Older blog entries for nutella (starting at number 212)

My pundit is louder than your pundit!
Oh yeah. After all the celebration over advogato not going away, thanks for reminding me that it isn't all sweetness and light here and that some people don't like to let mere objective data spoil a strongly held opinion. The world in a microcosm...

Peace to you all, folk. It's that time of year.

Re: spammers
I notice that tolerance levels vary. For some people an uncertified user with no posts and no user information (and there are many of them) is considered a problem. I'm not so sure.

On the other hand I notice I have been certified by mike32 whose content looks fairly spammy and links to magic who created a clear Spam Project. I know neither of these users. Are there any more pseudoproject being used for spam? Is there anyway to refuse a certification? Does the trust metric cope with such one-way certification or does it assume that it is automatically two-way?

Oooh! Thanks IBM. It looks like the chapter from John Casti's book but with a glpk perspective. Nice.

"On a waiter's bill pad numbers dance."
I was recently reminded of the following mathematical puzzle. I first encountered it over 30 years ago in a holiday How! annual and the currency in that version was pounds shillings and pence (so it was before 1971). Here's the current version of the story.

Three people have lunch in a restaurant and the bill, including tip, comes to exactly $30

• Each diner chips in $10
• The server says there's been a mistake and returns $5
• To save asking for change each diner takes $1 and gives the remaining $2 to the server
• What happened to the $30?
• Each diner paid ($10-$1) = $9 so $27 total
• The server had $2 as an extra tip
• $27 + $2 = $29
• Where did the other $1 go?

Good fun if you think about it too quickly.

The Advogato glitch is back. Never a dull moment around here...

Unglitched
Advogato's Recent entries is now behaving itself.

Thanks Seagate. A relatively new 73GB SCSI drive (not one of those mentioned here) was rather unreliable. I persisted with it so long that the shop guarantee ran out. I filled out the forms on the Seagate web site and they sent me a replacement last week. No quibbles. All is apparently well. My old (now ~4 years) 36 GB Maxtor drives are currently the winners for SCSI reliability (and low temperature and low noise). IDE winners are a pair of 10 GB IBM UDMA33 drives. Still no problems after ~9 years (of course IBM's drive division self-destructed soon after these were made so I have a couple of newer drives that died after only 1.5 - 3 years). I also have some dead WD Caviar drives from when WD went through their bad patch (sticky lubricant?). Hopefully the recent proliferation of cheap storage doesn't mean that quality will take a dive. Hopefully.

Advogato glitch
I see lkcl's entry on the "Recent blog entries list". But when I follow the Recent entries list it is not one of those displayed. Luke is rated as Master so his entry shouldn't fall below the threshold.

The local library is cool. They have a copy of Revolution OS in the DVD collection. This is either apt or ironic as one of the major events for Windows Refund Day took place only a few hundred yards away.

Don Marti DOES Get It (duh!)
I agree that this is very excellent. More so as it includes a definite QOTD:
This will keep less from clearing the screen after you look at the man page, and spoil the mental workout that you normally get by playing "Remember the Man Page And Then Try To Type The Command."

Paul E. Ceruzzi Does Not Get It
I've been reading his 1999 book A History of Modern Computing, grabbed from the library pretty much at random, which has a very nice overview of the U.S. side of computer development from UNIVAC onwards. The surprise was his apparent anti-UNIX bias. One of the apparent faults of early UNIX is that it was closely associated with networking so "it made it easy to write programs that acted like a 'virus'". Another apparent fault was that circulating the source allowed people to create other, potentially incompatible, versions. Instead the author hails MS-DOS as a real (author's emphasis) desktop standard. This is a bizarre choice as he also complains about UNIX's difficult command line interface. The complaint against openness also destroys one of his earlier points where he points out that Rockford Research Institute's tight legal control of its TRAC language likely led to its downfall, in comparison to the then contemporary and more open SHARE (collaboratively developed) and MAD (University of Michigan) languages. I am assuming that there was a long delay in submission and publishing as there's no mention of Linux (actually the book coverage seems to stop at about 1995 with the formation of Netscape).

Having said that, if you want an overview of 1950's - 1980's hardware, computer languages and system software it is a nice book.

Jumpering the shark
I recently had a problem with a rebooted PC throwing SCSI errors and the two attached hard drives resetting frequently until the thing just hung. I've used SCSI for a while and so my historically biased approach to diagnosing problems is "It's either cabling or termination". These days of idiot-proof automatic termination and blocks hard-wired to the cables reduces the chances of these kinds of events happening. The bottom line is, that after a great deal of jiggling and reseating, I found that the actual cause was that the SCSI ID jumper of one of the drives had worked loose and thus rendered it SCSI ID 0. Naturally the other drive already had that ID so the two of them were fighting. Maybe the smart move is to number them 1 and 2 so that unless they both shed their jumpers they'll remain unique. Anyway, I should have more quickly remembered the third historically biased diagnosis "...or bad SCSI IDs".

(Where will I be able to post my "I was an idiot" confessions if Advogato goes away?)