Archive for March, 2008

Thanks to IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) and WWF, the global conservation organization, there is now a new community web site targetting young people of the world willing to have their opinion heard in the upcoming October 2008 World Conservation Congress.

Aimed at people aged between 13 and 35, Connect2Earth is collecting the expression of Internet users willing to share their love of our planet. These words, these photos, these short movies will have a chance to be shown to the participants of the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona and -maybe it’s as important as the previous incentive- to win a new Nokia phone.

The Marwell Zoo in Hampshire (United Kingdom) is proud to be the location of birth for a marvelously nice kitten: 14 weeks, already some impressive teeth and not yet a name.

It was just a few days ago that the small big cat has been autorized to go out (under the attention of its mother Asha) and to be seen by the public.

The event was even more significant because this is probably the feline whose disparition is the nearest. Originating in Eastern Siberia (near the Korean border), the species seems to only have 35 females left (and a few more males) and that will certainly not be enough to ensure the survival of the species in the wild.

Source: Daily Mail.

Elephants are -generally speaking- a species endangered in Africa. They have been vigorously hunted for the ivory of their tusks (sometimes for the mere pleasure of hunting big game) and poaching is still intense of many African countries (from de 1.5 million animals in 1970, we are now down to around 500,000 pachyderms). The largest share of this business goes to Asian countries but elephant ivory is appreciated in many other countries all over the world.

This is why 17 African countries signed a protocol to ensure their protection. The Bamako Declaration strenghten the decisions taken in June 2007 within the fourteenth conference of CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species).

However, protection of a species is not a simple business once Nature is off-balance. For example, in South Africa, the elephants are no longer considered as on the brink of extinction but are becoming a source of trouble and pertubation for their own environment. They have the strong tendency to break trees where they want to reach higher branches or roots. After trying several other solutions (including oral contraception for elephants), RSA Government finally decided to approve some selective kills for culling in an attempt to limit the local populations of elephants. They doubled their inital quotas and it is a matter of reducing the risks of over-population (environmental destruction and death by lack of food or water).

Source: Futura-Sciences.

The very good anti-virus software got a little better with version 8. But the free version (which made it so popular) is not yet available. For now, you’ll have to stick to the excellent v7.5.

This is really a pity when some of the best old games disappear just because nobody even think of leaving a way to use them. They usually call this “abandonware” (software that has been abandonned by its creators).

Their legal status is flimsy, but some companies try to give us access to them. Somehow, they grab the software and put it on sale (really don’t ask me how; I feel that it involves getting an old copy and transfering it to an Internet web archive). I found it freshening (for my old age) to see at Abandonware Games (also known as C:Dos) that they had a large choice of old games still (partly) usable on your modern PC. Like Day of the Tentacle or Worms or even Panzer General 2.

Also, they include a lot more than just the download links (reviews, screenshots and media), but the choice of games is still quite limited in the Classics category. However, if you are ready to dig in the box, you can find wondrous amounts of less well-known games in the Rare category (by Rare, you should understand that this is nearly impossible to find somebody who remembers about these games, most probably because they did not encounter the success, leaving open the options of “this was a sucker” or “this was a little gem that nobody had a chance to discover”). And there even is a forum for fans.

When you have a computer with multiple partitions on the same disk or several disks with different partitions, things start getting bad if one of them is a Linux Ext or Ext2 partition: Usually, you can’t access the Linux partition from your Windows computer, Microsoft totally ignore your disk/partition.

In order to correct this, you can/must use a special Windows driver able to recognize correctly those Linux Ext/Ext2 partitions. Ext2 IFS provides full read/write access. It’s is essentially a kernel ext2/ext3 filesystem driver for Windows. When installed in your Windows computer, it simply becomes able to natively access the Linux disk. After installing, you can mount your Linux partition under a drive letter, just like you would an NTFS partition. The drive will be available in Explorer and within any file browser dialog in your favorite Windows applications.

Download from fs-driver.org.

Hollywood! Movies! There’s no other place where:

1. If the hero starts dancing, suddenly, everybody around knows the steps and dance with them.
2. Any car hit by a bullet immediately explodes in a cloud of flames, a mere rivulet of oil turns into a fire ball.
3. An ugly girl only has to remove her glasses and untie her hair to transform herself into an iridescent beauty queen.
4. If you look languorously into the eyes of a woman, music always starts to play (even if there is no stereo in the room). Ain’t it handy?
5. In car pursuits, you only have to zip through crossroads for all others to halt in tire shrieks. No need to check the traffic lights…
6. In car pursuits, you just need to speed up to fly over wide gaping spaces (gravity seems nullified provided that you can push the pedal hard enough!)
7. The first truncheon hit systematically sends the bad guy either to sleep or flying through the room like a ball on a pool table.
8. The hero will only yield to baddies after dozens of hits by a large group of hulking champion weight-lifters.
9. All computers are fifteen years ahead of current technology and blinkingly beautiful (no dull grey boxes, but nice blinking lights or impressive 3D graphics interface).
10. Baddies are always easy to recognize in a crowd. They are ugly, dirty and grimacing (if not with a scar on the face). Why doesn’t the police use this kind of clue in movies while the same kind of profiling is used routinely in our streets?
11. When the hero enters an unknown derelict space ship, he has no difficulty finding and operating the door lock, the ship’s controls and the hyper-space radio.
12. When we see a distant explosion on screen, the sound is never late (is speed of sound as fast as speed of light in movies?).
13. Radio-activity makes objects glow in the dark (it’s useful since we wouldn’t see it - Many scientists including Pierre and Marie Curie would have wanted to know that they just had to switch off the light in their laboratories!)
14. In the void of empty space, sounds are deafening: Shrieking spaceship rockets can be heard from the other end of the galaxy despite the total lack of atmosphere to transmit it.
15. A detective cannot solve a case before he has been suspended for insubordination
16. Even when the road is straight, if you drive a car, you must continuously swing the wheel right and left
17. The wounds of the hero will not make him even wince, except when a gorgeous woman is trying to clean them