bonglonglong

Fewer children are being vaccinated and community outbreaks of easily preventible but highly contagious and sometimes deadly diseases are increasing.  The change is due to many parents who are concerned that autism is linked to the administration of vaccines despite significant studies that indicate non-correlation.

But never mind the old way of doing science, this is how we do it now:

The debate over vaccination has played out in the media, with actress Jenny McCarthy saying she believes vaccines trigger autism. Her views are at odds with those of actress Amanda Peet, a spokeswoman for Every Child by Two, which promotes vaccinations.

Report: More parents choose not to vaccinate

Delia Derbyshire was one of the pioneers of electronic sound, and is only now beginning to be recognized for her influence.

Perhaps she is most famous for her uncredited but pivotal role in the creation of the original theme music for "Doctor Who".  Her entirely electronic rendition of the piece is so powerful that the unique sounds she brought to it have persisted through its many revisions.

Most of the groundbreaking work she and her colleagues performed was done in anonymity at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.  Ron Grainer composed the "Doctor Who" theme but it is unlikely he could have imagined the amazing new sounds she had created from scratch.  After first hearing it he asked, "Did I write that?" to which Derbyshire replied, "Most of it."

Granier requested that she share the composition credit for the piece, but the BBC declined to do so.  This decision (which apparently stands to this day as she is still absent from modern "Doctor Who" credits) certainly led in some degree to the years of obscurity she endured after leaving the BBC.

At the end of her life she saw electronic music emerge from the dark ages of the 70s and 80s and begin to realize the potential she saw in it 40 years before.  As new musicians discover the pure expressive possibilities of creating entirely new sounds, they have also discovered the amazing work of Delia Derbyshire and her contemporaries and their lasting impact on music.

 

If you want to play with a G1 (HTC's new Android phone for T-Mobile) in advance, you can download the emulator and do with it almost everything you can do with the actual handset.

1. Download the SDK
2. Extract the archive
3. Download Jeffrey Sharkey's G1 skin for the emulator
4. Install the skin in android-sdk-*/tools/lib/images/skins
5. cd android-sdk-*/tools
6. ./emulator -skin G1

You can change the orientation (portrait/landscape) by hitting the 7 key on the numeric keypad (with NumLock off).  You may want to read the documentation to learn about the other options the emulator has, as well as how to trigger simulated events, such as an incoming call.

The victims, both farmworkers, told deputies they were awakened by a stranger applying spices to one of them and striking the other with a sausage.

From the Fresno Bee.

 

MySQL is justly famous for providing incomprehensible error messages.  The typical response to receiving one of these messages is to google for it, because someone else has almost certainly run into the same problem before, and the answer will be posted on a forum.

Perhaps because NDB is somewhat more exotic than MySQL itself, I have been privileged to encounter some messages that the Internets could not completely decode for me.  As a public service, I intend to annotate the unusual error messages I receive.

The first entry in this MySQL error lexicon is deceptively complicated.  It is actually a well known error message with a common meaning.  But like all the best words, it has another more subtle meaning.  I encounted it when one of our NDB API nodes died, and after rebooting, was unable to rejoin the cluster and provided only this message, which is contradictory on its face:

[MgmSrvr] Allocate nodeid (0) failed. Connection from ip 192.168.2.24. Returned error string "Connection done from wrong host ip 192.168.2.24."

I have found that message can mean any of the following:

1. The obvious meaning: an NDB node has been configured to connect using the wrong IP address.  Perhaps the node id is specified in the connect string and it doesn't match the IP address of the node.
2. A node is trying to connect but it hasn't been configured at all.  This is also very common, but does require a slightly more liberal interpretation of the error message.
3. NDB allocates resources for each node that is configured, and as long as it believes that a node is connected, it will not let another process connect as the same node (be that by specifying the node id or auto-detecting the node id using the IP address). It may be that if the node has died in a particular way, ndb_mgmd still thinks that it is connected.  Issuing "PURGE STALE SESSIONS" from ndb_mgm may cause ndb_mgmd to recognize that the node is no longer connected.  Reports indicate that improvements to NDB may have rendered this problem obsolete.
4. Just as ndb_mgmd allocates resources for each node, so do the data nodes.  And even if ndb_mgmd is aware that the problem node is not connected, the data nodes may mistakenly believe that it is, especially if it has died in an inopportune manner.  If the configuration is correct, and issuing "PURGE STALE SESSIONS" and restarting ndb_mgmd do not solve the problem, there may be a stale connection on a data node.  The command "lsof" will show whether ndbd has an open connection to the host that can not join the cluster.  If it does, a rolling restart of the data nodes may release the resources that are preventing the node from joining.