Harrowdown Hill

Some choice quotes from Haider

A couple of quotes thanks to Christianfuchs’s Weblog:

“… the right of natives for their country is stronger than the right of foreigners for family life. Austria should therefore exit the European Human Rights Convention.”

“I visited friends in Namibia, the former German Southwest-Africa, together with my family, because I wanted to test a little bit how living together with the blacks looks if they have the majority. It is really a problem with the blacks. Even in places, where they have the majority, they accomplish nothing. This is really a lost cause”

What a thoroughly nasty man Haider was.

Bob Breitband on a G4 Power PC iBook mac

Bob Breitband seems to be the cheapest not-quite-a-contract mobile internet service on offer in Austria at the moment (55 Euro for the modem, including 1 GB of transfer, then after that it’s 4 Euro per GB).  So, I ordered a starter pack without checking to see if my iBook mac would be capable of talking to the modem. It cannot, I learned from the Windows(-only) CD in the pack, and from their helpline.  I will have to use a different modem, they sadly informed me.  Thanks to Google I got the thing working eventually anyway.

Here’s the useful info:

• the USB thingy (3G modem?) that comes with the Bob pack is a Huawei E160.
• APN stands for Access Point Name.
• A posting on Ev’s Tech Thought of the Day blog got me started, but the drivers posted there don’t work on my machine (they appear to be Intel only).
• The Bob competitor yesss! has a page with a Mac download for the E160 (found thanks to this forum), see “Installation für Mac OSX” at the bottom of this page.  This got me a little further: the software talks to the modem, and communicates with the the mobile network.  However it didn’t let me connect to t’internet.
• The driver for the E220 works with the E160.  Grab it over here and follow the instructions here for the driver that doesn’t work.
• One key detail seems to be disabling the SIM card’s PIN using the yessss!-site downloadable software I mentioned above.

Some kind soul who is struggling with the same problem and who has time on their hands might want to piece this together systematically.  I’m not going to risk killing my net connection today to work out what bits actually do the work!

Computer programming

Ducks

(From here.)

Nicholas Lezard on pub quizes

“Newcomers and innocent bystanders are encouraged – no, bullied – into taking part. The young are particularly welcome, because they cannot pace their drinking, not that it would matter much if they could, for they know absolutely f**k-all about anything, especially as the quiz is set by the regulars, none of whom is ever going to see 45 again, and whose frame of reference reflects this.”

“The real point of the quiz, as far as I can see, is not to win, but for everyone to shout at each other.”

(Well on a particular pub quiz, but I think it’s a general phenomena.)

Experimental bankomat studies

Suppose you go to a cash machine (a.k.a. hole in the wall, money machine), type in your PIN (note: I did not write “PIN number” as that angers some people), and successfully withdraw some money.  What happens if you forget to collect your money?

Eva hypothesised that the money would be sucked back into the machine.

I hypothesised there’d be some beeping, but the money would stay available for any passerby to nick.

(Note, parallel working hypotheses—see T. C. Chamberlin, 1890—this is real science.)

We ran an experiment with one (1) cash machine on one (1) occasion.  For security purposes I cannot reveal the bank, because the result probably severely p’ed off a techie somewhere.

Here’s what happened: the machine did not beep, but waited for a while before displaying an Out of Order message.  The money was not sucked in so we could grab it and run.

The lady in the queue behind us seemed unimpressed.

Empirical science works.

Harry Patch (In memory of)

New Radiohead tune (thanks Sally for the tip-off!)…

Give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves
I’ve seen devils coming up from the ground
I’ve seen hell upon this earth
The next will be chemical but they will never learn

Swine flu craziness in New Statesman

(This full page ad was in this week’s issue.)

Art hate