A Mind @ Play

President Sarkozy will not be the one to tell French schoolchildren that the borders of Europe extend to Syria and Iraq , ((Earlier report on Sarkozy’s election here [in German].)) should Turkish overtures to the EU be fully accepted. One must assume then, that he would have no problem explaining that the current borders of the EU extend to Morocco on mainland Africa , or that France itself shares borders with Brazil and Suriname. Or perhaps that under fifty years ago, its borders extended south to the Sahara Desert .

It’s a fairly common problem with Windows. Somehow a program manages to create a file with a name containing illegal characters or otherwise outside the file system’s parameters. No matter what you try, you just can’t rid yourself of it. The file certainly isn’t in use and being locked up by another program. Trying to delete or rename the file only results in Windows telling you the file cannot be found: “This is no longer in . Verify the item’s location and try again.” Even running the Command Prompt with administrator privileges doesn’t allow you to move, rename or delete the blasted thing!

Interesting little book review on the Irish Times website about the role of Cromwell in the disappearance of wolves in Ireland. Kieran Hickey’s book (possibly entitled The Natural and Cultural History of Wolves in Ireland—the article makes no reference) seems to confirm the role of Cromwell’s appearance in Ireland with the hunting and eventual extinction of the Irish wolf. I’m not aware of any attempts to reintroduce wolves to Ireland, and as this post on the Blather points out, there were fears that no one had learned from history, when policies in recent years called to cull badger numbers in the hopes of combating bovine tuberculosis.

Interesting little snippet about the current state of South African Internet services. Designed simply to show up the state of South Africa’s Internet options, the test pitted a pigeon against a connection delivered by their largest provider. The pigeon managed to deliver 4GB of data 60 miles in little over an hour, and it took the company another hour to upload the data (one can only assume they were for some reason using an old USB 1.o/1.1 connection). In this time, just 4% of the data had been transferred via ADSL. Humbling though this message might be, I really wonder if services in the UK would fare much better? At a rough estimate, in the total amount of time it took the pigeon, my own connection might have managed around 5% of the total. The average business connection would probably have achieved twice that, but either way, the pigeon method wins hands down. Having said that, I don’t think we’ll be seeing any alternative pigeon networks set up in the UK just yet. ‘Packet loss’ due to hawk attacks would be monumental.

It’s all a bit late now. Boris Johnson writes about the Gary McKinnon case in The Telegraph and points out what anyone living under a rock wearing a bag on their heads could already see. McKinnon is charged with breaking into US military computers from his 56k modem, leaving messages, deleting files and causing general mayhem. He admits to all accounts of hacking in, though denies deliberate attempts at causing damage, claiming these charges were invented to pursue extradition proceedings. Quite what the prosecutors are trying to achieve with this man are unclear, given that his crazy quest for the secrets of little green men and free energy actually provided a service to the US military authorities in pointing out their lax security. As Boris Johnson points out, they could as well be offering him consultancy fees, as trying to clap him in irons. But how long does it take before someone is willing to stand up for common sense? And given the seemingly endless machinations of the legal process, will such calls even have an affect? Aside from highlighting the blatant partiality of the US-UK Extradition Treaty, these proceedings have once more underlined the spinelessness of the UK government when it comes to rectifying gross injustice, and defending its people against what can only be described as foreign tyranny. Watching paint dry, grass grow, the wheels turn in Whitehall: the simile edges ever closer to a regular place in our vocabularies.

In a multi-record breaking event, marred by controversy over the technology of the new swimsuits , the final day of the 2009 World Aquatics Championships featured a fairly typical line-up for the Men’s 4 x 100m Medley Relay . Aside from Australia replacing Canada, and Brazil in place of Italy, the event could very well have been made for the G8. A fact no less marked than that the victors had a full replacement team to the one that qualified earlier in the day. Whoever said sport and money were a bad combination?

At least, so you could be forgiven for believing. Taking photos of buses can get you in some trouble these days. Perhaps now the British government would think twice about stepping in to prevent their own tourists from suffering judicial heavy-handedness . Even snapping a bobby in London could land you up to 10 years, under Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008. You can see how important that “Counter” part in the title was felt to be; if they’d left it out you’d never be quite sure which way to interpret the act. Fortunately there are still some people willing to stand up for common sense . Nevertheless, the UK government policy seems clear. Whilst UK citizens have to accept being the people most spied upon by their government, the latter is taking every advantage to make sure the cameras only point one way. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I recently installed Ubuntu on a system with a slightly irregular hard drive configuration. Two SATA drives were running Windows on a mirrored (fake) RAID array, and a third SATA drive was ready to have linux installed. The Ubuntu installer recognised the drive as the third hard drive, and installed itself as expected, with Grub installed in the MBR of this drive, being first in the BIOS’ boot queue. However, all references in Grub’s menu.lst for the Ubuntu installation pointed to (hd2,0), which resulted in an “Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition.” message from Grub. The solution was simply to edit the entries to read (hd0,0) for (hd2,0) as Grub now recognised the third drive as the first on account of its place in the boot order.

Having recently set up some network storage, I came across a rather irritating problem mapping network drives in Windows XP. The basic setup procedure, as outlined here , worked perfectly on some systems, but failed to retain the stored username/password for network attached drives requiring alternative login details. The solution found, courtesy of this blog, is to map the drives using the following command (replacing U with the drive letter, and NETHOME\LOCID with the relevant UNC network location):