Saturday Apr 22, 2006
When we moved here we were told the place in this photo was a bird sanctuary. Today it remind me of the rubbish strewn river that moved Iron Eyes Cody to tears in the old Keep America Beautiful ads. I thought about organizing a clean-up, but it would require dozens of expensive skips (dumpsters) and the type of earth-moving equipment which is in high demand by the hyperactive construction industry. I've seen cleaner landfills. At least the concrete swan doesn't have bird flu.
There are about 5 acres of parks and other green space within a 10 minute walk of our home. Unfortunately, most of it acquires a new layer of broken glass and other rubbish every weekend. This dumping has probably has more to do with lazyness than the 7.50 Euro bin charges. Friends told me that such "trashing the landlord's property" is a leftover from colonialism. If so, it's really out of place now that Ireland is independent and has the highest home ownership rate in the world. Landscape pollution does vary by country. Cairo, Tokyo and Hong Kong had less trash even though they have 8-10 times the population. Ever since the "Keep America Beautiful" ads, U.S. landscape pollution is usually in the form of advertising billboards and graffiti. Some of Antalya's 1970s architecture wasn't beautiful, but I didn't see any graffiti there. There is an unintentially humorous bit of graffiti near our home, apparently from a street gang called THE WORRIERS. Oh dear, Oh my! Maybe the culprit meant to spell "the Warriers?" ...or even "The Warriors" (Thanks for the correction Johann, this is why I don't write my blog in spray paint!)
The best "earth day" news I can come up with is that we were able to organize a second recycling bin to compensate for the fact that green bin collection is only once a month. I also heard that Sun Ireland is powered (at least in part) by offshore wind energy.
Wednesday Apr 12, 2006
I assumed that Sun's "eat thy own dogfood" policy wasn't terribly unusual. So I was suprised to learn that Novell still runs Microsoft Windows on many of its corporate desktops. In the spirit of fun competition, I wonder if Johnathan or whoever has the numbers and authorization could publish:
How many JDS (SuSE Linux based) desktops do we run?
How many JDS (Solaris/OpenSolaris based) desktops do we run?
How many GNOME desktops (including Sun Ray) do we run?
How many Windows "dual boot" desktops we run?
How many GNOME (Linux and Solaris based) desktops have we delivered to our customers?
I don't have the answers but it would really surprise me if we didn't beat SuSE both in number of SuSE based (JDS1,JDS2) desktops and number of Solaris GNOME (JDS3+) desktops deployed internally. We certainly have a lower percentage of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft office desktops! I wonder if SuSE could let us in on what is taking them so long to migrate away from MS Windows. The obstacles to their migration could be useful for others in the open source desktop community. I'd have to admit that Sun doesn't have as much experience with internal migration from Microsoft Windows because most of us could never justify migrating to MS-Windows in the first place.
Sunday Apr 02, 2006
My family and I just returned from a trip with the Irish Federation of Astronomical Societies
(IAS) to Antalya Turkey to view the March 29, 2006 total eclipse of the sun. We're not the kind of dedicated eclipse chasers who travel to the center of the south pacific, arctic and antarctic regions or remote areas of siberia or sahara desert in order to see totality. But for us this rare sky event is a perfect excuse to visit a corner of the world we might not otherwise see, but which isn't too expensive or difficult to reach. We were rewarded with warm weather, friendly people, spectacular mountainous mediterranean scenery and well-preserved ancient cities. We also had clear skies over Manavgat for the total solar eclipse.
The above photo was a 1/8 second exposure at F2 taken with my broken Casio QV-4000. The missing lens element gives a distorted, but very wide view which shows the sky, eclipsed sun and the foreground.
We set up a play tent so that my daughter and her new friends could play together during the partial phases. Capturing a total solar eclipse on film is even more difficult than capturing a sunset, a rainbow or a dark starry sky. And most of us don't want to spend the short time of this rare event looking through a viewfinder or at an LCD screen. That's my excuse for why none of the totality photos I attempted look anything like what we saw. My wife took a couple of photos with her tiny Canon Powershot SD300 which look like text book photos of totality and the diamond ring.
It was an amazing experience. If you don't see us in Shanghai or southern Japan for the 2009 eclipse, look for us in southern Illinois or Eastern Oregon1 for the next contintental U.S. eclipse in 2017!
1 Currently eastern Oregon is semi-desert and southern Illinois/Missouri is typical midwestern "anything goes" weather, but with global warming kicking in, maybe it will be the reverse by 2017.
Update: University of Wisconsin-Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) put together a very clear Java animation of the eclipse as seen from Meteosat-8.
Update: Albert White, another Sun Ireland guy who is active with IFAS, was also at the Antalya solar eclipse expedition. He just
posted his eclipse photos and a bit of audio. If a 1999 honeymoon in rainy Gerlingen Germany counts, this is my third total eclipse, Next time I'll leave it to Albert, my wife and my daughter to take the photos and I'll just look!
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