STRAY neuron

Most brilliant work from Microsoft in years…

UPDATE (6/2/07): The Register questions whether all this hype about Surface Computing is more “smoke and mirrors” than actual breakthrough. Good reading.

Would you like to create a lively, “top”-like output from some of the monitoring commands in your toolbelt?

“watch” can be of help here, as it can poll your command every X seconds and render its output to full screen.

Try “watch -n1 date” for a demo.

NAME
watch - execute a program periodically, showing output fullscreen

SYNOPSIS
watch [-dhv] [-n ] [–differences[=cumulative]] [–help]
[–interval=] [–version]

I stumbled onto this while troubleshooting Putty disconnects on XP…gotta love FAQs w/ attitude.

A.7.12 When I cat a binary file, I get ‘PuTTYPuTTYPuTTY’ on my command line.

Don’t do that, then.

This is designed behaviour; when PuTTY receives the character Control-E from the remote server, it interprets it as a request to identify itself, and so it sends back the string ‘PuTTY’ as if that string had been entered at the keyboard. Control-E should only be sent by programs that are prepared to deal with the response. Writing a binary file to your terminal is likely to output many Control-E characters, and cause this behaviour. Don’t do it. It’s a bad plan.

If your Trac install has a “reassign-to” field displaying as a text box (instead of a drop-down), try setting “restrict_owner=true” in trac.ini.

This tip should be especially valuable for those with co-workers with un-typeable login names.
:)

Bookmarking this…since I’m having lock problems with BerkeleyDB…

$ svnadmin create –fs-type fsfs /path/to/new/repository
$ svnadmin dump /path/to/repository | svnadmin load /path/to/new/repository

UPDATE (12/26/2006): I ended up pulling the trigger on the BerkeleyDB->FSFS conversion as I was getting absolutely sick of running the “svnadmin recover” and “db_recover” scripts. Conversion was painless - here’s the “productionalized” list of steps I followed:

1. Shut down svnserve, Apache, and anything else that might be accessing the repository.
2. svnadmin dump /path/to/repository > dumpfile.txt
3. mv /path/to/repository /path/to/saved-old-repository
5. svnadmin create –fs-type fsfs /path/to/repository
6. svnadmin load /path/to/repository < dumpfile.txt
7. Copy over hook scripts, etc, from the old repository to the new one.
8. Restart svnserve, Apache, etc.

When Oracle bought out SleepyCat, they also broke all the legacy BerkeleyDB permalinks, pointed to by Subversion documentation.

Inconsiderate bastards - don’t people know how to map legacy URLs to new ones?

See http://www.sleepycat.com/docs/ref/lock/max.html for an example - it forwards to some cheesy, generic Oracle documentation page.

Independent Sources has a hilarious list of Top 10 unintentionally bad URLs.

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net

IEEE Spectrum is featuring an interesting article which pretty much dismisses Metcalfe’s Law as hogwash and introduces n log n as a better approximation of the value of a network.

Wow. I just bought a domain through GoDaddy.com and I’m absolutely SPENT!

It is, by far, the worst booking experience I’ve ever had - it takes a fucking half hour to actually get to the purchase button.

Can you possibly squeeze more upsells into a booking experience? Who the hell is running that place?

To follow the Linus/Tanenbaum microkernal debate I needed to brush up on my microkernel knowledge. Enter Wikipedia.

A microkernel is a minimal form of computer operating system kernel providing a set of primitives, or system calls, to implement basic operating system services such as address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication. All other services, those normally provided by the kernel such as networking, are implemented in user-space programs referred to as servers.

UPDATE: One of the Slashdot users posted “the truth about microkernels“.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate

Once in a while I like to read up on a topic that I know only superficially. Today’s topic was “frame rate” or “frame frequency”. Here are a couple of more interesting snippets of the Wikipedia page:

Frame rate, or frame frequency, is the measurement of how quickly an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames. The term applies equally well to computer graphics, video cameras, film cameras, and motion capture systems. Frame rate is most often expressed in frames per second (fps) or simply, hertz (Hz).

The frame rate is related to but not identical to a physiological concept called the flicker fusion threshold or flicker fusion rate. Light that is pulsating below this rate is perceived by humans as flickering; light that is pulsating above this rate is perceived by humans as being continuous. The exact rate varies depending upon the person, their level of fatigue, the brightness of the light source, and the area of the retina that is being used to observe the light source. Few people perceive flicker above 75 hertz or so.

There are three main frame rate standards in the TV and movie making business.

• 60i (interlaced; 50i in Europe and Australia), is the standard video frame rate that has been in use for decades; it’s what you see on your home TV, whether from a broadcast signal, rented DVD, or home camcorder.

• 30p, or 30-frame progressive, is a non-interlaced format and produces video at 30 frames per second. Progressive (non-interlaced) scanning mimics a film camera’s frame-by-frame image capture and gives clarity for high speed subjects and a cinematic-like appearance. Shooting in 30p mode offers video with no interlace artifacts.

• The 24p frame rate is also a non-interlaced format, and is now widely adopted by those planning on transferring the video signal to film. But film- and video-makers turn to 24p for the “cine”-look even if their productions are not going to be transferred to film, simply because of the “look” of the frame rate.

A culture of competition has arisen among game enthusiasts with regards to frame rates, with players striving to obtain the highest fps count possible. Indeed, many benchmarks released by the marketing departments of hardware manufacturers and published in hardware reviews focus on the fps measurement. Modern video cards, often featuring nVidia or ATI chipsets, can perform at over 160 FPS on intensive games such as F.E.A.R. This does not apply to all games - some games apply a limit on the frame rate. For example, in the Grand Theft Auto series, Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City have a standard 30 fps (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas runs at 25 FPS) and this limit can only be removed at the cost of graphical and gameplay stability. It is also doubtful whether striving for such high frame rates is worthwhile. An average 17″ monitor can reach 85 Hz, meaning that any performance reached by the game over 85 fps is discarded. For that reason it is not uncommon to limit the frame rate to the refresh rate of the monitor in a process called vertical synchronization. However, many players feel that NOT synchronizing every frame produces better in-game performance, at the cost of some “tearing” of the images

“A prince who is not himself wise cannot be wisely advised? good advice depends on the shrewdness of the prince who seeks it.”

This article strikes close to home.