A380 making of

history internet media technology

The soundtrack is boring. The editing uninspired. The camera angles lack anything that I would consider to be good work. It’s seven minutes long. It’s about an industrial process.

And still I think it is really really great. I am a geek and I like technology. I spend to much time in airplanes not to care about them. Every new A380 will fly over my house once when it will go from the Factory in Toulouse to the client center in Hamburg where it will get readied for the hand over. I think that clips like this will have a great future. There are fans for all sorts of products. People care where things come from. And most things are being made in a very interesting environments. You think people would watch a clip how an iPod is been made? How workers in a google data center push a shopping cart with replacement servers down an ever ending aisle of computers? Of course we care. Enough people do. If Airbus would have needed to buy 7 minutes TV airtime then they would have not had a success at hand. With those internets that is a different story now. Different technologies have allowed content to develop and take new forms. It takes a surprisingly long time though. For years early movies were nothing else then filmed theatre performances. For years the internet had to cary TV movies and ripped CDs. Only recently people realised that the internet can cary different content than existing / older media. There are hundreds of new genres to be discovered. This clip is a good example for one of them.

as we move forward

history media

the images change new content still lags behind years.

linux, I hate yer

linux

As nice as a working default install can be as terrible can things go with the very same software. I just wasted three hours trying to get lm_sensors to work on a Fedora Core4 install on a different, yet not exotic hardware. While I am convinced it can be made work, I just don’t feel the need to spend 4 days on something that took 4 minutes on another machine. What I really hate about Linux is that it is almost impossible to find out how long something will take. The range is usually between four minutes and four weeks. Just that some things are worth 7. Minutes or Hours, it really depends.

The other thing that I hate about Linux is that people just assume that the whole god damn world knows about their specific prerequisites. Of course you have this, that and the other thing installed and configured so that all these modules do indeed find each other. There needs to be a definition of ‘mainstream’. You go on a web page and see: Supported on mainstream, not supported on mainstream. As simple as that and you already could know if you are in the 4 minute range or not. Of course there is always a fix. Of course it can be all done easily if you just learn this, and install that. And oh, yes, of course you need to get some other things as well with it. Nightmare, that’s what it is.

The fix will be that a couple of ‘distros’ dissapear into obscurity. Would be also nice if the same configuration files would live in the same place on different distros.

the ten k dell

technology

Sadly I know people that would file a PO against it if it were not for the flames on the chasis.

And on the same day they say that they will buy Alieanware

weird

free of any reason internet

while I was looking for images of ‘bullet trains’ on google images I came accross this odd ‘gallery’ [Mildly NSFW].

Sometimes I really have a hard time understanding other peoples fetishes. Of course I don’t have to.

Will Wright on games

internet media

I have no time to read this, but I certainly will try to see what Will Wright says about games

temperature monitoring redhat fedora core 3 with asus A8V board

BlogsNow linux

BlogsNow started crashing. I wonder if it is the CPU temperature. Since I am a 5000 miles away from the computer I needed something to measure the temperature. This was harder to google to than it should be. In the end it was as simple as:


yum install lm_sensors
/etc/rc.d/init.d/lm_sensors start

sensors-detect
[accept all defaults]

sensors
[will output what the machine feels like]

now I need to copy this to another machine and then I know what happens when the machine dies.

A super simple monitoring way is to create an executable cgi file in your webservers path like this:

#!/bin/bash
echo Content-type: text/plain
echo ""
date
sensors

And then you wget / cron on a different machine to get the status and pipe it to one file …

Apple PowerMac G5 DIY list of user replacable hardware components

Apple

Apple’s DIY list for the PowerMac G5

tv is not dead

confessions of a pixel pusher history internet

says Mark Cuban

Of course he is right. I do dissagree with the focus on the last mile. Bandwidth between one and 5 Megabit a second is actually good enough for lots of uses. The real problem will be the backbones. Right now everybody and his dog tries to get a big user base. Subsrcibers rarely change services. The more highspeed client Telco and Co rake in the better they think. Performance and price are two main criteria in choosing an internet provider.

Since Cuban kicks predictions around here are mine:

I think that most Telco’s oversold their inventory. Maybe not by todays surfing habbits. But these are radically changing. A thing called “RSS 2.0 with media enclosures” will cause serious troubles. Your average Internet ISP CEO might not have a concept of it yet. He probably still mumbles ‘google google google’ every minute or so in a failing attempt to get what made these people so sucessfull. If the ISPs see it coming or not: “RSS 2.0 with media enclosures” is the dragon that will burst into their board room and will bite a head or two off.

Right now a very very small minority of people subsrcibes to these media enclosure feed. Since 95% of all users do not use their internet connection 99% of the time you can seriously oversell your available back bone bandwidth. Imagine you are an airline and for whatever reason only one out of hundret passengers that bought tickets show up. You probably will reduce your prices in order to get more clients. Same happened to the ISPs.
“RSS 2.0 with media enclosures” changes that once you load videos that way. It has been around for almost two years. Tools were cumbersome but they get better. If they should become mainstream then there is simply not enough bandwidth to make people happy. The problem is that the internet will become slower. Since an ISP has to throttle it’s clients. Right now they can afford to be as fast as possible, since almost everybody only uses his bandwidth for surfing html pages and the occasional jpg or video file. It has been said that a third of internet traffic is BitTorrent. Now go on the street and ask people that you see

A. if the use the internet
B. if they use BitTorrent

Most people will say yes on ‘A’ and on ‘B’ you get a blank stare. Bittorrent is still very geekish. So is “RSS 2.0 with
media enclosures”. It is not likely to stay that way.

We will look at 2006 and sigh. Saying “Remember when you could get a FIOS with flatrate”
Almost like: “Remember when you would go to America and traded Manhattan for a couple of pearl necklaces”

worse is better

confessions of a pixel pusher history technology

It used to be to that I spend Sunday mornings with the paper. If you don’t go to church on Sundays, then you have this amazing time that you can read just for your own joy. These days it’s the internet. Of course. But I follow different stories on a Sunday morning. Today is was Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel, via Math for programmers via BlogsNow background info on this important essay from seventeen years ago. It probably is so important that I should pretend that I woul have just ‘reread’ it. But, no: Never had heard of it before. Much like a really good movie that you see for the first time after it has been out for 20 years and that you picked up via DVD it makes you feel good since there might be countless other gems out there. Burried in all that history, waiting for to come back to light much like diamonds emerge from the soil in heavy rain. The “test of time”. Or it can make you sad, since you lived without this piece for 20 years. Might have gotten hundreds of references and jokes not all or only half way. Digressing entirely here I am considering to show my seven year old son the original Star Wars movie, even though I think he is WAY to young for that. But there are so many references in the culture around him that I feel he should see it, only that he can decipher all those references. Finally the fact that an important piece went on noticed for me for so long could also have a vastly depressing aspect: How many other items are lingering out there and I never came accross them. And, at least that is a fact, I spent the last seventeens years rambling about everything, including software creation, without being able to put into a context to “Worse is Better”. Now that I have had it my coffenated head for half an hour I am almost tempted to reference to it as “WIB”.

The essay might also only intresting to me, since I was writing in Lisp seventeen years ago and switched to Unix/C. I have to correct this, since I wrote my first code for legal money in AutoLisp under AutoCAD Version 2.18. Lisp was not my choice, C was. Very much so.

Of course now we can read things like

Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.

or


The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++.

with a historical perspective. 1995 and it turned out that Mr Gabriel thought to be worse would be pushed from 90% of all CPUs by something that is even worse than worse: Windows 95. Ironically Windows 95 could also be seen as Version 1.0 of a virus (real ones here) API disguised as an ‘operating system’.

… and then a fast forward to the world of software development in 2006. “totally”