horticultural experiments

Germinating Rose Seeds

Roses are not difficult to grow from seed, if you do it right.
[ . . . . ]
First, be aware that each rose seedling is a new, never-before-seen variety.

Well, after reading
The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View… and doing a little research in rose hips as seeds, I decided to see what kind of strange variants I could get from my rose bushes. I am fortunate in having three good sized hips (the size of a cherry) from three different roses. None of the plants are identified, though my garden mentor — my father — suspects one is a Queen Elizabeth. That’s the one I just worked on. It occurs to me now I should have used the digital camera, and I will on the next one I do (I have found no pictures of the process).

I simply followed the instructions on the page linked to above. We’ll see what happens, come the new year.

the ultimate hosting machine

Yahoo! News – Blueprint for an Apple Xserve Rollout

“Xserve is like a BMW engine. It’s fast, safe and reliable,” Toker noted, adding that the company researched white papers and tested the Xserve against competitors, such as Dell and IBM. In the long run, especially from clients’ perspectives, the Xserve made more sense.

One of the most surprising things I read in this article was this: “a strong selling point is the tightly coupled integration between the Xserve’s OS and its hardware platform.”

So the open hardware standard we’ve heard touted for so long may not be as strong as the integrated approach used by Sun and Apple, the two companies most often cited as not offering a compelling reason to buy their products over their “open” rivals.

Perhaps the value of time spent debugging and devising workarounds for mismatched components is better understood these days.

scratching an itch with iCal

Apple – iCal

I have been doing more stuff with iCal and keep finding more to like about it. What really makes it work for me is phpiCalendar (look for in on SourceForge). I can publish calendars and share them in an interface that looks and works a lot like the iCal desktop application.

I have high hopes for the Mozilla calendar module to allow platform-neutral editing, but it’s not there quite yet (it’s still in beta, I realize). In fact, I had to open a bug against one problem I am having.

I do wish the date files were more easily readable (unlike so much of the other prefs files in OS X, there are not human-parsable XML, but some other format that doesn’t immediately make sense to me). But then again, the phpiCalendar parser is available as open source, so I can work out the logic from that, if need be.

Have I mentioned how cool I think this is?

no more blows against the empire

I am going to try to refrain from adding my voice to the anti-MSFT chorus in future. No compelling reason, other than boredom with the whole topic. There’s nothing new to talk about. How many times does anyone want to read or write about lousy business practices, shoddy design and implementation, an utter lack of regard for customer choice or desires, and an unwillingness to do anything about any of these things?

There are lots of other weblogs that link to the same bug reports, the same pithy attacks: the Waypath results I was getting helped me realize how unoriginal my gripes were, so I’m going to leave it to others to work those fields.

hard to tell if this works

HT-26

First, how can you accurately diagnose yourself for developing kidney stones? Easy. Sit down and place one of your foot on your knee. There’s a small bone protruding out at the bottom of your ankles. Note the small semi- depressed area between that bone and your Achilles tendon toward the back of your foot. Use your thumb and with some pressure, push around that area. If you feel a strong reaction of some sort, that means you have stones. No reaction, no stones. The right foot corresponds to the right kidney. The left foot the left kidney. If you have even the slightest response, take HT-26. Within 2-3 days, the developing stones (size of grains of sand) will pass. If you have a strong reaction, it is recommended that HT-26 be taken for a longer period of time. When can one stop taking HT-26? When all pain or reactions from ‘pressing’ on the side of your foot/ankle is completely gone. This method for detecting kidney stones is very easy and accurate, so you can check every day to see your progress.

According to this, I’m stone free. I have my doubts about that, as much as I’d like to believe it.

I may be wrong on this one

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Laptops for all? ‘Stupidest idea’ makes grade

But the governor compares the critics to naysayers who rose up generations ago when schools talked about sending children home with other learning devices. “They said they could throw them at each other, or dump them in mud puddles and destroy them,” King said. “They were talking about books.”

I have been and continue to be opposed to widespread use of computers in the classroom for a variety of reasons. But this article may answer a lot of my arguments.

For one, there’s no access problem: everyone gets one. For another, I suspect they didn’t cost as much as if each parent had bought their own (Apple would love to get back into education and if I read the story right, some Gates Foundation money funded this: sweet irony). And while it’s early, it seems to be effective at getting kids focused on their work: discipline problems are down, attendance is up. Obviously, some other things have changed to make the equipment useful: the same old “chalk and talk” techniques don’t really leverage a school full of wireless networked laptops, and that aspect of things didn’t get much attention.

For now, I’ll stay with my old position: I still think, given the way coursework is designed and taught, all a computer is really good for is to teach typing or keyboarding as it’s now known.

One of my biggest issues has been that by teaching with a computer, you teach the student about the computer itself: it becomes a distraction. And given the pace of innovation (slow though it is in these monopoly-dominated times), what will a seventh grader learn that will help him ten years later as he enters the job market? Put another way, do you need ten years to learn how to manage files and do basic word processing?

Of course not. And we’re starting to see exciting developments in the interfaces we use (mouse gestures, for example) that make keyboard skills less essential. Funny how the big innovative company makes the only browsers that don’t use this . . . . . .

Mark me down as interested but not convinced.

Open Office

OpenOffice.org I haven’t had any luck building this from source, even through the ports collection, but these packages are supposed to work. So far, all I get are crashes, so I am going to try the Linux packages and run them in the emulation ABI. Of course, I can’t install the Linux version until the I get the FreeBSD one uninstalled: some remnants survived my attempts at removing it all, so I have to now download it again and see if I can uninstall it properly. They’re managing that much MSFT emulation quite well: make it difficult to uninstall or reinstall.