I was watching a David Attenborough program the other day on the origins of life on Earth. He visited a place in Morocco where some enterprising locals are grinding down a mountain of sandstone looking for trilobyte fossils which they clean up and sell, in some cases for thousands of dollars. These fossils are pretty small - easily fit in the palm of your hand - but the detail is amazing.

Click here to go see the original on the smithsonianmag's blog (click the image again when you get there - they have an enormous hi-res image). Here's some more for your viewing pleasure.

Wikipedia, of course, has a very nice page on trilobytes with some more nice photos, notably this one of an eye column. Apparently the lenses are calcite (yes, they had eyes made of rock - before they were fossilized).

Now that's cool.

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Dug out a couple more old sketches.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table at my old house when I started this first one, which means it pre-dates March 2007 when I moved. Its drawn from a photo I took on a holiday with friends in Scotland in 2004 I think. Contrary to an earlier post my pencils aren't Derwent Studio's (oops), I checked and they are in fact Faber Castell Polychromos, which have a lovely soft feel, on 220gsm A2 (594mm x 420mm) Windsor & Newton heavyweight cartwridge paper.

The whole back-end of the squirrel is missing - can't squeeze enough into my A4 scanner (A4 is 1/4 the size of A2). I attempted to stitch a second scan onto this one to complete the squirrel, but the join is very clear to see, and i just can't summon the energy to wrestle The Gimp into blending the two images together nicely.

Red squirrel, colour pencil on A2, drawn from photo I took in Scotland in 2004.

The next one pre-date's the squirrel, but again was drawn at my old house, after my holiday in Mexico (where I took the picture its drawn from). That dates it somewhere between September 2002 and March 2007. My guess is 2004. Again its Faber-Castell colour-pencil on Windsor & Newton A2, scanned by my A4 scanner so the legs (to the right of this section) and the tail (above this section) are cut off here.

Jaguar, colour pencil sketch

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Sometimes you'll want to use a non-standard CSS property in GWT via CSSResource - say to use rounded-corners on your borders using -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius.

However, if you just plonk those properties in your CSSResource you're in for some warnings. GWT doesn't like property names that start with "-". The solution is very simple: escape the leading "-" with a "\", e.g. \-moz-border-radius: 5px.

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Dump a db with:

mysqldump -h<host-or-ip> -u<username> -p<password> <db-name> > dump.sql

To import, first create the target db, then import the dump with:

mysql -h<host-or-ip> -u<username> -p<password> <db-name> < dump.sql

Yep, its that easy.

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I decided it was high time I got a copy of my photos from the last 10 years or so backed-up somewhere. I downloaded Picasa (3.0-beta for ubuntu x64) and signed up for web-albums and started rummaging through my pics. Picasa tells me I have 5,773 pictures in my ~/Pictures directory, so I could be having to spend rather a long time sorting through that lot!

Scrolling through I came across some old sketches from way back (2002 and older), some of which I had scanned at various stages during the sketch. After a bit of fighting with Picasa (I didn't want it to throw away my original tif files) I got it to pick up the extra converted jpg copies which i made, and tried to upload them ... no go on that score, its still doing incrementally backing-off retries and failing to upload with no explanation. The log file location says "c:\Documents and settings...", which is a bit of a laugh given i'm running ubuntu :)

Instead I uploaded those converted jpg's via the web-albums website, and shared the album. Here's a sample:

pony sketch, step 1 pony sketch, step 2 pony sketch, finished

Honestly no idea why the last one has a blue-ish tint to it - I must have screwed up scanning it or something. I'll balance the colours and re-upload if I get a chance.

This was drawn from a photo I took at Llyn-Brianne in mid Wales, some time around 2002. There was a whole herd of what I can only assume are wild ponies just wandering around up there, and this little guy was one of them.

This sketch is a full side of A4, drawn with Derwent studio colour pencils. I saw someone drawing with these at an art show I went to with my dad years ago, and bought the 72 pack there and then - they really are fantastic.

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