A Tale Of Two Species

There are more than two species of kingfisher in USM, but the two largest ones are the white-throated kingfisher and the stork-billed kingfisher. I managed to get a shot of both of them a few weeks back in similar (almost mirror-image) poses. The birds also look similar (both are large, have blue wings and a red bill).

The white-throated kingfisher has a brown head and body, bright blue wings and tail and a patch of white on its breast.

The stork-billed kingfisher is slightly larger and stockier than the white-throated kingfisher. It has a brown cap, orangey body with blue wings and a blue tail.

I think there are smaller kingfishers lurking about in the mangroves, but I can't quite get a clear shot of them.

A Cute Kitten

This fluffy little kitten was seen wandering around the neighbourhood with its mother. It can't get too close to my house because my cats don't like it. I took its picture while it was scampering around in the yard.

Random Birds

My collection of bird pictures is growing. I now have gigabytes of bird pictures, and I keep putting off uploading the full-resolution ones to Flickr (but I will eventually)!

In the meantime, here are a selection of some of the pictures sitting on my hard drive.

A white-breasted waterhen runs along the bank of a stream.

A sandpiper waits on the shore of a lake.

A rather pudgy yellow-vented bulbul sits on the branch of a tree.

This looks like a zebra dove.

This tree is home to a few Asian koels. Here is one of them.

Language Tutor And Translator For Hire

No, not me.

My friend Kirsty J. McCluskey has set up a web page offering her services as a translator and tutor for hire. Besides English, she's fluent in French, German, Spanish and Russian (yes, count 'em, five) and can translate texts from any of those languages to English. She can teach you these languages too, as she offers online tutoring for them as well as history and writing. She's a brilliant lady, a Cambridge graduate, and she's had a ton of experience with this kind of thing.

I'm posting this here because Kirsty needs help to get the word out about her translation and tutoring service, so if you need translation done or language tutoring do visit her webpage and take a look at what she's offering.

Bumblebee Transforms

Bumblebee the Autobot transforms from a Chevrolet Camaro 2008 concept car to a big alien robot in this sequence of pictures. Click here to see it in animated gif form (this is a terrible example of stop motion).

Black-Naped Orioles

These days I've seen a lot of black-naped orioles around the campus, and also around my house. Even though these birds are abundant, it's quite tricky to get a really clear shot of them. I haven't been able to take many good photos until now. The first three photos were taken in USM, and the last bird was sighted right in front of my house.

Geodesic

There's a big geodesic structure on campus which gave me a few interesting shots.

This one says "Help! I've been trapped by a cheesy special effect!" like the starship Enterprise on various Star Trek episodes (the TOS episode "The Tholian Web" or the TNG pilot "Encounter At Farpoint" comes to mind).

Here's an artsy photo of a rusty hexagon that is part of the geodesic structure. You can tell it's artsy because it's a picture of a rusty object.

Larger versions of these photos will up on my Flickr account (eventually).

Non-Ninja Turtles

There are turtles in the lakes on campus. I'm sure my friends who used to study here miss them, so here are two of them.

TV Tropes

There is a fun website called TV Tropes that dissect "tropes", or common devices for storytelling used in television (and movies, and comics, and literature). Tropes aren't necessarily clichés, but you'll find a lot of those too on the site. Once you read it you'll be looking for tropes in everything you watch, which may ruin your whole viewing experience (or make it so much more fun). You've been warned.

Backing Up Drive Images Over The Network

I tried out some useful network kung fu today with dd, buffer and netcat (thanks for the tip, Jeff!). You can backup an entire drive by creating an image of it on another machine. It's really easy to do, and it comes in real handy.

On the remote computer, you should have enough hard disk space to fit the image of the source computer's hard disk. Run the following on the remote computer:

$ nc -l -p 1234 > file.img

You can replace 1234 with a port number of your choosing (1024 and above if you're not root), and you can also replace file.img with any filename.

On the source computer, let's say we want to back up hard disk sda to the remote host with the IP address of 10.0.0.4. We would run:

$ dd if=/dev/sda bs=64k | buffer -S 10M | nc 10.0.0.4 1234

The first command, dd will read /dev/sda 64k blocks at a time and pipe it into the program buffer, which in turn feeds it into netcat (nc). The destination is 10.0.0.4 and the port number is 1234, since that is the number we used on the remote machine. The use of the buffer program is optional, it's meant to improve network performance.

Once it's done a neat little file called file.img will sit on the remote computer containing the disk image for the source computer's sda drive.

You can actually use the image file in programs such as Qemu, and boot the operating system on it (if it has one) in a virtual machine. Hard disk images are also useful for cloning the setup of an OS on multiple computers.

Note that if your hard disk contains an OS or software that have unfriendly proprietary licenses such as Microsoft Windows, it is probably a violation of some stick-in-the-mud license agreement to do this procedure. However if you're using a free OS such as Linux, you're in the clear.