William Dampier

Powell’s Books – Review-a-Day – A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier by Diana Preston, reviewed by Times Literary Supplement:

William Dampier was a Somerset man, born in the village of East Coker in the middle of the seventeenth century. His memorial brass, in the medieval parish church of St Michael, speaks of a life driven by a profound curiosity about the natural world. Unstated, but implicit in the brief list of his remarkable achievements, is the sustained courage essential for any exploration of the ocean at a time when wind was the only power, when the determination of longitude was problematic and many coastal seas were uncharted:

TO THE MEMORY OF WILLIAM DAMPIER BUCCANEER EXPLORER HYDROGRAPHER and sometime Captain of the Ship Roebuck in the Royal Navy of King William the Third. Thrice he circumnavigated the Globe and first of all Englishmen explored and described the coast of Australia. An exact observer of all things in Earth, Sea and Air he recorded the knowledge won by years of danger and hardship in Books of Voyages and a Discourse of Winds, Tides and Currents which Nelson bade his midshipmen to study and Humboldt praised for Scientific worth.

Surely here was a man of whom the people of East Coker could be justly proud, a heroic figure to add lustre and interest to an otherwise obscure corner of England? Strangely though, Dampier’s memorial was not erected until 1907, and even then, its appearance in the ancient church was not welcomed by all of the worshippers.

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Hmm, I have been by his house many times. I knew he was a major figure in England’s nautical past, but didn’t realize he was this notable a figure. And he is no longer the only reason to make a pilgrimage to St Michael’s church: T. S. Eliot is interred in the wall there.

MacGuffin

MacGuffin – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

A MacGuffin is a plot device that holds no meaning or purpose of its own except to motivate the characters and advance the story. The device is usually used in films, especially thrillers. The term “MacGuffin” was invented by Alfred Hitchcock, who made extensive use of the device in his films. It is still almost always used in specific reference to Hitchcock’s plots, rather than as a general term for similar narrative conveniences in unrelated stories.

In the story I am writing, the genesis of it was a character who has now become a MacGuffin. But as I noted earlier, I’m just transcribing events as they happen. If I thought he was a main character, obviously I was wrong.

fun with cacti

I started playing with cacti (take a look here), web-based RRDtool-driven system graphing tool, and find it pretty interesting. I am hoping there are ways to add additional datapoints onto it (I passed along the script I use to drive rrdtool — the thing that makes these graphs — in case it’s at all useable.

Graph Image

I especially like the graph colors for CPU usage: looks like the box is on fire đŸ˜‰

There are some built-in scripts to support data collection on some known devices or anything that runs UCD/net-snmp: OS X and FreeBSD work just fine with it for basic stuff like network monitoring and load.

as little TV as I watch [none except during baseball season] this looks worth doing

EFF: Cooking with EFF: KnoppMyth r5a5 and pcHDTV for DTV Liberation:

Welcome to the EFF guide to assembling your own personal video recorder (PVR) with KnoppMyth r5a5 and pcHDTV. In our experience, creating your own HDTV PVR with free/open source software is a fun and rewarding experience. In the United States, some of the hardware required may only be lawfully available until July 1, 2005, so there’s a substantial incentive for those who are interested to start promptly.

At the very least, I’ll get the tuner card that doesn’t grok the Broadcast Flag before they disappear.

restoring the >console account in OS X

OSXFAQ – Technical News and Support for Mac OS X:

Ever wanted to gain access to the UNIX command line without having to login into your user account? Sure you could start single user mode at startup, however, you are limited to what commands you can do. Luckily, Mac OS X makes it easy for you to login into the UNIX command line directly from the Login Window.

This was in earlier releases by default: you could log in as “>console” and do commandline stuff without the UI. I can’t recall if you needed to authenticate to run restricted commands and haven’t tested it in X.3.

But I will add this just in case I ever need it.

more benefits to darwinports

If you have systems with mismatched capabilities (olde skoole iMacs or laptops with constrained disk speeds/bus bandwidth/RAM) you can farm out the heavy lifting to perhaps one capable machine (in my case as smokin’ hot Blue & White with a G4 upgrade — a sizzling 550 MHz) and have the port mechanism generate pkgs (.dmg, rpm, pkg and mpkg formats are all supported).

I could see this as useful in a lab or small office setup. I plan to make some use of it here.

the network is . . . whatever you need it to be

I followed these excellent docs for setting up automounting in OS X. This was useful for a couple of reasons:

  • backups using Apple’s Backup utility
  • mounting source code repositories that I don’t need to keep on my ickle 30 Gb drive

So backups work just fine: at 9:30 AM, Backup kicks off, mounts the drive, and updates the backup repository.
But updating my darwinports-installed binaries has been failing: I would get screens full of this.

---> Extracting openssl
Error: Target com.apple.extract returned: shell command "cd Ă¢â‚¬?/mnt/red/darwinports/dports/devel/openssl/work" && gzip -dc /opt/local/var/db/dports/distfiles/openssl/openssl-0.9.7e.tar.gz | tar -xf -Ă¢â‚¬? returned error 2
Command output: tar: openssl-0.9.7e/util/pl/ultrix.pl: Cannot change ownership to uid 0, gid 0: (null)
tar: openssl-0.9.7e/util/pl/unix.pl: Cannot change ownership to uid 0, gid 0: (null)

Changing uid and gid ownership with chmod(1) didn’t do anything. Then I remembered something from the stub /etc/exports file, something about mapping the root user’s UID . . . .

Sure enough, adding -maproot=0 fixed it.

/opt -maproot=0 -alldirs -network 192.168.2.0 -mask 255.255.255.0

Now all seems well.
Now to bounce the NFS server:

On the server (kill the NFS daemon, restart mountd, and restartd the NFS daemon):

killall -TERM nfsd
killall -hup mountd
nfsd -u -t -n 4

Now playing: Verbum Bonum Et Suave by Anonymous 4 from the album “La Bele MarieĂ¢â‚¬? | Get it

Why we weren’t sad to leave “the Sunny South”

CNN.com – Ice storm shuts down Georgia roads – Jan 29, 2005:
 Cnn 2005 Weather 01 29 Winter.Weather.Ap Story.Street2

Ice was a quarter-inch thick on downtown Atlanta streets as a storm system spread snow, freezing rain and sleet from the Midwest into Georgia and the Carolinas.

That’s CNN Center in the background, where I worked for the last 5 years we lived in the Empire State of the South.

It was about 5 years ago I visited Seattle for a job interview: upon my return, we had an ice storm so severe we lost power for 5 days, making our house unlivable. We spent that time at my sister-in-law’s townhouse — she has since moved here as well — and factored these regular occurrences into our decision.

Now playing: Ave Maria Gracia Plena by Anonymous 4 from the album “La Bele MarieĂ¯Â¿Â½? | Get it