it's not about poker. (!!!)

The world is both amazing and small. It doesn't take that much effort any more to get from one side of it to the other - at least not with a half decent aircraft.

After 2 and a half months, from the mists of Ireland, to the Abbeys of France, the waltz of Istanbul to the angst of Israel. From new friendships to the death of my Grandfather, it's been a journey of significance.

If there was any one treasure that I brought back with me from our pilgrimage, it was the knowledge that God is good, and so are most people most of the time.

If fact I'd go so far as to say that the default attitude of your average human being is to desire good for their fellow human being. This is a comforting thing to be reminded of, and makes all the hardship of travel worth while.

After quite some time I've put enough time aside to update the itinerary.

This will give you an idea of what we've seen and what locations lie ahead of us.

We have a collection of comments and Photo's that I'd be happy to post, just as soon as I find some cheap internet access... like a free wireless network - hmmmmm..

A word of advice to those considering travelling and looking for free wifi access - Invest in a kensington wifi detector, or the like. It's a must, and very very very difficult to buy from computer shops in Europe.

A week passes quickly when you travel to a new location every day.

During our entire stay here in Ireland, this is the first occasion we've come across free wireless - in the departure lounge of the airport...

However our stay in Ireland has been blessed with mostly clement weather, magnificent treasures like the book of Kells, and the ancient manor & seat of clan Rynne.

Here are a few observations before the plane leaves - Ennis is lovely, Castlebar is not, and Westport is a town that people immediately fall in love with.

Cringely has a recent interview with the father of not just the mouse, but of many of the concepts that today's computing is based on - Doug Engelbart.

We're talking pre-PARC here people; the year is 1950 in fact. The day after he'd proposed to his girlfriend, Engelbart had a vision of what computers could be like, driving to work.

If we were to give credit where it's due, then quite a lot should go to Doug Engelbart.

On the 26th of April 1986 the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, situated in the Ukraine, had a catastrophic failure. This accident is widely regarded as the worst in the history of nuclear power generation.

Alexander Yuvchenko was on duty at Chernobyl's reactor number 4 the night it exploded, one of the few working there that night to have survived.

For the first time since the accident he has agreed to be interviewed, and gives a chilling description of what he witnessed when everything went pear-shaped:

In exactly a month from today, Life 2 the Full writers, Emeritus and Dante Jones will be hopping into a streamlined lump of steel with four Rolls Royce engines and a few hundred seats, and fly to the other end of the planet, while switching to Perigrinus 2004 mode.

There's that word again - Peregrinus.

From the very beginning Christians made pilgrimages to holy sites, and to the Holy Land in particular. There is a very valuable perspective that can be gained from literally walking in the footsteps of Christ. After the Romans killed Peter, his tomb also became a place of pilgrimage.

A little while after Peter, there was a Roman citizen, who's name was Peregrinus. It seems he travelled a lot. All over the Roman empire in fact. He wasn't happy in fact unless he was going from A to B. or M to N. or U to V... you get the idea.

A recent report on a study by a Southampton University team has appeared in the journal Public Health. It finds that dementia rates have trebled in men and increased by 90 per cent among women.

The study examined rates of the diseases in much of the Western world from 1979 to 1997. "This has really scared me," Professor Colin Pritchard, who led the study. "These are nasty diseases: people are getting more of them and they are starting earlier. We have to look at the environment and ask ourselves what we are doing."

"There's no single cause ... and most of the time we have no studies on all the multiple interactions of the combinations on the environment."

12 years is a while to be supporting the GUI desktop environments, of Mac OS and Windows. Prior to that there were other GUI desktops I used and supported that most users today have never heard of.

I've been using various Linux desktops seriously for the past 7 years, and during the normal course of my work, I'll use Mac OSX, KDE on Linux and Windows many times each day. Sometimes intermingled a bit with each other thanks to X over ssh and various remote GUI clients, as well as the odd emulator.

Although it seemed just a matter of time, I'm still surprised by IT industry research firm IDC's claim that "Linux captured the No. 2 spot as desktop operating system in 2003."

This has come about as HP announced it's now shipping its first notebook, the Compaq nx5000, to come with the Linux operating system preinstalled.

Sure Steve Jobs is the kind of fellow to either inspire or increase ire in people, but I cant help but like him. We have both been active in IT for some time now.

So it was something of a shock to me and others when we read of his pancreatic cancer in recent days.

It seems all is going to be ok, as Jobsie wrote emails on his 17” powerbook from his hospital bed, announcing that his form of pancreatic cancer — an islet cell neuroendocrine tumour — is extremely rare and easily cured if diagnosed early.

What at strange situation we find ourselves in. After years of robot movies like Robocop, Terminator, The Matrix and AI, now comes the father of them all; I, Robot.

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov is a collection of short stories published in 1950, and is best remembered for the three simple yet immutable Laws of Robotics. Looks like hollywood have finally decided to milk some cash from it in the form of a movie.

Although I'm yet to see this film, there are already signs of restlessness on forums and in blogs, and the choice of Will Smith as one of the lead characters does not instil confidence.

Intelligent people were sleeping at midnight last night. I was not one of them.

Instead, I went to the Crystal Method gig at the Family, in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley.

Although it's fine for a couple of DJ's to start their gig a quarter of an hour late, which a large numbers of their fans have paid $30 a head and given up a night's sleep to see, it's not fine at all when they drown their audience in an ocean of endlessly looped, uninteresting, badly produced, two dimensional DJ froth.

It was all gravy and no Roast and Vegies...