infinite sar display – neat option

history linux technology

wanting watch sar run in a terminal in linux indefinitely one can start it with


sar 1 0

The first number indicates the sampling time in seconds. The second number is usually the number of samples you like ot see.

If this number is 0 then sar will not stop. And as another bonus will look at how large the terminal is and will display a new header
accordingly.

Command line can be user friendly. I really like those little gems that show up in all software: People spending their time to make something better. It is like a little gift to the world. With software the value of even a little detail can potentially be significant. Which is an awesome thing.

For all we know it might very well be that the feature described here will please people in a hundred years from now.

I don’t think that mankind will manage to drop unix at this point. Neither can it give up on the use of steel. Yes there might be new systems, much like there have been new materials.

The new gets all the attention. But in many cases the new will not replace the old entirely. Only journalists tend to think that way. In reality the findings of Mr Newton help Boeing and Airbus today to build tubes with wings that shuttle people around the globe close to the sound of speed.

I hate this guy

daily life technology

Working on some code which is from 1992. Amazing fact number one is that the bits did not rot. Still compiles like a charm. But I really really hate the guy who wrote it. I know that back in the day storage was an issue. Things needed to be a bit more optimized than today. But having it all come down to a line like:


pos1 = ((*(*(l+x)+y)));

feels a bit outdated. Sure, it still works. Couple of comments could have been nice. Those extra brackets barely make up for it. I think the best thing that the author of those lines did, was not to get under a bus or die in any other way: I would not be here in that case.

“Fight Club” in 2013

communication daily life economy history internet marketing media politics

Watching “Fight Club” again today is a strange and very interesting experience.

So much has changed since the book / film came out. It is clearly set in a different epoch.

Its character ‘Tyler Durden’ says:

God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables;
slaves with white collars.  Advertising has us chasing cars
and clothes, working jobs  we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.

…

We've all been raised on television to believe
that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods,
and rock stars.

But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact.
And we're very, very pissed off.

It seemed fitting at the time. What happened since then?

Many of those jobs are gone. People in that slice of society
make less money today. Sometimes even in absolute dollars.
Certainly corrected for inflation. In the same time the share
of the upper sliver of society on the other end of the wealth
distribution has nothing but exploded.

So why seems the portrayed unrest even further removed
from reality than less than a score years ago?

The answer might lie in the proliferation of computer games and the Internet
during that time.

Both soak up all that extra male testosterone and time that would
otherwise find not much constructive application in the world of 2013.

Oh, and it looked absolutely awesome. I miss movies shot on film.

4×6 index card or Din A 6 Karteikarte

deutschland

In case you are looking for Din A6 Karteikarten in the US you can use 4×6 index cards. These are close enough.

Stupidity

misc

In some -older- javascript code I found the following today:

Within 4 lines the author manages to look not so smart himself: the regular expression to find the Internet Explorer version assumes that it remains in the single digits.

With Internet Explorer 10 the match starts failing. The code that follows has no idea how to deal with that.

In German a person who is not the brightest is sometimes been titled as ‘can not count to ten’ (“Kann nicht bis Zehn zählen,”)

gmail: do not send to spam and other filters

google

Recently GMail has – in my experience – more trouble with filtering spam: An average of 5 messages a day come through and end up in my inbox.

Much worse is that messages that are ham end up in the spam folder.

I added a file to get some of them automatically out of spam. Which worked, but has one drawback:

Messages that match my ‘ham filter’ but also match an older filter (think mailing list) started to show up in my inbox, and no longer in the folder, I mean label,
that the filter sets.

This feels as if the gmail ‘do not send to spam’ instruction actually does an ‘mark mail as non spam and send to folder inbox’.

Which is strange since messages can have a label AND be in the inbox.

The remedy seems to be filter order. I got the previous behavior back when I moved the ‘ham’ filter before the other filters.

I don’t think it is possible to arrange filters. Changing the order means deleting filters that should move to the end and creating them again.

TM-Edition Trademark Scam

malware

One of the “benefits” of having a registered trademarks is that scamers will try to make a quick buck.

TM-Edition Ltd.
Széchenyi tér 17.
2000 Szentendre
HU

Bank: MKB Bank Zrt.
SWIFT: MKKB HU HB
IBAN: HU57 1030 003 1056 3675 4902 0011

just tried this, trying to charge 1650 USD for “registration costs”

Sadly such scams must work often enough that it is worth somebodies while.

I think there should be severe punishments for this kind of behaviors. Allot of energy goes into nowhere for such scams.

For every dollar these idiots make they cost the world hundreds. And they contribute zero.

hover is awesome

internet marketing technology

Hover is just awesome.

With Godaddy and Network Solutions I have to battle through an ever increasing amount of screens that try to sell something when doing even the simplest things.

Yes, it’s as painful as that last sentence.

Hover is a wonderful. Even if the others were OK Hover would still stand out. It is really nice.

A domain would auto renew next week. I don’t need it anymore. So Hover sends an email asking me what I would like to do. The others just auto renew.

I really like that. Treating your customers right. Looking for what they could want. Instead of looking for upsell opportunities.

Very very nice.

waste of time: news

duke of count economy internet media

I found this today on a web site of a pewspaper:


Countless publications show the same AP story.

What is the problem with this?

According to the latest numbers China grew by 8.9%.
Since this is China one could also say: grew only by 8.9%

The US GDP grew 1.7% in the same time.

The headline of the AP story says something else.
So does the first sentence. And 8.9% growth are being called ‘anemic’

This is a very simple thing: growth did decline by 0.3%. Growth did. NOT the actual output.

I wonder what happens to the 99% of topics in the news that are more complex and faceted than this China statistic.

After I wrote this I went back to google news. On CNN one can read that the economy slowed:

I think following this kind of ‘news’ is a complete waste of time.

Thermaltake BlacX seing 801.57 GB on a 3TB disk

technology

For time machine and other local data needs I really like a drop in design for an external disk. When drives were cheap it was so nice just to drop them into the ‘enclosure’ and go on.

I ended up buying and liking the BlacX ones from Thermaltake. Slight cheap electronic stench when you open them. 1 out 5 that I bought ended up not working. But the price was really right.

Unfortunately the love ends with larger than 2TB drives. It seems to say somewhere in the specs for the device. The model I have is old too.

But it is still a bit of a let down if a 3.0 Tb drive only shows you 801.57 GB in ‘Generic External Media’ in Disk Utility under OS X.

I remember having spent hours at a client in 1987 trying to get their whopping 30 Megabyte hard drive to work with the limitation of the initial FAT16 allocation table.

There have been countless problems caused by an “oh this kind of system will last for sooo long” engineering attitude since then. “Nobody will want to have so much space, speed, insert-thing-here.”

People seem to have a hard time estimating how long something will be around – and in what kind of world things might have to fit in.

Doing those underlying things ‘right’, making them easily extendable for instance, creates tremendous value.

If Amazon actually manages to continue to fully implement their SOA approach then we might be hearing from that for quiet a while. They are currently one of the few companies that positively surprise me when I interact with them.

We will see. And I wonder what kind of size limit the new drive enclosures have that I just ordered.