I don't believe this

This picture is from The Guardian 12 February 2009. The caption reads:



"A mysterious metallic object that crashed through the roof of a New Jersey family's home in January 2007 was not a meteorite after all. Scientists say it is a stainless steel alloy that does not occur in nature and is most likely orbital debris, perhaps remnants of a satellite, a rocket or some other spacecraft component".

Now come on guys, we know what space debris does. It either falls as a pile of recogniseable junk or it burns up as it descends. It does not melt into something that looks like an iron meteorite. A stainless steel object falling from a plane would not melt at all.
Stainless steel is iron with 10-20% chromium, 5-15% nickel added. Whilst all metal meteorites are iron-nickel alloys they include no chromium, hence the mystery. Chromium is mined as FeCr₂O₄, no nickel.
So what is it? I don't know, I merely don't think there is a likely explanation. Some phenomena don't presently have explanations, and 'scientists' shouldn't be grabbing the nearest available one and saying 'that must be it'.

Spot the Scientologist

On Saturday a couple of dozen protesters visited the CoS 'secret' headquarters in rural California. Lawyer Graham Berry's interview with the local Fox News station was interrupted by the Scientology PR Director who handed the reporter contact details but answered a request for a comment with "No".
Larger image, photo by cameraanonymous.
Sorry, no prizes for spotting the Scientologist - the look on Graham's face says it all...
The full story of pickets at 'Gold Base' can be found elsewhere, here's a link to a lot of videos. The current series has kept up the cult's reputation for bizarre and creepy behaviour in the face of Americans standing up for their First Amendment rights to say what they damn well want.

Cosplay

Second Life has several Rosen Maiden costumes, the Gothic Lolita Paradise shopping mall has all of them. Here is one of my avatars posing. They are not visible in the screenshot but I managed Suiseseki's dichromatic eyes by making green eyes in the normal way and then adding a red one as an attachment. Long red hair that spills over her dress would also have to be specially made, and I don't have the patience for that!

Shinku is particularly striking in her crimson outfit, and 'Feather' have a proper teaset for her.
So now I can wander about ~desuing and demanding cups of tea, to the confusion of most mundane residents.

HD TV arrives

It did several months ago actually.
I live at the bottom of a narrow and twisty valley so terrestrial TV is and always will be poor, the nearest cable is several miles away and across the Thames so satellite is my only option, doubly so when analog is switched off in 2012 as digital doesn't do poor reception. That leaves me with satellite.
Rupert Murdoch used to have a monopoly on this with Sky TV, though in a rare display of determination the government forced him to offer the channels that are normally free for no subscription and I got my dish that way. From the same satellite there is now a BBC/ITV joint service, Freesat which I recently switched over to.
Is it better? It has less rubbish channels including Sky - Sky makes its money from sport and movie subscription channels which are of no interest to me. And it does have HD for free, for which Sky charges an extra subscription on top of a normal one.

So I watched the Olympics in HD, which was excellent except that with its limited number of HD cameras that meant the BBC either showed everything or nothing, with some sports being totally ignored.

As for normal viewing, the BBC offers evening only HD and mostly endless repeats since they don't have enough cameras to do much production. ITV came up with the brilliant marketing strategy of keeping their HD scheduling secret, only putting up an 'also in HD' message up on their main channel at the last moment.
I guess we'll have to wait until the American switch to HD before more is available.

HD TVs do generate a good computer picture though, with a reasonable 1360x768 resolution.

Second Life

I have one. Can't think why I haven't blogged this before!
I had a brief look at SL several years back, but the interface was clunky and I wasn't enthused enough to continue. A few months ago I tried again, found it much improved, and as soon as I got beyond the 'new player experience' I was hooked.

I'll assume you've at least read the media accounts of Second Life, which indicate that it is populated by pedophiles, virtual conferencing business suits and land sharks. Well those people are there in small numbers, but the bulk of 'residents' do other things.

The difference between SL and other online games is that players have the in world editing program. Almost everything you see in SL is constructed by players - buildings, avatars, vehicles and so on. There is a scripting language that enables them to add animations, sound and video. So what do they do with this? Well actually they do what people do in Real Life...

Have sex. Sex in SL is (for me at least) mostly fun, but now and then a good animation with attractive avatars and a good partner can be surprisingly erotic. For others, I gather it works quite well as a masturbation aid, and good luck to them! It's also interesting as part of the overall kick I get out of roleplaying games, which is to be 'someone else'.

Learn new skills. In SL this means finding out how to Create things, something I've only scratched the surface of so far. I've extensively rebuilt my castle, modified clothes, can do textures but my scripting is still Read Only.

Make money. Well, not so far. as in RL that requires a good product, marketing and after sales service with the added twist that the relative values of things are entirely different. A castle is cheaper than a sex bed because of the time spent creating them, since raw material cost is zero.

Anonymous terrorism

My Anonymous friends have just notched up their sixth monthly worldwide protest against the Church of Scientology, and the cult still hasn't a clue about how to stop them. In most locations the cult seems to have retreated inside its buildings, stuck its fingers in its ears and pretended nothing is happening, which would have been a sensible reaction from the start if the leader of Scientology David Miscavige had effective control over his staff.

However with his rational senior staff leaving or locked up in Scientology's prison camp in California Miscavige is increasingly at the mercy of the fanatics, who are telling members that the Nazi Communist terrorists that the multinational drug companies are paying to attack the Scientology religion will be exposed as sex criminals any day, any month, any year, any decade now. Fine - except that they are telling the press the same because they really believe it.

Personally I've been concentrating recently on getting protests going at Saint Hill, the cult headquarters in the UK. It's a big mansion out in the beautiful Sussex countryside, a pleasant day out with pints in the pub afterwards.

ISP, broadband update

My ISP (Orange) like most large mass market ones offer webspace as part of their package. However as they don't actually make any money out of personal websites their wonks keep trying to correct this. Their first attempt was an ad banner, easily circumvented by linking direct to index.html. Their latest is to delete my website, scrap FTP access and tell me to rebuild from scratch using a crap online editor.
Enough! I moved to the company (Freezone) that look after the Newsfrombree domain for me. They have the dreadfully old fashioned idea that providing services that customers want is a good way to run a business.

On the Broadband front however Orange are improving. I switched to their current package which comes with a wireless router though I'm using its Ethernet connection at present, and it has an automatic speed regulator that typically has me at 3Mb. Heh, right now it's 0.7Mb, it does wobble now and then but at least the connection rarely drops.

Stealth upgrading

Did I mention that the 2006 attempt to upgrade my broadband speed from 1Mb to 2Mb failed? The line was dropping too often so Silent Fred, the BT engineer who doesn't tell you anything, reset it back to 1MB.

Easter Sunday, with no warning, my connection went up to 2Mb again and this time it's holding steady without a single dropout. I can only suppose there's been an upgrade somewhere along the line.

It took me a long hunt on the Internet to find a webpage that explained with numbers how to check your own connection, so let me pass this on:

The two parameters that matter are Signal to Noise ratio (S/N, Margin) and Drop off (Attenuation). Both are measured in decibels (Db).
S/N is the difference in strength between the signal and the background hiss. It needs to be >10Db. Attenuation is the difference between the signal strength when it leaves the Exchange and when it reaches your modem, and the higher the speed the lower the limit for this. 1Mb requires lower than 60Db, 2Mb lower than 45Db.

For the copper wire telephone lines we have in the UK, this equates to ~6km maximum for 1Mb and ~3.5km for 2Mb.

My Attenuation is a steady 40Mb so 2Mb is the most I can get. My S/N is 24Db at 1Mb but 17Db at 2Mb, still OK though it can fall to 10Db on a bad day. I suspect that it is S/N discrimination that has improved for me.

We live in interesting times

This is the title of an entry in another guy's weblog. Mr G Allen is he says just an ordinary American who heard about a local protest, went along to take photographs and find out what was all about.

Later he received a legal letter saying he was a member of the protesting group. The letter accused the group of illegal activity such as making bomb threats and demanded that 'his' organisation stop behaving illegally.

An employee of a nearby coffee shop who just happened to be walking past the protesters received an identical letter. He and she had been followed to their cars and had their number plates photographed by private detectives. This was, apparently, the sole 'evidence' the lawyers had.

OK, you've guessed. This is the Church of Scientology again, making new friends.

Ides of March

The second outing for the Anonymous worldwide pickets against the happy fun cult was just as successful as the first it seems, plus better organised and larger. I attended at London as previously, and whilst waiting for Anonymous to arrive I and a suppressive friend popped into a sandwich bar for sustenance. We were soon joined to our amusement by a spy from the Org a couple of doors away - so the DSA recognised me then! - but too late, my contact from Smith-Kline-Pharma had already handed over the thick wad of notes for me to pass on to the Anonymous Central Committee so we were talking about... I forget, was it the ARSCC elections? Nothing of interest to OSA anyway.

This time Anonymous were loaded with cake, chicken, and good humour. They chanted, cheered honking cars and sang Ron 'Happy Birthday' with three Hip-hip-hoorays; the old folk stood at the back and chatted, it was especially nice to meet a lady who had sailed on the Apollo with Ron. I left when the threatening rain finally started around 16:00, but they were good for hours more.

Joanna on webcam

Back in June I started blogging about a remarkable series of Internet pages and blogs concerning the alternate reality of Joanna. At the time I had assumed that she could not possibly be real, that 'Joanna' was a persona devised for purposes unknown that happened by chance to include Scientology, history, the occult, conspiracy theory and other interests of mine. Was this an extended joke, an alternate reality game? Why was I apparently the only person in the world reading this?

I was wrong.

Over the past two weeks the author has made 21 Youtube videos, presumably influenced by the explosion of such clips from Anonymous and others concerning Scientology. They appear to be a restatement of her reality along with some more mundane information, I haven't watched them all yet, too much at once and I'll vanish down that rabbit hole...

Judgement Day

So I'm sitting trying to wipe this grin off my face.

It's crunch day for Anonymous. Could they bring their merry band of virtual personas out of the Matrix, down the Internets and into the Real World? I say 'is' because since we don't live on Discworld results from California are not in yet, but first reports look good.

I arrived at the London Dianetics and Scientology Improvement Centre at around 11:00 for a quick chat with the bobbies setting up barricades. Barricades? Yes, police radio was reporting crowds assembling at the London Scientology Org a couple of miles away. Hundreds of them...

As planned they moved to Tottenham Court Rd a couple of hours later. It was a noisy but well behaved crowd, improving their chants by the minute - some football fans amongst them I'd say. Placards, masks, leaflets of all descriptions, and an anarcho-syndicalist flag.

My fellow critics had followed them, and it was good to see old friends who had come out of the shadows for the Big Day. There were several Youtube wannabes filming, including a livecam.

Cult reaction? Exactly what I'd hoped for in London. They came out to play, but could only watch in bemusement.

There can be only one doll

Rozen Maiden is a Japanese TV anime series that ran for two seasons 2004/5 plus a 2006 Christmas special. It was popular there but will never be shown in the UK, but then no Japanese anime series of this kind will be shown outside Japan.
Why not? It's a cultural difference. Rozen Maiden is made for teenagers not children. The central (human) characters are all teenagers, and the human plotlines revolve around specifically teenage concerns.

Oh, sorry, go read some background. Read, now!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rozen_Maiden

I watched the whole series over the holidays, it was my treat one episode a day since the TV had nothing I wanted to see except for Kiki's Delivery Service which is, oh dear, an anime. It was... wonderful, the best anime I've watched since 'Scrapped Princess'. I could type pages over how wonderful it is, but I don't expect to convince anyone so, duely noted.

Now my question: am I the only person who can see this? Rozen Maiden is 'Highlander' as played out by magic dolls. Consider: immortal beings who are destined to fight until one is left who gains a great prize? A story which has amongst its themes the consequences of being immortal; the effects on the mortals around them who will grow old and die as they go on?

Hackers destroy Scientology

Well not as such, but it's been an interesting couple of weeks.

Jan 15th, Andrew Morton's much heralded unauthorised (by a long way) biography of Tom Cruise was published. It revealed two shocking facts - Tom was heterosexual and he was a Scientologist. Not many people knew that.
So Tom isn't suing. Being caught lying about having been cured of dyslexia by his religion is it seems a small price to pay for a 'Not Gay' certificate.

The famously litigious Church of Scientology however was distressed to find that the book was in its second half mostly about it and its hitherto publically unknown leader, Mr David Miscavige. As Chairman of the Board of Religious Technology Center and the most ethical being on the planet, Mr Miscavige has been the absolute dictator of the Church since the death of founder L Ron Hubbard in 1986.
The Church put out a 14 page non-denial of the lies in the book but that as I predicted at once was it - no libel writ has been served.

It was then that the bombs began to go off. Cue repeat of the Panorama disaster - a short clip of Cruise from a 2004 Church promotional video, long known about by its critics, popped up on YouTube. Since it appeared to show that Tom had gone raving mad four years ago but we somehow hadn't noticed, the Church tried to get it off the Internet but failed, as it always fails against sufficiently annoyed Freedom of Speech advocates. More clips from the video were posted, and other videos are (I happen to know) queued up ready to roll.

A niece of Mr Miscavige blew her top and wrote an incensed open letter to the Church, which had made its routine denial that it broke up families. "Oh yes it does", she refuted, claiming she had been cut off from her parents.

From out of nowhere an Internet prankster community known as Anonymous (because they are) suddenly got serious, announcing in a series of hilariously over the top video manifestos that they were going to drive the cult off the Internet starting with a DDos attack. That's where you get lots of people to access a website all at once, so it overloads and crashes.

If they were expecting moral support from the existing critics of the cult they didn't get it, indeed a chorus of condemnation resulted. DDosing and hacking were Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Internet vs Scientology war, held by both sides but not used. Alarmed, Anonymous switched tactics and surprisingly decided to try to get their previously virtual people out onto the real life streets for a worldwide protest February 10th, which we await with some trepidation.

Spam

A survey of the spam situation on my main Email address:

Orange, my ISP, stores Email in a webmail system before I collect it with my regular Email program, Thunderbird. It has an optional spam filter. Yesterday there were 7644 Emails in its 7 day Junk folder, 45/hour. About 3/hour get through.
There are very few false positives, mostly receipts for shopping online. Orange also seems to use an IP blocking database, so I've had to whitelist a few friends.

What Orange misses are recent spam types such as Image only, so I have my own filter built in to Thunderbird, which reduces that 3/hour to 3/day.

Googling around I found that resetting Bayesian filters and giving them fresh spam to eat can help. So I have, and we'll see if things improve.

Halloween updates

In a 26 October 2006 post I noted that an AVG anti-virus program update had fixed some Email problems. It just happened again! Spooky...

The latest AVG update (7.5.503) appears to have not only restored the Email scanner without disabling PGP but also cured the problem I was having with not being able to send Emails via my ISP's server, though weirdly the Google Gmail server was fine. I've had my Email accounts happily Emailing each other PGP encrypted messages anyway.

Picket

This Orange Multi Media Message was sent wirefree from an Orange MMS phone.

Blogged from the pub! Back home, here's another - Gingernut modelling an XL Clambake shirt.




Reports elsewhere, but it was an uneventful event.

Hello world

...or blog anyway.
Having acquired a camera/phone/txt/USB/blog/Email thing, I spend a happy weekend persuading it to do so, acquiring another pageful of passwords, secret codes and stuff along the way.

Facebook cleverly cross referenced my mobile number which it knew with the number of the phone that was calling it and linked up without needing confirmation. Clever but spooky as it didn't tell me it could do this.

Blogger wouldn't reply though. It seems Orange affix the international code when messaging abroad and then won't accept incoming messages using that code, which is dumb. I had to Email Blogger for help, which they quickly provided.

PC Interface OK, except that it wants to Synchronize with programs I don't use. Oh well, at least deleting messages is a lot easier on a PC monitor than on a phone screen.

False positive

For the first time in Vista, AVG found a virus this week. Or... it was a trojan in the DLL and EXE for a popular install program, so I had several copies scattered in Temp folders going back six months to the modem driver install. That seemed unlikely.
There are several online virus checkers for suspicious files. I tried a couple and the files came up clean, so this was an AVG only alert.
I typed the name AVG came up with into Google, and several forums were discussing Generic6.UMS already. It looked to be a 'false positive', an error which we'd all downloaded with that day's AVG auto update, and sure enough the next day's update removed it.
So AVG working correctly then, and this is the first time I've had it do this. I expect there are lots of reformatted hard drives and new installs out there now!

Medieval II - Total War (2)

The default shortcut provided goes to Launcher.exe, a small program that accesses the Internet to provide details of updates and mods. Unfortunately Launcher on Vista takes 50% of CPU doing absolutely nothing and the main program fails to unload it, even when exited. It has to be turned off using Task Manager.
The solution is to create a shortcut to medieval2.exe.

Creative's sound driver for Vista remains buggy after 9 months, they seem to be unable to fix it. They did come up with an EAX patch, so that kind of works with Windows and more importantly with the range of games that don't have a 'plain vanilla' Soundblaster setting such as Medieval II. And then, knowing they had hordes of pissed off customers of Mongolian proportions, they charged $10 for it.

The game? It's fine, lots of epic battles.