codelike
codelike: "1) The one which is easier to use wins"'via Blog this'
[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] QoTD: Bob Hoffman
Online advertising was supposed to be interactive. It
was supposed to rescue us from having to force people
into looking at our ads. Consumers were going to want
to interact with us, they were going to want to have
conversations with marketers, they were going to want
to have relationships with brands.
It was all fantasies and delusions based on naive
interpretations of consumer behavior by people who had
a whole lot of ideological commitment to the web, and
very little experience with real world marketing.
Selenium, Chromedriver2, and SSL pages
If you are doing Selenium testing using Chromedriver2 0.8 and are having problems with self-signed SSL certificates, this is a known problem and will be fixed in a subsequent release. In the meantime I found that using the Chromedriver 26.0.1383.0 still worked without problems for Chrome 27 and also did not have this SSL certificate regression in it.
Syndicated 2013-05-24 13:47:32 from In Nomine - The Lotus Land
Raspberry Pi car computer | Flamelily I.T
لینوکس در ایستگاه فضایی
ایستگاه فضایی بینالمللی قصد دارد از سیستم عامل لینوکس به جای ویندوز در لپتاپهای خود استفاده کند.
در این ایستگاه تعدادی لپتاپ وجود دارد که فضانوردان از آنها در ماموریتهای خود استفاده می کنند. ناسا تا کنونی از سیستم عامل ویندوز بر روی این گونه لپتاپها استفاده کرده است اما قصد دارد یک سیستم عامل امن و قابل اعتماد را جایگزین آن نماید.
ایستگاه فضایی بینالمللی
یکی از کارشناسان ناسا در این زمینه می گوید ما در حال مهاجرت از ویندوز به سمت لینوکس هستیم چون ما نیاز به سیستم عاملی داریم که پایدار و قابل اعتماد باشد و به ما توان کنترل از راه دور در مرکز را بدهد. چنانچه اگر نیاز به نصب وصلهها، تنظیم و تغییر داشته باشیم به راحتی بتوانیم این کار را انجام دهیم.
چووالا، کارشناس ناسا، می گوید ما از لینوکس علمی به دبیان ۶ مهاجرت کردهایم. وی افزود لپتاپهایی که در بردهای ایستگاه توسط افرادی استفاده می شوند که نیازها و مسئولیتهای بسیار ویژهای دارند.
استفاده از لینوکس در ناسا چیزی جدیدی نیست. قبلا در پروژههایی همانند فرستادن کاوشگر به مریخ از این سیستم عامل استفاده شد. هر چند این تغییر و تحولات وقت زیادی را در زمینه جابهجایی برنامههای قدیمی ویندوزی خواهد گرفت اما نگرانی ناسا را در زمینه امنیت و آسیبپذیری کم خواهد کرد.
Syndicated 2013-05-24 11:06:29 from وب سایت مصطفی دانشور » linux
Recette pour burgers – LinuxFr.org
Le Motorola X Phone est-il vraiment mort ? – FrAndroid
Arrivera ? N’arrivera pas ? Allez !!!!! sortez le nous ce X Phone !!!
How can I break the Facebook habit?
I understand all those I'm quitting social
site
posts, really. The open web is much more
fun, useful, and promising in the long run than
hanging out on whatever current site has taken the
place of AOL, CompuServe, and MySpace.
But, really, just quitting a site? Might be harder than it sounds. Habits are hard to break, so here's a list of things to help add some motivation to social network quitteration.
Awkward friending. Every week or so, connect with a person who isn't really your friend, but would find it difficult to turn you down. Be a creepy ex-coworker. Don't spam, though.
Social marketing FAIL Find the most awful "engaged brands" in the ads on social sites and follow or friend them. Keep yourself from being tempted to return to a social site by knowing that your feed there will be full of FREE WEBINARs.
Social marketing double FAIL Befriend the most heinous companies and astroturf organizations you can find. The "American Sugar Alliance" and other groups looking for corporate welfare usually do it for me.
Klouchebaggery. Do a search for "social media marketing" and do the first tip you find. These change all the time, so be creative.
Open the RSS spigot. Set up an account on a
site such as dlvr.it
to automate posting your blog's feed to the social
site. Good for breaking a social networking habit.
(If you're all like, I just need to get on and
post my one blog link,
and before you know
it you've been on for an hour, this is better.
And yes, dlvr.it works for me.)
It's always Hug a Spammer Week. Someone named
Melissa wrote to tell me, I like your picture and
you look cute n awesome.
Well, Melissa, I think
you're cute n awesome too. Friend request accepted,
and welcome to my social graph.
Bonus link: Silicon Valley’s Problem by Catherine Bracy.
Can I uninstall Java?
The answer is almost certainly yes—unless you're a Java programmer. It can't hurt to remove it if you don't need it, and can probably help.
I've been running without Java on the desktop for years. The only thing that I've needed to put it back for has been with one extremely "legacy" behind-the-firewall application.
There are some old corporate applications that still depend on Java in the browser. If you're in the situation of having to use one of those, don't mess with the software installed on your company system, because the IT Department probably has a required setup that you're supposed to use, and you can just use that. (What are you reading random blogs for? Call your company help desk if you have questions about that machine!)
For your own computers, the instructions for removing Java depend on the OS. On Linux, you can use the regular system package manager to remove Java. On other platforms you can read How do I uninstall Java on my Windows computer? and How to disable Java on your Mac.
Compartilhado nas redes sociais
A busca por inspiração e a compreensão da linguagem e decisão daqueles que admiramos é algo comum no entretenimento e, provavelmente, em toda redação criativa. Alguém já fez algo bem, por que não compreender e concentrarmos a atenção na evolução em vez da perpetuação de erros, não é mesmo?
Pensando assim, tenho assistido muitos filmes durante a preparação para as filmagens do meu tão esperado curta-metragem, “The Flower Shop” (cujo um dos patrocinadores é o B9 e que já comentei aqui durante a fase de crowdfunding), e por conta da natureza de “filmes de época” optei por colocar “A Invenção de Hugo Cabret” na lista dos títulos mais importantes dessa seleção. Além da homenagem descarada às origens do cinema, elemento que, aliás, ainda me tira lágrimas por conta do trabalho de Ben Kingsley, notei algo mais sutil, algo mais marcante e fundamental nas escolhas de Martin Scorsese. “Hugo” é um tratado cinematográfico sobre a observação e pontos de vista.
A constatação deveria ser clara depois daquele impressionante passeio por Paris e pela estação de trem logo na abertura, entretanto, nas primeiras assistidas, fiquei encantado pela história e perseguindo cada referência possível a George Méliés e aos primórdios do cinema. Foi mais um mergulho naquele mundo entre-guerras, nos detalhes que Scorsese optou por mostrar.
De certa forma, assistimos um filme dentro do filme de outro filme. Hugo, Méliés e a obra de Méliés e dos Lumiére.
Anteontem, assisti novamente analisando tecnicamente e além de perceber que, exceto pelas grandiosas tomadas com grua e o uso limitado de steadi cam, o diretor optou por cortes secos na maior parte do filme. Ele quase não move a câmera; quem tem fluidez são os personagens e aquilo que eles veem. Arrisco apontar a composição das tomadas ter cerca de 25% de pontos de vista.
Muito por conta da natureza do assunto homenageado – o cinema, onde todos são espectadores e espiam por uma janela por vezes convidativa, por vezes assustadora – os personagens de Hugo Cabret também estão observando. Eles veem os detalhes, ou seja, quase nada de inserts (close ups fechados de objetos ou ações) mecânicos ou pontos de vista neutros.
Alguém sempre está olhando, seja Hugo, seja Méliés, seja o próprio Autômato. Tudo é motivado e reforça o conceito da relevância do cinema. Méliés surtou quando viu os sonhos perderem a batalha para o realismo e a dor, do mesmo modo Hugo sonha com os detalhes da realidade idílica na qual vive, mesmo contra qualquer razão lógica. Sozinho, ele não busca ajuda; ele continua a projeção na esperança de um fim milagroso, como nos filmes.
“Cinema trata do que está na tela, e do que não está” – Martin Scorsese
A variedade de pontos de vista, de intensidade na observação e mo grau de maravilhamento vivenciado pelos personagens graças a essa escolha de Scorsese é intrigante. Ele costuma dizer que “cinema trata do que está na tela, e do que não está”; Hugo trabalha, e questiona, esse conceito de forma profunda. Se estamos observando, quem vê o que sentimos? Até que ponto a sensação alheia pode refletir no estado de espírito do observador? O cinema é mesmo limitado àquilo que se vê ou se escuta? Em muitas ocasiões, um poderoso “reaction shot” vale mais do que mostrar uma tragédia. Na dinâmica da vida de Hugo, todos são personagens, menos ele. Quem o observa é inanimado.
Quando isso muda, a linguagem muda. Ele passa a figurar mais e o medo inicial deixa de ser o único tom quando ele ri, corre riscos e, mesmo sem perceber, se apaixona. De certa forma, é a trajetória de Méliés, que o observava mesmo sem que o garoto notasse. Sentado atrás do balcão, o cineasta sonhador via um mundo no qual era incapaz de provocar efeito, de despertar o devaneio, de criar sorrisos.
Em vez de concentrar esforços na redescoberta da visão de Méliés, Scorsese transfere toda essa carga para as crianças e o efeito é o mesmo. Eles descobrem, exploram, observam e são observados. O diretor aproveitou cada ângulo dos cenários, cada possibilidade maluca criada pelas cenas em CGI e sempre nos manteve espiando.
De certa forma, assistimos um filme dentro do filme de outro filme. Hugo, Méliés e a obra de Méliés e dos Lumiére. Esse tratado sobre pontos de vista torna “A Invenção de Hugo Cabret” um filme muito mais relevante do que o apelo histórico e romântico inicial, e demonstra compreensão total de um diretor pela alma daquilo que ele ama. Ele inclusive explica isso na cena em que Hugo mostra a cidade vista do alto a Isabelle. “É assim que eu vejo tudo!”, diz o garoto.
O cinema é mesmo limitado àquilo que se vê ou se escuta?
Adaptar a percepção da realidade era, ao mesmo tempo, a única defesa contra a solidão e o desespero, e a arma para concluir aquele objetivo tão sonhado. Pensando como alguém envolvido com criação, a simplicidade e a obviedade dessa característica não deveria gerar muito espanto, porém, a busca por algo a mais sempre funciona como uma barreira. Mesmo que encontremos algo, ele está em outro lugar. Alterar o mundo, em vez de esperar que ele nos altere, pode ser a melhor solução, não é?
Reveja e preste atenção no mundo editado pelos olhos de Hugo, em suas preocupações, medos e sonhos, todos revelados pela câmera sensível de Scorsese. As surpresas estão lá, esperando por você!
============
Fábio M. Barreto é jornalista, cineasta e autor da ficção científica “Filhos do Fim do Mundo”.
Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
Twitter | Facebook | Contato | Anuncie
Seguindo as instruções deste tutorial, você aprenderá a fazer o Cut Out no Gimp. Ele serve para destacar uma imagem, deixando uma foto em preto e branco com apenas uma parte colorida. Efeito Cut Out feito no Gimp (Foto: Reprodução/Raquel Freire) …
Atenção: O conteúdo desta postagem é automática e contém o resumo diário das minhas atividades nas redes e recortes de outros sites ou blogs.
Syndicated 2013-05-24 02:31:13 from ValessioBrito.com.br » Blog
I signed this petition about the Koch brothers -- now can you?
Syndicated 2013-05-23 21:45:00 (Updated 2013-05-23 21:45:58) from proclus
documenting for posterity – ansible – wait for a dir to exist before continuing
Got a ridiculous process **cough**Jenkins**Cough** that you have to wait to create a dir before doing things?
This might help you as godawful ugly as it is.
– name: wait for a dir to exist – this is just ugly
shell: while `true`; do [ -d /var/lib/jenkins/plugins/openid/WEB-INF/lib/ ] && break; sleep 5; done
async: 1800
poll: 20
codelike
codelike: "If you create or maintain an open source project and want to make it big: Generate buzz!"Lumail continues to progress
Although I've still not got the ability to reply to messages, and composing new ones is ugly, my toy mail client is working nicely.
I've received a couple of patches, and given commit access to the repository to one other user.
Currently I'm still juggling primitives around and working out what is missing. The big exceptions are the obvious:
But on the plus side the lua scripting is lovely:
precious ~/git/lumail $ rm /tmp/unread.log precious ~/git/lumail $ ./lumail --rcfile ./lumail.lua --eval "dump_unread();" precious ~/git/lumail $ head /tmp/unread.log Selected folder /home/skx/Maildir/.Automated.backups Folder has 10 unread messages Selected folder /home/skx/Maildir/.Automated.bounces Folder has 3 unread messages Selected folder /home/skx/Maildir/.CRM.Spam Folder has 7 unread messages Selected folder /home/skx/Maildir/.facebook.com Folder has 4 unread messages ..
The website needs some love, most notably a logo. And there are several reported bugs/todo-items I need to work through.
Still for a toy program I'm using it daily. (Though still using mutt to reply to messages & view/save attachments.)
Noise from Shaving
About 10 years ago I started using an electric shaver. An electric shaver is more convenient to use as it doesn’t require any soap, foam, or water. It is also almost impossible to cut yourself properly with an electric shaver which is a major benefit for anyone who’s not particularly alert in the morning. Generally my experience of electric shavers has been good, although the noise is quite annoying.
Recently a friend told me that an electric shaver is as noisy as a chain-saw. Given the inverse-square law and the fact that the shaver operates within 1cm of my ears that sounds plausible. So the risk of hearing loss is a great concern. Disposable ear plugs are very cheap and they can be used multiple times (they don’t get particularly dirty while shaving or get squashed in the short time needed to shave). So for a few weeks I’ve been using ear plugs while shaving which reduces the noise and presumable saves me from some hearing damage – although after 10 years of using electric shavers I may have already sustained some damage.
According to Cooper Safety their ear plugs reduce noise by 29dB, [1] I presume that the cheap ones I bought from Bunnings would be good for at least 15dB.
According to Better Hearing Sydney the noise from an electric shaver is typically around 90dB, less than the 100dB that is typical of a chain-saw [2]. So if my ear-plugs are good for 15dB then they would reduce the noise from a typical electric shaver to 75dB which is well below the 85dB that will cause hearing damage. Given that the noise from a typical shaver is only slightly above the damage threshold it seems that I might not need particularly good ear-plugs when shaving.
A quick scan of shaver reviews indicates that the amount of noise differs by brand and technology. The Hubpages review suggests that rotary shavers tend to make less noise than foil shavers [3], but I’m sure that it varies enough between brands that some rotary shavers are louder than the quietest foil shavers. It seems that the best thing to do when buying a new shaver would be to go to a specialised shaver shop (which has many models on offer) and get the staff to demonstrate them to determine which is the quietest. If a typical shaver produces 90dB then it seems likely that one of the more quiet models would produce less than 85dB.
Another item on my todo list is to buy a noise meter to measure the amount of noise produced in the places where I spend time. There are some Android apps to measure noise, I’m currently playing with the Smart Tools Co Sound Meter [4] which gives some interesting information. The documentation notes that phone microphones are limited to the typical volume and frequencies of human voice, so my Galaxy S3 can’t measure anything about 81dB. My wife’s Nexus 4 doesn’t seem to register anything above 74dB. Additionally there is some uncertainty about the accuracy of the microphone, there is a calibration feature but that requires another meter. Anyway the Sound Meter app suggests that my shaver (a Philips HQ7380/B) produces only 71dB at the closest possible range – and drops down to 67dB at the range I would use if I grew sideburns.
Getting a proper noise meter to protect one’s hearing seems like a good idea. An Android app for measuring noise is a good thing to have, even though it’s not going to be accurate it’s convenient and will give an indication.
When buying a shaver one should listen to all the options and choose a quiet one (I might have got a quiet one by luck).
Sideburns seem like a good idea if you value your hearing.
Related posts:
Why you should write Makefiles
Why you should write Makefiles: "Your build process usually can be described in terms of sequences of commands with some dependencies between. make captures this naturally as a set of build targets (with dependencies) and associated snippets of shell script (usually sh):"Doom3 BFG Source Code Review: Introduction
Doom3 BFG Source Code Review: Introduction: "No exceptions.#Guantanamo ends now - #gitmo #closegitmo
Syndicated 2013-05-22 20:47:00 (Updated 2013-05-22 20:47:08) from proclus
Viewing: 'relative/path/to/file.py'
Launch 'opendiff' [Y/n]:
Tell the Senate: Repeal the Monsanto Proection Act
Syndicated 2013-05-22 15:20:00 (Updated 2013-05-22 15:20:21) from proclus
A Gaga Musical review: Beautifully staged tale of Lady Gaga | On Stage | Arts | National Post
A Gaga Musical review: Beautifully staged tale of Lady Gaga | On Stage | Arts | National Post: ") She’s played here by a performer with the wonderfully appropriate name of Kimberly Persona, who functions beautifully as a walking Rorschach test."Grand Opening
"I love that he's pictured standing under a sign saying Grand Opening. What a grand opening he is."GVT: atendimento péssimo, ouvidoria cínica.
Dia 20 de abril mudei-me de casa. Fora a encheção de mudar de casa em si, para uma casa menor, veio a encheção de tentar transferir a minha linha da GVT.
Liguei uns poucos dias antes para tentar agilizar as coisas. Pediram 3 dias úteis para analisar se a minha nova residência teria disponibilidade de serviço. Aguardei os 3 dias, tinha disponibilidade, pedi a mudança.
Aí começa a novela.
A minha casa anterior tinha 35 mega de velocidade. A nova, só tem disponibilidade de 25 mega. Aí eu ligo, eles dizem que primeiro preciso baixar a velocidade do meu pacote de dados. Pedem para eu aguardar 3 dias úteis. Ligo de novo 3 dias depois. Algo deu errado. Mais 5 dias úteis. Mais 3. Mais 7 dias.
A última feita, aguardei os 7 dias úteis ao final dos quais a linha deveria estar instalada. Sim, sou paciente. Ligo lá no sétimo dia útil, só pra ver se vai rolar mesmo. ‘Senhor, a sua mudança não foi confirmada, está dando erro no sistema. Vou passar para a área técnica onde eles tentarão emitir uma ordem de serviço manual, mas será necessário aguardar mais 3 dias úteis’.
Apelo para a ouvidoria. A ouvidoria, cínica, trata meu pedido de transferência de linha como um pedido de mudança de endereço de correspondência e diz que eu já fui atendido, fechando meu chamado.
A mensagem que mandei pra ouvidoria no dia 7 de maio:
Há dias tento solicitar a minha mudança de endereço da xxx para a yyy em Brasília. O último prazo que me deram, 7 dias úteis, se encerraria hoje. Ao ligar na GVT hoje, sou informado que a ordem de serviço ainda nem foi gerada, e terei de aguardar mais 72horas para verificar se a ordem foi gerada, devido a algum erro misterioso que ninguém sabe me dizer ao certo qual é. Mais 3 dias para verificar SE a linha poderá ser transferida. Estou extremamente decepcionado com isso, e nem ao menos sou informado da razão desse erro misterioso, que nem a atendente soube me informar. Uma pena que vocês tratem seus clientes com tão absurdo descaso.
A resposta absurda da ouvidoria, no dia 13 de maio:
Prezado Walter, Em atenção ao seu e-mail, informamos que o endereço foi alterado com sucesso, para: bla bla bla bla novo endereço Atenciosamente, Joana Ouvidoria GVT – Atendimento ao Cliente Não responda esse e-mail. Em caso de dúvida ou sugestão acesse novamente o Fale Com a Ouvidoria
Último contato da parte deles foi na última terça-feira, por volta das 10 da manhã, onde após eu praticamente spamear a caixa de mensagens do perfil do facebook deles, eles ligam falando: ‘Então senhor, não temos disponibilidade de 35 mega no seu novo endereço, podemos prosseguir com o serviço de 25 mega?’
Como se eu não tivesse ouvido isso de vários atendentes anteriores. Digo que sim, que eu preciso de QUALQUER internet. Até hoje, nada de contato da parte deles.
Sigo spameando s caixa de mensagens deles do facebook (inefetivo, porém me dá vazão a profunda frustração que me acomete). Fiz reclamação na anatel na sexta-feira passada, dia 17. Protocolo 1541960.2013. Tive até hoje qualquer ligação ou retorno deles? Óbvio que não.
O mais absurdo é, por tudo o que me foi dito até o momento, não existe nenhum problema técnico que impossibilite a instalação da linha na minha nova casa, com velocidade de 15, 25, ou qlqr outra que eles puderem me fornecer. O que existe é um tremendo descaso, um atendimento péssimo e até esse cinismo, que são os aspectos que mais me incomodam no processo inteiro.
Nem escrevo na intenção de que isso cause qualquer solução. Apenas torço pra que outra história do descaso absurdo dessa operadora fique indexado na internet.
(Sim, vocês podem me perguntar, porque eu não cancelo e peço de novo: quando perguntei dessa possibilidade, falaram-me que seria mais sete dias úteis.
Give students the same interest rates on loans as the big banks
Syndicated 2013-05-21 20:31:00 (Updated 2013-05-21 20:31:26) from proclus
The Future Is Now - Visual poi vid - YouTube
The Future Is Now - Visual poi vid - YouTube: ""No Backups WTF
Some years ago I was working on a project that involved a database cluster of two Sun E6500 servers that were fairly well loaded. I believe that the overall price was several million pounds. It’s the type of expensive system where it would make sense to spend adequately to do things properly in all ways.
The first interesting thing was the data center where it was running. The front door had a uniformed security guard and a sign threatening immediate dismissal for anyone who left the security door open. The back door was wide open for the benefit of the electricians who were working there. Presumably anyone who had wanted to steal some servers could have gone to the back door and asked the electricians for assistance in removing them.
The system was poorly tested. My colleagues thought that with big important servers you shouldn’t risk damage by rebooting them. My opinion has always been that rebooting a cluster should be part of standard testing and that it’s especially important with clusters which have more interesting boot sequences. But I lost the vote and there was no testing of rebooting.
Along the way there were a number of WTFs in that project. One of which was when the web developers decided to force all users to install the latest beta release of Internet Explorer, a decision that was only revoked when the IE install process broke MS-Office on the PC of a senior manager. Another was putting systems with a default Solaris installation live on the Internet with all default services running, there’s never a reason for a database server to be directly accessible over the Internet.
But I think that the most significant failing was the decision not to make any backups. This wasn’t merely forgetting to make backups, when I raised the issue I received a negative reaction from almost everyone. As an aside I find it particularly annoying when someone implies that I want backups because I am likely to stuff things up.
There are many ways of proving that there’s a general lack of competence in the computer industry. But I think that one of the best is the number of projects where the person who wants backups has their competence questioned instead of all the people who don’t want backups.
A decision to make no backups relies on one of two conditions, either the service has to be entirely unimportant or you need to have no bugs in the OS or hardware defects that can corrupt data, no application bugs, and a team of sysadmins who never make mistakes. The former condition raises the question of why the service is being run and the latter is impossible.
As I’m more persistent than most people I kept raising the issue via email and adding more people to the CC list until I got a positive reaction. Eventually I CC’d someone who responded with “What the fuck” which I consider to be a reasonable response to a huge and expensive project with no backups. However the managers on the CC list regarded the use of profanity in email to be a much more serious problem. To the best of my knowledge there were never any backups of that system but the policy on email was strongly enforced.
This is only a partial list of WTF incidents that assisted in my decision to leave the UK and migrate to the Netherlands.
About a year after leaving I returned to London for a holiday and had dinner with a former colleague. When I asked what he was working on he said “Not much“. It turned out that proximity to the nearest manager determined the amount of work that was assigned. As his desk was a long way from the nearest manager he had spent about 6 months getting paid to read Usenet. That wasn’t really a surprise given my observations of the company in question.
Related posts:
Fabrication du pneu Michelin Vidéo n°53 Auteur Jean Michel Bonnemoy – GRAVURE CAOUTCHOUC ARTISTIQUE
Fabrication du pneu Michelin Vidéo n°53 Auteur Jean Michel Bonnemoy – GRAVURE CAOUTCHOUC ARTISTIQUE.
Advice on Buying a PC
A common topic of discussion on computer users’ group mailing lists is advice on buying a PC. I think that most of the offered advice isn’t particularly useful with an excessive focus on building or upgrading PCs and on getting the latest and greatest. So I’ll blog about it instead of getting involved in more mailing-list debates.
In the late 80′s a reasonably high-end white-box PC cost a bit over $5,000 in Australia (or about $4,000 without a monitor). That was cheaper than name-brand PCs which cost upwards of $7,000 but was still a lot of money. $5,000 in 1988 would be comparable to $10,000 in today’s money. That made a PC a rather expensive item which needed to be preserved. There weren’t a lot of people who could just discard such an investment so a lot of thought was given to upgrading a PC.
Now a quite powerful desktop PC can be purchased for a bit under $400 (maybe $550 if you include a good monitor) and a nice laptop is about the same price as a desktop PC and monitor. Laptops are almost impossible to upgrade apart from adding more RAM or storage but hardly anyone cares because they are so cheap. Desktop PCs can be upgraded in some ways but most people don’t bother apart from RAM, storage, and sometimes a new video card.
If you have the skill required to successfully replace a CPU or motherboard then your time is probably worth enough that getting more value out of a PC that was worth $400 when new and is worth maybe $100 when it’s a couple of years old probably isn’t a good investment.
Times have changed and PCs just aren’t worth enough to be bothered upgrading. A PC is a disposable item not an investment.
There are a range of things that you can buy. You can spend $200 on a second-hand PC that’s a couple of years old, $400 on a new PC that’s OK but not really fast, or you can spend $1000 or more on a very high end PC. The $1000 PC will probably perform poorly when compared to a PC that sells for $400 next year. The $400 PC will probably perform poorly when compared to the second-hand systems that are available next year.
If you spend more money to get a faster PC then you are only getting a faster PC for a year until newer cheaper systems enter the market.
As newer and better hardware is continually being released at low enough prices that make upgrades a bad deal I recommend just not buying expensive systems. For my own use I find that e-waste is a good source of hardware. If I couldn’t do that then I’d buy from an auction site that specialises in corporate sales, they have some nice name-brand systems in good condition at low prices.
One thing to note is that this is more difficult for Windows users due to “anti-piracy” features. With recent versions of Windows you can’t just put an old hard drive in a new PC and have it work. So the case for buying faster hardware is stronger for Windows than for Linux.
That said, $1,000 isn’t a lot of money. So spending more money for a high-end system isn’t necessarily a big deal. But we should keep in mind that it’s just a matter of getting a certain level of performance a year before it is available in cheaper systems. Getting a $1,000 high-end system instead of a $400 cheap system means getting that level of performance maybe a year earlier and therefore at a price premium of maybe $2 per day. I’m sure that most people spend more than $2 per day on more frivolous things than a faster PC.
As so many things are run by computers I believe that everyone should have some basic knowledge about how computers work. But a basic knowledge of computer architecture isn’t required when selecting parts to assemble to make a system, one can know all about selecting a CPU and motherboard to match without understanding what a CPU does (apart from a vague idea that it’s something to do with calculations). Also one can have a good knowledge of how computers work without knowing anything about the part numbers that could be assembled to make a working system.
If someone wants to learn about the various parts on sale then sites such as Tom’s Hardware [1] provide a lot of good information that allows people to learn without the risk of damaging expensive parts. In fact the people who work for Tom’s Hardware frequently test parts to destruction for the education and entertainment of readers.
But anyone who wants to understand computers would be better off spending their time using any old PC to read Wikipedia pages on the topic instead of spending their time and money assembling one PC. To learn about the basics of computer operation the Wikipedia page for “CPU” is a good place to start. Then the Wikipedia page for “hard drive” is a good start for learning about storage and the Wikipedia page for Graphics Processing Unit to learn about graphics processing. Anyone who reads those three pages as well as a selection of pages that they link to will learn a lot more than they could ever learn by assembling a PC. Of course there’s lots of other things to learn about computers but Wikipedia has pages for every topic you can imagine.
I think that the argument that people should assemble PCs to understand how they work was not well supported in 1990 and ceased to be accurate once Wikipedia became popular and well populated.
There are a lot of arguments about quality and reliability, most without any supporting data. I believe that a system designed and manufactured by a company such as HP, Lenovo, NEC, Dell, etc is likely to be more reliable than a collection of parts uniquely assembled by a home user – but I admit to a lack of data to support this belief.
One thing that is clear however is the fact that ECC RAM can make a significant difference to system reliability as many types of error (including power problems) show up as corrupted memory. The cheapest Dell PowerEdge server (which has ECC RAM) is advertised at $699 so it’s not a feature that’s out of reach of regular users.
I think that anyone who makes claims about PC reliability and fails to mention the benefits of ECC RAM (as used in Dell PowerEdge tower systems, Dell Precision workstations, and HP XW workstations among others) hasn’t properly considered their advice.
Also when discussing overall reliability the use of RAID storage and a good backup scheme should be considered. Good backups can do more to save your data than anything else.
I think it’s best to use a system with ECC RAM as a file server. Make good backups. Use ZFS (in future BTRFS) for file storage so that data doesn’t get corrupted on disk. Use reasonably cheap systems as workstations and replace them when they become too old.
Update: I find it rather ironic when a discussion about advice on buying a PC gets significant input from people who are well paid for computer work. It doesn’t take long for such a discussion to take enough time that the people involved could spent their time working instead, put enough money in a hat to buy a new PC for the user in question, and still had money left over.
Related posts:
Advice on Buying a PC
A common topic of discussion on computer users’ group mailing lists is advice on buying a PC. I think that most of the offered advice isn’t particularly useful with an excessive focus on building or upgrading PCs and on getting the latest and greatest. So I’ll blog about it instead of getting involved in more mailing-list debates.
In the late 80′s a reasonably high-end white-box PC cost a bit over $5,000 in Australia (or about $4,000 without a monitor). That was cheaper than name-brand PCs which cost upwards of $7,000 but was still a lot of money. $5,000 in 1988 would be comparable to $10,000 in today’s money. That made a PC a rather expensive item which needed to be preserved. There weren’t a lot of people who could just discard such an investment so a lot of thought was given to upgrading a PC.
Now a quite powerful desktop PC can be purchased for a bit under $400 (maybe $550 if you include a good monitor) and a nice laptop is about the same price as a desktop PC and monitor. Laptops are almost impossible to upgrade apart from adding more RAM or storage but hardly anyone cares because they are so cheap. Desktop PCs can be upgraded in some ways but most people don’t bother apart from RAM, storage, and sometimes a new video card.
If you have the skill required to successfully replace a CPU or motherboard then your time is probably worth enough that getting more value out of a PC that was worth $400 when new and is worth maybe $100 when it’s a couple of years old probably isn’t a good investment.
Times have changed and PCs just aren’t worth enough to be bothered upgrading. A PC is a disposable item not an investment.
There are a range of things that you can buy. You can spend $200 on a second-hand PC that’s a couple of years old, $400 on a new PC that’s OK but not really fast, or you can spend $1000 or more on a very high end PC. The $1000 PC will probably perform poorly when compared to a PC that sells for $400 next year. The $400 PC will probably perform poorly when compared to the second-hand systems that are available next year.
If you spend more money to get a faster PC then you are only getting a faster PC for a year until newer cheaper systems enter the market.
As newer and better hardware is continually being released at low enough prices that make upgrades a bad deal I recommend just not buying expensive systems. For my own use I find that e-waste is a good source of hardware. If I couldn’t do that then I’d buy from an auction site that specialises in corporate sales, they have some nice name-brand systems in good condition at low prices.
One thing to note is that this is more difficult for Windows users due to “anti-piracy” features. With recent versions of Windows you can’t just put an old hard drive in a new PC and have it work. So the case for buying faster hardware is stronger for Windows than for Linux.
That said, $1,000 isn’t a lot of money. So spending more money for a high-end system isn’t necessarily a big deal. But we should keep in mind that it’s just a matter of getting a certain level of performance a year before it is available in cheaper systems. Getting a $1,000 high-end system instead of a $400 cheap system means getting that level of performance maybe a year earlier and therefore at a price premium of maybe $2 per day. I’m sure that most people spend more than $2 per day on more frivolous things than a faster PC.
As so many things are run by computers I believe that everyone should have some basic knowledge about how computers work. But a basic knowledge of computer architecture isn’t required when selecting parts to assemble to make a system, one can know all about selecting a CPU and motherboard to match without understanding what a CPU does (apart from a vague idea that it’s something to do with calculations). Also one can have a good knowledge of how computers work without knowing anything about the part numbers that could be assembled to make a working system.
If someone wants to learn about the various parts on sale then sites such as Tom’s Hardware [1] provide a lot of good information that allows people to learn without the risk of damaging expensive parts. In fact the people who work for Tom’s Hardware frequently test parts to destruction for the education and entertainment of readers.
But anyone who wants to understand computers would be better off spending their time using any old PC to read Wikipedia pages on the topic instead of spending their time and money assembling one PC. To learn about the basics of computer operation the Wikipedia page for “CPU” is a good place to start. Then the Wikipedia page for “hard drive” is a good start for learning about storage and the Wikipedia page for Graphics Processing Unit to learn about graphics processing. Anyone who reads those three pages as well as a selection of pages that they link to will learn a lot more than they could ever learn by assembling a PC. Of course there’s lots of other things to learn about computers but Wikipedia has pages for every topic you can imagine.
I think that the argument that people should assemble PCs to understand how they work was not well supported in 1990 and ceased to be accurate once Wikipedia became popular and well populated.
There are a lot of arguments about quality and reliability, most without any supporting data. I believe that a system designed and manufactured by a company such as HP, Lenovo, NEC, Dell, etc is likely to be more reliable than a collection of parts uniquely assembled by a home user – but I admit to a lack of data to support this belief.
One thing that is clear however is the fact that ECC RAM can make a significant difference to system reliability as many types of error (including power problems) show up as corrupted memory. The cheapest Dell PowerEdge server (which has ECC RAM) is advertised at $699 so it’s not a feature that’s out of reach of regular users.
I think that anyone who makes claims about PC reliability and fails to mention the benefits of ECC RAM (as used in Dell PowerEdge tower systems, Dell Precision workstations, and HP XW workstations among others) hasn’t properly considered their advice.
Also when discussing overall reliability the use of RAID storage and a good backup scheme should be considered. Good backups can do more to save your data than anything else.
I think it’s best to use a system with ECC RAM as a file server. Make good backups. Use ZFS (in future BTRFS) for file storage so that data doesn’t get corrupted on disk. Use reasonably cheap systems as workstations and replace them when they become too old.
Related posts:
What's up with the Q and A posts?
Just realized that I have gotten into the bad habit of writing stuff on a web questions and answers site instead of here. (cue kid from The Simpsons saying HA HA!)
Saving some, deleting the rest.
What are the benefits of participating in open source?
Depending on the project and your role in it, you might get lots of different benefits.
Learn new languages and tools to keep your skill set current.
Practice techniques that you might not be able to justify putting time into in a corporate environment. (For example, coding for extreme security or efficiency or minimum power and memory usage.)
Make connections with people outside your company.
Signal your technical competence and ability to work with others. Often, willingness to put time into open source depends on the job market for high-skill non-management programmers. The more that the hiring process depends on formal education and certification, and the less input it has from peers, the less incentive that a programmer has to Signal his or her skill using open source.
Talk with real users about bugs and features without a company filter, to get a better understanding of a software problem space.
Inside Google's Secret Lab - Businessweek
Inside Google's Secret Lab - Businessweek: ", “The world is not limited by IQ. We are all limited by bravery and creativity.”"Repeal the #Monsanto Protection Act - #gmo
Syndicated 2013-05-21 20:30:00 (Updated 2013-05-21 20:30:23) from proclus
Tell Governor O'Malley to Ban #Fracking in Maryland!
Syndicated 2013-05-20 19:40:00 (Updated 2013-05-20 19:40:08) from proclus
Usando ckeditor e jquery validate juntos
Mais simples impossível:
$('#form1').validate({
ignore: [],
rules: {
corpo : {
required: function()
{
CKEDITOR.instances.corpo.updateElement();
}
}
}
})
At the Wikimedia Foundation (for, um, three months now)
Since it was founded 12 years ago this week, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of the world’s information infrastructure. It’s a kind of public utility: You turn on the faucet and water comes out; you do an Internet search and Wikipedia answers your question. People don’t think much about who creates it, but you should. We do it for you, with love.
Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner, from http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/14/wikipedia-the-peoples-encyclopedia/
As Sue says, the people who create Wikipedia are terrific. I’m lucky enough to say that I’ve just wrapped up my first three months as their lawyer – as Deputy General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. Consider this the personal announcement I should have made three months ago :)
Greenberg Traurig was terrific for me: Heather has a wealth of knowledge and experience about how to do deals (both open source and otherwise), and through her, I did a lot of interesting work for interesting clients. Giving up that diversity and experience was the hardest part of leaving private practice.
Based on the evidence of the first three months, though, I made a great choice – I’ve replaced diversity of clients with a vast diversity of work; replaced one experienced, thoughtful boss with one of equal skill but different background (so I’m learning new things); and replaced the resources (and distance) of a vast firm with a small but tight and energized team. All of these have been wins. And of course working on behalf of this movement is a great privilege, and (so far) a pleasure. (With no offense to GT, pleasure is rarely part of the package at a large firm.)
The new scope of the work is perhaps the biggest change. Where I previously focused primarily on technology licensing, I’m now an “internet lawyer” in the broadest sense of the word: I, my (great) team, and our various strong outside counsel work on topics from employment contracts, to privacy policies, to headline-grabbing speech issues, to patent/trademark/copyright questions – it is all over the place. This is both challenging, and great fun – I couldn’t ask for a better place to be at this point in my life. (And of course, being always on the side of the community is great too – though I did more of that at Greenberg than many people would assume.)
I don’t expect that this move will have a negative impact on my other work in the broader open source community. If anything, not focusing on licensing all day at work has given me more energy to work on OSI-related things when I get home, and I have more flexibility to travel and speak with and for various communities too. (I’m having great fun being on the mailing lists of literally every known open source license revision community, for example. :)
If you’d like to join us (as we work to get the next 1/2 billion users a month), there are a lot of opportunities open right now, including one working for me on my team, and some doing interesting work at the overlap between community, tech, and product management. Come on over – you won’t regret it :)
What I've learned at SourceForge
Today I'll be leaving SourceForge and taking a role at RedHat. Please don't think for a moment that it's because I don't like SourceForge. I continue to think that SourceForge does community *way* better than either Github or Google Code, and while there are places where the platform can improve, the team that's working on it is one of the finest bunch of engineers I've ever had the privilege of working with.
Here's a few of the many things I've learned at SourceForge.
People are passionate
Every time I talk to anybody about my job, I mention two projects: PonyKart and OpenMRS. These projects illustrate to me how people can be passionate about anything. Having talked with the leads of both of these projects, I'm blown away by their passion for excellence.
Of course, these projects could hardly be more different.
PonyKart is a My Little Pony themed Mario-Kart style game. It's fun. The physics are well done. The courses are well designed. The community is very engaged. And it has My Little Pony characters in it. The guys that did this project wanted it to be a MLP game, but they also wanted it to be excellent. They wanted it to be fun. They wanted it to be *good*. They are passionate about it.
The OpenMRS project is a medical records system that was developed for a hospital in Kenya that had a hacked-together Access database monstrosity, and it was faster and easier for these guys to hack something together than to try to fix what was there. But that wasn't enough. They were passionate. They wanted it to be done right, and they wanted hospitals all over the world to benefit from it. And now they have a non-profit dedicated to giving this product away to hospitals in developing nations that need it. These guys are my heroes.
I am continually blown away by the quest for excellence, and the vast range of ways that it manifests itself.
People are kind
I've met amazing people in my time at SourceForge. These people are helpful, kind, patient, and, as I've mentioned, passionate. For the most part, people get that I'm human and can't solve all of their problems immediately. They get that we all have the limitation of time and resources.
Most people *don't* throw tantrums or demand their way. For this I am very grateful. I'm glad to have met a few of the nice people.
People are cruel
Sure, SourceForge is the underdog right now. I get that. It's not necessary to be a jerk.
It's hard to remember, when people are being jerks, that they're in the minority. Most people are, in fact, nice. But the jerks are very loud.
I'd like to remind the jerks that the folks who happen to be developing their project on the SourceForge platform are passionate, and they are pragmatic, and they are doing something useful while you fling mud at them.
'nuff said.
People are pragmatic
Tools are tools. They are not your children.
For the most part, people want to get a job done, and they use the tools they have, because the focus is the task, not the tools. Once, we used CVS and MailMan and we *liked* it. SVN is better. Some people like Git better. But if we had to use CVS and MailMan, you know what? We'd still get stuff done.
Religious debates over the relative merits of DVCS and CVCS systems are all well and good over beer at conferences, but most of us have a job to do, and we don't have time for that indulgence. You may, in fact, be right, but I don't have that kind of time.
I grow very weary of the This vs That flame wars that have characterized the IT world for so long. Perl vs Python, VI vs Emacs, Linux vs Windows vs Mac, Git vs SVN. The thing is, if you're a professional, you need to know *all* of them, and you're not coming across as brilliant, you're coming across as only knowing one tool. Nice hammer. Sometimes a screwdriver is useful.
But, much as most people are nice, it turns out most people are pragmatic. Most people don't have time for those debates either. They want to get their job done. I really appreciate having met a lot of those kinds of people.
Syndicated 2013-05-20 12:03:49 (Updated 2013-05-20 12:05:14) from Notes In The Margin
gpg --ask-cert-level considered harmful
Occasionally, someone asks me whether we should encourage use of the --ask-cert-level option when certifying OpenPGP keys with gpg. I see no good reason to use this option, and i think we should discourage people from trying to use it. I don't think there is a satisfactory answer to the question "how will specifying the level of identity certification concretely benefit anyone involved?", and i don't see why we should want one.
gpg gets it absolutely right by not asking users this question by default. People should not be enabling this option.
Some background: gpg's --ask-cert-level option allows the user who is making an OpenPGP identity certification to indicate just how sure they are of the identity they are certifying. The user's choice is then mapped into four levels of OpenPGP certification of a User ID and Public-Key packet, which i'll refer to by their signature type identifiers in the OpenPGP spec:
- 0x10: Generic certification
- The issuer of this certification does not make any particular assertion as to how well the certifier has checked that the owner of the key is in fact the person described by the User ID.
- 0x11: Persona certification
- The issuer of this certification has not done any verification of the claim that the owner of this key is the User ID specified.
- 0x12: Casual certification
- The issuer of this certification has done some casual verification of the claim of identity.
- 0x13: Positive certification
- The issuer of this certification has done substantial verification of the claim of identity.
Most OpenPGP implementations make their "key signatures" as 0x10 certifications. Some implementations can issue 0x11-0x13 certifications, but few differentiate between the types.
By default (if --ask-cert-level is not supplied), gpg issues certificates ("signs keys") using 0x10 (generic) certifications, with the exception of self-sigs, which are made as type 0x13 (positive).
When interpreting certifications, gpg does distinguish between different certifications in one particular way: 0x11 (persona) certifications are ignored; other certifications are not. (users can change this cutoff with the --min-cert-level option, but it's not clear why they would want to do so).
So there is no functional gain in declaring the difference between a "normal" certification and a "positive" one, even if there were a well-defined standard by which to assess the difference between the "generic" and "casual" or "positive" levels; and if you're going to make a "persona" certification, you might as well not make one at all.
And it gets worse: the problem is not just that such an indication is functionally useless; encouraging people to make these kind of assertions actively encourages leaks of a more-detailed social graph than just encouraging everyone to use the default blanket 0x13-for-self-sigs, 0x10-for-everyone-else policy.
A richer public social graph means more data that can feed the ravenous and growing appetite of the advertising-and-surveillance regimes. i find these regimes troubling. I admit that people often leak much more information than this indication of "how well do you know X" via tools like Facebook, but that's no excuse to encourage them to leak still more or to acclimatize people to the idea that the details of their personal relationships should by default be public knowledge.
Lastly, the more we keep the OpenPGP network of identity certifications (a.k.a. the "web of trust") simple, the easier it is to make sensible and comprehensible and predictable inferences from the network about whether a key really does belong to a given user. Minimizing the complexity and difficulty of deciding to make a certification helps people streamline their signing processes and reduces the amount of cognitive overhead people spend just building the network in the first place.
An app for a conference - with a surprising set of features
I'm going to a conference next week, and the conference invites me to "Download the app!" Well, OK, you think, maybe a bit of overkill, but it would be useful to have an app with schedules etc. Here is the app listed on google play.
Oh and here's a list (abbreviated) of permissions that the app requires:
"""This application has access to the following:
"""
Now tell me, what fraction of those permissions should a conference-information app legitimately use? (I've edited out some of the mundane ones.) Should ANYONE install this on their phone/tablet?
Syndicated 2013-05-20 00:06:07 (Updated 2013-05-20 00:06:25) from Dan Stowell
Mountain Sun IPAs
Not only is Boulder Colorado the Hebden Bridge of the USA (I'm told it's "where all the hippies went"), but it also has a really impressive amount of craft beer. Following a tip-off (thanks Bob), tonight I went to sample a few IPAs in the Mountain Sun pub. For the education of no-one except myself, here are my tasting notes - first in visual form:
then in words:
Not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, these are all lovely beers, very well served, but when they're sitting next to each other I have to compare them. Hence the ups and downs in the notes. The winner for me is definitely the Illusion Dweller. The ratings over at ratebeer tell almost the opposite story for some reason, with Illusion Dweller the only one not scoring ninety-something. Who knows what to make of that.
Updates - more beer I've tried from Mountain Sun:
More beer from other breweries:
Syndicated 2013-05-19 23:13:49 (Updated 2013-05-23 18:51:02) from Dan Stowell
The Cost of Inaccessibility at the Margins of Relevance
I use RSS feeds to keep up with academic journals. Because of an undocumented and unexpected feature (bug?) in my (otherwise wonderful) free software newsreader NewsBlur, many articles published over the last year were marked as having been read before I saw them.
Over the last week, I caught up. I spent hours going through abstracts and downloading papers that looked interesting or relevant to my research. Because I did this for hundreds of articles, it gave me an unusual opportunity to reflect on my journal reading practices in a systematic way.
On a number of occasions, there were potentially interesting articles in non-open access journals that neither MIT nor Harvard subscribes to and that were otherwise not accessible to me. In several cases where the research was obviously important to my work, I made an interlibrary request, emailed the papers’ authors for copies, or tracked down a colleague at an institution with access.
Of course, articles that look potentially interesting from the title and abstract often end up being less relevant or well executed on closer inspection. I tend to cast a wide net, skim many articles, and put them aside when it’s clear that the study is not for me. This week, I downloaded many of these possibly relevant papers to, at least, give a skim. But only if I could download them easily. On three or four occasions, I found inaccessible articles at this margin of relevance. In these cases, I did not bother trying to track down the articles.
Of course, what appear to be marginally relevant articles sometimes end up being a great match for my research and I will end up citing and building on the work. I found several suprisingly interesting papers last week. The articles that were locked up have no chance at this.
When people suggest that open access hinders the spread of scholarship, a common retort is that the people who need the work have or can finagle access. For the papers we know we need, this might be true. As someone with access to two of the most well endowed libraries in academia who routinely requests otherwise inaccessible articles through several channels, I would have told you, a week ago, that locked-down journals were unlikely to keep me from citing anybody.
So it was interesting watching myself do a personal cost calculation in a way that sidelined published scholarship — and that open access publishing would have prevented. At the margin of relevance to ones research, open access may make a big difference.
Syndicated 2013-05-19 16:00:05 (Updated 2013-05-20 15:18:41) from copyrighteous
Inside Google's Secret Lab - Businessweek
Inside Google's Secret Lab - Businessweek: "Thrun had grown disenchanted with the pace of academia, where professors are motivated to publish papers rather than build products. "Compartilhado nas redes sociais
Atenção: O conteúdo desta postagem é automática e contém o resumo diário das minhas atividades nas redes e recortes de outros sites ou blogs.
Syndicated 2013-05-19 02:31:29 from ValessioBrito.com.br » Blog
Join us on App.Net
I liked the idea behind App.Net (or ADN for the initiated) from the start; I’ve happily signed up during the initial funding effort and before it even existed. It is quite like Twitter, although it does have some pretty interesting API advantages that allow clients to do things that are not possible in Twitter such as creating private chat rooms (with Patter.) I found a text by Matt Gemmell, App.Net for conversations, that sums it up nicely:
The interesting part, though, is what you won’t be used to from Twitter. There are no ads, anywhere. Because it’s a paid service, there’s no spam at all; I’ve certainly never seen any. There’s an active and happy developer community, which ADN actually financially rewards. There’s a rich, modern, relentlessly improved API. And again because it’s a paid service, there’s a commensurately (and vanishingly) low number of Bieber fans, teenagers, illiterates, and sociopaths.
But the real difference I notice is in the conversations. On Twitter, the back-and-forth tends to be relatively brief, not only in terms of the 140-character limit, but also the number of replies. There’s a certain fire-and-forget sensibility to Twitter; it’s a noticeboard rather than a chatroom. Then there’s the keyword-spam (woe betide the person who mentions iPads, or MacBooks, or broadband, or just about anything). Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that any malcontent with internet access can create an account (or two, or ten) in seconds. Not a happy mixture.
I’d add that there seems to be less of a popular clique on ADN. Popular users seem to be much more engaging with “regular people” than on Twitter. And there’s the developers… although most of the rush is now behind us, it was fun to follow the developers working on ADN clients. It was a very collaborative effort, with alpha builds floating around and discussions about whether this or that should be done in a certain way.
As for the developers of ADN proper, well, you can try asking ADN CEO and Founder Dalton something to see if he’ll answer you in about 30 seconds. He actually does. :)
It all feels like a big community where everyone feels a bit like they own the place as well and want it to thrive. Again I think Matt is on the money on why this is so:
We value what we pay for. We not only pay for things which we deem to be of value, but we also retrospectively assign and justify value based on what we’ve paid. Any consumer is familiar with the simple psychology of cost equating as much to value after the transaction as value does to cost beforehand (likely moreso, from my own experience). At its core, I don’t think that the reason for the noticeably different, warmer, more discursive “feel” of ADN is any more complicated than that.
I personally love the service and I think you should consider it too. There is a free tier account that allows you to follow up to 40 people for free, as long as you’re invited by a current user. If you’re interested, I have a few invites.
Feel free to comment on this post by using Google+ or also by talking to me on, where else, ADN, where I’m @robteix. And of course Twitter isn’t going anywhere and I’m there too.
Skype with care – Microsoft is reading everything you write – The H Security: News and Features
Voilà pourquoi je ne veux pas utiliser Skype !!!
Skype with care – Microsoft is reading everything you write – The H Security: News and Features.
If I had a spinneret
If I ever meet the Wizard of Oz, I'll ask him to turn me into a spider. Here's a song about that.
I would hurry to the kitchen
with pedipalps a-twitching,
to see what I could get.
And when there I would eat all
the insides of every beetle,
if I had a spinneret.
And that's only the beginning;
it sets my head a-spinning
to see them in my net.
To the edge I would scarper
where I'd pluck it like a harper
if I had a spinneret.
Oh, I could catch the fly
that ventured near my web,
then another as the hunger starts to ebb.
I'd be an arthropod celeb.
And I'd tell the tale with recaps
from more than seven kneecaps
to everyone I met.
And I'd be the provider
of a web for every spider
if I had a spinneret.
This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/277391.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist
Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist: "Some describe their work as “slave labour”. "Burners, nerds and folks in between unite at Maker Faire | The Technology Chronicles | an SFGate.com blog
Burners, nerds and folks in between unite at Maker Faire | The Technology Chronicles | an SFGate.com blog: ": Get glimpses of the future — stuff like fully-solar powered vehicles, home built motion sensors that activate LEDs and personal drones. While many of these are fun projects, you start to get a sense of what the world will begin to look like — small computers everywhere. "Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is - Programming
Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is - Programming: "When Dart was originally launched, many developers mistook it for some sort of Java clone. In truth, Dart is inspired by a range of languages such as Smalltalk, Strongtalk, Erlang, C#, and JavaScript. Get past the semicolons and curly braces, and you’ll see a terse language without ceremony. Dart has evolved into its own, and here are some of my favorite language features."L’intérieur d’un moteur | Virage8
sorting srpms by buildorder
Hey folks,
Working on something for Spot I revived some code I had written a
few years ago and then discovered that other people had made much more
robust leveled topological sorts than I had written 
Anyway – if you grab the files from:
http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/misc/buildorder/
And run:
python buildorder.py /path/to/*.src.rpm
it will look up the interdependencies of the src.rpm to figure out a
build order. It outputs a bunch of different things:
1. a flat build order
2. a build order broken out by groups – you can build all the pkgs in
any group in parallel provided that all the pkgs in the previous group
have finished building.
3. outputs lists of direct loops between srpms.
4. probably will output A LOT of noise and garbage from the rpm
specfile parsing from the rpm.spec() module
But it might be worth a look at and, ideally, patches to make it a bit
more robust.
If you have a set of pkgs which you need to build but you can’t figure
out the buildorder this might help you out.
I’d love to know how often it is right or ‘right enough’.
Known Issues:
1. some spec files make the rpm.spec() parsing break in interesting
ways – sometimes tracing back
2. if a pkg is not dependent on any other pkg and nothing else depends
on it – they get lumped in the last grouping. Not really an issue -
just something someone noticed and was surprised.
3. It will handle file-buildreqs not at all, it will handle virtual
provide buildreqs, not at all, if your buildreqs are REALLY picky about
requiring <= Version – it will ignore all of that.
4. I fully expect that 2 or more level circular build deps (foo req bar
req baz req quux) will not be detected but will make the topological
sort function die). If so…. tough… go fix your packaging.
Anyway – give it a run and see if it helps you solve a problem.
If it does let me know about it. Some of us are curious if this could
fit well in mockchain or wrapped around/in mockchain.
Science Diction: Scientist
Science Diction: Scientist: "Eventually, Whewell suggested that "by analogy with artist, they might form scientist""2013 : mauvais cru pour les quotidiens nationaux ?
L’Etat doit-il financer la presse ?
Introducing The Layout
As engineers, I believe the way we approach a problem is as important as the code we write. This is especially relevant in the context of UI engineering where design is such a vital element.
Unfortunately, it seems quite hard to find good content about everything that happens around us and inside our heads when we are building user interfaces. This is what The Layout is about.
My intent is to create a space for high quality content discussing the principles, mindset, and practices that I believe shape the craft of UI engineering. It is meant to be a shared space with many voices—so, expect some awesome guest authors.
I’ve just posted the very first article, Mind the Gap. My plan is to publish a new article every other week-ish. For now, subscribe to the RSS feed or simply follow The Layout on Twitter or Google+ to get future updates.
I really hope you enjoy it!
Compartilhado nas redes sociais
As ações voltadas para o combate aos crimes na Internet e de defesa cibernética estão sendo articuladas de forma estanque pelos entes envolvidos, entre eles, a Polícia Federal e o Exército. Falta, na visão do diretor do Departamento de Segurança da Informação e Comunicações da Presidência, Raphael Mandarino, um órgão capaz de articular e coordenar as iniciativas.
Atenção: O conteúdo desta postagem é automática e contém o resumo diário das minhas atividades nas redes e recortes de outros sites ou blogs.
Syndicated 2013-05-17 02:30:42 from ValessioBrito.com.br » Blog
Voltage Inside a Car
I previously wrote a post with some calculations about the power supplied to laptops from a car battery [1]. A comment on the post suggested that I might have made a mistake in testing the Voltage because leaving the door open (and thus the internal lights on) will cause a Voltage drop.
So I’ve done some more tests:
| Test | Voltage |
|---|---|
| battery terminals | 12.69 |
| front power socket with doors closed | 12.64 |
| front power socket with doors open OR ignition switch on | 12.37 |
| cigarette lighter socket with ignition switch on | 12.32 |
| front power socket with doors closed and headlights on | 11.96 |
| front power socket with engine running | 14.38 |
| front power socket with engine running and headlights on | 14.29 |
In my previous tests I recorded 12.85V inside my car (from the front power socket which although having the same connector as a cigarette lighter isn’t designed for lighting cigarettes) and 13.02V from the battery terminals – a 0.17V difference. In my tests today I was unable to reproduce that but I think that my biggest mistake was to take the reading too quickly. Today I noticed that it took up to a minute for the Voltage to stabilise after opening a door (the Voltage dips after any current draw and takes time to recover) so a quick reading isn’t going to be accurate.
My car is a Kia Carnival which has two sockets in the front for power and for actually lighting cigarettes. The one for lighting cigarettes has a slightly lower Voltage and only works when the ignition is turned on. The car also has a power socket in the boot (the trunk for US readers) which delivers the same Voltage as the power socket in the front.
Also one thing to note is that today is a reasonably cold day (16.5C outside right now) and my car hasn’t been driven since last night so the battery would be quite cold (maybe 12C or less). My previous measurements were taken in summer so the battery would have been a lot warmer and therefore working more effectively.
The Voltage drop from turning on the internal lights surprised me, I had expected that a car battery which is designed to supply high current wouldn’t be affected by such things. Certainly not to give a 2% Voltage drop! The Voltage difference from reading inside the car and at the battery terminals might be partly due to the apparent lead coating on the terminals, I pushed the probes of my multimeter beneath the surface of the metal and got a really good connection.
The 14% Voltage increase when the engine was running was also a surprise. It seems to me that if you are running a power hungry device (such as a laptop) it would be a good idea to disconnect it when the engine is turned off. A 14% higher voltage will give a 14% lower current if the PSU is efficient and therefore less problems with heat in the wiring and less risk of blowing a fuse.
Also it’s a good idea to be more methodical about performing tests than I was before my last post. There are lots of other tests I could run (such as testing after the engine has been running for a while) but at the moment I don’t have enough interest in this topic to do more tests. Please leave a comment if there’s something interesting that you think I missed.
Related posts:
Effective Conference Calls
I’ve been part of many conference calls for work and found them seriously lacking. Firstly there’s a lack of control over the call, so when someone does something stupid like putting an unmuted phone handset near a noise source there’s no way to discover who did it and disconnect them.
Another problem is that of noise on the line when some people don’t mute their phones, which is related to the lack of control as it’s impossible to determine who isn’t muting their phone.
Possibly the biggest problem is how to determine who gets to speak next. When group discussions take place in person non-verbal methods are used to determine who gets to speak next. With a regular phone call (two people) something like the CSMACD algorithm for network packets works well. But when there are 8+ people involved it becomes time consuming to resolve issues of who speaks next even when there are no debates. This is more difficult for multinational calls which can have a signal round trip time of 700ms or more.
I think that we need a VOIP based conference call system for smart phones to manage this. I think that an ideal system would be based on the push to talk concept with software control that only allows one phone to transmit at a time. If someone else is speaking and you want to say something then you would push a button to indicate your desire but your microphone wouldn’t go live while the other person was speaking. The person speaking would be notified of your request and one of the following things would happen:
Did I miss any obvious ways for the system to react to a talk request?
Is there any free software to do something like this? A quick search of the Google Play store didn’t find anything that seems to match.
Related posts:
De-Fund the CIA
Syndicated 2013-05-20 15:57:00 (Updated 2013-05-20 15:57:08) from proclus
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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