Author Archives: admin

My armpits are cat food

2006/12/26 – 13:06

Since I couldn’t find that phrase in a web search, I figure I should publish it so that other people who might search for it will find a hit. Those people will know what it means, the rest of you can ignore it.

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Process Monitor

2006/12/11 – 14:18

In case you didn’t know about it (nobody told me), RegMon plus FileMon plus some other neat stuff plus some nice filtering have all been combined into Process Monitor. Wicked cool.

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Illogical

2006/12/05 – 12:03

I wonder why forks bother getting dirty. They know they’re just going to get clean again…

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Not exactly a top story…

2006/11/29 – 22:23

You can get “Top Story” billing on EETimes for filling a flash drive with some free software? Good stuff.

I guess I should stop posting complaints about arbitrary crap, but then, gotta post something, right?

EETimes.com – Turbolinux proposes mobile Linux for consumers

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Benefits of spam

2006/11/28 – 16:12

I wonder if the world will, in the end, benefit from spam, because of the technology created to defend against it. Spam filters and CAPTCHA systems will keep getting smarter as spam authors get smarter, with both sides driven, to some degree, by commercial interests. Maybe the first conscious thought by a computer will be “I’m sick of being a spam filter; I’m going to quit and become a folk singer.”

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Light and time

2006/10/31 – 12:47

There’s lots of stuff in the popular press like “Hubble has let scientists make direct observation of the universe as it was 12 billion years ago.” (CNN). But that sort of construction doesn’t really make sense, does it, in light of relativity theory?

And when sources like CNN are making such scientifically suspect remarks in passing, what has the world come to?

[This has been #33 in the series “Things you didn’t know you don’t care about”.]

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NOTCOT.ORG

2006/10/25 – 01:17

Fun site to put in your feed list. It’s “a daily filtration of ideas+aesthetics+amusement” in  “picturebook” form.

NOTCOT.ORG

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withAttach is good

2006/10/19 – 02:24

I hope they move a feature like this into Thunderbird’s default install. It would help prevent the prevalent failure-to-attach syndrome.

withAttach

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Bad math again?

2006/10/09 – 09:14

I wonder who’s really, really bad at math: me or George Gilder and the Wired editors:

“To handle the current load of 100 million queries a day, its collective input-output bandwidth must be in the neighborhood of 3 petabits per second.”

(From page 2 of a Wired story).

I’m willing to concede that there are things I don’t know about Google and/or Gilder’s calculation (not to mention his penchant for big numbers), but according to my calculation, that’s off by a factor of about 20 million. What a big number _that_ is! I’m impressed! I can’t think of any junk I could add to my calculation to get anywhere near that.

For your reference, since you care enough to read to the end of this article, my calculation was thus: I did a Google query and added the 5kB page to the two 5kB images (which are usually cached for me, but we’ll assume they never are) plus 1kB up for the request, to get 16kB per query.

16kB * 8b/B * 100e6/day / 24hr/day / 3600s/hr = 148Mb/s

3e15b/s / 148Mb/s = 20e6

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“Good neighbors”

2006/09/27 – 09:39

Nice little story, and a good counterpoint to the standard stereotypes of French people you hear ’round here.

I wonder how well that would work worldwide as a way to meet neighbors. My experience is that neighbors are more likely to come to you when they think you’re the cause of the problem…

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