Posted on November 25, 2006

Unix tricks

Posted on November 23, 2006

To move a lot of data from a Linux server to an ftp.

mkfifo dump.tar.gz
tar czf - /home > dump.tar.gz
ftp ftp.tmp.net
put dump.tar.gz

After upload is complete decompress the dump file on the target site
tar xzvf dump.tar.gz

Why all this?
It’s faster to transfer one big file.
To save bandwidth, because of the compression.
To save disk space on the server.
P.S It’s stupid but ftp clients I tried can’t download from named pipe, you have to upload the file.

Simplicity

Posted on November 22, 2006

I don’t like Joel latest rant. People that think like that take good stuff and simplify it in a quest to satisfy every idiot. They remove “advanced” options from applications, produce one button mouses and make stuff that only idiots are willing to use.

Look what happened to GNOME when they decided to make it accessible to the average user. In new GNOME the most you can do is change the theme and wallpaper. In the old GNOME you could change WM if you wanted to.

I am not against simplicity and elegance, I enjoy it, I don’t like options panel in Word, but all those options there are there because somebody needs them, and to remove them would be to surrender to marketing.

Advanced stuff is there because stuff we use is complex. Better design should be used to hide rarely used items not to remove them.

Should we avoid keyboard short-cuts because they duplicate menu items and are not obvious?
Should we make one official way to close the window?
I can make a big list, but my answer is “no”, because this leads to a small box with a red-button with label “Make me happy”. No actually without the label, just button. Excellent design… for people with below average IQ.

…the magic word

Posted on November 22, 2006

Today I found a magic word “XYZZY” in IBM book.

Stupid me

Posted on November 20, 2006

I lost my iPod 3 month ago, I was disappointed - 300$ is a lot of money. Anyway today the metro was late, so I decided to clean my backpack, and I found it in the most unused pocket. I never even thought to look for it there. That’s good news.

The bad news is somehow I managed to break my Sun Ultra 60 workstation. And I am still puzzled why and how it broke. The story goes like this: I bought two 450 Mhz CPUs, 2GB of RAM and a new video card. Installed the hardware, found that I need to update firmware, uninstalled new, installed old, decided to test is everything is ok. Power-cycled. No video signal. Power-cycled. Video is ok, but after the memory test it just stops responding. I think that because I left jumper in WRITE position, firmware got corrupted during the test. But I can still access command-line when I hit Control-A. So unless I can restore it, I lost 100$ on parts I can’t anymore.

Now that I don’t have workstation I’m thinking about buying something new like Dell Dimension 9200 for 1400CAN. But I’m not sure how well Solaris will work on it. I could buy new SUN workstation, but even thought they are better in almost all aspects I can not afford extra cost now.

I wonder who decided that it is OK to sell alcohol…

Posted on November 16, 2006

I wonder who decided that it is OK to sell alcohol at gas stations?

Grr, I hate those “4 hours to solve” assignment qu…

Posted on November 16, 2006

Grr, I hate those “4 hours to solve” assignment questions.

The Future of Computing

Posted on November 13, 2006

I attended lecture by John Hopcroft about his vision of future of computing. I don’t think that I understood everything he was talking about (but I am not familiar with multidimensional geometry and I don’t remember statistics).

I think the main idea of his talk was that there are is a lot of information, and it has funny properties - there are a lot of simple small clusters from which a super information clusters form as the interconnection between the cluster increase. We can use this to model for example airline routes or Internet. Now with that in mind how can we logically group information into clusters and how can we remove the noise (such as search engine optimization).

He also showed a phenomen that demonstrated that as we increase the number of dimension we can not assume anything about geometrical properties we are fammiliar will. For example volume of sphere in a multidimensional space decrease as we increase the number of dimensions.

He raised an interesting question. What system of measurement should we use to mesure the distance between information.

He also pointed that tracking, annotating, and making information available saves time and helps people.

Development of Windows Vista is complete.

Posted on November 10, 2006

Microsoft OS team just released new version of Windows operating system. Congratulations!

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