Tag Archives: Silliness

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Illogical

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…

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

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

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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Bad math again?

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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The joy of del.icio.us

By popular demand, and yeah, ‘popular demand’ can indeed mean ‘a single request’ if the population from which the request(s) came is only about three people anyway, I’ll add a bit more to my previous post about using del.icio.us as a browsing tool. And that bit is, that even if you don’t have an account or contribute links yourself, they offer different ways (more than I knew about, actually, until I just looked, because they’ve added some new tools) to see what’s hot with other users. All I do, usually, is use the recent additions (del.icio.us/recent). As you might notice from the link, I set the minimum number of linkers to 1 in order to get everything, because I personally find it most interesting to see what’s not popular (yet) but is still link-worthy.

It’s actually pretty amazing how often there’s something of interest to me in the recent links. I should mess around with their other discovery tools, but, ya know, randomness is good. That’s also why I visit LinkSwarm, although that’s more hit-or-miss (but also more ‘egdy’, so don’t let your mothers or employers see you lookin’ at it).

And, ya know, if my writing seems, as it may well be, especially disjointed or runny-onny, and jumps around a lot, it’s proabably because I’ve been watching Stella, which you should also, if it’s the sort of thing you should watch.

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P. Peeves

‘Pet peeves’. Seems we ought not be nurturing our peeves as if they were something we want to thrive under our care, like a pet. Seems they’re more like parasites than pets (but then, parasites are an analogy that’s more likely to come to my mind in any situation after reading “Parasite Rex”). We don’t really want them, but we haven’t yet developed a personally effective way to deal with them. But we certainly shouldn’t be treating them like pets…

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Smack!

Y’ever want to smack yourself until you cry?

Today I spent an hour and a half trying to figure out why a web browser control I placed in a dialog was refusing to show the page I navigated it to. I won’t go into the details of the symptoms and the things I tried to fix it, but it was weird, and I tried everything.

Turns out I had somehow placed two identical copies of the control on top of each other, and I was (successfully, probably) navigating the bottom one but not the top one. Geee, eeee, eeesh.

Of course, I can’t entirely blame myself, as it was the retarded IDE that caused me to plop down two copies of the control…

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Produced IT humor

Huh, it’s pretty cool what the Brits can do with their low-budget TV ways. Spreading the money around lets them explore farther out-there.

I’ve watched the first episode of “The IT Crowd” online, and I have to say that it was pretty darn good, with actual production values and real scripts and actors and stuff. Not world-class, but British-class for sure. Easily one of the best IT-focused bits of comedy television I’ve seen, but then, well, you know… it’s the only bit I’ve seen. The Dilbert cartoons don’t count cuz they weren’t really IT-focused.

Anyway, I can’t tell from the site whether this is an ongoing concern or whether there are just the two eppies, but in any case, hit these if you can:
The IT Crowd.

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Ice wuss

I’m an ice wuss, I admit. I really, just really, don’t like walking on ice. But I’m trying not to be such a wuss about it, so I made myself walk home under icy conditions today. Had a couple slips, but no falls.

Well, until the very last step of my route that had any ice on it. At which point I fell forward, but in a rather brilliant way such that I landed with both hands in some fairly cushiony snow, and no other body parts making contact. I’d like to see it on film, actually; it must have looked pretty cool.

So, anyway…