You Are What You Buy

Ben Goldacre has been reading the PhD thesis of TV nutritionist 'Dr' Gillian McKeith and it turns out that  it is  just as fraudulent and pseudoscientific as the rest of her work.  Entitled “Miracle Superfood: Wild Blue-Green Algae, the nutrient powerhouse that stimulates the immune system, boosts brain power, and guards against disease” it is, according to Goldacre, full of cargo-cult science.  The PhD was from a non-accredited correspondence course at  Clayton College of Natural Health in the USA, in other words, it is a cargo-cult PhD.

Fortunately for TV viewers in the UK, McKeith's 'You Are What You Eat' program on Channel 4 has some fairly stiff competition from the excellent Dr Alice Roberts with 'Don't Die Young' (on BBC2 on Tuesday and Thursdays) and also from 'The Truth About Food' (BBC2, Thursdays), which seemed quite good when I watched it last week, even if the experiments were a bit oversimplified.

Something New on the Web

Over at Planet Lisp I came across these little graphs being used to indicate the posting history of blogs.  The software to produce them was written by Zach Beane.  I think they are a rather effective application of Edward Tufte's 'sparklines'.  Various other implementions of sparklines are available out on the web.

My Walk to Work this Morning

Over night we had our first snow of the winter, about 2 to 3cm fell.  I was up early and caught the 7:00am train to Farnborough North.  Then I walked along the BlackWater Valley Path through the woods to Frimley.  As can be seen from the above picture, I was the first person along that section of the path since the snow had fallen.  At one point, I saw three deer through the trees.  They panicked and ran one way, then turned and ran back again, and finally disappeared behind a dense thicket.  Though I had my camera in my hands, they were too quick and too far off, and it was too dark for me to get a photo.  The snow was all gone when I left work at 4:00pm.

Installing Xubuntu on a 200MHz PC

During the Christmas holidays I got my old Dantum95 PC out from the corner of the bedroom where it was gathering dust.  I was intending to throw it out as by today's standards it is seriously under-powered, having  only a puny 200MHz CPU and a mere 98MB of RAM.  However, I had recently come across Xubuntu, the light-weight version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, and I thought it might be fun to try and get it running on the Dantum.  I was at a loose end and didn't have much else to do.   In what follows I describe the main problems I came across and how I solved them in the hope that this might be of some use to anyone mad enough to try something similar.

First, some details of the PC:

• 200MHz Pentium-MMX P55C CPU
  
• VX97 motherboard
  
• 98MB RAM
  
• 10GB ST310211A hard disk drive
  
• Toshiba XM-6182B CD-ROM drive
  
• 3.5 inch Floppy disk drive
  

It also has a 100MB Iomega Zip drive but that stopped working in 2003 so I disconnected it (removing it altogether would have left a big hole in the front of the PC).

First, I went to the Xubuntu home page, downloaded the "PC (Intel x86) alternate install CD" image for Xubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), and burnt it to a CD. Then I set up the Dantum BIOS and changed to boot order to A-drive (floppy) first, CD-ROM second and C-drive third.  I then rebooted the Dantum with the Xubuntu CD in the CD-ROM drive.  Within a few seconds the Xubuntu installation menu came up and I selected "Install in text mode"  (which is the option for the 'standard' Xubuntu system with X-windows). 

The installation ran smoothly, occasionally prompting for input (keyboard type, screen size - that sort of stuff), until 65% of the way through the "installing selected software" phase when it seemed to get stuck installing something called "anthy".  A bit of Googling revealed that this is a known problem with Xubuntu installation on small RAM machines.  Apparently anthy is quite large and the installation process gets bogged down copying parts of it back and forth between RAM and the swap partition on the hard disk.  It also turned out that most people don't even need anthy - it provides support for the input of Japanese characters.  The fix for the stalled installation was refreshingly direct: I pressed Alt-F2 to bring up the second console, entered "ps ax | grep mkworddic" to display the id of the process that was attempting to install anthy, used "kill -9 nnnnn" (where nnnnn is the process id) to kill the process, and then pressed Alt-F1 to return to the original console where the installation quickly ran to completion.

I took out the installation CD, rebooted the PC but it then got stuck immediately after displaying "GRUB _".  Grub is the boot loader that Xubuntu uses to load itself.  I suspected a problem with the way the hard disk was partitioned and I spent a lot of time trying different partions and reinstalling and rebooting, but to no avail. Then I found in the back of my Dantum manual a note, that I must have written several years ago, to the effect that the I should use the BIOS hard disk auto-detection facility and set the hard disk to LBA mode.  I did that, reinstalled Xubuntu, rebooted and evetually the Xubuntu graphical login screen was displayed.

 However, two problems were immediately evident:

• there was no mouse pointer
• the graphical login screen came up extremely slowly

The mouse pointer I was fairly sure I could fix with a bit of Googling, but the slowness of the graphics indicated that the PC was really not powerful enough for a modern X-windows system.  I was quite happy with a command-line only system so I re-ran the installation once more, selecting the "Install command-line system" option this time.

Finally, I was able to log in to my Xubuntu command-line system.  To my horror, I discovered that Emacs wasn't installed, instead the only editor was a Vi clone called Elvis.  For a while I was a bit lost because the Synaptic package manager, that I have come to rely on so much nowadays, requires X-windows to run.  However, I eventually came across Aptitude which does the same sort of things from the command line.  The best introduction to Aptitude appears to be Daniel Burrows' Aptitude User's Manual.

Update on Wed 2007-02-07 by Tristram Brelstaff

I now realise that I should have read the Ubuntu Installation/Low Memory Systems page before trying this.  It contains a lot of good advice that would have helped me avoid quite a few (but not all) of the problems I ran into.

Update on Sat 2007-03-10 by Tristram Brelstaff

A few weeks later I ran through the installation again following the instructions from the Ubuntu Installation/Low Memory Systems page (along with some of the hacks mentioned in the main post).  To make the graphical interface usable I installed Fluxbox and set it as the default window manager.  After using Windows XP, the Fluxbox menus seem lightning fast, even on a slow PC.  One minor niggle, which I haven't yet sorted out, is that Fluxbox desktop colour does not 'stick' through a X-windows restart, however, reselecting the window manager from the menu causes it to be set up correctly. I then tried various lightweight web browsers, such as Dillo, but found them all too awkward to use, so I installed Firefox instead and it seemed to work well enough, if a bit slowly.  I now have a system which should be usable for emergency access to the web if my main PC and lap top are unavailable.

Sunrise in Ilulissat

This is part today's BBC Weather Forecast for Ilulissat, Greenland.  The small town of  Ilulissat, also known as Jakobshavn, is about half-way up the west coast of Greenland.  The thing that caught my eye in the forecast was that today sunrise and sunset both occur at 12:32 WGT (presumably West Greenland Time).  In other words, today the sun first peeps above the horizon following the long winter night.  Given that it is up for less than a minute, don't you think that the yellow sun symbol in the "Summary" column is a little misleading?