Older blog entries for pedro (starting at number 54)

en?tymology -- my two favorite things

I love both etymology and entymology.

Yesterday, I found this on the wall near our shower. It looked at first like a crack in the tile, or a dusty drip of caulking or spackle, which are numerous in our bathroom. But I took a closer look, and there was a little Alice In Wonderland-esque worm poking its head out of both ends of the case, which looked like a dirty pumpkin seed. Unbelievable! Turns out it is the larvae of a Case Making (or alternatively Bearing) Clothes Moth. I don't like the fact that we have clothing moths, but that thing was neat, if a little freaky.

Syndicated 2008-11-19 14:21:24 from (l)andscape: (a)lien

weird moments in the grocery store

So, I was at Ralph's the other day, and what came over the PA but the love theme from Bladerunner! That reminds me of the time that Mel, my late night cashier at Jewel in Chicago, said that sometimes in the middle of the night they play weird stuff like classical music and whatever because they think nobody's listening.

Syndicated 2008-10-23 16:43:40 from (l)andscape: (a)lien

masterpiece security theatre

This has been all over the Internet, but here's a great article about why the TSA screening, etc. is just designed to make you feel better and doesn't actually stop smart terrorists.

Syndicated 2008-10-17 14:56:54 from (l)andscape: (a)lien

i never should have written all those tank programs, or: life imitates art

This is an awesome story about some kids who wrote a "light cycles" program for an Apple IIgs. All was going well until the computer players decided to escape the game grid into system memory... (from clickolinko)

Syndicated 2008-10-10 00:18:06 from (l)andscape: (a)lien

750,000 jobs and 250 billion dollars?

I hate to parrot Slashdot, but this article from Ars Technica discusses the sources and legitimacy of the common figures used to support the further restriction and enforcement of copyright and other IP protections. It's a really good read.

In essence, the figures of 750,000 jobs and 250 billion dollars "lost to piracy" have been quoted and re-quoted for years in lobbying efforts, testimony, articles, and more in an effort to get tougher IP laws. Unfortunately, no one ever followed the breadcrumb trail back to the original source of the figures or did any simple reality testing of them until now... and the numbers don't really hold up to scrutiny. Do you like your government making laws based on flimsy statistics? I don't.

Syndicated 2008-10-09 21:28:25 from (l)andscape: (a)lien

get_pageblock_migrationtype

Are you a kernel newbie like me? Have you been perusing kernel code and wondering what "migration type" is or whether it's important for you to understand? Here's a link.

Page migration is about moving pages around to alleviate differences in RAM in access times. How can acccess times be different? Well, in traditional systems, they're not, because the system has only one bank of RAM, and the time to access it is always the same.

However, some new systems are NUMA systems. NUMA stands for Non Uniform Memory Access and describes a system where the memory access times are not uniform from processor to processor. For example, my dual Opteron board has two banks of RAM, one for each processor. The bank for CPU0 can hold 4G, but the bank for CPU1 can only hold 2G. As you might imagine, there are times when CPU1 needs more than 2G of RAM, so it can "borrow" from CPU0 -- but of course, memory access to the other bank will take longer than memory access to its own, local bank, so sometimes we'd like to "migrate" the data from one memory bank to another.

You can imagine how this kind of thing could get very complicated in a large multi-system cluster or in future "1000s of cores" designs.

Syndicated 2008-10-06 16:50:26 from (l)andscape: (a)lien

call me old school

I've been annoyed at the proliferation of iTunes-like music players and the dearth of old school Winamp/xmms-like players. I still listen to albums in the time honored fashion of selecting one and listening to it straight through. I also have many, many gigabytes of music, and importing them into my library never seems to go as smoothly as it should. Importing one album at a time seems like an insulting waste of time, since the whole point of these players is library management. Furthermore, I also have a lot of different music in different formats, like .mod, .spc, etc and those don't seem to be readily supported by rhythmbox, etc. so I can't listen to them anyway.

Adding insult to injury, xmms has disappeared from Ubuntu in favor of xmms2 which, while it has plugins for different formats, crashes when I try to play music! Thanks a lot, guys! I guys the "2" in xmms2 stands for "sucks".

Thankfully, I just discovered 'audacious' today -- which appears to be basically a workalike of xmms. (The apt data says it's a fork of 'beep' -- maybe that's a fork of xmms... I don't know, or care.) Anyway, Ubuntu has lots of plugins for it, including all my old music. So I'm back in business.

Syndicated 2008-10-03 17:04:58 from (l)andscape: (a)lien

sarah palin interview

It's been an interesting few weeks for American politics. I normally don't post about them, but I honestly feel like it is my patriotic duty to say something. I'm also going to say some things that might be challenging to some people. I'd like to encourage you to take 10 minutes of your day and read this post and then watch the accompanying video. Don't stop if it makes you uncomfortable.

In general, I hate it when people take cheap shots at politicians or parties they don't like on principle. When making a meaningful criticism, you need to say meaningful things, not just "XXXX sucks!". And there is a difference between meaningful, substantive criticism (which I think is essential to democracy and therefore patriotic) and personal attacks (which I think are cheap and pointless).

I would describe myself as an independent moderate. I like John McCain, and 8 years ago I was an ardent McCain supporter. I still wish he had won. But -- and please don't tune me out for saying this -- his pick of Sarah Palin is seriously questionable if not irresponsible.

That said, I don't mean anything personal against Sarah Palin. I'm not going to make arguments about her politics or personal beliefs as to why she shouldn't be VP. The primary, first issue with Palin is her qualifications and readiness for the job. Not because she is a first term governor and former mayor -- but her informedness and ability to meaningfully communicate about the issues is seriously lacking. A VP should be a good candidate right away -- not someone who needs to be programmed by the campaign in order to have meaningful things to say.

If you haven't seen her interviews with Katie Couric, you -- as an American voter -- really, really need to. There are several key issues in the interview that she fails to speak meaningfully on, and some parts where it's not even clear what she is saying or how it is directly relevant to the question.

John McCain has (according to the tables used for health insurance) a 1 in 5 (or greater) chance of dying in office strictly because of his age. Regardless of how much you like Sarah Palin, it is hard to see the interview and think that she is truly ready to step in and be sworn in as president at a moment's notice. Again, not because of any ideological reasons (although you may or may not like her ideology), but because she is simply not ready.

Please, forget all the SNL sketches and the vitriolic editorials, forget the bias of magazines and edited media. You have a rare opportunity to simply watch her responses to simple questions that, in my opinion, a VP should be able to answer.

Here's a link to the YouTube search terms "couric palin interview". This way, if the links change you can still find clips. Make sure you listen to her answers about three topics: 1., why the bailout shouldn't go to the middle class instead of the banks, 2., her foreign policy experience, and 3., McCain's track record of regulating the economy. Some videos are excerpts or have commentary, etc., I encourage you to find and watch the unedited interviews.

Syndicated 2008-09-30 18:57:41 from (l)andscape: (a)lien

solanaceae

If I could be any family of flowering plants, I would want to be the nightshade family. It's the best!

Syndicated 2008-09-29 20:27:31 from (l)andscape: (a)lien

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