Fri Oct 03 12:04:58 call me old school: I've been annoyed at the proliferation of iTunes-like music players and the dearth of old school Winamp/xmms-like players. I still listen to albums in the time honored fashion of selecting one and listening to it straight through. I also have many, many gigabytes of music, and importing them into my library never seems to go as smoothly as it should. Importing one album at a time seems like an insulting waste of time, since the whole point of these players is library management. Furthermore, I also have a lot of different music in different formats, like .mod, .spc, etc and those don't seem to be readily supported by rhythmbox, etc. so I can't listen to them anyway.
Adding insult to injury, xmms has disappeared from Ubuntu in favor of xmms2 which, while it has plugins for different formats, crashes when I try to play music! Thanks a lot, guys! I guys the "2" in xmms2 stands for "sucks".
Thankfully, I just discovered 'audacious' today -- which appears to be basically a workalike of xmms. (The apt data says it's a fork of 'beep' -- maybe that's a fork of xmms... I don't know, or care.) Anyway, Ubuntu has lots of plugins for it, including all my old music. So I'm back in business.
Mon Oct 06 09:50:26 PST get_pageblock_migrationtype: Are you a kernel newbie like me? Have you been perusing kernel code and wondering what "migration type" is or whether it's important for you to understand? Here's a link.
Page migration is about moving pages around to alleviate differences in RAM in access times. How can acccess times be different? Well, in traditional systems, they're not, because the system has only one bank of RAM, and the time to access it is always the same.
However, some new systems are NUMA systems. NUMA stands for Non Uniform Memory Access and describes a system where the memory access times are not uniform from processor to processor. For example, my dual Opteron board has two banks of RAM, one for each processor. The bank for CPU0 can hold 4G, but the bank for CPU1 can only hold 2G. As you might imagine, there are times when CPU1 needs more than 2G of RAM, so it can "borrow" from CPU0 -- but of course, memory access to the other bank will take longer than memory access to its own, local bank, so sometimes we'd like to "migrate" the data from one memory bank to another.
You can imagine how this kind of thing could get very complicated in a large multi-system cluster or in future "1000s of cores" designs.
Thu Oct 09 14:28:25 PST 750,000 jobs and 250 billion dollars? : I hate to parrot Slashdot, but this article from Ars Technica discusses the sources and legitimacy of the common figures used to support the further restriction and enforcement of copyright and other IP protections. It's a really good read.
In essence, the figures of 750,000 jobs and 250 billion dollars "lost to piracy" have been quoted and re-quoted for years in lobbying efforts, testimony, articles, and more in an effort to get tougher IP laws. Unfortunately, no one ever followed the breadcrumb trail back to the original source of the figures or did any simple reality testing of them until now... and the numbers don't really hold up to scrutiny. Do you like your government making laws based on flimsy statistics? I don't.
Thu Oct 09 17:18:06 PST i never should have written all those tank programs, or: life imitates art: This is an awesome story about some kids who wrote a "light cycles" program for an Apple IIgs. All was going well until the computer players decided to escape the game grid into system memory... (from clickolinko)
Fri Oct 17 07:56:54 PST masterpiece security theatre: This has been all over the Internet, but here's a great article about why the TSA screening, etc. is just designed to make you feel better and doesn't actually stop smart terrorists.
Thu Oct 23 09:43:40 PST weird moments in the grocery store: So, I was at Ralph's the other day, and what came over the PA but the love theme from Bladerunner! That reminds me of the time that Mel, my late night cashier at Jewel in Chicago, said that sometimes in the middle of the night they play weird stuff like classical music and whatever because they think nobody's listening.
[Main]  | Unless otherwise noted, all content licensed by Peter A. H. Peterson
under a Creative Commons License. |
Fri Oct 03 12:04:58 call me old school: