Monthly Archives: February 2008

Nature

Pollution in the World’s Oceans

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Amazing article about the extent of pollution in the world’s oceans:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-ocean30jul30,0,6670018,full.story

The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour.

When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips blistered and peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos.

Linux, Tech

Dell BIOS updates using Linux

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Dell provides Ubuntu support for updating the BIOS of Dell systems:

http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/12/05/37446.aspx

… be sure the Universe section is enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list, then run as root:

wget -q -O – http://linux.dell.com/repo/firmware/bootstrap.cgi | bash
aptitude install firmware-addon-dell
aptitude install $(bootstrap_firmware -a)
update_firmware

Thanks Dell!

Nature

Waving frog waves for the last time

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Sad:

The Panamanian golden frog communicates with other frogs by semaphore in the form of gentle hand waves.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7219803.stm

What’s is amazing is that they took video of them in the wild before the last wild populations were destroyed by a fungi:

… after filming for the BBC One series Life In Cold Blood, the frogs had to be rescued from the wild, due to the threat of chytrid fungus.

More details on chytrid fungus and a possible cure:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7067613.stm

The blow that chytrid has dealt to the frog population is already immense.

The disease has probably accounted for one-third of all the losses in amphibian species to date, says Professor Rick Speare, an expert in amphibian diseases who works with the University of Otago’s frog research group.

Update:
Just found this video on YouTube that from the BBC documentary mentioned above:

kde, Linux, Tech

kde4 & debian!

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Works great! Following the instructions here:

http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/experimental.html

However, if you install the KDE4 kdeartwork package, any remaining kde3 packages, such as k3b & amarok, will uninstalled and aren’t available for KDE4 on Debian yet.

See the screenshot that highlights transparency:

KDE4 on Debian

However, this does seems buggier than on my laptop running Ubuntu. For instance, whenever I type in the brower (such as writing an e-mail using gmail), the pager flickers off and on, and sometimes the whole bar on the bottom flickers on and off. I’ve tried setting KWIN_NVIDIA_HACK=1 and that didn’t help.