www.gamma.net.nz

What's the best thing about Windows?  You can run Ubuntu on top of it.

Okay, so I am stuck with a locked up enterprise computer running Windows XP (... and yes we run IE6.0).  However, when I wanted to start to learn some OCaml during my spare time on my work computer I did not want to use MS Based Technology, I am not comfortable with it as a development environment. I new I had to get some flavour of Linux on it.  Linux, for me,  is the ultimate development environment, and I prefer working with it.  At first I looked at installing into full hardware virtualisation, like VMWare, Xen and VirtualBox.  I ended up trying to install Kubuntu under VirtualBox from Oracle.  It was damn slow, my Enterprise Dell Latitude D620 has no hardware virtualisation support, so the software does it, and this tends to be real slow.  Kubuntu was painfully slow using to use and for some reason it would only run in a 800x600 window.

Then I discovered Portable Ubuntu Remix (PUbuntu).  I don't know how it works, but it's great and I'm hooked.  In summary it has the following features:

• it runs Ubuntu 9.10 on top of Windows (I use it on XP, but I think it works on all versions).
• the total size is just under 4GB, so it fits on a USB nicely - this is great.
• it runs as a standalone, no need to install anything - this is awesome.
• it looks, feels and behaves just like Ubuntu.
• it comes with Synaptic / apt so you can add/remove any software, and it uses actual Ubuntu repositories, not specially developed ones.
• it's relatively fast, you can tell it's not native, but for browsing and writing code you don't notice any lag.
• It's super stable.
• The clipboard is shared between Windows and PUbuntu.
• It uses Windows as a window manager - not the best, but it is sufficient.
• Windows file system is accessable - I don't know if this is a good thing or not ;)

One cool feature it could have is to enable hibernate  This would allow me to hibernate just PUbuntu and bring it back up again to the same place when I start it again.

I really don't know what technology it uses to do this, it's not documented that I can find. And only the sourceforge page exists, the original webpage just redirects to back to sourceforge.  But it is actually running Linux, running dmesg shows the full and typical Linux log and it says it's running version 2.6.33-co-0.8.0.

... actually a little digging shows that it is running on top of coLinux, which allows you to run linux on top of Windows.  Either way I am highly impressed and use it every day now, but not at work.

Dunedin police say they know the two women who allegedly abused and assaulted a pair of cyclists over the weekend. New Zealand representative cyclist Shane Melrose, 30, and Logan Edgar, 19 were riding two-abreast on Loan Metal Rd towards Outram, 11km northwest of Mosgiel, on Saturday when a car forced them off the road. The driver sounded the horn and the passenger shouted abuse out the window before the vehicle stopped suddenly, forcing Mr Melrose into gravel on the wrong side of the road. "It came up pretty quickly and tried to collect us with the front door," Mr Edgar told The Otago Daily Times.  He was caught behind the open car door when a woman got out and began slapping and punching him, he said.She also threw a bottle at him."The woman was going nuts. They dragged my bike into the front passenger seat and took off," he said. "It's stranger than fiction." Mr Edgar said he was frustrated by the attack and theft of his $12,000 bike and hit the car, breaking his hand. Police yesterday found his undamaged bike in a ditch.Dunedin Senior Sergeant Bruce Ross today said he knew who the women were and they would be spoken to shortly.

Source:stuff.co.nz

None of the mainstream news stories I read covered the story with enough detail for my liking. So here it is from the horse's mouth

Results of a survey of 4000 Britains:

1. Wheel 
2. Aeroplane
3. Light bulb 
4. internet 
5. PCs
6. Telephone 
7. Penicillin
8. iPhone 
9. Flushing toilet
10. Combustion engine.

Scrapertown from California is a place. on Vimeo.

Found via lastfm.

I have stuffed ~900 KML files from tracks.org.nz into a geo database and displayed them in a map.

Each map move event queries the db for the currently visible tracks, this allows me to display a large data set, that would not be able to all be rendered at once.

This is a proof of concept so apologies to Firefox users if its all a bit slow. 

I am trying to keep the number of points as low as possible by using postgis' simplify() on the line data when zoomed out and using bounding boxes when zoomed out even further. You'll notice line complexity increases as you zoom in.

Next step is displaying info bubble with all the track details when a track is clicked on.

I listened to an excellent discussion of Vertical Farming on a podcast this morning. Vertical farming is the idea of growing produce in a building. 

Two reasons why this could be a great idea struck me immediately.

1. As the price of petrol increases, growing produce locally will become more economical. Vertical farms could allow cities to grow locally.

2. Climate change could mean increased droughts or floods in some areas, climate controlled farming can prevent damage to crops.

Here is a link to an mp3 of the podcast:

Futures in Biotech: Vertical Farms

You'll need to skip to about 33mins in for the vertical farming discussion to start

Please sign the Wellington Declaration:

http://www.gopetition.com/online/35443.html

The Wellington declaration is a call for transparency and public involvement in the secret ACTA treaty negotiations. [ed]

If you don't know what the Wellington Declaration is here is some background:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/04/the-wellington-declaration.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

http://publicacta.org.nz/sign-the-wellington-declaration/