Derek Sorensen

Pick a card, any card.

Interesting article in the New York Times about the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC a few weeks back. Two theoretical physicists, Holger B. Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, have proposed that the Higgs Boson is so “abhorrent to nature” that the future universe is somehow reaching back in time to the present, and sabotaging the LHC to prevent it from creating one.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

They’ve even come up with a way to test the idea: draw a single card from a deck of 1 million cards. If the card you draw is a particular one, then cancel the project. If they are right, then doing the card experiment would seem to be a sensible thing to do as it would save an awful lot of wasted time and money if the project is doomed to failure anyway. Those in charge don’t see it that way though, and have decided not to go along with the Nielsen and Ninomiya’s gamble.

Anyone curious enough to want to read their paper can find it here.

What’s interesting is that the pair started writing about their theory as far back as July 2007 when they predicted in their original papoer that the LHC would fail. It wasn’t until Autumn 2008 that the LHC fell over shortly after being turned on.

These guys might just be having a joke at everyone’s expense, although it appears that many in the Physics community aren’t laughing. While some physicists think this kind of speculation isn’t a problem, others describe the pair’s ideas as ‘embarrassing crackpottery’, or simply ‘crackpotty’.

Personally, I think it might be the beginning of the evidence I’ve been looking for: evidence that we are, indeed, living in the matrix.

Derek

It’s always sad when someone dies unnecessarily. Yes, of course, there is a sense of “divine justice” when the victim is a quack who dies of the same quackery they have been peddling to unsuspecting victims - and this seems to happen more often than you’d expect - but at least we can have some confidence that they believed in the snake-oil they were selling.
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This post is for the techies. If you don’t consider yourself a techie, look away now.

Ok, now we’ve got rid of them, let’s talk about Joint Ventures.

If it hasn’t happened to you yet then it almost certainly will eventually. Someone comes along with a sure-fire idea but needs someone with your skillset to make it work. He[1] has no money to invest, so invites you to be part of a joint venture. Perhaps you’ll be offered equal shares in the proceeds, although IME you’ll usually be offered a lot less, because - after all - it was he who had the Brilliant Idea. And Brilliant Ideas are worth their weight in gold[2], aren’t they?
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The phone rings. You pick it up.

“Hello?”

The voice at the other end of the line says, “Have you heard … Tesco are planning a superstore in [insert your town here]”.

If you live in a small town, as I do, then to hear that Tesco are planning on moving in is not dissimilar to hearing a loved one tell you they have been diagnosed with a life-threatening disease. The next time you visit your town’s centre, you try to imagine it with no bakery, no butcher, no greengrocer. In their place a charity shop, or a vacant shopfront with a ragged to-let sign and whitewashed windows.

“But”, I hear you say, “It doesn’t have to be like that, does it? Surely local shops can compete with Tesco. After all, they are all selling the same things, competing in the same market. And anyway, the local shops sell lots of things that Tesco never will. You can’t buy [speciality product] in Tesco, but my local Butcher/Baker/Greengrocer does. People will shop at the local shop to get the things they can’t get at Tesco.”

And this is true. People will still buy the speciality items from the small retailers who provide them. But the problem is, selling a handful of speciality items isn’t enough to keep those small shops open. The local baker, who bakes a special type of bread much adored by the few customers who love it, isn’t able to sustain his business if nobody buys his regular sliced white loaves. And when the majority of people who used to visit the town are now shopping at the new Tesco, positioned just far enough away to make a trip into town more bother than it’s worth, there is only one outcome: that family baker who has been in your town since your grandmother was a girl is going to close. Another victim of the retailer presently known as Tescopoly.

But relax, it’s not going to happen to you. There’s nowhere in your town they could build a superstore. Is there?

That’s what we in Newport Pagnell thought until a few weeks ago, when Tesco announced they intended to move in to the former Aston Martin Lagonda site on Tickford Street. Now we are looking forward to a couple of years of fighting the Tesco cancer; I hope we win; there’s certainly enough public opposition that it’ll not be an easy thing for the local council to give it the nod, but it’s early days.

If you are a resident of Newport Pagnell or the surrounding area and you’d like to help stop Tesco turning our beautiful town centre into a row of boarded up shops, then please join the campaign at http://NoTesco.org.uk.

Say NO to a Tesco Superstore at Aston Martin, Newport Pagnell.

Derek

Say NO to a Tesco Superstore at Aston Martin, Newport Pagnell.

Tesco has submitted a planning application to Milton Keynes Council for the erection of a store of 15000 square feet with possible expansion to 20000 sq ft. This is almost the size of the Waitrose store (21000 sq ft) in Milton Keynes city centre. It is to be located about 500 metres from the town’s High Street on the Aston Martin Lagonda site in Newport Pagnell.

This proposed store will have a detrimental effect on Newport Pagnell High Street and the local area. Tesco’s size and market share mean they can dominate the local market.

A number of local people have formed an action group to oppose the plans and the campaign is well under way. If you live in or near Newport Pagnell and would like to get involved please join us. You can find out more our website, at http://NoTesco.org.uk. The site is new, but already we have a number of relevant documents to download, including simple campaign posters, copies of the plans, and various briefing documents, all accessible from our download section, and a handful of discussion forums which are gradually gathering pace. And if you want to get involved, please sign up to the site and let us know you’d like to help.

If you would would like to oppose the Planning Application for a Tesco Store at Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd. Newport Pagnell, please write to:

Or email to: planning.enquiries@milton-keynes.gov.uk

Or phone: 01908 252274

Head your letter with the following: Outline Planning Application for a Tesco Store and Ancillary Works at Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd Tickford St Newport Pagnell MK16 9AN: Ref No 09/00530/OUT.

Write that you wish to register your objections to the proposal to develop a Tesco Store of up to 20000 sq ft on the old Aston Martin site, Tickford Street, about 500 metres from the centre of Newport Pagnell.

You might also wish to send copies of your letter to our local MP, and the members of Milton Keynes Planning Committee

Say NO to a Tesco Superstore at Aston Martin, Newport Pagnell.

Derek

On Wednesday I posted a blog about getting TortoiseCVS working on Windows Vista. Out of curiosity, I googled for it the next day using the search term “TortoisePlink has stopped working” and it was at number two. On Friday it was at number one. Today (Saturday) google doesn’t appear to have heard about it - no matter what search terms I use, Google returns everything but. I even tried “TortoisePlink has stopped working +site:dereksorensen.com”. Very strange. I’m not really bothered about it, just wondering how this can be.

I notice some porn site (going by the name of Lord Matt) has copied the first line of the post and is now number one in Windows Live Search; I wonder if this is related?

Sometimes I think the internet is such a snake pit, we were better off without it.

Derek

If you are trying to get TortoiseCVS working on Windows Vista, but keep getting the error “TortoisePlink has stopped working”, read on.

On Monday I took delivery of a shiny new Dell Inspiron 1510 and so far I’m really pleased with it. I opted for the standard install of Vista Home Premium SP1, with some trepidation as there are a lot of stories about how awful it is. I’m fairly new to Vista; my first contact with it was when I changed jobs two months ago and at the end of my first week was presented with a new laptop with Vista Pro installed.

But despite the horror stories I’ve read elsewhere, I’m pretty happy. However, I did encounter one problem which was, for me, a show-stopper. I couldn’t get CVS to work. I’ve been using CVS for quite a few years now, and have a large library of software in a CVS repository on an ageing Dell SC420 running Fedora Core 4 (yes, I know, I should really upgrade - but it works, so why fix it)?

My old box is an XP pro machine, and I use TortoiseCVS as a client for convenience, so naturally the first thing I did on Monday evening was install TortoiseCVS and see if I could get some kind of connection. Obviously I ignored the warning from the installer that Tortoise might not work on Vista, as it has been working quite happily at work on my Vista Pro box.

I realised I might have a few tries, but the first thing I tried was to enter the following in the CVSROOT, and try to connect:

:ext:dereks@crowe:/home/dereks/cvsroot

(crowe is the hostname of the Fedora box, and dereks is the CVS user)

I expected one of two things to happen:

1. Failure to connect at all
2. A password request to appear, followed by failed authentication as it’s been so long since I logged on to that box manually, I wasn’t sure I remembered the password.

What actually happened was a popup from Windows which said: “TortoisePlink has stopped working”.

Ok, off to Google. It appears other have had the same problem, and have found solutions in a number of ways: turning off Vista’s UAC (User Access Control), disabling various protocols on the network connection, uninstalling McAfee (why does everyone seem to hate McAfee?), turning off anything remotely resembling a firewall, and so on. And believe me, I tried them all. And every time I tried to connect using ext I got the same error: “TortoisePlink has stopped working”.

I’d installed PuTTY and could connect using it via SSH, so I was fairly happy that SSH was possible, but I was having no success at all with TortoiseCVS, and all down to something wrong with TortoisePlink, or Vista’s interaction with it.

One post I found seemed to indicate that the problem was with Vista’s handling of the way that TortoisePlink was restarting CVS (I must admit I didn’t understand the details, as although I’m a good applications programmer, and have some experience with systems work, much of the discussion seemed to require knowledge of Windows internals which I don’t have) but the situation seemed quite hopeless; it seems that once you’ve got this problem, it stays.

Ok, so let’s use a different client. After all, if Tortoise is broken on Vista, perhaps there are other clients which aren’t? WinCVS, sadly, fared little better; and I even read reports of the same issue with various SVN clients, again intractable, and I was beginning to wonder if I’d end up shelling out for XP Pro - which I do feel would be a backward step as over the past couple of months I’ve got to quite like Vista; plus I wanted to be able to test the software I write on Vista as well as XP and without a Vista box that’s quite difficult.

Without much hope of success, I pretended I had got everything working, and carried on setting up the environment to use TortoiseCVS in the most streamlined way possible. This basically involves creating a public private key pair, and using the keys to connect via SSH automatically. So the steps I took were:

1. On the vista box, create a private/public key pair using PuTTYgen (part of the PuTTY suite).
2. Add the private key to Pageant.
3. Set up a session in PuTTY, using that private key. Save the session, I used the name “dereks-crowe”.
4. On crowe, add the PUBLIC key to ~/dereks/.ssh/authorized_keys2
5. In TortoiseCVS, replace dereks@crowe in the CVSROOT with the name of the PuTTY sessionsaved in step 3.

So my CVSROOT is now:

:ext:dereks-crowe:/home/dereks/cvsroot

And, Hey! Presto! It worked. TortoiseCVS now connects correctly, with no need for a password.

The final thing was to make sure this was really the fix. I stopped Pageant (right click on the icon in the system tray and choose exit) and try to connect again. Result: “TortoisePlink has stopped working”. Restart Pageant but don’t add the private key: “TortoisePlink has stopped working”. Add the key to Pageant: success.

It’s early days, but I reckon I’ve fixed the problem.

Note: To get Pageant to automatically load the private key on startup, add the path to the private key file to Pageants command line. If you add this to the startup menu as a shortcut, it should start automatically. My startup shortcut reads:

“C:\Program Files\PuTTY\pageant.exe” “c:\program files\putty\dereks-crowe.ppk”

So what are you waiting for. If you are having this or a similar problem, go and download PuTTY, PuTTYgen and Pageant and give it a whirl. It might not work, but if it does it’s a lot better than disabling your virus scanner, firewall, UAC, networking extras, and all the other Vista-goodness you paid good money for. And please let me know how it works out.

Derek

From Quackwatch:

Nevada bill aims to legalize quackery.

http://www.quackwatch.org/07PoliticalActivities/nevada_sb69.pdf

Nevada State Senator Michael A. Schneider has introduced S.B. 69, an 85-page bill that would:

**Declare Nevada a “freedom of health” state.

**Affirm that patients are “entitled to access to and the use of the products and services of any provider of health care chosen by the patient, including, without limitation, a complementary integrative medical physician or any other provider of health care.”

**Replace the current homeopathic board with a Board of Complementary Integrative Medical Examiners that has the same powers but can authorize people to become licensed or certified as a “complementary integrative medical physician,” “advanced practitioner of complementary integrative medicine,” “complementary integrative medical assistant” or “complementary integrative medical nutritionist.”
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E. W. Djisktra Diskjtra Diskra Dijkstra

According to Dijkstra, he was the first professional Computer Programmer in Holland (PDF), although at the time of his marriage he wasn’t allowed to call himself a programmer, and hence his marriage certificate read “Theoretical Physicist”.

In programming circles - particularly among geeky, pretentious programmers like me - Dijkstra is almost - but not quite - as well quoted as Knuth. In this blog, I will share some of my favourite and not so favourite Dijkstra quotes, and offer my own interpretation of them. I don’t know if this will be boring for anyone who isn’t a programmer, or even for those who are, but hey - you run it up the flagpole in the hope that someone salutes, right?

On the off-chance that there are some people reading who aren’t turned off by it, I’d welcome any comments - positive and negative - of my interpretation of the Great Man’s words. Ok, here goes.
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… and lays the blame for the MMR/Autism hoax where it belongs - on the shoulders of the British Press.

http://www.badscience.net/2008/08/the-medias-mmr-hoax/

“Dr Andrew Wakefield is in front of the General Medical Council on charges of serious professional misconduct, his paper on 12 children with autism and bowel problems is described as “debunked” - although it never supported the conclusions ascribed to it - and journalists have convinced themselves that his £435,643 fee from legal aid proves that his research was flawed.”

Well worth a read.