Cloud shapes on Jupiter

Okay so I'm not much of a blogger and nobody who knows me well are the least bit surprised. When things have been filtered into the piles of:
"stuff where I'll use my name",
"stuff I shouldn't talk about",
"stuff I simply shouldn't do",
"easily misunderstood stuff with wildly fluctuating awesome to crazy ratios highly dependent on any readers' education and sense of humor" (I'm still considering a post about a conceptual connection between the Banach-Tarski paradox and Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythology but I'll probably let it slide into oblivion),
and "stuff that would take ages to write up properly",
then there isn't much left (except for multiple unpublished half-finished posts that ought to be deleted).

But sometimes there's something that really ought to exist somewhere on the internet but doesn't, not until now.

It's all about a nice image from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA-JPL) --you can find the original here-- showing Io crossing Jupiter. It was taken by the Cassini orbiter at the start of the millennium and has been used as a book cover for some SF book I haven't read and whose author's name I've forgotten but anyways I can see why it was used since it's such a beautiful picture.

So nice in fact I decided to use it as my desktop background. Doing so required a slight rescaling down to 900 pixels height and adding a fairly large blackish area since it's used on a screen that is 1600x900 pixels. Because of that gray-black area I decided to flip the image horizontally so that all the cruft of desktop icons went over the black part.

It worked out really well (especially with a customized New Wave GTK theme on Gnome on Linux), have a look at the desktop background version for yourself (feel free to right-click the picture and open it in a new tab):



Now finally to the point of all this...

So there you are, floating by proxy far above Jupiter courtesy of US tax payers, stretching out, relaxing and looking down at the clouds. Your eyes are drawn to Io and you start looking for cloud shapes.

Maybe you'll find the biggest cloud shape in our solar system?

That wouldn't happen to be a reddish version of Midgardsormen would it? Lurking beneath the topmost layers of clouds? Wrapping itself several times around Jupiter in its determined chase of Io? Some kind of space serpent? Do you see its eye and the round white spot above it reminiscent of the eyespots some animals have? Do you see the teeth and the gaping maw hunting for a lunar morsel?

Are we looking at what might become a 25th century schoolyard myth? ^_^

Original photo by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA-JPL), used and remixed by Gla'funk in compliance with NASA guidelines.

Nucleus accumbens

About once a year, more often if I'm lucky, there's a decent thunderstorm of some size during summer. Today, tonight, was that day. Perhaps the only good thing about this tiny apartment is the view it offers from above all but the tallest trees and all the way towards the horizon of low and gently sloping mountains.

The curtains are moved aside as far as they go, all lights turned off except for one, and I sit right in front of the windows with a favorite beverage or two.

The barrage picks up and euphoria rises, the haze of falling rain is accentuated by the increasing distance of multiple local horizons it creates in the landscape.

As the clouds thicken lightning strikes constantly, every speck of sky --clouds and rain-- is drenched and blurred by patterns of rising and falling light.

Later the rain moves in for real. Cascading torrents of rain. Enough rain that I can make out the shadows of light from the windows in the apartment above as they're reflected in the rain, and then it gets even denser.

Suddenly in the curtains of falling water two ghostly blue seagulls swoop by to the sounds of thunder. They're neon blue, illuminated by the ad on the roof of the building, flying against a backdrop of almost pastel lilac clouds, clouds without any horizon only a gradient to solid black.

The rain lessens and the lightning picks up again, in the distance it makes a series of solid columns of light moving perhaps only a few hundred meters from source to target, this thunderstorm was flying unusually low.

I love lightning.

Update with some numbers: 11000 registered lightning strikes, 34.4 millimeters of rain (34 liters per cubic meter) during 12 hours most of which fell down in a fairly short time consisting of only a few hours.

Original photo by Flickr user Alberto Jaspe, used and remixed by Gla'funk under a Creative Commons license.

Surprising victories

FIFA World Championship 2010 top winners:

1st place Gold: Paul the Squid

Paul the Squid gastronomically prognosticated correctly to the despair of PhD statisticians worldwide. Mathematics will never be the same again and now involves faculties taking out bounties and assassination orders on suspected paranormally gifted animals.

2nd place Silver: Jimmy Jump

Jimmy Jump is without a doubt one of the best things given to the world from Spain in recent years. While teams and fans continue their arms race in ninja techniques and grandiose theatrical displays Jimmy Jump stays true to the long cherished ideals of organized physical activity as a means towards a fit and healthy peaceful world wide brotherhood.

3rd place Bronze: Brother Future

A strong contender for first prize however we should all now rest assured that the world will absolutely not under any circumstances what-so-ever end in 2012 for any reasons at all and thus Chinese Brother Future has given us all a glimmer of hope until January 1st 2013.

All in all a great World Cup, among the best really ^_^

Original photo by Flickr user Sebastian Niedlich (Grabthar), used and remixed by Gla'funk under a Creative Commons license.

ZTE MF363 USB modem on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

I've recently had to use this modem for internet access and was led on somewhat of a wild goose chase by various search results when in fact using it is simplicity itself.

1. Go to draisberghof.de, get USB_ModeSwitch, and follow the instructions to put it on your system (2 small downloads and 2 small make installs). This of course requires a working internet connection, save the downloads and a copy of their web page locally or on a USB flash memory stick or similar on another computer and transfer as necessary.

[1.5. I should emphasize checking that your system has an appropriate libusb package as mentioned on the draisberghof.de page, on Ubuntu use the Synaptic Package Manager to check (use its search function and compare, it's fairly intuitive). I don't recollect having to do any changes regarding libusb on Ubuntu 9.04 but better safe than sorry.]

2. With those tasks completed plug in your ZTE MF363, wait for the "MODEM DISK" to appear on your desktop (takes a little while), wait for Ubuntu's Network Manager thingy to pop up asking you about creating a connection entry, select your provider, enter your PIN, and do whatever else you want to.

3. To connect or disconnect click the Network Manager icon in the system tray and choose accordingly. To be on the safe side and doing things right also unmount "MODEM DISK" if you're going to unplug the modem.

By memory that's all I had to do. Afterwards when booting or rebooting one only has to plug it in and choose to connect.

Using it for about a month I've had the ZTE freeze once or twice after many days of use while being plugged and unplugged without system resets/reboots, now I just leave it on. During this time I've also been through an electrical power failure with a following manual fsck with a little bit of inode corruption which fubared the Network Manager entry. No problem as the Network Manager connection thingy popped up and I just selected the correct provider and entered the PIN and I was back to normal.

Edit @ Monday, May 17, 2010: Forgot to mention this and it might be ordinary behavior for mobile modems that is not particular to the ZTE itself but the ZTE does not seem to automatically work if left plugged in while booting or rebooting and then re-connecting. Instead the ZTE needs to be unplugged and plugged in again before establishing the internet connection. End of edit.

Haven't tried using the modem disk or the SD card slot on the modem.

USB_ModeSwitch is simply awesome!

As for mobile internet I almost can't believe how cheap the cheapest local USB modem offers are (50 NOK until you exceed your quota and about 600 NOK maximum monthly and I chose the offer that has the highest speed after using up your quota and being throttled down). I would never think of using this as my regular internet connection but in a pinch for a somewhat short period of time it's great and I'll keep my subscription as a just-in-case fall-back solution and for its mobility.

N.B. don't ask me about 9.10 or 10.04, Ubuntu is establishing a tradition for doing too much weird stuff with new releases and I might not ever upgrade to either.

Original photo by Flickr user Charlie Beldon, used and remixed by Gla'funk under a Creative Commons license.

First Post

Never had a blog before + don't really need one + don't have much time for one + don't like the idea of putting too much private info on the net = gla'funk will be moving along randomly at a glacial speed with little content and fewer comments, which suits me just fine ^_^

Gla'funk would be Norwegian for "Happy'Funk" but has a nicer sound to it in English; try saying it out loud, fast, faster, while pretending to be James Brown ^_^

The byline of this blog is the title and lyrics of a song dressed up as a quote by the performers and composer. The song is short, funky, Japanese, and brilliant. It's from one of the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack albums called "Ask DNA", YouTube has the song for your listening pleasure. The Cowboy Bebop animated TV series are recommended as well and of course also the rest of the soundtracks.

Oh and that Jabber IM address? Doesn't exist and if it does it isn't me, Blogger.com insisted on an IM address that's all.

Original photo by Flickr user sⓘndy°, used and remixed by Gla'funk under a Creative Commons license.