John M. Marzluff & Tony Angell, Yale University Press, 2005

The subject of animal intelligence is emotionally charged and controversial, often pitting steely-eyed, cold-hearted scientists against pet-owners and their fuzzy, big-eyed companions. The scientists want to see repeatable experimental data before making a judgement call, whereas the pet owners are overwhelmed with evidence.

In the Company of Crows and Ravens falls into both camps simultaneously.

On the side of science, the book documents examples of culture among animals — learned behaviors that have are localized to specific groups and which are passed on from generation to generation. It describes the co-evolution of human and animal culture, and gives concrete examples of where the behavior of one species influences a cultural practice or tradition in another. On its main subject, the family corvidae, it describes experiments confirming the ability to recognize individuals of other species, the use of group-specific vocabulary, and documents observed shifts in group behaviors in response to outside influences which is then taught to others outside the influence area. It even documents observations of brand loyalty among crows, and cultural place memories.

On the other side, however, the book is a paean to corvids, their cleverness, and their playful ways. It is clear that the authors love these birds, respect them, and maybe even want them to be smarter and more talented than the actual average crow.

I’m one of the many people who will be using VNC to do remote assistance for a relative using Windows.

There are a number of tutorials out there. Most of them fail because they require the ability to VNC in to the remote system, which won’t work in my case because the remote Windows box is behind a firewall/router that I can’t configure. There are also several reverse approaches out there, where the user needing assistance initiates the connection. The first of these I say was Gina Trapani’s approach at Geek to Live, which uses UltraVNC on both ends. This is almost the solution I want, except that it requires Windows on my end as well. It also assumes that I’m at a fixed location.

In the comments, I came across Fazal Majid’s response. He had the same requirements as I do, and links to his source where he built a customized VNC server that targets a fixed IP address. Fazal’s approach matches my needs exactly.
But then I ran into the problem of the last step: the reverse SSH tunnel from my known server (which gets hard-coded into the executable) to my notebook running Chicken of the VNC.
Building reverse SSH tunnels is really not that difficult. But when I created the setup, I was able to make it work from a Linux machine and from a Cygwin terminal under Windows, but it mysteriously failed under Mac OS. Using lots of -v flags, I kept seeing the service for the port on the Mac side refusing the connection from the tunnel. The ssh debug looked like:

debug1: remote forward success for: listen 5900, connect localhost:5500
debug1: client_input_channel_open: ctype forwarded-tcpip rchan 2 win 131072 max 32768
debug1: client_request_forwarded_tcpip: listen localhost port 5900, originator ::1 port 60475
debug1: channel 0: new [::1]
debug1: confirm forwarded-tcpip
debug3: channel 0: waiting for connection
debug1: channel 0: not connected: Connection refused
debug2: channel 0: zombie
debug2: channel 0: garbage collecting
It turns out that this means the tunnel doesn’t even see the service. After wasting time with firewall tests and a lot of other false leads, I finally noticed the [::1] notation in there. Yup, that’s an IPv6 address. The solution is to make sure the ssh tunnel is using IPv4. For reference, the command that works is:

ssh -nNT4 -R 5500:localhost:5500 -l my_username myhost.com

So a Windows Update breaks the ability to allocate big chunks fo contiguous memory (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924054/), which causes this JBoss configuration to fail. Restarting summons the dreaded VM Error: Could not reserve enough space for object heap error message.

So Microsoft knows they broke stuff. They have a “hotfix” (which, despite the “hot” part of the name will require a reboot). But I can’t just download it. Nope. Gotta pay for a support contract.

Now, I don’t have a huge issue with a bug like this creeping into a Windows security update. Let’s face it, bugs happen. But to charge me to fix the problem, even after I paid for the OS? That’s just not right. Cast my vote for Free Software.

This was being shouted into a telephone so loudly that I heard it through the office door as I passed along in the hallway:

“No, not now! I’m not going to negotiatiate, I’m late for meditation!”

Michael Crichton, HarperCollins, 2004.

Crichton knows how to write a thriller, and even when it’s a pedantic screed, he still manags to make it fun. Imagine, if you will, a cabal of evil environmentalists, who go to outlandish lengths to try to kill lots of people in order to sway public opinion, thereby bringing in more revenues for their nefarious organizations (which need big money primarily to support their leaders’ lavish lifestyles). Don’t think too hard about the fact that these evil environmentalists’ biggest scheme is to trigger a tsunami in order to spread fear about climate change (huh!?).

Crichton definitely has his axe to grind, and even has a few valid points to make (I liked the idea about double-blind science funding, for example). But this just isn’t a book you can take seriously as anything but a preachy adventure. There are some fun aspects, though. I enjoyed the barely disguised Martin Sheen and Barry Glasner characters, for example, and Crichton’s sadistic glee in dispatching one of them. Crichton is obviously infuriated by hypocracy within the environmental movement and among its promoters. And sure, he has plenty of footnotes to support his “no such thing as global warming” hypothesis — drawing different conclusions than some of the studies’ authors. He explains that away by arguing that they have to make the politically-correct assumption in order to publish. But any chance of taking his science seriously is impacted by assertions like that there are more old-growth forests around today than 150 years ago (must have something to do with what the definition of “are” is).