This handbagged face lady can tell me nothing..
Spending her time sniffing poo, and making fat people cry.
From the outset (flakey accreditation)
- The value of McKeith’s certified membership of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants = Guardian journalist Ben Goldacre managed to buy the same membership online for his dead cat for $60.
- ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith = a non-accredited correspondence-course PhD from the US
“If you contact the Australasian College of Health Sciences (Portland, US) where McKeith has a “pending diploma in herbal medicine”, they say they can’t tell you anything about their students. When you contact Clayton College of Natural Health to ask where you can read her PhD, they say you can’t. What kind of organisations are these? If I said I had a PhD from Cambridge, US or UK (I have neither), it would only take you a day to find it.”
Examples of her technical reasoning
- ”She talks endlessly about chlorophyll, for example: how it’s “high in oxygen” and will “oxygenate your blood” – but chlorophyll will only make oxygen in the presence of light. It’s dark in your intestines, and even if you stuck a searchlight up your bum to prove a point, you probably wouldn’t absorb much oxygen in there”
- ”She says DNA is an anti-ageing constituent: if you “do not have enough RNA/DNA”, in fact, you “may ultimately age prematurely”. Stress can deplete your DNA, but algae will increase it: and she reckons it’s only present in growing cells. Is my semen growing? Is a virus growing? Is chicken liver pate growing? All of these contain plenty of DNA”
- McKeith argues that examining and smelling faeces can give clues to bodily misfunction. – According to Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George’s Hospital, London, “it is impossible to diagnose medical conditions from looking at a normal brown stool.”
NetBSD quick fix
This is a quick list for bits and bobs on getting a ‘working’ netbsd box after the installation has completed. This will generally focus on getting the network up and then related services.
1. set up network editing the files /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/rc.conf and /etc/ifconfig.xxN. (xxN is your adapter name, e.g. xennet0 for a xen network interface)
[code lang="bash"]
echo "nameserver x.x.x.x" >> /etc/resolv.conf
echo "inet 202.233.42.4 netmask 255.255.255.0" >> /etc/ifconfig.xxN
[/code]
Open /etc/rc.conf with vi and add/change the following lines.
[code lang="bash"]
hostname="xxxx"
domainname="xxxx.xxxxx"
defaultroute="x.x.x.x"
[/code]
This will now have you set up with a permenantly configured network interface. Next step is enabling remote logins either ssh or telnet, obviously ssh is the prefered method as it’s secure. Enabling ssh involves adding an overide to /etc/rc.conf, the /etc/defaults/rc.conf has the directive sshd=NO.
[code lang="bash"]
echo "sshd=YES" >> /etc/rc.conf
/etc/init.d/sshd start
[/code]
Enabling telnet is done through /etc/inetd.conf and consists of removing the hash from the beginning of the telnet directive. Also remove the ‘-a valid’ from the end to allow all types of logins.
A reboot will then allow remote users to log into the system, also remember to add a user to the ‘wheel’ group allowing them to su to root.
Read Moreebayz
There have been a number of new toys appear at chateau de Dan recently, my new macbook, a new router and something i’ve been after for ages (an rs232 to ethernet).
The macbook replaces my ageing powerbook 
which i’ve had for a couple of years now and is starting to really show it’s age. The Macbook is complemented by 4Gb of ram which I ordered from crucial and arrived in no time what so ever. I could have ordered a macbook with the memory already in it, however it’s 500 quid for the memory from apple and 60 quid from crucial so only a nutter would buy the ram from apple. Also I had planned to use the discount that I get from BT. However with Kim with me it emerged that students again get discount from apple, a ridiculous amount of discount infact. The BT discount amounted to 6%, which isn’t to be sniffed at. However students get 14% discount on hardware and software and 70% discount on apple care. So I snapped there hands off when we were told this, and now i’ve a fully apple cared for laptop 
.
The replacement router is a belkin ‘N’ which is utter dog wank, no snmp, no static routes, no telnet access, no snmp, crashes all the time and doesn’t work with my xBox. So I expect i’ll replace it soon enough.
The rs232 to ethernet adapter on the other hand is fantastic, this is something that i’ve wanted for a very long time. The reason it’s taken so long to get one has been the fact that they cost a small fortune to buy new. I have trawled through ebay numerous times to find a cheaper one, but had so fair failed to find one. Luckily I found one on a nightshift a couple of days ago and bid a couple of quid on it, got outbid pretty sharpish and proceeded to forget about it. Then a couple of days later someone mentioned that they had been outbid on something else on eBay at which point I decided to see how much the adapter was. When I checked it hadn’t moved from three days ago and there was 4 minutes remaining on the auction. So I snapped that up and it appeared a day ago.
works like a charm
Netbsd 4.0 domU How-to
Not a 100% straight forward to install, and there were gaps in most FAQ’s and guides I found on the internet. However collating them gave me the information i need to have a fully working Netbsd4 install in my xen enviroment.
Step 1. (find the kernel)
If you go to their website and read the xen install guide it pretty much will tell you that you need a xen kernel (of course) which are are in the binary kernel downloads. Looking on their download pages and through mirrors would only find me a i386 kernel which is no good. Under the amd64/ folder was only their general kernels and not a dom0 or dumU kernel. A bit of googling found be a link that didn’t work, however after traversing the link i worked out that the xen kernels are under the daily builds folder (my own fault for not reading things thoroughly enough). So click here and get yourself a xen kernel — > CLICK HERE
Step 2. (create domU)
I’m assuming (never a good thing) that if you’re googling or searching for such things as a netbsd domU install then you know the basics for making a domU. Creating you domU config file is straight forward, allocate memory, a name, a disk (file or physical path) and then give it a path to the kernel. You may have noticed that there were a couple of xen kernels on the ftp site, two are required:
netbsd-INSTALL_XEN3_DOMU
netbsd-XEN3_DOMU
To begin with use the install one (pointing out the obvious here) this contains a ramdisk which will configure your hardware (such as network cards) and allow you to do a step by step install. Be mindful of the path used in the ftp/http install as the default one is incorrect. Once the installation has completed *DONT REBOOT*
Step 3. (Fix domU)
Once installation takes you back to the main install screen, open the utilities and drop to the shell /bin/sh. The xen device files need moving over to the actual file system otherwise on reboot it wont find any disks, which can be irritating as it took me some messing around until i found this solution.
mount /dev/xbd0a /mnt cp -pR /dev/rxbd* /mnt/dev cp -pR /dev/xbd* /mnt/dev halt -p
This will mean that when you reboot the system will see the xen devices and actually have a disk to boot from. Once this is done and the system is halted you probably will need to control-5 out and do an xm destroy on the netbsd domU (doesn’t matter as the system is halted). The final step is to change the kernel in your domU config file from the install one over to the actual domU kernel.
Step 4. (boot your working netbsd domU)
xm create -c <your_config>
Enjoy… oh and cheers for asistance
Read MoreNetbsd 64bit domU
I’ve been wanting a bsd domU since i managed to originally get my xen server up and running, again googling the great wide web revealed past threads on forums and dead links. The effort to port the freeBSD kernel has been all but abandoned, and openBSD doesn’t appear to be moving toward that at all. So I looked into netBSD with their motto “Of course it runs NetBSD.” surely I couldn’t go wrong. However when I was originally looking in Nov ’07 there was only a 32bit domU kernel and my xen domain is all 64bit so unless i went down the hvm route (which i didn’t) then that was that.
Yesterday I noticed that netbsd has been updated late december, and after a bit of searching found a note in the changelog saying that there was a 64bit kernel now for xen. However it’s hidden in the various depths of netbsd’s ftp site, which took a considerable bit of finding. However here is proof –>
