More Zonkyness

So It Turns Out St Augustine Had Something To Say About Ken’s Performance

Feb 062014

Recently a Creationist (Ken Ham) debated with a sensible person (Bill Nye) about the merits of Creationism. The full debate can be found online :-

However it can all be summed up by a response to a simple question: “What would make you change your mind?” :-

Bill: “Evidence”
Ken: “Nothing”

So what is this about St Augustine? It turns out that Christians have known they’ll look stupid if they get too literal about the story of creation, for a very long time. St Augustine had this to say about the likes of Ken :-

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.”

St Augustine of Hippo, from “The Literal Meaning of Genesis”, appx 400 C.E.

So I guess St Augustine is busy rolling his eyes and cringing at the sight of christians like Ken.

The Dawlish Train Line

General, Politics No Responses »

Feb 062014

The train line at Dawlish has collapsed after the recent storms (early February 2014) – details here.

Having travelled that part of the railway several times, I can say that the train line just there was always vulnerable and this sort of damage was pretty inevitable. Of course it needs to be repaired whatever happens.

However in the long run, it is time to think of moving the train line somewhere further inland. Fantastically expensive of course, but quite possibly cheaper than doing a patch up every time a storm washes away the line over the next 100 years.

“Mounting” A VDI Image Under Linux

Computing, Working Notes No Responses »

Feb 042014

So I found myself in the position of wanting to poke around the file system of a virtual Windows machine – the kind of poking around you would prefer I didn’t if it were your Windows machine – and needed to make a VDI disk image available as a block device under Linux so it could be mounted in the normal fashion.

Googling around found some instructions; which didn’t work properly. Solutions were also available, but I’m writing up the ‘fixed’ instructions here to save myself time in case I need it again.

First step is to become root; if you need help doing that, this is probably the wrong page for you!

Next step is to install the Debian package qemu-utils which contains the tool qemu-nbd which we’ll need later. We also need to load the network block device module with a parameter :-

apt-get install qemu-utils
modprobe nbd max_part=16

This parameter is the key here – for some reason the default on at least some of my Linux machines is not to create additional block devices for any additional partitions that show up.

The next step is to ‘attach’ the VDI image (or presumably anything supported by qemu-img which covers pretty much everything popular) and tell the Linux kernel that there may be some new partitions to create device files for :-

qemu-nbd -n -c /dev/nbd0 disk.vdi
partx -a /dev/nbd0
partx: /dev/nbd0: error adding partitions 1-2

(Added the “-n” flag after reading about some more problems and a work-around; as I haven’t tested it, be careful!)

The error from partx indicates that qemu-nbd managed to create the partitions itself, but there are hints that this sometimes doesn’t happen so I’ve included the command here “just in case”. Once the partition block devices are present, they can be used as any ordinary devices.

Once finished, unmount anything mounted and release the block device with :-

qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0
rmmod nbd

Amanda Knox: The Murderer On The Run

General No Responses »

Feb 022014

The recent Italian court verdict has found that Amanda Knox is guilty of murdering Meredith Kercher together with her accomplices, Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede. One of the accomplices is in prison, and the other is in Italy so it is unlikely that he will escape imprisonment but what about Amanda Knox?

The key fact here is that a court one assumes to be reasonably competent has found Amanda Knox guilty of murder.

So she is a murderer on the run.

You may believe she is innocent, but is that because you have taken a long hard look at the evidence and made a considered judgement? Or is it because she looks cute? Or because you have certain prejudices about the justice systems in foreign countries?

And It Turns Out That Journalists Can’t Count Up To Three …

Media No Responses »

Feb 022014

The Independent is claiming today that the government’s cut in the means tested council tax is being described as “poll tax mark II”.

But what they really mean is “Poll Tax Mark III” :-

The first Poll Tax was in fact a series of taxes charged during the late medieval era in Britain. Some were genuine flat rate taxes where everyone pays the same; some were in fact progressive taxes although the first “step” may have been so distant to normal people it would have looked like a flat rate tax.
The second poll tax was the Community Charge which was probably the most reviled tax of modern times with mass protests against it’s implementation and huge non-payment movements.

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