The Blog of Harald

From Nelson’s Weblog: life / escapeFromNoise:

bq. Sound isn’t like light. You can close or avert your eyes but it’s nearly impossible to avoid an offensive sound.

* Here at work we have a large atrium rising the height of the building (eight floors). All but floors six and seven are open to the core; no walls, just a railing. Needless to say, noise carries quite well, especially up from the lobby.

* There are a few cell phones in the group, mainly for the customer support team. They get annoying quickly.

* Our old Dell’s are, well, old. The main CPU cooling fan starts to _squeek_ after a while. It’s a very high-pitched sound, difficult to track down when computers are behind partitions and under desks.

I wear headphones most of the day…

In Personal Spam Volume: over 1GB/year Jeremy Zawodny extrapolates his spam load over a year to 1GB. Curious, I pulled out my procmail logs, which apparently go back to April 9th of last year. They tell me that I received a total of 1.2GB of email in the last year (well, slightly less), of which 100Mb (about 8.5%) was spam.

On the other hand, load for the last three months is 220Mb of email, of which 22Mb is spam. So my total email volume is dropping (I left some high noise, high traffic lists last fall), but the percentage of spam has increased from 8.5% to 10%. A small dataset to be sure, but a disturbing trend.

btw, this does not include spam rejected by postfix; the log analyser tells me that I’m dropping about 10% of the total cfrq.net email before it gets accepted…

“Jvstin”:http://www.skyseastone.net/jvstin/ says it all:

bq. Why aren’t we outraged that we’ve polluted the oceans enough that we have to have our kids and pregnant women limit their fish intake because of an excess of a pollutant?

(from Blog, Jvstin Style: New FDA Fish Guidelines)

world subways – subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale. I’m sure it’ll be depressing when he gets around to adding Toronto…

This book could be an interesting read:

Amazon.ca: Books: Who Really Matters: the Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success

bq. “a depressing number of business corporations have evolved into organizations with one primary purpose: To extract wealth from all constitutions (not just the shareholders, but the employees, customers, and neighbors as well) and give it essentially to the children and grandchildren of some of its senior executives.”

(via “Rodent Regatta”:http://www.rodentregatta.com/archives/005758.php)

Maybe I’m punchy from my deadlines, but I laughed and laughed when I saw this…

Finally, porn that is Safe For Work.

(via “memepool”:http://www.memepool.com/.)

Here you go: yet another “solve problems on a grid” puzzle game (remember “Dyson’s Telescope”:http://www.dyson.co.uk/game/default.asp ?):

Chromatron, by Silver Spaceship Software is a free game of laser beams and mirrors.

-_*Update*_: Help, I’m stuck on level 30!-

_*Update*_: Ok, I got past level 30. It was ugly :-).

I had four or five levels left near the top, and they were all trial-and-error stuff; if I plugged away at them hard enough, I’d be able to solve them, but there was no satisfaction in doing so. So I went to “a solutions site”:http://www.republika.pl/chroma/ and cleared off my game, so that I’d stop wasting time on it :-)

“Extreme Tech”:http://www.extremetech.com/ recently published “a review of four Linux LiveCDs”:http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,3998,a=117223,00.asp, which was linked to by “slashdot”:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/25/0340221.

The distributions were:

* “Knoppix”:http://www.knoppix.com/ – daddy of ’em all
* “Feather Linux”:http://featherlinux.berlios.de/ – very small, light, and minimalist.
* “Gnoppix”:http://www.gnoppix.org/ Gnome-only version of Knoppix (which is KDE-based).
* “Mepis”:http://www.mepis.org/

The reviewers liked Knoppix best, with Mepis a close second. They had trouble with Gnoppix (and I have to agree; I did too when I tried it), and Feather is too minimalist for casual users (but might be great for power users).

I cary a Knoppix live-CD around with me, and I’ve used it for a couple of emergency rescues already, as well as for repartitioning an evil Win2K box a while back.

The slashdot comments add pointers to others:

* “Damn Small Linux”:http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ it’s specialty is to fit on a 50mb business card CD.
* “MandrakeMove”:http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/mandrakemove/ implements USB keys for storing configuration and profiles, so that you can quickly turn any bootable PC into your personal desktop.
* And of course: “Linux Live”:http://www.linux-live.org/ allows you to create a LiveCD from any linux distribution…

I might make a DSL business card CD, just for the fun of it…

A couple of good packages for monitoring the disk space usage on your computer.

JDiskReport:http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/ creates pie and ring charts of space usage, and lets you navigate up and down through the directory hierarchy, looking at the relative sizes of files and directories.

“SpaceMonger”:http://www.werkema.com/software/spacemonger.html has an interesting interface. Each file or folder on a given drive is displayed in a box in the main window whose size is a relative comparison to all the other files in your system.

I find both displays useful, for different reasons. SpaceMonger is a better “at-a-glance” tool, but the display can sometimes be cluttered and confusing; it’s hard to tell what level of the filesystem things are at, sometimes. JDiskReport has some useful reports, like the Top 100 and size histograms, but only lets you see detail on one level at a time.

Anyway, I use them both; I thought I’d share…

The Mars Planetary Defense Forces are winning, “20:16”:http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/marsscorecard.html …

My wife and I are sitting downstairs in front of the TV. We’re watching CSI off tape (no TIVO here yet), and working on our laptops. I come across this amusing article on Rands In Repose: N.A.D.D. (Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder), in which I read:

bq. The presence of NADD in your life is directly related to how you’ve dealt with the media deluge of the new millennium. You’ve likely gone one of three ways:

bq. 3) You enjoy the content fire hose. Give me tabbed browsing, tabbed instant messaging, music all the time, and TIVO TIVO TIVO. Welcome to NADD.

Sounds like us, eh? So earlier he writes:

bq. Stop reading right now and take a look at your desktop. How many things are you doing right now in addition to reading this column?

So I check (webmail, reading blogs, writing my blog, ICQ and Jabber). I was reading parts of the article to Michaéla ,and she ‘fessed up: 12 windows! 3 email, 2 MS word documents, a file browser, 2 different versions of the same powerpoint file, Google, and a pop-up ad, MS clip-art, and an online clipart page. All dedicated to the same project, but still a busy desktop.

Now the clincher:

bq. Here’s a tip: If the building you are currently in is burning to the ground, go find the person with NADD on your floor. Not only will they know where the fire escape is, they’ll probably have some helpful tips about how to avoid smoke inhalation as well likely probabilities regarding the likelihood you’ll survive.

The prosecution rests; we’re afflicted….

In “Challenge to Open Source”:http://www.ftponline.com/weblogger/forum.aspx?ID=1&DATE=12/10/2003, Jim Fawcette writes:

bq. I was originally excited by the idea of open source, collaborative development. But the direction open source is headed seems like a waste. Creating clones of commercial software isn’t impressive creatively. But more importantly, what does it contribute? Why would anyone with excellent computer skills want to work long hours to create code so that millionaire executives at IBM can use it to sell expensive mainframe computers and middleware with six-figure licenses? All for no compensation and little recognition.

I found this perspective interesting and amusing, and there are many areas where it applies. There are organisations that extensively use open source without “giving back” to the community. There are others that aggressively release projects as open source, even when they don’t have to and don’t gain any (tangible) benefits.

I don’t think IBM is fair game in this case. The article is missing a critical piece: all of the coding that is done by IBM employees (and those of other large organisations), which is then released as open source. The obvious example is Eclipse, which represents thousands of man hours of development paid for by IBM, and is now available to any software developer. I’m sure there are many others.

“Chuq has a rebuttal”:http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/001141.html that is worth reading too.

Now this is a _cool_ practical joke.

Friends foil Olympia man’s home

bq. nearly everything else in Chris Kirk’s downtown Olympia apartment was encased in aluminum foil when he returned home Monday night from a trip to Los Angeles.

bq. The walls, ceiling, cabinets and everything in between now shimmer with a metallic glow, thanks to a prank by Kirk’s longtime friend, Olympia native Luke Trerice.

They foiled the walls, the furniture, the stuff on the furniture, the bookshelves, the _books_, all the kitchen appliances; basically everything except for a single book (Penn & Teller’s Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends), a picture of his girlfriend, the bed, and a bath mat. They even _individually_ wrapped his loose change.

Amazing attention to detail:

bq. Trerice and his friends unrolled the toilet paper in the bathroom, enveloped the bath tissue in aluminum foil and rolled it back up again. They covered Kirk’s book and compact disc collections but made sure each CD case could open and shut normally.

All of the enfoiled kitchen appliances still work…

Curling: Still set in stone after 200 years

bq. Exactly 200 years ago today, on January 6, 1804, members of Duddingston Curling Society approved the first written rules of the “Roarin’ Game” in the Curlers’ Hall in Duddingston, at that time a small village outside of Edinburgh.

(I’ve only been curling for 10 years; I have some cathing up to do :-)

“An article on sofware theft by Nick Bradbury”:http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2004/01/on_piracy.html prompted several random thoughts, that are only loosely related (and don’t qualify as a counter-argument :-). (He’s since posted “an update”:http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2004/01/on_piracy_part_.html).

Nick Bradbury has a point: theft is theft. Compare this to the “but Dad, you steal satellite TV” ads running right now.

however:

To unfairly pick on one example: TopStyle sells for $80. While it looks like a very useful piece of software, for me personally, it’s not possible to justify spending $80(US) on software for personal / hobby use. To compare, my server hardware only cost me $300 (CDN, new). If I were doing web design and programming for a living, it would be a different story. (btw, I’ve never even downloaded the trial version, although I’ve tried FeedDemon a couple of times).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against paying for software; I use several other small products (that I’ve paid for :-), because I could justify the expense: HanDBase, Desktop To Go, Nelson Email Organizer (to name a few).

So then I started thinking about books. I know many successful book authors. I’m pretty sure I don’t know any who make a living from writing. The market has settled into an equilibrium where hardcovers are expensive, but few people buy them; mass-market paperbacks are cheap; $10 (CDN) or so.

Software is expensive (compared to books), particularly software that takes approximately the same amount of effort (an average novel is between six months and a year of full-time writing and editing). Authors get very little of that $10 book price; shareware authors in particular get all of it (minus transaction costs, which are small in comparison).

There is a strong lending economy in books; one person will purchase a book and then lend it to a couple of their friends. (This borrowing economy is truer of the more expensive DVDs; see an earlier weblog entry :-). There’s no way to lend software to someone (without violating EULAs). Granted, it’s hard to “lend” software, because of the perfect copying problem…

So those were my thoughts. I know it’s not as cut and dried as “make software cheaper and people won’t steal it”; the issue is more complicated than that. But I think it’s worth thinking about the current pricing and usage models for software, and how they could (should?) change…

My friends and I have been getting DVD players and DVDs. We’ve been talking for a while about building a database at CFRQ to list the DVDs each of us own, and to keep track of lending. The discussion came up again last night over cards, so I did a bit of digging…

As per normal, someone else not only had this idea, but wrote the software. The Open Media Lending Database is a PHP + MySQL solution to the problem that is pretty sophisticated. It supports multiple “media” types: DVD, VHS, CD, Games, Books, etc.. You can add data by crawling IMDB and Amazon.com. It supports multiple users. There are some features that we don’t need, but overall it looks like it will be very useful.

So I installed it :-)

There are some interesting tidbits in the comments on this plastic article: Plastic: Is The Kyoto Protocol Melting?

Probably worth wading through the chaff. At least the signal to noise ratio is better than on slashdot…

Interesting. According to “an article in The Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1108853,00.html, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface has decreased by 10% over the last three decades.

bq. “Unlike many of the other symptoms of Global Warming, the evidence for Global Dimming is quite clear: there has been a marked and quantifiable decrease in solar radiation striking the earth every year since records have been kept, there have also been tests on the evaporation rate of water in metal pans and the Dutch (much of whose specialized farming is done in greenhouses) have noticed a definate decrease in their productivity.

The ties to global warming are interesting. The sun’s output has not dropped over those decades, so the missing radiation has to be going somewhere. “Recent NASA studies”:http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/stories/20030513/ have shown that atmospheric soot is a major source of climate change and potentially related to global warming. If atmospheric soot is absorbing sunlight (and converting it to heat), that could tie Global Dimming and Global Warming to each other.

Oh, and incidentally, drive another nail into the Kyoto coffin, since Kyoto is focusing on CO2 emissions. Much as I hate to admit it, CO2’s connection to global warming is still relatively tenuous…

(via “Plastic: Goodbye, Sun”:http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=03/12/21/07534647)

“The Fact: It is impossible to fold any piece of paper no matter how big, small, thin or thick more than eight times.”:http://educ.queensu.ca/~fmc/june2002/PaperFact.htm

Well, “Britney has proven them wrong”:http://www.osb.net/Pomona/12times.htm” …

Hey, “DynDNS.org”:http://www.dyndns.org/ has added some cool new for-pay services since I last looked. Of particular interest to me, now that I’ve lost two of my three free server locations, is the Secondary DNS service. $14.95 per zone annual fee is pretty reasonable…