Articles – Page 99

Thrashing

Thrashing is a computer science term referring to an undesirable occurrence in multiprocessing systems.

When a processor is given multiple jobs to do, it services them a little each in a round-robin fashion (assuming that no priority system is in effect), until each is done. This is, of course, actually significantly less efficient than doing each job one at a time, but doing a little of each job, a little at a time is more productive when dealing with humans, who like – for example – their web page to download at the same time as they write a Word document.

Unfortunately, optimizations to this system can cause it to go wrong. By giving the processor more and more jobs to do, it eventually passes a critical point at which it is spending more time performing administrative tasks and managing it’s ’round robin’ scheme than it is actually performing the tasks you want it to. You’ve probably seen a system doing this. The solution, of course, is to either stop giving the system jobs to do until it can finish some of those it already has, or, better still, to kill some of the running processes to enable the processor to catch up on it’s workload. The solution is not to click irritably on the buttons, or repeatedly demand more and more of the processor.

Today, I feel like a thrashed processor.

How To Keep Up With The Latest Happings On Scatmania (or What Are All Those Pretty Buttons?)

If you’re looking for a way to keep up-do-date with the latest Scatmania happenings, it’s now really really easy. I’ve enhanced my weblog with a heap of useful syndication tools that make keeping track of my latest activities a doddle, even for those of you who are unenlightened and can still be caught using an awful choice of web browser.

You may have noticed that at the bottom of the Scatmania menu there’s a series of button. Most of these buttons (the top five) relate to subscribing to Scatmania, like this:

RSS	RSS is a popular format for syndicating news and views on the internet, supported by most weblog communities and applications, as well as by many news sites. To view RSS content, you will need an RSS Aggregator such as Pluck (a plug-in for Internet Explorer), RSSOwl (for most operating systems) or the attractive NewsMac for MacOS. The Opera web browser now supports RSS feeds, too, and it looks likely that other browsers will soon follow suit. The RSS : Journal feed from Scatmania provides you with the latest blog entries, as they happen. The RSS : Comments feed collates the newest comments and replies to my weblog entries. RSS is a great way to keep up with your friends weblogs and your favourite news sites.
Atom	ATOM, like RSS, is a simple way to keep up-to-date with your favourite sites. Just download an ATOM-enabled newsreader (some, like BottomFeeder, can read RSS feeds as well) and point it at the sites you want to watch. Scatmania publishes an ATOM feed of the latest blog entries.
ESF	ESF is a small, fast, and simple new way to publish content like weblogs. There aren’t really any programs for reading it right now. Why not consider writing one (see how simple the data format is).
CDF	CDF, developed my Microsoft as part of Internet Explorer 4, was supposed to be the future of the way we used the web and subscribed to the services of web sites… but it never took off. However, Internet Explorer to this day provides the means to subscribe to ‘active channels’, and for Internet Explorer users, this may be the easiest way to keep up with Scatmanian events. Just click the button in Internet Explorer and Scatmania will be added to your Favourites list as a submenu, automatically adding new items (and removing old ones) as new entries are added to the blog. Thanks to Aquarionics for suggesting this reincarnation of Internet Explorer ‘active channels’.

So, now you’ve got no excuse for not being up-to-date with my blog… or anybody elses!

The other buttons are mostly just me showing off because I can write standards-compliant code – click on them and see for yourself.

1984 Revisited: What If Apple Took The ‘Microsoft Route’

Daring Fireball has an article about “Apple vs. Microsoft” with a difference. Contrary to many, he argues that if Apple had taken the ‘Microsoft route’ in 1984, with their hardware and software (significantly superior to IBM-PC platforms running Microsoft software), by licensing the platform, they wouldn’t necessarily be the market leader today. It’s a well-written and compelling article, and if you’ve any interest in OS politics or parallel universes, it’s worth a look.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Competing Directly Against Microsoft May Be Hazardous to Your Company

Weather Situation Unclear For Weekend’s Parachuting

As you may know, I’ll be doing a crash course in parachuting – hopefully climaxing in a solo freefall – next weekend, to celebrate my (finally) getting a degree, courtesy of my dad. The weather reports don’t look too favourable, though – potentially stormy at the end of this week. Hmmph. We’ll see. It’ll take more than a little lightning to stop me from throwing myself out of an aeroplane.

In other news, Claire‘s been using the student loan repayment calculator on The Guardian’s Education site, looking at different career paths and calculating how long it would take her to repay her student loans (at £18,000 + inflation only, it would take her about 40 years). She clicked on “Web Site Designer”, just out of curiosity, and the resulting page caused her browser to crash. Somehow, this is very funny.

Dan Breaks The Internet… Again

Whoops. You’d have thought I’d have learnt my lesson when I fucked around with BIND last year, and ‘broke’ a small portion of the internet, but no. I managed to ‘break the internet’ again while playing with the Domain Name System settings on big. That’s why Scatmania was inaccessible for the last day or so (to most people).

In other news, spent Sunday in the office, working on getting the database for the project I’ve been working on live and online, with some success, despite the power company’s best attempts to stop me. Those in Aber will have experienced the power cuts of Friday and Sunday (half an hour in the second case), which crippled one of SmartData‘s computers with a power spike to it’s PSU – one I’ll be glad to be rid of, admittedly (yet another cheaply made piece of junk from Microland UK). But nevertheless, the power cut was of great inconvenience to those of us trying to work to a deadline, on a Sunday, and wanting to get home in time to go out and see I, Robot. I sat outside in the sun-come-drizzle and read a book that was one of my recommended course texts but that I never got around to reading while I was actully doing my degree, and listened to the ocassional screams of the UPS bricks to let me know that I still couldn’t actually get on with some work.

I, Robot was OK… kind-of a re-hashing of the concepts put forward in Blade Runner, Electric Dreams, The Matrix, A.I., and Bicentennial Man, with an excessive use of bullet-time and slow motion. Coherent, though… but you will come out of the cinema saying “See every other robot movie for examples of this theme.”

Right; off to work…

I’m Surrounded By Idiots

Conversation with a co-worker, who shall remain nameless:

Her: Is anybody any good at Fireworks?
Me: Yeh; you just light the blue touchpaper and run. But seriously, you ought’a be using Corel Photo-Paint.

(I wander over to her desk, and see that she’s working with a bitmapped image of our logo – she’s trying to remove some of the text from it… using the text tool… the text is jaggedy and quite obviously bitmapped)

Her: Why can’t I select this text?
Me: Umm… because it’s not text; it’s an image. The same reason that if I scanned in some of my handwriting and gave you that as a file, you couldn’t select it.
Her: But it is text: look…

(at this point, I collapse into a blubbering heap on the floor… this person has several years of an internet computer science degree tucked under her belt, but can’t understand the difference between vector-based and bitmap graphics [pretty fundamental year one web design stuff])

Computer Hardware For Sale: Bargain Prices

Overclockers Australia is running an article, collecting together advertisements for computer hardware and software over the last quarter of a century. I’ve pulled out a few of my favourites:

1989 Tandy 500 MC Professional – only $8499; VGA graphics, 386/20MHz, 2MB RAM – this computer’s a real beast: and what a bargain!
Late-80’s Portable Computer – just $2295; 8" (monochrome) screen, CP/M (w/ WORDSTAR, MAILMERGE, and SUPERCALC). Has 64K of RAM and not one but two floppy disk drives (double-density)!
Looking to increase your hard storage space (this means you, Paul)? There’s a 10-MB Hard Disk (sold in 1981) for the sweet price of $3398! Yes, that’s 10 megabytes, not gigabytes. About the same size as a modern desktop computer CD-ROM drive, and with a slower seek time.
TRS-80 Model 16 (wonderful piece of hardware) for just $8499: 128K of RAM, dual-processors (one MC68000, one Z-80), multi-processing, page-capable memory model, optional 8MB HDD, two serial and one parallel port, and an 80×24 character 30.5cm green screen. Add a second floppy drive for just $500 more!

Those offers sound fresh! I think I’ll see if I can get a trade in against Duality…

64-Bit Columbine

Toy… Phill from work has gotten himself a sweet new AMD64 processor; I went round to help him install it after he thought he’d broken it during assembly (turns out he’d missed a power lead and hadn’t fully locked the processor into it’s socket). Jeez; those 64-bit processors have a heap of pins (as one might expect). Runs pretty cool, though.

Claire, Paul, Bryn, and I watched Bowling For Columbine yesterday evening. Most of us’d seen it before, but it’s worth a second look. We came to the eventual conclusion that Michael Moore‘s films are all about the shock value, and that his books carry a far more meaningful (and less biased) examination of the topics… and that this choice was made because to get through to the “stereotypical American white male”, he feels that you need to shock them with a film. Would his books get to the people who he felt needed them without the films to ‘get the foot in the door’.

Gonna be a long week at work.

Reb’s Back

Looks like I am making a regular reader out of Reb, my ex-. She posted another comment today. This time I’d improved the trace algorithm already (mostly out of curiosity). She’s connecting from her Tiscali IP (80.40.255.212). There’s no (meaningful) firewall running on the connection, and ports 439 (DASP), 445 (Microsoft-DS) [that could be interesting], 1723 (PPTP), 2001 (DC), and 6001 (X11:1) are open for incoming traffic (although the first two are filtered). Interesting that there’s a PPTP and X11 server running at that IP… looks like it’s probably a business server. Might see if I can probe it a little further… that wide-open port 445 looks like an interesting entrance…

The Jews Are Back In Town (Spread The Word Around)

A large number of orthodox jews have descended upon Aberystwyth as part of an annual tradition going back for as long as anyone seems able to remember. They charter a train and rent out PJM, the student village. It’s an interesting spectacle. I recall that about this time two years ago I had a fire on the beach. The people I’d been there with had gone home, and I stayed to tend the embers. Eventually, I fell asleep, curled up beside the fire, and when I woke up (at around 3am) I found myself surrounded by orthodox jews (of all ages), standing, staring out to sea. As you can imagine, I assumed I must be dreaming, but it gradually became apparent that no, this was actually happening, and the beach really was filled with jews. Trippy.

On other jewish related news, are any of you familiar with Dor Yeshorim, a schecme to reduce the frequency of close-society-breeding related genetic disorders in jews of Eastern European origin? I guess not, but anyway – SmartData is writing the software that tracks the genetic samples submitted by Dor Yeshorim service users, which is keeping folks like Alex and I immensely busy with lots of early mornings and late nights.

In other news; he saw beans, lots of beans, lots of beans, lots of beans; he saw beans, lots of beans, lots of beans, lots of beans.

An Idea – How To Get Treeware Junk Mail Banned

Here’s a thought: a way to try to get unsolicited (treeware) junk mail banned –

Every time you receive a bit of junk mail, just go and put it back in the post box: it’s almost all franked mail, and so the post office will re-sort it and deliver it back to you. Put a tally on the reverse side, and add one to it each time you forward it to yourself. If enough people did it, I wonder how many recursions you’d need to put through the post office before the postal workers union petitioned the government to disallow the sending of unsolicited treeware junk mail.

Not sure if it’d work, but I think I’ll do it anyway, just out of curiosity about how high a tally I can get before the post office start refusing to re-deliver them. Heh.

Got my Dad’s web site done. Just waiting for the domain name registration to go through so I can deploy it.

Making Progress

Claire’s at work this Saturday morning, so I’m taking advantage of the oppertunity to finish the web site I’m developing for my dad – almost got a deployable version ready, which is nice, because I could do with getting his feedback on it and (assuming all’s well with design and whatnot) deploying it “live” on Monday morning. Which is all good, because I need the money!

The folks who now own the cafe below us – our new landlords – have made great strides in getting it ready for use. It’s now got tables, and chairs, and a chiller unit, and some stock, and a coffee maker, and all kinds of stuff. It’s been entirely repainted and refloored and redecorated. It’s pretty much ‘there’. They’ve even put up the new sign. The new sign advertises the cafe’s web site, mgees.com. I’ve taken a look… and… it would appear that they tried to make a web page in Microsoft Word (bad start), then ran the source code through a copy of Dadadodo to ensure that it was completely mangled, before they uploaded it. Jeez. Still, they’ve asked me to quote them for a new one, so once I’m done with this site for my dad I’ll see what I can do for them.

Speaking of Dadadodo, Claire‘s been playing with it recently. You should see what happens when you put the book of Genesis through it… oh; we laughed.

Back to the code…

A Win For A Sensible Web Browser

I’m making progress with the people I work with. I’ve now got six of the eight folks in our office using Opera (they were formerly using Microsoft Internet Explorer, and some of them have tried Mozilla Firefox. Perhaps my recent spate of ‘blog posts criticising Microsoft’s browser – combined with the various hacks I’ve been showing them that I can use to exploit an IE terminal – has had some part in this.

Just Phil and Sarah left who still use IE as their primary browser. Think I’ll install Firefox on the sly and see how long it takes them to notice.

Win. R.

Dadadodo Poetry

Decided to have Dadadodo, which I used yesterday, to generate some poetry based on my vanity pages from the old version of AvAngel.com, my perpetually-under-redevelopment web site. Take a look at this:

My body, of the religion,
That of seeing myself in a moment,
Stares ahead.
Always been an existential touch,
And I banish this.
My life, without a link, is in my writing,
To her I’m water,
At the rain comes ecstasy:
It’s gone.

Not bad for an algorithm with no pre-programmed understanding of language, I thought. Meaningless… but in a good way…

Damn My Buggy Code!

Whoops! As a result of some buggy code I’d written, my recent ‘blog entries didn’t get cross-posted to LiveJournal, as they usually do – it turns out that the cross-posting code I wrote only works if I write my entire blog entry at once… and my recent entries have been quite long and so I’ve written them in ‘instalments’, which didn’t work. Hmm. I’ll write a fix for that soon.

In any case; here’s a summary of my recent posts, with links so that you can go read them:

Rearing Of The Ugly Head, And Apache’s Dirty Secrets – 26th July: Reb, my ex-girlfriend, reads my blog and places a comment… so I have a bitch about it.

Something Cheery – 26th July: A pick-me-up after my grotty post about Reb.

Things I Don’t Have Time For At Work – 27th July: Rant about an indecisive co-worker.

Dreams Within Dreams Within Dreams – 28th July: Description of a weird, convoluted, recursive and self-referential dream I had. Odd.

Dadadodo: Exterminate All Rational Thought – 28th July: I download a clever word disassociation program and let it loose on Scatmania, with bizarre – yet funny – results.