Category: technology

one gig is not enough

Apple history OSX technology

Thirteen years ago I worked for the first time on a SGI computer. “Super Computer” as it’s owners liked to call it whenever they could. They spent more than you would pay for mid sized house on it’s memory alone. It had 1GB RAM. Telling people casually about this machine back in the day I had to emphasize: No, not the hard drive, the RAM is one Gigabyte. There were a handful of computers of this size in Germany back in the day.

Yesterday I saw somebody beach-ball on a MacBook. She just uses it for the normal communication things you do these days, no ‘heavy’ applications. This computer had the same memory size: one Gigabyte. And it is not enough. The machine was swapping. Horribly slow.

Something is a bit odd here: Using one gigabyte you could store one million pages of text. Or one thousand books with a thousand pages each. Or you could fill the screen of the laptop with 350 layers of images. 349 of them being invisible.

Memory is cheap these days. But wasting a whole GB is something that might
lead to the wasting a whole 16GB in a few years. That memory one could use probably for real useful things as well.

Callwave for voice mail: so far so good

technology

So far I love Callwave. It’s a service that will handles voice mail for cellphone accounts. For free. After a bit of set up that was almost instant for me and pretty well documented on their site they take over your cellphone voice mail. Which means that I get now an email when somebody leaves a message. Quicktime is a much nicer interface for voicemail than the phone.

uss san juan and DST

free of any reason technology

A billion dollar submarine that missed the Dailight Savings patch?
Emerging one hour off would do it.

y2k7

politics technology

All my servers moved into the new DST successfully. Which makes it easy to postulate the following:

If your computer or software shows the wrong date next week then your technology install sucks.
Either the people / company you pay to maintain it are stupid, incompetence, lazy etc, or you don’t
have support in the first place.

Oh, and it was the stupid Bush administration that caused this. Not OBL or anybody else. It’s a selfmade problem.
Born out of stupidity.

Next week will show how stupid / smart America really is.

12:00

update: the register calls the panic off and the register is always there when panic can be created

not that easy

Apple technology

March 11, and the spring-forward Daylight Savings Times goes into effect earlier. Right now (0:11am pacific) my properly updated OS X 10.4.8 dashboard is showing the time for central europe 1 hour to early. Which is amusing since Apple did indeed update it’s operating system. The change in DST was initiated in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Four weeks more time shift. It might be that the upcoming confusion next week is more costly for the economy than those hours of sunlight during peoples waking hours save resources and therfor money.

The underlying systems, servers and services will do just fine with the change. We still have 31 years left to fix all the equipment that has a sense of time.

Looking in my crystal ball after it’s DST confusion has cleared up, I see allot of bad software working oddly. Millions of people shrugging their shoulder because their computers time is now off by one hour. Corporate support desks will have a busy monday. It’s really bad software and the interaction with human readable time where the change might cause troubles.

As crazy as it is, some people just buy a new computer next week, one that shows the time correctly. And of course there will be poster child snafus that the media will be all over. Some big corporation loosing millions because of a weird cascade of events, triggered by a pointless law.

I would be very surprised if this years DST change would go as smooth and seamless as the last ten did.

distro history

history linux technology

I am not a sysadmin. Ok, I adminstrate machine, but mostly so that I can go back and write some more horrible code. Coding for unix system is the most fun. I still remember when the Sun spark pizzabox showed up in the adjacent office and it came with a huge box of documentation: “They want you to know all this? Awesome!” On DOS PCs I was used to an environment where equipement makers would not share any knowledge.
After working on Intergraph work stations I then spent years with Irix. Which was nice at the time, since SGI had lots of money and even used some of it wisely. Of course the writing was on the wall. And running a web server on basically free hardware (except for electricity) was intruiging enough to try to deal with Linux. I am still trying to do that. Redhat was what came my way first. It worked ok, but at some point I got sick of rpm dependency stacks. Debian looked good with apt-get. So I built two boxes running that, and they drive me crazy. No chkconfig, ‘just’ use ‘sysv-rc-conf’. Once in a while I have to deal with Suse, but new machines I build with Fedora. Yum is pretty much making me happy these days. I simply don’t understand why somebody thought it would be a great idea to rename httpd to apache (or vice versa). And there are lots and lots of these differences. You don’t notice them when you stay with one system. But switching back and forth makes this annoying. Comes with the concept of free and open software I guess. But somebody I would like to have the cake and eat it too.

The quality of software is quiet interesting: the core of things seems to work really well for linux. Not so much ‘core’ as in ‘kernel’ but rather functionalities. The fringes, the configurations, the interface to adminstrate these things is pretty horrible. The babylonic /etc/init.d/ confusion is only one example. Another one would be that sar is by default off after you installed it on debian. You have to go into /etc/default/sysstat and enable it. Trickier to find than it should be.

looks like what it is

technology

drive that looks like a drive

genesis assembly

technology

The genesis of a Genesis slightly edited

zodiac screening

confessions of a pixel pusher media technology

There will be 2 screenings of ‘Zodiac’ on 2/18 in Los Angeles. The movie opens on March 2nd.
The flyer from Camera House who organizes the screening since they provided the camera and capture system. You will have to rsvp I believe. Angus, Wyatt and myself will be part of the panel discussion at 4pm.

nice multi touch interface

technology

just turn the crappy music off

This interface sure demoes well, but could also be used in real life from something.