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slang

It is reported that a theater in Florida has changed the name of The Vagina Monologues to The Hoo-Haa Monologues after a complaint.

How does a medical term become so offensive? Is Hoo-Haa less offensive than other terms such as Beaver?

The Vagina Monologues is old news anyway. The idea was surprising when it was […]

a good dog for uplifting

The Norwegian Puffin Dog has six toes that are all fully formed. This has to be a good start for the uplift process.

The requirements for uplift are intelligence, speech, and the ability to use tools (dexterity in fingers). It seems that the Puffin Dog has a finger advantage over other breeds. Also the Lundehund […]

xen sucks

According to Debian bug #399113 and linked discussion it is impossible to run a stable system on Xen without enabling PAE. It seems that no-one is considering the fact that a hypervisor that runs on both 32bit and 64bit architectures should be able to support 32bit systems with <4G of RAM (IE not using the […]

John Howard is bizarre

Our despicable prime minister said “I think that would just encourage those who wanted completely to destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for (an) Obama victory“.

That statement is wrong in many ways, firstly the US (with Australian help) has destabilised and destroyed Iraq […]

names

Wouter wrote an interesting post about names. I wonder how many people know me as Russell SELinux…

No related posts.

execmod

Ulrich Drepper has written a good web page about text relocation which is most often noticed as execmod failures reported when running SE Linux. When an AVC message reports a failure of execmod against a shared object it means that the object has text relocations (the shared object code writes to code that it executes […]

xen and yoyo

One of the benefits of Xen is that it allows a machine to be easily rebooted. Remote console and remote power management technologies are either expensive or implemented on the motherboards of expensive machines. With Xen the virtual machines can be managed without such expense and also with less effort.

This raises immediate possibilities for […]

phone spam

Recently I had someone call my mobile phone asking whether I wanted to change phone providers. I asked them if they could hold the line – then I put my phone down and went back to work.

It took over eight minutes before they hung up on me.

Next time someone phone-spams you try to […]

classic security mistake

One of the most obvious (and yet most common) computer security mistakes is to take input from an untrusted (and potentially hostile) source. A classic example of this is in Windows Vista where audio output from the system speakers can be taken as input to the speech recognition system. According to the BBC article an […]