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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.