james holden

Last weekend, we visited some friends in Leicester and went to the Christmas steam day at Abbey Pumping Station. The massive engines were in steam, so I shot some video. It was nice to see them again - I haven’t seen them running for about 15 years since I used to visit with my Dad. The experience brought back a lot of memories.

Here’s a video I made of the engines running:

They were built in 1891 to pump sewage out of Leicester and up to the Beaumont Leys treatment works. Each of the four independent engines has an effective output power of 174 horsepower. Each flywheel is 21 feet in diameter and weighs 21 tons. They stretch from two floors below ground where the bottoms of the pumps are, to two floors above ground where the massive 15 ton beams sit. A steam pressure of 80psi is needed to run the engines.

Macworld is reporting that MySpace will use ‘audio fingerprinting’ technology to automatically identify copyright infringing material at the point at which it is uploaded.

The system is provided by Gracenote, and appears to be a mixture of ID3 tag recognition and audio waveform matching.

Of course, there are many valid reasons to upload material that the system may tag as infringing, such as parody or critical review. It’ll be impossible for any blogger to add clips of songs to a music review now.

Moller International are auctioning a prototype of their M400X VTOL flying car.

Current bidding is up to $2,501,500.00, which is a bit out of my price range. The bidders questions and answers are hilarious!

Q: Does it come with a Flux Capacitor or similar?
A: The M400X prototype is powered by eight, internal combustion rotary engines…

It seems a little strange to be writing about a piece of Windows software here, because I’ve not used Windows for about 5 years. It turns out that, while I’ve been happily ripping my CDs and encoding them with Ogg Vorbis, the unfortunate souls still using the other OS are having to put up with some sort of ropey media player that tries to stop you from transferring your media files to other computers you own, to your portable music player and so on.

All is not lost for those people though, because some enterprising chap has produced a utility that defeats this control mechanism. Because it seems that Microsoft deem possession of the utility to be copyright infringement (which is obviously isn’t), many sites are unable or unwilling to host the program. I don’t agree with Microsoft’s stance against fair use, so I’m hosting a copy here for anyone who wants it. You can get it on the FairUse4WM download page. The copyright of this file belongs to the author of the utility, not Microsoft. If the author wishes that I remove the file, then I’ll gladly do so.

Dave Farber just posted an interesting analysis of the current airport anti-terrorism precautions on the Interesting People list.

Based on the claims in the media, it sounds like the idea was to mix H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide, but not the low test kind you get at the pharmacy), H2SO4 (sulfuric acid, of necessity very concentrated for it to work at all), and acetone (known to people worldwide as nail polish remover), to make acetone peroxides. You first have to mix the H2O2 and H2SO4 to get a powerful oxidizer, and then you use it on acetone to get the peroxides, which are indeed explosive.

Link

Once again, another one of those posts for my future self!

If you’re getting:

Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client

…after upgrading to MySQL 4.1+, it’s because your client application doesn’t support the new password hashes.

The solution is to do the following:


SET PASSWORD FOR 'theuser'@'thehost' = OLD_PASSWORD('thepassword');


For a more permanent solution set add old_passwords in the [mysqld] section of the my.cnf file. This will keep any future password changes in the older format.

As always, don’t forget to do a flush privileges;!

After a slightly ropey prototype, I’ve put together a proper SMS message page template for Wordpress. It uses the PHP5 Soap client to send the messages via AQL’s SMS Soap service.

To stop broken scripts from spamming me, you have to complete a captcha. You also need to change the default message or it won’t let you send it.

We went to Paris last week to visit friends. With all the great things to take pictures of, I thought I’d try my hand at some fake tilt shift photography. It’s a photographic technique that results in pictures that look kind of like photos of little scale models.

I took this picture of the square on the opposite side of the river from the Eiffel tower (click the image for a larger version):

I’ll do some more later on, I think it’s pretty good for a first attempt though!

Yesterday I drove to Edinburgh and back. Now we’ve pretty much got to the end of deciding where things are going in the new house, it turned out that there wasn’t really room for my SGI Challenge L machine any more, so I took it up to live out the rest of it’s days with Ian Mapleson, of the SGI Depot.

Given that the thing weighs just short of 100kg, it was quite a struggle getting it into the car, but once it was strapped down, it was a pretty uneventful drive really.

I’ve chatted with Ian via email quite a bit in the past, and he’s very well known in the SGI community, but I’d never visited him before. His house up in Edinburgh is completely stacked with all things SGI, from the Challenge XL in the garage, to the Octanes in the bedroom, right through to the Fuels in the lounge. It think he’s got around 150+ machines there in various states.

The Challenge L took it’s place in the garage along side it’s big brothers, the Challenge XL and Onyx.

“Intelligent design is just a mutation of creationism.”