The New and the Old

daily life economy

Recently I noticed two interactions I had with products / companies / services.

They are un related. I remember them both since they were better / worse than what I had expected.

The bad one

Being bored in a Hotel room I switch on the TV. Since I never watched I was shocked again how bad it was. That was NOT unexpected. I just keep forgetting that. I stumbled upon “Blue Valentine”. I liked it a lot. And interesting movie to watch from the middle. I liked it quiet a bit and wanted to watch it completely. I ordered the BluRay Version.

I liked the entire movie as well. Nice to see that this kind of project gets made.

What really bothered me was the previews and trailers that want to play every time I insert the disc. I can fwd skip through things. But it is annoying. Very.

People do no longer buy media on discs anymore. As a reaction it seems that people try to sell things even harder. An junk-loop-spiral towards doom. Much like the Hotel phone prices jumping up when cell phones took away the call volume. A failed attempt to keep revenues steady in a shrinking market.

The good one

I wondered if it is possible to get a report from Amazon on past purchases. Sure enough it is. It works well. And it is so helpful. I never choose Amazon because of this. I had no idea I existed. I would use them if they had no reports.

Both – the disc makers and Amazon – deliver the core product that they offer.

The difference is in what they do extra: Amazon tries to think about what could be helpful for me. The disc makers try to think what is helpful for them.

How funny that they think that that will work.

hfs dmg files in Centos

Apple linux

In Centos 5.7 mounting dmg files created under OS X 10.6 with hdiutil no longer worked:

mount  -t hfsplus -o loop dmgFileFromOSX10.6.dmg  /mountpoint

results in

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0,

Without having researched it I doubt that it is the actual Centos Version that matters here.

The dmg has been created under OS X 10.6 in the terminal via:

hdiutil create -size 1024k dmgFileFromOSX10.6.dmg -fs HFS+ -volname 'test dmg'

DMG creation in the command line is a work around for the (arbritrary?) minimum size requirements of the Disk Utility program of 5.2MB and 10.1MB.

It turns out that a dmg file created with the same command line in OS X 10.4 ( on a G4 machine ) works fine. On which side 10.5 falls we did not test.

time to …

daily life history internet

It is time that we start taxing sugar. R. Lustig and C. Brindis published a very compelling opinion piece in the current issue of Nature. (Vol 482)

It is ALSO high time that Nature stops paywalling ALL articles. Op pieces like this one SHOULD be public on the net.

Science and Nature are both on this idiot pay-wall trip. They need to get over that.

The should be ways so that they have their content online for all and still give extra for people that pay now for the content.

centos source install wget 1.13 and GNUTLS

linux

installing wget 1.13 from source on Centos 5.7 the configure command was not happy:

checking for main in -lgnutls... no
configure: error: --with-ssl was given, but GNUTLS is not available.

It turns out the solution is simple:

./configure --with-ssl=openssl

did the trick.

At first I thought that a “yum install gnutls-devel” might help. The ./configure part indeed finished after the install of the developer package, but the actual make still failed:

gnutls.o: In function `ssl_connect_wget':
gnutls.c:(.text+0x3f1): undefined reference to `gnutls_priority_set_direct'
gnutls.c:(.text+0x481): undefined reference to `gnutls_priority_set_direct'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Configuring with the openssl option made everything work very smoothly …

once we had it we had to waste it

Apple misc

This looks like a nice mac memory stat.

Just that the whole circle represents 8 GB – and that there is no applications running (in the dock)

What is the OS doing with all that memory? A computer not doing anything and still using 6.5GB or memory.

Nice.

branding and 1 5 year old

communication

I could do without the background music, and the maker probably waited for the climax of a stuffy nose of his kid to record this, but it is still interesting to see just how much logo-sign-language kids pick up and

can identify.

From my own kids I remember that they knew the location of the nearest McDonnalds at a very very early age. They also made the fries / M connection.

Adobe service: rocks

misc

In a recent computer shuffle I must have missed to deactivate a laptop of mine. I got in touch with Adobe, hoping that they could provide me with the serial numbers of the computers that have the license. They were able to give me numbers. I didn’t get around to try to locate / translate them into a mac serial number: They were so kind to reset the activation count of my license.

This is awesome service. A benefit of using an illegal copy was that one would not have to worry when switching machines. With Adobe having this excellent license policy and support they make it much easier to do the right thing and to buy the software. I will remember this the next time I need to consider software purchases.

Apple Cinema Displays

Apple misc

Just switched back from the 27″ Apple Cinema display (latest with Thunderbolt etc) to the 30″ one after a couple of weeks.

The 27″ has a nice picture. But it is useless. I am ready to write it off and put into a corner. It looks nice. When it is turned off. Or when one glances over pretty pictures.
But for any work that requires reading it is not usable. A glossy screen is in the end a mirror. My brain sees the content on the screen and the reflection of the room behind
me. For me that causes un needed strain after a couple of hours. Maybe that’s related to the fact that I also get to see myself 🙂

I find it amazing that the 7 year old 30″ design is still the best screen that Apple ever made. There were hardware bumps etc. No wonder they go for a high price on eBay.

The whole glossy saga let me degrade my 13″ MacBook Pro’s into Backup and Wife usage. Back on the 17″ non glossy display I must say that it was really worth the switch.
A shame since the 13″ is a neat little machine. With 8GB Ram and a recent CPU it is quiet a bit of punch. Back on the Aircraft Carrier I realized that I missed all those pixels though.

medical imaging

communication history internet technology

So glad I found this great introduction and overview of medical imaging.

I liked the article since it gives a great overview of different techniques together with their genesis. Stuff like a PET scanner does not rain down on humanity. Lots of people needed to work hard to realize it. Ideas, Patents and -as it turns out- the Beatles were needed and involved.

I personally found it fascinating how much ample computation power has enabled. Nothing that mattered in the last 40 years would have been conceivable without massive numerical processing. Even 99.999% of computing power is wasted on Facebook and games it is just awesome that we people deviced instruments to compute so cheaply.

It is probably impossible to estimate the impact that technologies like DfMRI will have on our knowledge and picture of ourselves. The microscope changed the world and each of our lives in the most radical ways. Which might only have dawned on people in the 17th century.

Of course the link was found in Wikipedia. After having set up a monthly donation to them and knowing how good it feels now and will do in the future I wonder why I did not do so earlier. Specially learning new things most Wikipedia pages allow a quick overview about the topic. What I personally really love is how detailed yet concise even very specialized topics are being documented. Quiet brilliant.

google reader shows wrong content for feed

google internet technology

When adding the feed

http://rss.sciencedirect.com/publication/science/07357044

to google reader the resulting page showed the wrong content, while the title is correct:

This seems to be a caching issues. The workaround was to simply alter the URL in a way that would not have any effect on the feed:

http://rss.sciencedirect.com/publication/science/07357044?x

shows the expected content.