Why Linux isn't all around us

Linux has been used in mainly places, used on many server and has tones of advantages, the main one is it’s free. Linux has a fatal flaw though.

It was designed for tech savvy 15 year old boys with no life (trust me, I was one of them). It was never designed to be a user friendly operating system. Linux didn’t just wake up one day and say lets use this on my mums computer. Slowly projects are popping up trying to solvet his flaw and making Linux a popular alternative to OS X and Windows, however it still has some work to do.

Being that the programming for the main programs on linux is decentralized making something that’s going to come together and be good is hard. A lot of forks in code bases occur, where coolprogram become gCoolprogram (or Gnome Program) and kCoolprogram.

With the forking becomes more forking, and even remerging of code, things get sloppy and/or broken. Every single program has a different GUI and look and feel, every Distro has a different command set. Linux was just never made with a home user in mind, it’s targeted at power users. People that don’t call their computer a “hard drive”.

Ps, this is an awesome picture, Peace, Love and Linux.

Why I love the Idea of ZFS

Bonwick said, “Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn’t fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans.” Later he clarified:
“Although we’d all like Moore’s Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 litre of space can perform at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1031 bits of information.[10] A fully populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2128 blocks = 2137 bytes = 2140 bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2140 bits) / (1031 bits/kg) = 136 billion kg. To operate at the 1031 bits/kg limit, however, the entire mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy. By E=mc², the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2×1028 J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4×1021 kg. It takes about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celsius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1 kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4×106 J/kg * 1.4×1021 kg = 3.4×1027 J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans.”

Taken from wikipedia.

Autocad pump assignment


Autocad pump assignment
Originally uploaded by TheSkorm

The assignment is to pump water up the hight of 6 meters using manual labour or the wind. I’ve talked about this in a few blog posts, this is basically a test to see how well motion path animation is on AutoCAD, and how well flickr video is.

This also tests how well, flickr blogs it to my blog, let’s see how well it goes.

[Update]
Looks like it’s blogged alright, and it looks all pretty, which is nice.

Analytics

I’ve been playing with Google Analytics for a little time now on my blog, and I find the overall use of this feature nice. It allows you to see what type of audience is reading your site, where their visiting, and from which site they came from. 

Ethics of it, I’m still unsure about, yeah sure a site owner can do what ever they like, but is tracking people going to far. A lot of assumptions can be made from the data too, which I really wouldn’t like to happen to me. Although it does help the writer target the text at a particular country, language and internet speed.
It can also help with targeting and placement of ads, it wether or not they are actually doing their job.
I suppose it can be a good tool, if it is used correctly. 

OpenID Fun

I’ve been messing around with my OpenID, which blogger runs for me, on OpenID enabled sites like Propeller and Magnolia (both digg alternatives). Which has been quite fun. I also found Plaxo, which seems to sync all your contacts (OS, email server, email client, IM services) and it created a generic profile that allows you to have your youtube, last.fm, myspace, facebook, twitter, digg …. (The list goes on) stuff all in one places. It basically puts every Web 2.0 app in one place and includes calendar and address book syncing with several services. It seems really new so it’ll be nice to see how it turns out.

When pasting some items on Pastebin.ca, which I do quite often, I noticed an OpenID flavored login box, I further explored their site and noticed that they also do a image and file hosting service too, which I’m going to use for the moment. Skitch is a handy app to have, to take screenshots and upload to the net, allowing you to highlight certain aspects of the screenshot easily. A one click image upload feature is really handy, and I have enjoyed Skitch so far. I suggest you check these out.

I’m generally pleased with Bloggers OpenID simplicity.

Human Barcode Reading.

Long story short, practice tests are boring, and boring times provoke doing boring tasks, such as learning howto decode barcodes.

The coputer read sheet contains a 4 by 8 square matrix, with certain squares blackened.
Hmm, 8 squares, sounds like 8bit binary. Kinda. This is what I learnt, remembering that I was in an exam so I couldn’t use outside world help.

This is the barcode if it was written as binary (the first few attempts of me decoding it failed because I was reading it upside down).

11011100 | A
00001101 | B
00010101 | C
00000001 | D
(3349)

Now to read is quite simple, you get rows B and C and put next to each other, which make a 16 bit binary code.

0000110100010101

Which equals 3349, correct according to the number under the barcode. Now the next problem is what are rows A and D for. I presume they are for check sum, row D is a simple, “this row should equal one” check, but row A is left. If anyknows how the checksum works, comments would be nice. Btw, this was from a QCS prac. exam, I thought they would use something a little more harder.

Some more barcodes
00010111
11110001
11110110
00000001
(61942)

01111110
10000010
11111110
00000001
(33534)

Bonjour (and wikipedia mirror)

Opps, I missed a post on Sunday, so this ones a double (for tomorrow)

First off, which is the reason I missed posting on Sunday, is that I am mirroing wikipedia so I can use it as school without an internet connection. It’s a simple, but length process and if you follow this ( guide it’s easy. I’ve been processing pages from Friday and I’m only just half-way through. The compressed download is 3.7gb and the decompressed version is 16gb.

The second thing I would like to touch on is Bonjour which is brilliant networking system made by Apple, which simplifys networking. I’ve been using Leopard and Tiger for more than a year now, and this is the first time I saw it in action. I had a ubuntu box up, and I enabled vnc access. I started searching for some alternatives to Chicken of VNC os OS X since it was getting old, and tried a few, and then I noticed that the ubuntu box was in my finder window. I clicked on it and noticed that it screen sharing button enabled. It’s preformed its job so well and seemless. It’s kinda a mash up of Hamachi and local networking.

iDrive

yum9me later this week talked about backing up data and online storage solutions. After my hard drive wipe, I thought I’d try something a little differnt. I got a free account at iDrive, whic offers 2GB upload for free, which is plenty for me to upload my school work. The user interface is really nice and the upload speed is amazingly fast. It also does incremental backups to save time and bandwidth. The scheduler feature works excellently and even sends me an email once a backup is done. 

The only thing I do hate is the fact that you can’t change the colour of the little menu bar icon. Which is really annoying because I had a nice forest/tree theme going on. If you’re going to have something so out there, please allow people to change it, if not stay with the standard black icons. Speaking of which, here is my solution.

In finder goto /Applications/IDriveforMac/IDriveMonitor.app/Contents/Resources using the goto folder function in the go menu. Open up IDriveMenuIcon.tiff in your favorite image editor and change the colour or what not.