Category: unkategorisch

June 25th: The dow claims back a full percent in the late part of the session. The reason, and no, I don’t make this up: Many regulations put on banks after the 2008 financial meltdown were dissolved.

Again: The abolishment of measures intended to prevent another bubble – and therefor it inevitable bursting – actual fuels this one.

One more round. Bubble always aim for same thing: One more round. Just one new delivery of fresh blood. Robin Hood money gone already? How about another stimulus, or – no – wait – I know: The banks have to allocate billions as collateral for their swap deals. Just let them not do that anymore. All that money liberated. It will be peachy!

All the whilein the same time Covid-19 infection numbers in the US rise to levels that had not seen before. While there are zero novel approaches on the horizon to actually deal with it. 2020 will continue to be a very interesting year.

The WSJ headlines today, on June 25th 2020: More Than 20 Million Americans May Have Had Coronavirus, Government Says

So, there are two numbers:

• 2.3 million people are officially counted as infected.
• 20 million says ‘the goverment’ might already have it

What we know is, that sadly 122,000 people died in the US from Covid-19 so far.

Herd immunity does not have the best reputation. For good reason. Since actual mitigation in the US is not doing so well right now, lets pick it as a working assumption here. Based on those two wildly different infection counts and assuming a 70% infection limit the US would end up with either:

• 12 million dead, if it were really only 2.3 million that are infected, or it would, like the Government choose to believe, be rather
• ‘only’ 1.3 million people who would succumb to that novel pathogen that keeps us on our toes this year.

What horrible bookends for this scenario! Both numbers are not cool. Neither for those who have to look at this fate personally, nor for their kin, nor for the country as a whole.

Sadly I don’t make this shit up. It is a grim possibility. One that is worth avoiding. Which can be done. Other countries are doing it. The US better start acting like it can as well. And soon. Any mitigation efforts take a while to take effect. During which the pool of infected people grows, and it gets exponentially harder to contain the outbreak.

I wondered how much a Windows10 PC with SSD would be. Turns out in June 2020 200 EUR at Amazon is all I needed to pay for a black box described as:

Ankermann Business Work Silent leise PC
PC Intel CPU 2X 2.70 Ghz dual Core HD Graphic 
8GB RAM 240GB SSD Windows 10 PRO Office Professional

Got here when it should. Was well packaged. Didn’t smell. Even came with a DVI to VGA adapter. Yes, it makes a tiny little bit of noise. But otherwise I can not complain. Lots of connections, card slots, DVD recorder. Windows10 pro worked fine, Office is pre installed and licensed as well. For what I want to do this will probably be do just great.

EDIT1: The machine did everything it was supposed to do. Time to try some more stuff. Fusion 360 installed, but was sluggish and rightfully complaining about the graphics adapter. Da Vinci Resolve kinda installed (itself and lots of other things). After a couple of reboots that were required it said that it was not able to run. Which is totally fine. A small standalone app that could quickly check a machine configuration in respect to the Resolve requirements would probably a neat addition. Also helpful for support etc. It would pay for itself if it would generate links to purchase things that can improve the specific situation. It would run and spit out what you currently could do with your configuration. It would show you what you could do if you would upgrade CPU, Gfx, disk system. And it could tell Blackmagic Design what people are running their wonderful software on.

I ended up adding a GT 7100 with 2GB for 50 EUR. Fusion is much happier and snappier (which makes me happier) Resolve did install and launch. Haven’t worked with it at this point. The system boots into 4K right away and looks decent.

Inserting the card I was surprised how the case is built around so much air. The whole system would fit into a 40% of the current volume. Funny that a larger case is the cheaper thing.

The unix sar command is a nice way to have a quick view of how a system has been doing. The default shows cpu and IO, but its output can be customized to your hearts desire. Should said organ harbor indeed things of that nature.

Looking live at values is possible too. You just have to give the program the sampling time in seconds and -and this is the kicker- optionally the number of repetitions. For instance: observing how the next minute works out for your machine in 6 six equal time chunks would require you to enter:

sar 10 6 

So far, so good. But what if you want to look constantly? More than 20 years ago I learned that using

sar 1 0

would just give me that. The zero as the last parameter was interpreted as having no end to the repetition. Zero resulting in an never ending eternity. Yes, if marketing people don’t breathe down your neck, you can put things like this into what you create.

But no good deed goes unpunished. It turns out an even smarter option is it, to make that second parameter entirely optional:

sar 1

already gets you that desired simple output. That works, is awesome, and the right thing to implement it like.

Working on a more recent machine (we are talking decades here, not even kidding) I did not get the expected output when I applied finger muscle memory and then old known pattern. Then it got funny: I read the manual, googled around, emailed the author. I just felt solving this. Apparently I felt like writing about it too. All the while the machine – that I am now successfully looking at – revealed to me what it was doing, when it got bogged down.

I am unaware about what has led to my actual epiphany to consider the omission of the second parameter. Paying closer attention to such circumstances seems like a very fruitful enterprise.

I looked back, and I encountered the issue 2013 already. Back then, I must shamefully admit, I solved it by just entering a large second number.

Two years ago it actually took me 7 seconds to find the right solution already. For me a quick solution will seemingly not be remembered when there are so much previous habits and repetitions.