Nervy time for all laptop users

I dunno if this story (complete with scary picture) of a post-explosion Thinkpad is T or F but I suspect it is T.

It appears that the battery involved was not the original but that is just a detail at this point I think. The battery industry has a problem, therefore the laptop industry has a problem. Period.

Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places but I'm not seeing fantastic positive action and leadership-from-the-front on this issue out there amongst battery manufacturers.

I have a Thinkpad. I use it as my main machine. In other words, I use it all day, every day. Not just when I'm travelling. Its my main s/w dev box, my main doco box etc. It is plugged into the mains in my home office as I write this. I leave it on 24x7.

Have I a fire hazard ticking over in my house now? Does the risk of dodgyness in a battery decrease with longevity of the battery or get worse? Should I switch off my machine overnight?

Until such time as I know more, I think I will.

No Cork Accent?

I stumbled on the speech accent archive today and of course, I went straight to Ireland to check out the samples.

The south seems a tad, um, unrepresented.

To be representative of the diversity of accents in Ireland one would need to add a Dublin, a Cork and a Kerry at the very least, to the two samples already there.

The difference between, say, a Donegal accent and, say, a Cork accent is waayyyyy bigger than the physical separation of 200 miles or so would lead you to believe.

Python 2.5 and a look at the Python book scene

The last few weeks have seen some interesting announcements in the Python world. IronPython going 1.0 caused a stir. Now Python 2.5 final has been released.

I see a Python for Dummies book just released.

Also, I note that a Python book now trumps all the Monty Python stuff to the first search result on Amazon. I remember having to scroll to page 3 or so to encounter a Python programming language book.

On Python books: I don't know how up to date it is but http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonBooks is a good place to peruse the range of Python books available.

A scientific fraud?

Wow. Maybe I'm just out of touch but I don't remember the whole cold-fusion/Fleischmann/Pons thing as an incident of fraud. 10 scientific frauds that rocked the world. Was it?

Astrology. Science. Hmm.

Here is a list of books in the Science category...
Science.

Adverts? What adverts?

"With DVRs, advertisers can no longer rely on simple models for calculating eyeball counts. How many TV's view the advertisements with no eyeballs at all? In other words, how many of those eyeballs have become mindless DVRs, recording the advertisements only so that the human being can fast forward right passed them?"Stay tuned. We will be right back after these.

Parallel port printing (Ubuntu) Linux

If you are having problems getting your VMWare on (Ubuntu) Linux to print to old fashioned centronics (parallel) interfaces, this is the page for you.

I followed pretty much everything on that page but in my setup I was being caught out by the fact that CUPS appears to load the lp module, so I need to both stop the CUPS daemon and rmmod the lp module in order to free up the parallel port parport0 for vmware.