CNN attacks China

I am not a very political animal but I am getting angry at CNN’s attacks on China. CNN and its bosses have belatedly noticed the ascendancy of China and are trying the best to hold back the tide like King Canute. First they started with the pollution threat from China but on realizing that their argument didn’t hold water because the good old USA is still the world’s worst polluter it has seized upon quality as the issue to hit China with.

Last week on the CNN website there was a report on the recall of a chilli sauce from a Castleberry’s Food Company production facility in Atlanta Georgia. The company is American owned, the product produced in USA but directly in the prime webspace was an advertisement for a CNN TV programm on why so many Chinese food products have to be recalled. Anyone just glancing at this page would assume that the recalled product was chinese. This is one cheap trick another was the totally fake story about dumplings being made out of cardboard. Even CNN had to eventually admit that the story was totally made up.

We (CNN viewers and readers) are being bombarded with this bullshit day after day. That CNN is doing this under pressure is obvious but they should be aware that they are losing a lot of respect with this and they will suffer in the future. Please don’t take your viewers and readers for fools!

Gmaps. Coordinates, Bearing and Distance Calculator

If you need to find out the coordinates of a site, the distance between two sites or the bearing between two sites go to my Coordinate, Distance and Bearing Calculator

A new feature is dragable marker-B. Click on marker-B and the marker becomes dragable, drag it to a new location and release the button and all calculations are re-calculated for the new B location.

**NEW** The elevation for both points is shown plus a path profile showing the heights along a path between the two points.

Bash or Dash

There has been no major issues with my upgrade although one problem has been that some of my scripts stopped working.The problem is that with 6.10 the default shell is dash whereas before it was bash. The solution is to either keep changing your shell scripts to point to /bin/bash or change the symlink for /bin/sh. I have been changing my scripts as required, ie when I find that they don’t work.

If you think that changing the symlink is a better idea please let me know.

Ubuntu upgrade from 6.06 to 6.10 to 7.04

I decided it was time to upgrade. Last night I upgraded from 6.06 to 6.10 and it seemed to go well. The only problem I noticed was that I couldn’t play divx in Firefox any more. I fixed this by removing the Totem plugin and copying the mplayerplug-in-dvx.so and mplayerplug-in-dvx.xpt files from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins to ~/.mozilla/plugins.

Feeling confident after this success I decided to go the whole hog today and upgrade from 6.10 to 7.04. The upgrade hung with less than a minute to go because it couldn’t update “kong-kim”. I rebooted and Ubuntu and X started ok so I restarted the update manager to finish the upgrade which failed again for the same reason. I googled a bit and found this link which I applied. I then ran the update manager again and everything seems to be ok, we will have to wait and see how stable my upgrade turns out to be.

Filtering History

This make filtering history easy, you just use, for instance, “h mondo” and it will find all mondo references in the history.
Simply add the following line at the end of your ~/.bashrc file -
alias h="history|grep"