2011 — 26 August: Friday
Another dull grey start to the morning as I listen to the uninspiring BBC Radio 3 news. They do make some odd choices in their selection. Including this one that originated in a Press Release from Stanford University Medical Center (sic). I tracked it down elsewhere as I didn't hear with whom our ancestors had been "cross-breeding" in ways that had assisted their immune systems:
Although little is known about the Denisovans as the finger bone and tooth are the only fossils; by extracting a genome sequence from the finger bone they found an overlapping with modern humans. Gene flow from the Denisovans into modern humans has left the highest frequency of the HLA-B*73 allele in populations in West Asia, the most likely site for the fortuitous mating to have taken place.
One wonders what the (various) "good books" would have to say about such behaviour. I love that phrase "fortuitous mating"1 :-)
On with the show. I like Fridays. And "Plum" web sites like this one.
I'm not proud of...
... the appalling extent of my ignorance. But at least, in retirement, I can do a little something from time to time to paper over the cracks. "Agora" arrived a day or so ago; it's the tale of Hypatia — a lady I know all too little about...
And it's flanked by two of today's arrivals: issues #300 and #301 of "The Comics Journal". Since I last bought a copy of this fine American magazine,2 it seems to have metamorphosed into a giant book. Issue #301 weighs in at 620 pages, and includes what I hope will be a fascinating examination of the doubtless varied responses to Robert Crumb's equally fascinating illustrated Book of Genesis.
My new pair of walking boots has also turned up. Excellent. It's 11:11 and I need to nip out on a little errand or two. At least it's not (quite) raining at the moment.
What a difference...
... a few hours can make. I'm now able to host my entire Intranet web site, and my entire online music collection, and all my digitised photos on a dinky little black 1TB USB hard drive and serve up whatever I want throughout the house courtesy of my little (smaller than the Tablet PC) magic white netbook, bought (but criminally un-used in its original "Xandros" Linux incarnation) in early 2008:
Thank you, Brian! (He's even written a three-page instruction manual for me.) The simplest part of Day 1 of customer acceptance trials was the way the Roku Soundbridge network music player made instant best friends with the Firefly music server it automagically found on my network. The part that still needs most looking at is either a permissions issue, or perhaps a Windows 7 firewall port issue, with the lightweight "Webmin" HTML scripts package used for configuring aspects of the "LAMP" stack from any web browser on my network on any desktop device, but I don't yet need to poke at that.
The web serving part (which was my top priority requirement) has already proved to be a slot-in replacement for my current inhouse server; it runs exactly the same level of Ubuntu Server Edition, after all. The music player audio/video streaming application and file manager (with control over things like playlists) is Ampache, which was new to both of us. The music is streamed perfectly by Firefly to the Roku quite independently.3 And the photos are under the control of Gallery. That looks rather like a variant of the Java-based "JAlbum" application I used back when I was still building and publishing galleries of my DVD artwork. It is also new to me, but already looks most promising
Next task: work through the 2,112 podcasts salvaged from my "real" iPod (as opposed to the 24" iMac system I passed along to Junior a couple of months ago). I thought one iTunes upgrade too many had trashed them all, but Brian's managed to suck them off onto a separate disk for me. Sadly, they have lost the tagging, so each will need visiting in turn, as it were. Good job it's a Bank Holiday weekend, heh?
While looking for...
... something completely different, I happened to alight upon the Wikipedia entry for the Spanish island of Lanzarote. (I was intending to check the origin and meaning of the name as it seems I was misinformed originally during the first holiday [of two] that Christa and I enjoyed there more than 30 years ago.) There's currently a spectacular photo of the reflecting pool in the Cave of los Verdes, scene of one of the more panicky moments of my life when I lingered behind during a tour and all the lights suddenly went out. Not my finest hour, trust me!
