…and this time it’s the creationist / ‘intelligent’ design brigade.

The story over at the BBC discusses the view of a chemistry teacher at the Blue Coats School in Liverpool. He promotes the preaching of Intelligent design to school pupils.

Understandably, the Department for Education and Skills thinks the teacher’s ideas are not appropriate for class.

He is quoted by the BBC as saying:

“There’s a sense that if you criticise Darwin then you must be some kind of religious nut”

Did you spot the straw-man argument?

If you criticise Darwin, you may well be a practicing scientist looking for verifiable evidence to prove or refute one of the claims of The origin of species according to natural selection (this is the method of investigation by which we define science).

Whereas if you practice preaching Intelligent Design, you may well be a religious nut.

I’ve just had a brief look at ’suspend’ modes with Ubuntu on my Compaq Presario 2103EA.

First off, ‘Hibernate’ (Suspend to Disk) works fine, the image is saved from RAM fairly quickly considering there is about 570MiB installed. Starting up again takes just a little less time than a normal boot.

‘Suspend’ (Suspend to RAM) however, does not work. The system goes down quickly and the power light begins it’s rise/fall strobe. On restarting, the system fan spins up and the power light comes on but the wireless and wired NICs stay off, the screen staying blank. This is pretty much as expected as the Presario 2100s are not renowned for their standards compliance when it comes to ACPI.

I had a poke around on Google and found plenty of other people with the same issue - I will look in more detail soon to see if any found solutions.

So, if you do have Ubuntu on a Presario 2100, don’t use ‘Hibernate’ if you value your data in unclosed apps! (You should be saving before a hibernate anyway)

If you need statefull power-down, you should use ‘Suspend’; otherwise a normal power-down and power-up will be just as good time-wise.

The Times Online has an article about how the apparent IQ level in UK schools has dropped sharply.
More correctly, the IQ of parents, teachers and governors has apparently dropped. The head-teacher of Ysgol Pantycelyn comprehensive school said:

“The County Council and central government told us that wireless networks are perfectly safe”

But they ripped their wireless network out of the school anyway.
Yes, you’ve guessed it, somebody has put two and two together and come up with 802.11 about wireless radiation from WiFi networks.
Now, it’s not that it’s ever been conclusively proven that mobile phone radiation does anything more than locally heat your cranium when the phone itself is pressed against your head. This however does not stop parents and teachers getting all excited and going into the classic British media-fueled group hysteria when somebody realises that both mobile phones and WiFi networks produce forms of ‘radiation’.
Indeed, in the Times Online article, one teacher describes symptoms felt in the classroom which he ascribes to wireless radiation which would have most sane members of the population going to get their blood pressure and heart checked.
Of course, the parents are up in arm’s too. No doubt they will have been calling each other on their mobile phones to discuss this, or perhaps even their cordless landlines to tell each other to confiscate their children’s Xbox 360s which have 2.4Ghz controllers and to bin their children’s Mobile phones which allow them to share pictures and ring-tones via Bluetooth also in the 2.4Ghz band. These parents will also presumably be crossing the Nintendo Wii and Playstation portable off their children’s Christmas lists too for their inclusion of 2.4Ghz based technologies.
Seeing as WiFi units which work on just a couple of watts of output power cause such concern to parents, teachers and governors alike, presumably these same people will soon be campaigning for the dismantling of the multi-kilowatt television transmitters which cover much of the United Kingdom, permeating almost every household with radiation. They must be banishing their offspring from the kitchen whenever their Microwave is in operation lest any of the leaked 2.45Ghz radiation should touch them. Perhaps they should campaign against the sun and perhaps even the moon too which reflects so much deadly radiation at their children.

“The masses have never thirsted after the truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

It’s not that I’ve ever read The Crowd written in 1895 by Gustave Le Bon but it certainly makes for a good quote.

Today I woke up to the news that a friend’s e-commerce site was down, spewing up ‘errno 145′ and generally not doing much by way of commerce.

Now, errno 145 is a MySQL error, not actually a problem with the MySQL software itself, rather it is a corruption of the data held in the database. Such corruptions tend to happen when data is being written to a table and the server becomes overstressed and goes down (even momentarily).

This overloading seems quite likely knowing the hosting company which handles the website runs the virtual host packages without any margin to spare. To add insult to injury, I didn’t have SSH access to the server. I could probably have gained SSH access but only after a long telephone call to the host’s support, holding/verifying my ID etc.

Instead, I found that I was able to use phpMyAdmin which was provided by the hosts. I logged in, selected the corrupt database from the list on the left, scrolled to the bottom, selected ‘check all’ (to select all tables) and then selected ‘Repair Table’ from the drop down list. Behold! the database was unborked.

Please note, I’m a risk-taker but you should take a backup of the database (even if broken) before attempting this as it *could* make matters even worse.

I was just poking around in my new Ubuntu install’s package manager and I came across an app called BloGTK. Basically, BloGTK is a desktop GUI for editing your verbal-diah^Wblog-posts locally on your machine before uploading them. Handy if you want to write while you’re away from an internet connection and post later.

Just for the record; in order to have BloGTK work with Nucleus, you need to set the API to MovableType and set the server path to http://www.yourwebsite.com/nucleus/xml-rpc/server.php This should allow connection to your site and if it does in fact work, this post should now magically be appearing at delusionofgrandeur.

I’ve now spent a week using Ubuntu and I’m kicking myself for not having tried it earlier. I’m even still using Gnome despite being a big fan of KDE and it’s applications base.

When I say I’ve been ‘waking up’ to Ubuntu, I mean that quite literally in that I leave my laptop running by the bed overnight and then immediately grab it after my alarm goes off in order to check my usual news sites and avoid falling back to sleep. The real trick is to remember to set the screen brightness to low before I go to bed so that I don’t do the crazy-eyed man impression in the glare of the CCFLs.

I’m rather enamored of the package manager. All I have to do is go to the Applications icon of the menu > Add/Remove and I’m presented with a fast and easy interface for browsing the online software repositories (which are themselves extensive).

My only gripe is that while the default browser is Firefox, the default e:mail client is Evolution. While Evolution is definitely very capable, it’s also tied to Novell who just aren’t top of the pops with me right now so I will likely switch to Thunderbird if I decide to collect email locally on the laptop.