Notes and Jottings

Yahoo changed their authentication protocol yet *again*, so gaim 0.75 is using the web-based authentication for the moment. However, this doesn’t appear to work when going through a HTTP proxy.

What I’ve just done to work around this is create an ssh tunnel to a machine which *does* have direct HTTP access.
ssh -l [user] -L 80:login.yahoo.com:80 [host]

Then add login.yahoo.com to the list of names for 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts.

Scary stuff in this article about “a possible link between underarm deodorants and breast tumours”:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994555. Summary: be wary of deodorants (though it seems that they may have changed to a potentially safer form recently), read the article, and keep an eye out for further information.

I’ll be arriving in California (San Jos�) on 20 January. Training on 21-22 January in Cupertino, and a flight home on Monday 26 January. Yes, that’s three days to do whatever I want—yay! Cool or what?! Hey, guys

!http://www.lyranthe.org/gallery/main.php/download/1846-2/Arinsal_2003.jpg(Snowy Day in Arinsal over Christmas 2003)!

“Lost In Translation”:http://www.lost-in-translation.co.uk/ is a gem. Bill Murray has always impressed me, and this is the best I’ve seen, as he settles into a role which seems to fit him like a well-cut suit. Sound, light and angles help set the atmosphere throughout the story, I’m not giving any major spoilers about that here though. And throughout it all is laced the impact of living in an alien culture where others’ activities seem to have no connection to your own life, the dislocation caused by that, and the effects of jet lag. An evocative, romantic story, which you just gotta see.

I was worried how about Mozilla development might proceed, after the Mozilla organisation was spun off by AOL. And initially afterwards, the updates in CVS seemed to be reduced in number quite dramatically. But I’ve been watching the 1.7a commits stream in, and some great work is being done on Mozilla again. Lots of layout cleanups, preparation for CSS3 etc. And then I had a look at the [list of bugs fixed for Mozilla 1.6](http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=Browser&product=Directory&product=MailNews&product=NSPR&product=NSS&product=PSM&resolution=FIXED&chfield=resolution&chfieldfrom=2003-09-10&chfieldto=2004-01-10&chfieldvalue=fixed) and am very impressed. I won’t complain about the number of CVS commits any more—all the Mozilla guys are doing great work! I look forward to a superb Moz 1.6 release next week.

Recently a survey (the “Gemini Deep Deep Survey”:http://www.gemini.edu/gdds/) was made with the 8-meter Hawaii telescope of the Gemini Observatory, of a period 3–6 billion years after the Big Bang, and discovered many large galaxies up to 3 billion years old. The results were reported at this week’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society, and are surprising as that leaves very little time in the early history of the universe for such large-scale galaxial formations to come into being. Another mystery is that the survey shows a large amount of heavier atoms, and you know what that means… curiouser and curiouser.

In addition, “a large-scale structure was observed”:http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2004/0107filament.html, spread across 300 million light years, at a redshift of close to 2.38. According to standard models, such a structure should not have arisen so quickly.

“Subatomic Tracking Finds Clues to the Unseen Universe”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/09/science/09MATT.html

“Brain May Be Able to Bury Unwanted Memories, Study Shows”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/09/science/09MEMO.html

An “NYTimes article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/international/asia/08LOST.html?ex=1388898000&en=98f9bd88863a14f5&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND which shows how different Japanese culture is from our own. If you leave an umbrella behind you at a pub, are you going to see it again? Hell, no! But lost and found offices thrive in Japan. Once upon a time, people even brought in lost vegetables! The existence of such a culture is quite comforting.

So, who’s going to “this thing”:http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/events/longhorn/?

I would but not sure I can really afford a full day for something that’s more of a curiosity for me at the moment. I have no real intention of working on .NET at least over the next year, and all the information will come out on the web in due course.

Still, it’s an interesting direction (the whole Longhorn framework). I’d like to see Java clean up a bit, maybe I’m being a bit idealistic here, but “people have ideas”:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/07/31/java3.html about what changes could be made, to make Java more consistent and easier to use.

Vaguely on topic since I was talking about Longhorn, message buses seem to be the order of the day. “D-BUS”:http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/dbus seems to be gaining recognition continually. Two years down the line, I can definitely envision a combination of hotplug, udev and d-bus as the low-level centerpiece of a Linux system.