R in NZ Herald

A bit old news but still worth a read. Local 'language' spreads worldwide (on NZ Herald)

A letter from court

Apparently Patrick - the damm hell Chinese student - has done some other troubles somewhere else. Today we got a letter from the Department of Judgement which is for Patrick, although he doesn't live in here any more. According to it, Patrick has sold a kiwi a computer 3D graphics card which is what Patrick claims "brand new" and sues $430 on an online auction. However the card didn't work on the kiwi's computer (actually, it makes the computer keep crashing). Besides, the kiwi also found that the card had been scratched, which is not supposed to be seen on a new computer part. Now the kiwi wants his money back and the court ordered Patrick to return his money back by the end of this month. Unfortunately that Dick doesn't live in here. What will happen next...? This Patrick is literally a trouble maker...no wonder Jesica wants to kill him. :(

Security issue - Skype

Skype URL Handling File Disclosure Vulnerability (on Secunia) SKYPE-SB/2006-001: Improper handling of URI arguments (on Skype official site)

Corridor information update

Got an email from our office which says the information board introducing the research topic of each grad/post-grad student on the corridor has been out-dated and needs to be renewed urgently, therefore the staff is asking if we could supply our information (research area, interest, etc) and personal photograph ASAP. Now they finally aware of the expiry of the information board... Nearly half a year has passed this year... :P

Dell provides AMD products

AMD Issues Statement On Dell Decision To Offer Customers Choice (on AMD official site) Dell opts for AMD's Opteron (on CNET News) Dell switch dents Intel shares (on CNET News) A big leap of AMD marketting! \(^o^)/

Crazy bill

Vicky's got telecom bill, which makes her really really really mad today - actually she almost kills her daughter Jesica. Well, how could a person calm down if he/she gets a bill with up to 600 dollars! Especially when it's because her daughter rang "a friend in HAWAII"?! (within 2 weeks?!!) Vicky got so upset that she pushed Jess down and grabbed her hair and shake her violently (literally!), threw her a rubbish bag and wanted her get out of this house with her stuff. Finally Vicky took Brandon (5 year old son) and Jess to their grandmother's SEMITRY (hey, it's been 8:30, at night) and say sorry to the grandmother. After that they went Pop(grandfather)'s home and tell him what Jess had done. Of course Pop got angry too, but at least his heartattack didn't come out. Vicky had been bankrupt before I came here - a Chinese student Patrick ruined Vicky's business van which worths 8000 dollars; he also ripped her off >700 dollars with her low-end computer and stupid adsl lines. Patrick and other chinese students had also messed up every thing in this house when Vicky moved into this house, and Vicky and Jesica had to cost a fortune to clean those mess up. Now Vicky's got 2 jobs and 1 night part-time job, but still they're in big debt (home loan, tax, whatever). And now they have to pay the telecom bill tomorrow. How can she pay $600 since she hasn't got any money to pay...? (I suppose she'll borrow some money from Pop)

Campy news

Quite a lot. Campylobacter found in most chicken (on TVNZ.com) Scientists study Campylobacter bacteria (on Dailyindia.com) Action must be taken against fouled chicken (on Scoop News) Searching for clues to NZ tummy trouble (on WaikatoTimes) "...New Zealand has the highest campylobacter rates in the world" ...my goodness... Virtually all chicken carries campylobacter bacteria (on RadioNZ) Production Practices Effect Antimicrobial Resistance in Poultry (on RxPG News) Zooming in on the Campylobacter That Would Resist Antibiotics (on Newswise.com) Campylobacter in poultry subject of two studies (on FoodProductionDaily-USA) Stress may help campylobacter infect broilers (on FarmersWeekly) Research projects map out food safety hotspots (on NutraIngredients.com)

Meeting with Peter

1. There were some news (or reports...whatever) last weekend about Campylobacters in NZ. Interesting. I'll find them out these days. 2. Get ready to submit the paper for my works on Campylobacter. I'm workiing on it now. 3. There're some strange data in the result of Campylobacter MIC test. Re-check them. 4. Compare the MIC and MBC of normal and catalased manuka honey against bacteria, so that if we can see any relationship between the MBC and hydrogen peroxide. Choose Staphylococcus to proceed it. 5. Enterococci are , compare with other bacteria, relatively resistant to hydrogen peroxide, which might be responsible for the result of long-time surviving in manuka honey solution. Put this hypothesis in my thesis...until the antibacterial mechanism of manuka honey is cleared one day :P

Blood and... EtBr?!

Kerry showed me the new sheep blood she ordered recently and... the Ethidium Bromide Kerry ordered for me before the Xmas last year!!? Even though EtBr is carcinogen, still it shouldn't have taken this long to get here! Where the hell has it been during these months ?!?!

Security

I personally reckon that the importance of security can't be over-emphasized, especially those who are using computers or touching the internet are not supposed to do anything without considereing this issue. Sadly, even major facilities usually ignore how critical this issue is. By security I don't mean merely virus, spywares or malware things, but also other minor things such as the overall structure of websites or even the basic maintainance of the OS everyone is using. Oddly, many big facilities, even educational institute miss out this point. Recently I found a university puts a commercial software like this on there server yet set no protection on it and, honestly, I could copy it if I'd like to... :(

FreeBSD 6.1 released

Here is the release note.

2 more Enterococcus spp. from Ray

Enterococcus faecalis Enterococcus faecium See if these enterococci have similar trend to Enteroccus faecalis 1106 when incubated in honey solution within different time...(Ha! One more 12-hours-time-effect test...)

OpenBSD 3.9 released!!

The security-oriented OpenBSD project has announced its new release this month. Keep working Puffy!! BTW, would the next release be 3.10 or 4.0?

AMD Opteron notice

AMD Opteron x52 and x54 Processor Production Notice: CPU Frequency Margin Test Escape (from AMD official site) FAQ (from AMD official site) Opteron x52, x54...I think it's unafordable for individual users... :P

Joe's computer

I was asked to fix Joe's computer today as somehow his computer didn't boot up. From its beeps I realised it's caused by the video card or its cable. But apparently the problem is not that all. Some messages about SATA and RAID show up after booting up, and it also looks like some hardwares can hardly be detected. This is solely some mis-setting on BIOS. The biggest problem is that he wants to play online game (World of Warcraft) with this 3-year old machine, with which it's quite hard to play seamlessly. Actually even now the speed of the computer is quite bloody slow for daily use. What he can do is reinstall the whole Winblows Windows system for short term, or upgrade his hardwares for long term's viewpoint. The re-installation itself is not quite a hard task for me; the installation disk is the one Jou borrowed from his friend. As this is illegal version and the system can't be updated from M$'s website, the security issue is quite of concern to me. To play his game smoothly, it's unavailable for Jou to get some new parts and upgrade the spec of the computer (VGA, RAM, CPU, and hence motherboard as well). He said he'd buy new RAM module tomorrow morning. By the way. here is the current spec of Jou's computer (just in case): CPU: AMD Athlon 2100+ MB: Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra RAM: 256 + 512 MB (I find the 512MB one is not working :P ) HD: Seagate 80G Audio: onboard NIC: onboard (RTL8139)

R 2.2.1 -> R 2.3.0

The R project has relesased the new version of R. As usual, tons of update and new functions have been added in this new release. Rock! CRAN!!

Kerry's got eye infection

This morning we got a phone call from Kerry and said she'd got eye infection and would be off today. I was asked to do her a favor: Collect all towels and lab coats, pop them down to the science store and get new towels, and also get a box of petri dish and niddle.

Earthquake

Quake rocks remote Russian region (on BBC News) 7.7 magnitude...that's much more violent than 921 quake hit Taiwan years ago eh...

Another donation to OpenBSD (OpenSSH) project

GoDaddy.com Donates $10K to Open Source Development Project (on The Hosting News) Another $10k for OpenBSD project (and, again, therefore OpenSSH projct as well). Anyway, when would Sun show their respect to OpenSSH project by way of donation? :P (Huh? I heard they said NEVER)

Discussion with Ray (and David...?)

As I've got some strange result in time-effect test when comparing with Enterococcus faecalis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, I took those results down to Ray's place and had a small discussion. David was there as well. It looks like this result interested Ray and David, and they even thought this has to do with resistant gene and would like me to screen there genes. Not quite sure what resistnat genes may be responsible to this, Ray asked David which gene should be screened. Guess what David answered - 16S?! (Even Ray was surprised... :P ) Ray pointed out that the volume I'd been using (20ul) is too small and, I should use 100ul-1 ml instead. He also considered that the inoculum density of mine (100,000 CFU/ml) is too heavy and may reduce it down to thousands or even hundreds of CFU/ml. However, 20ul is what we've been using in our lab, and also 100,000 CFU/ml is the standard in CLSI (previously called NCCLS). Dillema...