What No One Told You About Z-Index — Philip Walton
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What No One Told You About Z-Index — Philip Walton:GVT: atendimento péssimo, ouvidoria cínica.
Dia 20 de abril mudei-me de casa. Fora a encheção de mudar de casa em si, para uma casa menor, veio a encheção de tentar transferir a minha linha da GVT.
Liguei uns poucos dias antes para tentar agilizar as coisas. Pediram 3 dias úteis para analisar se a minha nova residência teria disponibilidade de serviço. Aguardei os 3 dias, tinha disponibilidade, pedi a mudança.
Aí começa a novela.
A minha casa anterior tinha 35 mega de velocidade. A nova, só tem disponibilidade de 25 mega. Aí eu ligo, eles dizem que primeiro preciso baixar a velocidade do meu pacote de dados. Pedem para eu aguardar 3 dias úteis. Ligo de novo 3 dias depois. Algo deu errado. Mais 5 dias úteis. Mais 3. Mais 7 dias.
A última feita, aguardei os 7 dias úteis ao final dos quais a linha deveria estar instalada. Sim, sou paciente. Ligo lá no sétimo dia útil, só pra ver se vai rolar mesmo. ‘Senhor, a sua mudança não foi confirmada, está dando erro no sistema. Vou passar para a área técnica onde eles tentarão emitir uma ordem de serviço manual, mas será necessário aguardar mais 3 dias úteis’.
Apelo para a ouvidoria. A ouvidoria, cínica, trata meu pedido de transferência de linha como um pedido de mudança de endereço de correspondência e diz que eu já fui atendido, fechando meu chamado.
A mensagem que mandei pra ouvidoria no dia 7 de maio:
Há dias tento solicitar a minha mudança de endereço da xxx para a yyy em Brasília. O último prazo que me deram, 7 dias úteis, se encerraria hoje. Ao ligar na GVT hoje, sou informado que a ordem de serviço ainda nem foi gerada, e terei de aguardar mais 72horas para verificar se a ordem foi gerada, devido a algum erro misterioso que ninguém sabe me dizer ao certo qual é. Mais 3 dias para verificar SE a linha poderá ser transferida. Estou extremamente decepcionado com isso, e nem ao menos sou informado da razão desse erro misterioso, que nem a atendente soube me informar. Uma pena que vocês tratem seus clientes com tão absurdo descaso.
A resposta absurda da ouvidoria, no dia 13 de maio:
Prezado Walter, Em atenção ao seu e-mail, informamos que o endereço foi alterado com sucesso, para: bla bla bla bla novo endereço Atenciosamente, Joana Ouvidoria GVT – Atendimento ao Cliente Não responda esse e-mail. Em caso de dúvida ou sugestão acesse novamente o Fale Com a Ouvidoria
Último contato da parte deles foi na última terça-feira, por volta das 10 da manhã, onde após eu praticamente spamear a caixa de mensagens do perfil do facebook deles, eles ligam falando: ‘Então senhor, não temos disponibilidade de 35 mega no seu novo endereço, podemos prosseguir com o serviço de 25 mega?’
Como se eu não tivesse ouvido isso de vários atendentes anteriores. Digo que sim, que eu preciso de QUALQUER internet. Até hoje, nada de contato da parte deles.
Sigo spameando s caixa de mensagens deles do facebook (inefetivo, porém me dá vazão a profunda frustração que me acomete). Fiz reclamação na anatel na sexta-feira passada, dia 17. Protocolo 1541960.2013. Tive até hoje qualquer ligação ou retorno deles? Óbvio que não.
O mais absurdo é, por tudo o que me foi dito até o momento, não existe nenhum problema técnico que impossibilite a instalação da linha na minha nova casa, com velocidade de 15, 25, ou qlqr outra que eles puderem me fornecer. O que existe é um tremendo descaso, um atendimento péssimo e até esse cinismo, que são os aspectos que mais me incomodam no processo inteiro.
Nem escrevo na intenção de que isso cause qualquer solução. Apenas torço pra que outra história do descaso absurdo dessa operadora fique indexado na internet.
(Sim, vocês podem me perguntar, porque eu não cancelo e peço de novo: quando perguntei dessa possibilidade, falaram-me que seria mais sete dias úteis.
Give students the same interest rates on loans as the big banks
Syndicated 2013-05-21 20:31:00 (Updated 2013-05-21 20:31:26) from proclus
ULB Bonn ::: Dissertation - Rolf Bardeli: Algorithmic Analysis of Complex Audio Scenes, 2008
ULB Bonn ::: Dissertation - Rolf Bardeli: Algorithmic Analysis of Complex Audio Scenes, 2008: "In this thesis, we examine the problem-of algorithmic analysis of complex audio scenes with a special emphasis on natural audio scenes. One of the driving goals behind this work is to develop tools for monitoring the presence of animals in areas of interest based on Their vocalisations. This task, Which Often an occurs in the evaluation of nature conservation measures, leads to a number of subproblems to audio scene analysis.No Backups WTF
Some years ago I was working on a project that involved a database cluster of two Sun E6500 servers that were fairly well loaded. I believe that the overall price was several million pounds. It’s the type of expensive system where it would make sense to spend adequately to do things properly in all ways.
The first interesting thing was the data center where it was running. The front door had a uniformed security guard and a sign threatening immediate dismissal for anyone who left the security door open. The back door was wide open for the benefit of the electricians who were working there. Presumably anyone who had wanted to steal some servers could have gone to the back door and asked the electricians for assistance in removing them.
The system was poorly tested. My colleagues thought that with big important servers you shouldn’t risk damage by rebooting them. My opinion has always been that rebooting a cluster should be part of standard testing and that it’s especially important with clusters which have more interesting boot sequences. But I lost the vote and there was no testing of rebooting.
Along the way there were a number of WTFs in that project. One of which was when the web developers decided to force all users to install the latest beta release of Internet Explorer, a decision that was only revoked when the IE install process broke MS-Office on the PC of a senior manager. Another was putting systems with a default Solaris installation live on the Internet with all default services running, there’s never a reason for a database server to be directly accessible over the Internet.
But I think that the most significant failing was the decision not to make any backups. This wasn’t merely forgetting to make backups, when I raised the issue I received a negative reaction from almost everyone. As an aside I find it particularly annoying when someone implies that I want backups because I am likely to stuff things up.
There are many ways of proving that there’s a general lack of competence in the computer industry. But I think that one of the best is the number of projects where the person who wants backups has their competence questioned instead of all the people who don’t want backups.
A decision to make no backups relies on one of two conditions, either the service has to be entirely unimportant or you need to have no bugs in the OS or hardware defects that can corrupt data, no application bugs, and a team of sysadmins who never make mistakes. The former condition raises the question of why the service is being run and the latter is impossible.
As I’m more persistent than most people I kept raising the issue via email and adding more people to the CC list until I got a positive reaction. Eventually I CC’d someone who responded with “What the fuck” which I consider to be a reasonable response to a huge and expensive project with no backups. However the managers on the CC list regarded the use of profanity in email to be a much more serious problem. To the best of my knowledge there were never any backups of that system but the policy on email was strongly enforced.
This is only a partial list of WTF incidents that assisted in my decision to leave the UK and migrate to the Netherlands.
About a year after leaving I returned to London for a holiday and had dinner with a former colleague. When I asked what he was working on he said “Not much“. It turned out that proximity to the nearest manager determined the amount of work that was assigned. As his desk was a long way from the nearest manager he had spent about 6 months getting paid to read Usenet. That wasn’t really a surprise given my observations of the company in question.
Related posts:
Fabrication du pneu Michelin Vidéo n°53 Auteur Jean Michel Bonnemoy – GRAVURE CAOUTCHOUC ARTISTIQUE
Fabrication du pneu Michelin Vidéo n°53 Auteur Jean Michel Bonnemoy – GRAVURE CAOUTCHOUC ARTISTIQUE.
Advice on Buying a PC
A common topic of discussion on computer users’ group mailing lists is advice on buying a PC. I think that most of the offered advice isn’t particularly useful with an excessive focus on building or upgrading PCs and on getting the latest and greatest. So I’ll blog about it instead of getting involved in more mailing-list debates.
In the late 80′s a reasonably high-end white-box PC cost a bit over $5,000 in Australia (or about $4,000 without a monitor). That was cheaper than name-brand PCs which cost upwards of $7,000 but was still a lot of money. $5,000 in 1988 would be comparable to $10,000 in today’s money. That made a PC a rather expensive item which needed to be preserved. There weren’t a lot of people who could just discard such an investment so a lot of thought was given to upgrading a PC.
Now a quite powerful desktop PC can be purchased for a bit under $400 (maybe $550 if you include a good monitor) and a nice laptop is about the same price as a desktop PC and monitor. Laptops are almost impossible to upgrade apart from adding more RAM or storage but hardly anyone cares because they are so cheap. Desktop PCs can be upgraded in some ways but most people don’t bother apart from RAM, storage, and sometimes a new video card.
If you have the skill required to successfully replace a CPU or motherboard then your time is probably worth enough that getting more value out of a PC that was worth $400 when new and is worth maybe $100 when it’s a couple of years old probably isn’t a good investment.
Times have changed and PCs just aren’t worth enough to be bothered upgrading. A PC is a disposable item not an investment.
There are a range of things that you can buy. You can spend $200 on a second-hand PC that’s a couple of years old, $400 on a new PC that’s OK but not really fast, or you can spend $1000 or more on a very high end PC. The $1000 PC will probably perform poorly when compared to a PC that sells for $400 next year. The $400 PC will probably perform poorly when compared to the second-hand systems that are available next year.
If you spend more money to get a faster PC then you are only getting a faster PC for a year until newer cheaper systems enter the market.
As newer and better hardware is continually being released at low enough prices that make upgrades a bad deal I recommend just not buying expensive systems. For my own use I find that e-waste is a good source of hardware. If I couldn’t do that then I’d buy from an auction site that specialises in corporate sales, they have some nice name-brand systems in good condition at low prices.
One thing to note is that this is more difficult for Windows users due to “anti-piracy” features. With recent versions of Windows you can’t just put an old hard drive in a new PC and have it work. So the case for buying faster hardware is stronger for Windows than for Linux.
That said, $1,000 isn’t a lot of money. So spending more money for a high-end system isn’t necessarily a big deal. But we should keep in mind that it’s just a matter of getting a certain level of performance a year before it is available in cheaper systems. Getting a $1,000 high-end system instead of a $400 cheap system means getting that level of performance maybe a year earlier and therefore at a price premium of maybe $2 per day. I’m sure that most people spend more than $2 per day on more frivolous things than a faster PC.
As so many things are run by computers I believe that everyone should have some basic knowledge about how computers work. But a basic knowledge of computer architecture isn’t required when selecting parts to assemble to make a system, one can know all about selecting a CPU and motherboard to match without understanding what a CPU does (apart from a vague idea that it’s something to do with calculations). Also one can have a good knowledge of how computers work without knowing anything about the part numbers that could be assembled to make a working system.
If someone wants to learn about the various parts on sale then sites such as Tom’s Hardware [1] provide a lot of good information that allows people to learn without the risk of damaging expensive parts. In fact the people who work for Tom’s Hardware frequently test parts to destruction for the education and entertainment of readers.
But anyone who wants to understand computers would be better off spending their time using any old PC to read Wikipedia pages on the topic instead of spending their time and money assembling one PC. To learn about the basics of computer operation the Wikipedia page for “CPU” is a good place to start. Then the Wikipedia page for “hard drive” is a good start for learning about storage and the Wikipedia page for Graphics Processing Unit to learn about graphics processing. Anyone who reads those three pages as well as a selection of pages that they link to will learn a lot more than they could ever learn by assembling a PC. Of course there’s lots of other things to learn about computers but Wikipedia has pages for every topic you can imagine.
I think that the argument that people should assemble PCs to understand how they work was not well supported in 1990 and ceased to be accurate once Wikipedia became popular and well populated.
There are a lot of arguments about quality and reliability, most without any supporting data. I believe that a system designed and manufactured by a company such as HP, Lenovo, NEC, Dell, etc is likely to be more reliable than a collection of parts uniquely assembled by a home user – but I admit to a lack of data to support this belief.
One thing that is clear however is the fact that ECC RAM can make a significant difference to system reliability as many types of error (including power problems) show up as corrupted memory. The cheapest Dell PowerEdge server (which has ECC RAM) is advertised at $699 so it’s not a feature that’s out of reach of regular users.
I think that anyone who makes claims about PC reliability and fails to mention the benefits of ECC RAM (as used in Dell PowerEdge tower systems, Dell Precision workstations, and HP XW workstations among others) hasn’t properly considered their advice.
Also when discussing overall reliability the use of RAID storage and a good backup scheme should be considered. Good backups can do more to save your data than anything else.
I think it’s best to use a system with ECC RAM as a file server. Make good backups. Use ZFS (in future BTRFS) for file storage so that data doesn’t get corrupted on disk. Use reasonably cheap systems as workstations and replace them when they become too old.
Update: I find it rather ironic when a discussion about advice on buying a PC gets significant input from people who are well paid for computer work. It doesn’t take long for such a discussion to take enough time that the people involved could spent their time working instead, put enough money in a hat to buy a new PC for the user in question, and still had money left over.
Related posts:
Advice on Buying a PC
A common topic of discussion on computer users’ group mailing lists is advice on buying a PC. I think that most of the offered advice isn’t particularly useful with an excessive focus on building or upgrading PCs and on getting the latest and greatest. So I’ll blog about it instead of getting involved in more mailing-list debates.
In the late 80′s a reasonably high-end white-box PC cost a bit over $5,000 in Australia (or about $4,000 without a monitor). That was cheaper than name-brand PCs which cost upwards of $7,000 but was still a lot of money. $5,000 in 1988 would be comparable to $10,000 in today’s money. That made a PC a rather expensive item which needed to be preserved. There weren’t a lot of people who could just discard such an investment so a lot of thought was given to upgrading a PC.
Now a quite powerful desktop PC can be purchased for a bit under $400 (maybe $550 if you include a good monitor) and a nice laptop is about the same price as a desktop PC and monitor. Laptops are almost impossible to upgrade apart from adding more RAM or storage but hardly anyone cares because they are so cheap. Desktop PCs can be upgraded in some ways but most people don’t bother apart from RAM, storage, and sometimes a new video card.
If you have the skill required to successfully replace a CPU or motherboard then your time is probably worth enough that getting more value out of a PC that was worth $400 when new and is worth maybe $100 when it’s a couple of years old probably isn’t a good investment.
Times have changed and PCs just aren’t worth enough to be bothered upgrading. A PC is a disposable item not an investment.
There are a range of things that you can buy. You can spend $200 on a second-hand PC that’s a couple of years old, $400 on a new PC that’s OK but not really fast, or you can spend $1000 or more on a very high end PC. The $1000 PC will probably perform poorly when compared to a PC that sells for $400 next year. The $400 PC will probably perform poorly when compared to the second-hand systems that are available next year.
If you spend more money to get a faster PC then you are only getting a faster PC for a year until newer cheaper systems enter the market.
As newer and better hardware is continually being released at low enough prices that make upgrades a bad deal I recommend just not buying expensive systems. For my own use I find that e-waste is a good source of hardware. If I couldn’t do that then I’d buy from an auction site that specialises in corporate sales, they have some nice name-brand systems in good condition at low prices.
One thing to note is that this is more difficult for Windows users due to “anti-piracy” features. With recent versions of Windows you can’t just put an old hard drive in a new PC and have it work. So the case for buying faster hardware is stronger for Windows than for Linux.
That said, $1,000 isn’t a lot of money. So spending more money for a high-end system isn’t necessarily a big deal. But we should keep in mind that it’s just a matter of getting a certain level of performance a year before it is available in cheaper systems. Getting a $1,000 high-end system instead of a $400 cheap system means getting that level of performance maybe a year earlier and therefore at a price premium of maybe $2 per day. I’m sure that most people spend more than $2 per day on more frivolous things than a faster PC.
As so many things are run by computers I believe that everyone should have some basic knowledge about how computers work. But a basic knowledge of computer architecture isn’t required when selecting parts to assemble to make a system, one can know all about selecting a CPU and motherboard to match without understanding what a CPU does (apart from a vague idea that it’s something to do with calculations). Also one can have a good knowledge of how computers work without knowing anything about the part numbers that could be assembled to make a working system.
If someone wants to learn about the various parts on sale then sites such as Tom’s Hardware [1] provide a lot of good information that allows people to learn without the risk of damaging expensive parts. In fact the people who work for Tom’s Hardware frequently test parts to destruction for the education and entertainment of readers.
But anyone who wants to understand computers would be better off spending their time using any old PC to read Wikipedia pages on the topic instead of spending their time and money assembling one PC. To learn about the basics of computer operation the Wikipedia page for “CPU” is a good place to start. Then the Wikipedia page for “hard drive” is a good start for learning about storage and the Wikipedia page for Graphics Processing Unit to learn about graphics processing. Anyone who reads those three pages as well as a selection of pages that they link to will learn a lot more than they could ever learn by assembling a PC. Of course there’s lots of other things to learn about computers but Wikipedia has pages for every topic you can imagine.
I think that the argument that people should assemble PCs to understand how they work was not well supported in 1990 and ceased to be accurate once Wikipedia became popular and well populated.
There are a lot of arguments about quality and reliability, most without any supporting data. I believe that a system designed and manufactured by a company such as HP, Lenovo, NEC, Dell, etc is likely to be more reliable than a collection of parts uniquely assembled by a home user – but I admit to a lack of data to support this belief.
One thing that is clear however is the fact that ECC RAM can make a significant difference to system reliability as many types of error (including power problems) show up as corrupted memory. The cheapest Dell PowerEdge server (which has ECC RAM) is advertised at $699 so it’s not a feature that’s out of reach of regular users.
I think that anyone who makes claims about PC reliability and fails to mention the benefits of ECC RAM (as used in Dell PowerEdge tower systems, Dell Precision workstations, and HP XW workstations among others) hasn’t properly considered their advice.
Also when discussing overall reliability the use of RAID storage and a good backup scheme should be considered. Good backups can do more to save your data than anything else.
I think it’s best to use a system with ECC RAM as a file server. Make good backups. Use ZFS (in future BTRFS) for file storage so that data doesn’t get corrupted on disk. Use reasonably cheap systems as workstations and replace them when they become too old.
Related posts:
What's up with the Q and A posts?
Just realized that I have gotten into the bad habit of writing stuff on a web questions and answers site instead of here. (cue kid from The Simpsons saying HA HA!)
Saving some, deleting the rest.
What are the benefits of participating in open source?
Depending on the project and your role in it, you might get lots of different benefits.
Learn new languages and tools to keep your skill set current.
Practice techniques that you might not be able to justify putting time into in a corporate environment. (For example, coding for extreme security or efficiency or minimum power and memory usage.)
Make connections with people outside your company.
Signal your technical competence and ability to work with others. Often, willingness to put time into open source depends on the job market for high-skill non-management programmers. The more that the hiring process depends on formal education and certification, and the less input it has from peers, the less incentive that a programmer has to Signal his or her skill using open source.
Talk with real users about bugs and features without a company filter, to get a better understanding of a software problem space.
Yitang Zhang Proves 'Landmark' Theorem in Distribution of Prime Numbers | Simons Foundation
Yitang Zhang Proves 'Landmark' Theorem in Distribution of Prime Numbers | Simons Foundation: "“Basically, no one knows him,” said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the Université de Montréal. “Now, suddenly, he has proved one of the great results in the history of number theory.”"Repeal the #Monsanto Protection Act - #gmo
Syndicated 2013-05-21 20:30:00 (Updated 2013-05-21 20:30:23) from proclus
Tell Governor O'Malley to Ban #Fracking in Maryland!
Syndicated 2013-05-20 19:40:00 (Updated 2013-05-20 19:40:08) from proclus
Usando ckeditor e jquery validate juntos
Mais simples impossível:
$('#form1').validate({
ignore: [],
rules: {
corpo : {
required: function()
{
CKEDITOR.instances.corpo.updateElement();
}
}
}
})
At the Wikimedia Foundation (for, um, three months now)
Since it was founded 12 years ago this week, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of the world’s information infrastructure. It’s a kind of public utility: You turn on the faucet and water comes out; you do an Internet search and Wikipedia answers your question. People don’t think much about who creates it, but you should. We do it for you, with love.
Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner, from http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/14/wikipedia-the-peoples-encyclopedia/
As Sue says, the people who create Wikipedia are terrific. I’m lucky enough to say that I’ve just wrapped up my first three months as their lawyer – as Deputy General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. Consider this the personal announcement I should have made three months ago :)
Greenberg Traurig was terrific for me: Heather has a wealth of knowledge and experience about how to do deals (both open source and otherwise), and through her, I did a lot of interesting work for interesting clients. Giving up that diversity and experience was the hardest part of leaving private practice.
Based on the evidence of the first three months, though, I made a great choice – I’ve replaced diversity of clients with a vast diversity of work; replaced one experienced, thoughtful boss with one of equal skill but different background (so I’m learning new things); and replaced the resources (and distance) of a vast firm with a small but tight and energized team. All of these have been wins. And of course working on behalf of this movement is a great privilege, and (so far) a pleasure. (With no offense to GT, pleasure is rarely part of the package at a large firm.)
The new scope of the work is perhaps the biggest change. Where I previously focused primarily on technology licensing, I’m now an “internet lawyer” in the broadest sense of the word: I, my (great) team, and our various strong outside counsel work on topics from employment contracts, to privacy policies, to headline-grabbing speech issues, to patent/trademark/copyright questions – it is all over the place. This is both challenging, and great fun – I couldn’t ask for a better place to be at this point in my life. (And of course, being always on the side of the community is great too – though I did more of that at Greenberg than many people would assume.)
I don’t expect that this move will have a negative impact on my other work in the broader open source community. If anything, not focusing on licensing all day at work has given me more energy to work on OSI-related things when I get home, and I have more flexibility to travel and speak with and for various communities too. (I’m having great fun being on the mailing lists of literally every known open source license revision community, for example. :)
If you’d like to join us (as we work to get the next 1/2 billion users a month), there are a lot of opportunities open right now, including one working for me on my team, and some doing interesting work at the overlap between community, tech, and product management. Come on over – you won’t regret it :)
What I've learned at SourceForge
Today I'll be leaving SourceForge and taking a role at RedHat. Please don't think for a moment that it's because I don't like SourceForge. I continue to think that SourceForge does community *way* better than either Github or Google Code, and while there are places where the platform can improve, the team that's working on it is one of the finest bunch of engineers I've ever had the privilege of working with.
Here's a few of the many things I've learned at SourceForge.
People are passionate
Every time I talk to anybody about my job, I mention two projects: PonyKart and OpenMRS. These projects illustrate to me how people can be passionate about anything. Having talked with the leads of both of these projects, I'm blown away by their passion for excellence.
Of course, these projects could hardly be more different.
PonyKart is a My Little Pony themed Mario-Kart style game. It's fun. The physics are well done. The courses are well designed. The community is very engaged. And it has My Little Pony characters in it. The guys that did this project wanted it to be a MLP game, but they also wanted it to be excellent. They wanted it to be fun. They wanted it to be *good*. They are passionate about it.
The OpenMRS project is a medical records system that was developed for a hospital in Kenya that had a hacked-together Access database monstrosity, and it was faster and easier for these guys to hack something together than to try to fix what was there. But that wasn't enough. They were passionate. They wanted it to be done right, and they wanted hospitals all over the world to benefit from it. And now they have a non-profit dedicated to giving this product away to hospitals in developing nations that need it. These guys are my heroes.
I am continually blown away by the quest for excellence, and the vast range of ways that it manifests itself.
People are kind
I've met amazing people in my time at SourceForge. These people are helpful, kind, patient, and, as I've mentioned, passionate. For the most part, people get that I'm human and can't solve all of their problems immediately. They get that we all have the limitation of time and resources.
Most people *don't* throw tantrums or demand their way. For this I am very grateful. I'm glad to have met a few of the nice people.
People are cruel
Sure, SourceForge is the underdog right now. I get that. It's not necessary to be a jerk.
It's hard to remember, when people are being jerks, that they're in the minority. Most people are, in fact, nice. But the jerks are very loud.
I'd like to remind the jerks that the folks who happen to be developing their project on the SourceForge platform are passionate, and they are pragmatic, and they are doing something useful while you fling mud at them.
'nuff said.
People are pragmatic
Tools are tools. They are not your children.
For the most part, people want to get a job done, and they use the tools they have, because the focus is the task, not the tools. Once, we used CVS and MailMan and we *liked* it. SVN is better. Some people like Git better. But if we had to use CVS and MailMan, you know what? We'd still get stuff done.
Religious debates over the relative merits of DVCS and CVCS systems are all well and good over beer at conferences, but most of us have a job to do, and we don't have time for that indulgence. You may, in fact, be right, but I don't have that kind of time.
I grow very weary of the This vs That flame wars that have characterized the IT world for so long. Perl vs Python, VI vs Emacs, Linux vs Windows vs Mac, Git vs SVN. The thing is, if you're a professional, you need to know *all* of them, and you're not coming across as brilliant, you're coming across as only knowing one tool. Nice hammer. Sometimes a screwdriver is useful.
But, much as most people are nice, it turns out most people are pragmatic. Most people don't have time for those debates either. They want to get their job done. I really appreciate having met a lot of those kinds of people.
Syndicated 2013-05-20 12:03:49 (Updated 2013-05-20 12:05:14) from Notes In The Margin
gpg --ask-cert-level considered harmful
Occasionally, someone asks me whether we should encourage use of the --ask-cert-level option when certifying OpenPGP keys with gpg. I see no good reason to use this option, and i think we should discourage people from trying to use it. I don't think there is a satisfactory answer to the question "how will specifying the level of identity certification concretely benefit anyone involved?", and i don't see why we should want one.
gpg gets it absolutely right by not asking users this question by default. People should not be enabling this option.
Some background: gpg's --ask-cert-level option allows the user who is making an OpenPGP identity certification to indicate just how sure they are of the identity they are certifying. The user's choice is then mapped into four levels of OpenPGP certification of a User ID and Public-Key packet, which i'll refer to by their signature type identifiers in the OpenPGP spec:
- 0x10: Generic certification
- The issuer of this certification does not make any particular assertion as to how well the certifier has checked that the owner of the key is in fact the person described by the User ID.
- 0x11: Persona certification
- The issuer of this certification has not done any verification of the claim that the owner of this key is the User ID specified.
- 0x12: Casual certification
- The issuer of this certification has done some casual verification of the claim of identity.
- 0x13: Positive certification
- The issuer of this certification has done substantial verification of the claim of identity.
Most OpenPGP implementations make their "key signatures" as 0x10 certifications. Some implementations can issue 0x11-0x13 certifications, but few differentiate between the types.
By default (if --ask-cert-level is not supplied), gpg issues certificates ("signs keys") using 0x10 (generic) certifications, with the exception of self-sigs, which are made as type 0x13 (positive).
When interpreting certifications, gpg does distinguish between different certifications in one particular way: 0x11 (persona) certifications are ignored; other certifications are not. (users can change this cutoff with the --min-cert-level option, but it's not clear why they would want to do so).
So there is no functional gain in declaring the difference between a "normal" certification and a "positive" one, even if there were a well-defined standard by which to assess the difference between the "generic" and "casual" or "positive" levels; and if you're going to make a "persona" certification, you might as well not make one at all.
And it gets worse: the problem is not just that such an indication is functionally useless; encouraging people to make these kind of assertions actively encourages leaks of a more-detailed social graph than just encouraging everyone to use the default blanket 0x13-for-self-sigs, 0x10-for-everyone-else policy.
A richer public social graph means more data that can feed the ravenous and growing appetite of the advertising-and-surveillance regimes. i find these regimes troubling. I admit that people often leak much more information than this indication of "how well do you know X" via tools like Facebook, but that's no excuse to encourage them to leak still more or to acclimatize people to the idea that the details of their personal relationships should by default be public knowledge.
Lastly, the more we keep the OpenPGP network of identity certifications (a.k.a. the "web of trust") simple, the easier it is to make sensible and comprehensible and predictable inferences from the network about whether a key really does belong to a given user. Minimizing the complexity and difficulty of deciding to make a certification helps people streamline their signing processes and reduces the amount of cognitive overhead people spend just building the network in the first place.
An app for a conference - with a surprising set of features
I'm going to a conference next week, and the conference invites me to "Download the app!" Well, OK, you think, maybe a bit of overkill, but it would be useful to have an app with schedules etc. Here is the app listed on google play.
Oh and here's a list (abbreviated) of permissions that the app requires:
"""This application has access to the following:
"""
Now tell me, what fraction of those permissions should a conference-information app legitimately use? (I've edited out some of the mundane ones.) Should ANYONE install this on their phone/tablet?
Syndicated 2013-05-20 00:06:07 (Updated 2013-05-20 00:06:25) from Dan Stowell
Mountain Sun IPAs
Not only is Boulder Colorado the Hebden Bridge of the USA (I'm told it's "where all the hippies went"), but it also has a really impressive amount of craft beer. Following a tip-off (thanks Bob), tonight I went to sample a few IPAs in the Mountain Sun pub. For the education of no-one except myself, here are my tasting notes - first in visual form:
then in words:
Not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, these are all lovely beers, very well served, but when they're sitting next to each other I have to compare them. Hence the ups and downs in the notes. The winner for me is definitely the Illusion Dweller. The ratings over at ratebeer tell almost the opposite story for some reason, with Illusion Dweller the only one not scoring ninety-something. Who knows what to make of that.
Syndicated 2013-05-19 23:13:49 (Updated 2013-05-19 23:23:35) from Dan Stowell
The Cost of Inaccessibility at the Margins of Relevance
I use RSS feeds to keep up with academic journals. Because of an undocumented and unexpected feature (bug?) in my (otherwise wonderful) free software newsreader NewsBlur, many articles published over the last year were marked as having been read before I saw them.
Over the last week, I caught up. I spent hours going through abstracts and downloading papers that looked interesting or relevant to my research. Because I did this for hundreds of articles, it gave me an unusual opportunity to reflect on my journal reading practices in a systematic way.
On a number of occasions, there were potentially interesting articles in non-open access journals that neither MIT nor Harvard subscribes to and that were otherwise not accessible to me. In several cases where the research was obviously important to my work, I made an interlibrary request, emailed the papers’ authors for copies, or tracked down a colleague at an institution with access.
Of course, articles that look potentially interesting from the title and abstract often end up being less relevant or well executed on closer inspection. I tend to cast a wide net, skim many articles, and put them aside when it’s clear that the study is not for me. This week, I downloaded many of these possibly relevant papers to, at least, give a skim. But only if I could download them easily. On three or four occasions, I found inaccessible articles at this margin of relevance. In these cases, I did not bother trying to track down the articles.
Of course, what appear to be marginally relevant articles sometimes end up being a great match for my research and I will end up citing and building on the work. I found several suprisingly interesting papers last week. The articles that were locked up have no chance at this.
When people suggest that open access hinders the spread of scholarship, a common retort is that the people who need the work have or can finagle access. For the papers we know we need, this might be true. As someone with access to two of the most well endowed libraries in academia who routinely requests otherwise inaccessible articles through several channels, I would have told you, a week ago, that locked-down journals were unlikely to keep me from citing anybody.
So it was interesting watching myself do a personal cost calculation in a way that sidelined published scholarship — and that open access publishing would have prevented. At the margin of relevance to ones research, open access may make a big difference.
Syndicated 2013-05-19 16:00:05 (Updated 2013-05-20 15:18:41) from copyrighteous
Compartilhado nas redes sociais
Atenção: O conteúdo desta postagem é automática e contém o resumo diário das minhas atividades nas redes e recortes de outros sites ou blogs.
Syndicated 2013-05-19 02:31:29 from ValessioBrito.com.br » Blog
Join us on App.Net
I liked the idea behind App.Net (or ADN for the initiated) from the start; I’ve happily signed up during the initial funding effort and before it even existed. It is quite like Twitter, although it does have some pretty interesting API advantages that allow clients to do things that are not possible in Twitter such as creating private chat rooms (with Patter.) I found a text by Matt Gemmell, App.Net for conversations, that sums it up nicely:
The interesting part, though, is what you won’t be used to from Twitter. There are no ads, anywhere. Because it’s a paid service, there’s no spam at all; I’ve certainly never seen any. There’s an active and happy developer community, which ADN actually financially rewards. There’s a rich, modern, relentlessly improved API. And again because it’s a paid service, there’s a commensurately (and vanishingly) low number of Bieber fans, teenagers, illiterates, and sociopaths.
But the real difference I notice is in the conversations. On Twitter, the back-and-forth tends to be relatively brief, not only in terms of the 140-character limit, but also the number of replies. There’s a certain fire-and-forget sensibility to Twitter; it’s a noticeboard rather than a chatroom. Then there’s the keyword-spam (woe betide the person who mentions iPads, or MacBooks, or broadband, or just about anything). Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that any malcontent with internet access can create an account (or two, or ten) in seconds. Not a happy mixture.
I’d add that there seems to be less of a popular clique on ADN. Popular users seem to be much more engaging with “regular people” than on Twitter. And there’s the developers… although most of the rush is now behind us, it was fun to follow the developers working on ADN clients. It was a very collaborative effort, with alpha builds floating around and discussions about whether this or that should be done in a certain way.
As for the developers of ADN proper, well, you can try asking ADN CEO and Founder Dalton something to see if he’ll answer you in about 30 seconds. He actually does. :)
It all feels like a big community where everyone feels a bit like they own the place as well and want it to thrive. Again I think Matt is on the money on why this is so:
We value what we pay for. We not only pay for things which we deem to be of value, but we also retrospectively assign and justify value based on what we’ve paid. Any consumer is familiar with the simple psychology of cost equating as much to value after the transaction as value does to cost beforehand (likely moreso, from my own experience). At its core, I don’t think that the reason for the noticeably different, warmer, more discursive “feel” of ADN is any more complicated than that.
I personally love the service and I think you should consider it too. There is a free tier account that allows you to follow up to 40 people for free, as long as you’re invited by a current user. If you’re interested, I have a few invites.
Feel free to comment on this post by using Google+ or also by talking to me on, where else, ADN, where I’m @robteix. And of course Twitter isn’t going anywhere and I’m there too.
Skype with care – Microsoft is reading everything you write – The H Security: News and Features
Voilà pourquoi je ne veux pas utiliser Skype !!!
Skype with care – Microsoft is reading everything you write – The H Security: News and Features.
HMS Glorious
In my dream last night, the admirals came to tell Elizabeth I that the Spanish were invading, and she said, "Well, repel them." But as the admirals were leaving, she added, "Wait, come back. I have invented a submarine, and I think this would be the best chance to test it in action. I shall call it HMS GLORIOUS." So HMS Glorious was built, and Elizabeth insisted on being the pilot. It carried no torpedoes, for they had not been invented, but instead it had a sharp point at the front which was used to ram the Spanish ships (yes, you're welcome to give a Freudian reading to this). And as the Armada sank ship by ship, the sailors would cheer and say, "Well done, your Majesty! Er, I mean, well done, mysterious sailor whose name we forgot."
This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/276740.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
FFT's are fast DFT Algorithms.
FFT's are fast DFT Algorithms.: "For example, the popular 'Radix 2' algorithms are useful if N is a regular power of 2 (N=2p). These algorithms have complexity of only O(N.logN). If we (naively) assume that algorithmic complexity provides a direct measure of execution time (and that the relevant logarithm base is 2) then the ratio of execution times for the (DFT) vs. (Radix 2 FFT) can be expressed:"JavaScript Regular Expression Enlightenment - Tech.Pro
JavaScript Regular Expression Enlightenment - Tech.Pro: "It wasn't until I re-adjusted my thoughts on the nature of regular expressions that my fear of them turned into pleasure. This happened when I started thinking about regular expressions as an actual language itself, instead of a value contained within a language. I know it is not technically a language, but studying it like a programming language might just help a developer get over the steep learning curve. "L’intérieur d’un moteur | Virage8
sorting srpms by buildorder
Hey folks,
Working on something for Spot I revived some code I had written a
few years ago and then discovered that other people had made much more
robust leveled topological sorts than I had written 
Anyway – if you grab the files from:
http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/misc/buildorder/
And run:
python buildorder.py /path/to/*.src.rpm
it will look up the interdependencies of the src.rpm to figure out a
build order. It outputs a bunch of different things:
1. a flat build order
2. a build order broken out by groups – you can build all the pkgs in
any group in parallel provided that all the pkgs in the previous group
have finished building.
3. outputs lists of direct loops between srpms.
4. probably will output A LOT of noise and garbage from the rpm
specfile parsing from the rpm.spec() module
But it might be worth a look at and, ideally, patches to make it a bit
more robust.
If you have a set of pkgs which you need to build but you can’t figure
out the buildorder this might help you out.
I’d love to know how often it is right or ‘right enough’.
Known Issues:
1. some spec files make the rpm.spec() parsing break in interesting
ways – sometimes tracing back
2. if a pkg is not dependent on any other pkg and nothing else depends
on it – they get lumped in the last grouping. Not really an issue -
just something someone noticed and was surprised.
3. It will handle file-buildreqs not at all, it will handle virtual
provide buildreqs, not at all, if your buildreqs are REALLY picky about
requiring <= Version – it will ignore all of that.
4. I fully expect that 2 or more level circular build deps (foo req bar
req baz req quux) will not be detected but will make the topological
sort function die). If so…. tough… go fix your packaging.
Anyway – give it a run and see if it helps you solve a problem.
If it does let me know about it. Some of us are curious if this could
fit well in mockchain or wrapped around/in mockchain.
Google Developers Live at I/O 2013 - Web Audio - YouTube
Google Developers Live at I/O 2013 - Web Audio - YouTube: ""2013 : mauvais cru pour les quotidiens nationaux ?
L’Etat doit-il financer la presse ?
Introducing The Layout
As engineers, I believe the way we approach a problem is as important as the code we write. This is especially relevant in the context of UI engineering where design is such a vital element.
Unfortunately, it seems quite hard to find good content about everything that happens around us and inside our heads when we are building user interfaces. This is what The Layout is about.
My intent is to create a space for high quality content discussing the principles, mindset, and practices that I believe shape the craft of UI engineering. It is meant to be a shared space with many voices—so, expect some awesome guest authors.
I’ve just posted the very first article, Mind the Gap. My plan is to publish a new article every other week-ish. For now, subscribe to the RSS feed or simply follow The Layout on Twitter or Google+ to get future updates.
I really hope you enjoy it!
Compartilhado nas redes sociais
As ações voltadas para o combate aos crimes na Internet e de defesa cibernética estão sendo articuladas de forma estanque pelos entes envolvidos, entre eles, a Polícia Federal e o Exército. Falta, na visão do diretor do Departamento de Segurança da Informação e Comunicações da Presidência, Raphael Mandarino, um órgão capaz de articular e coordenar as iniciativas.
Atenção: O conteúdo desta postagem é automática e contém o resumo diário das minhas atividades nas redes e recortes de outros sites ou blogs.
Syndicated 2013-05-17 02:30:42 from ValessioBrito.com.br » Blog
Voltage Inside a Car
I previously wrote a post with some calculations about the power supplied to laptops from a car battery [1]. A comment on the post suggested that I might have made a mistake in testing the Voltage because leaving the door open (and thus the internal lights on) will cause a Voltage drop.
So I’ve done some more tests:
| Test | Voltage |
|---|---|
| battery terminals | 12.69 |
| front power socket with doors closed | 12.64 |
| front power socket with doors open OR ignition switch on | 12.37 |
| cigarette lighter socket with ignition switch on | 12.32 |
| front power socket with doors closed and headlights on | 11.96 |
| front power socket with engine running | 14.38 |
| front power socket with engine running and headlights on | 14.29 |
In my previous tests I recorded 12.85V inside my car (from the front power socket which although having the same connector as a cigarette lighter isn’t designed for lighting cigarettes) and 13.02V from the battery terminals – a 0.17V difference. In my tests today I was unable to reproduce that but I think that my biggest mistake was to take the reading too quickly. Today I noticed that it took up to a minute for the Voltage to stabilise after opening a door (the Voltage dips after any current draw and takes time to recover) so a quick reading isn’t going to be accurate.
My car is a Kia Carnival which has two sockets in the front for power and for actually lighting cigarettes. The one for lighting cigarettes has a slightly lower Voltage and only works when the ignition is turned on. The car also has a power socket in the boot (the trunk for US readers) which delivers the same Voltage as the power socket in the front.
Also one thing to note is that today is a reasonably cold day (16.5C outside right now) and my car hasn’t been driven since last night so the battery would be quite cold (maybe 12C or less). My previous measurements were taken in summer so the battery would have been a lot warmer and therefore working more effectively.
The Voltage drop from turning on the internal lights surprised me, I had expected that a car battery which is designed to supply high current wouldn’t be affected by such things. Certainly not to give a 2% Voltage drop! The Voltage difference from reading inside the car and at the battery terminals might be partly due to the apparent lead coating on the terminals, I pushed the probes of my multimeter beneath the surface of the metal and got a really good connection.
The 14% Voltage increase when the engine was running was also a surprise. It seems to me that if you are running a power hungry device (such as a laptop) it would be a good idea to disconnect it when the engine is turned off. A 14% higher voltage will give a 14% lower current if the PSU is efficient and therefore less problems with heat in the wiring and less risk of blowing a fuse.
Also it’s a good idea to be more methodical about performing tests than I was before my last post. There are lots of other tests I could run (such as testing after the engine has been running for a while) but at the moment I don’t have enough interest in this topic to do more tests. Please leave a comment if there’s something interesting that you think I missed.
Related posts:
Effective Conference Calls
I’ve been part of many conference calls for work and found them seriously lacking. Firstly there’s a lack of control over the call, so when someone does something stupid like putting an unmuted phone handset near a noise source there’s no way to discover who did it and disconnect them.
Another problem is that of noise on the line when some people don’t mute their phones, which is related to the lack of control as it’s impossible to determine who isn’t muting their phone.
Possibly the biggest problem is how to determine who gets to speak next. When group discussions take place in person non-verbal methods are used to determine who gets to speak next. With a regular phone call (two people) something like the CSMACD algorithm for network packets works well. But when there are 8+ people involved it becomes time consuming to resolve issues of who speaks next even when there are no debates. This is more difficult for multinational calls which can have a signal round trip time of 700ms or more.
I think that we need a VOIP based conference call system for smart phones to manage this. I think that an ideal system would be based on the push to talk concept with software control that only allows one phone to transmit at a time. If someone else is speaking and you want to say something then you would push a button to indicate your desire but your microphone wouldn’t go live while the other person was speaking. The person speaking would be notified of your request and one of the following things would happen:
Did I miss any obvious ways for the system to react to a talk request?
Is there any free software to do something like this? A quick search of the Google Play store didn’t find anything that seems to match.
Related posts:
De-Fund the CIA
Syndicated 2013-05-20 15:57:00 (Updated 2013-05-20 15:57:08) from proclus
Internal Gravatar type service
Since arriving at my new job (excellent ta, thanks for asking) I've once again come across some internal pages that it'd be nice to associate mugshots with (thumbnail is fine) in a service just like gravatar offer. In fact, exactly like gravatar offer... then it could be used with some minimal URL re-writing and minor code changes in applications
Syndicated 2013-05-16 15:05:00 (Updated 2013-05-16 15:05:56) from Andrew Elwell
IRS stalls NAGR- #holder #obama #doj #2a #nra #rkba #tcot #tgdn #rights #privacy #gunrights #molonlabe
| proclus@gnu-darwin.org has sent you a personal message: NAGR is highly recommended, and a great gun rights group. The fact that they are being harassed by the IRS comes as no surprise, and seems to confirm that the harassment is politically motivated. Regards, proclus http://www.gnu-darwin.org/ --------------------- | |
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Syndicated 2013-05-16 20:49:00 (Updated 2013-05-16 20:49:41) from proclus
Fast Multiplication of Normalized 16 bit Numbers with SSE2
If you are compositing pixels with 16 bits per component, you often need this computation:
uint16_t a, b, r; r = (a * b + 0x7fff) / 65535;
There is a well-known way to do this quickly without a division:
uint32_t t; t = a * b + 0x8000; r = (t + (t >> 16)) >> 16;
Since we are compositing pixels we want to do this with SSE2 instructions, but because the code above uses 32 bit arithmetic, we can only do four operations at a time, even though SSE registers have room for eight 16 bit values. Here is a direct translation into SSE2:
a = punpcklwd (a, 0); b = punpcklwd (b, 0); a = pmulld (a, b); a = paddd (a, 0x8000); b = psrld (a, 16); a = paddd (a, b); a = psrld (a, 16); a = packusdw (a, 0);
But there is another way that better matches SSE2:
uint16_t lo, hi, t, r;
hi = (a * b) >> 16;
lo = (a * b) & 0xffff;
t = lo >> 15;
hi += t;
t = hi ^ 0x7fff;
if ((int16_t)lo > (int16_t)t)
lo = 0xffff;
else
lo = 0x0000;
r = hi - lo;
This version is better because it avoids the unpacking to 32 bits. Here is the translation into SSE2:
t = pmulhuw (a, b); a = pmullw (a, b); b = psrlw (a, 15); t = paddw (t, b); b = pxor (t, 0x7fff); a = pcmpgtw (a, b); a = psubw (t, a);
This is not only shorter, it also makes use of the full width of the SSE registers, computing eight results at a time.
Unfortunately SSE2 doesn’t have 8-bit variants of pmulhuw, pmullw, and
psrlw, so we can’t use this trick for the more common case where
pixels have 8 bits per component.
Exercise: Why does the second version work?
Compartilhado nas redes sociais
Postagem original por lucy pitty:
https://github.com/friendica/red/wiki/zot
Zot is a JSON-based web framework for implementing secure decentralised communications and services.
It differs from many other communication protocols by building communications on top of a decentralised identity and authentication framework.
The authentication component is similar to OpenID conceptually but is insulated from DNS-based identities. Where possible remote authentication is silent and invisible. This provides a mechanism for internet scale distributed access control which is unobtrusive.
For example,
Jaquelina wishes to share photos with Roberto from her blog at "jaquelina.com.xyz", but to nobody else. Roberto maintains his own family website at "roberto.com.xyz". Zot allows Jaquelina to create an access list containing "Roberto" and allow Roberto unhindered access to the photos but without allowing Roberto's brother Marco to see the photos.
Roberto will only login once to his own website at roberto.com.xyz using his password. After this, no further passwords will be asked for. Marco may also have an account on roberto.com.xyz, but he is not allowed to see Jaquelina's photos.
Additionally, zot allows Roberto to use another site – gadfly.com.xyz, and after login to gadfly.com.xyz he can also access Jaquelina's private photos. Jaquelina does not have to do anything extra to allow this, as she has already given access rights of her private photos to Roberto – no matter what site he is logged into.
Zot also allows basic messaging and communications with anybody else on the Zot network.
In order to provide this functionality, zot creates a decentralised globally unique identifier for each node on the network. This global identifier is not linked inextricably to DNS, providing the requisite mobility. Many existing decentralised communications frameworks provide the communication aspect, but do not provide remote access control and authentication. Additionally most of these are based on 'webfinger' such that in our example, Roberto would only be recognised if he accessed Jaquelina's photos from roberto.com.xyz – but not from gadfly.com.xyz….
Postagem original por Robyn Peterson:
For those who wish they could better remember names and faces, a new demo app for Google Glass now gives you notes on how you know each person.
E a festa nem durou muito pelo visto: mal foi lançado o Facebook já deu um “chega pra lá” e bloqueou o acesso à API do Social Roulette, um aplicativo que prometia trazer mais emoção a quem desejava cair fora da rede do Zuck.
Tal como o nome sugere, nada mais era do que uma roleta russa: a cada rodada, havia uma chance em seis de sua conta ser sumariamente eliminada, concluindo o “facebooquicídio” com estilo. 
De acordo com os devs, o app serviria para chamar a atenção dos aspectos negativos da rede social. É, nao convenceu.
Segundo o Facebook o app lançado no último sábado “viola a política de uso da plataforma, já que a decisão de remover seu perfil da rede social cabe única e exclusivamente ao usuário”. Faz sentido, mesmo que ele tenha acionado o app há um terceiro na jogada, e por conta disso ele foi extirpado.
Mas o problema real nem é esse: às vezes penso que o Coringa comissário Gordon tinha razão ao dizer que “algumas pessoas só querem ver o mundo queimar”. Qual a utilidade real de um app desses além de fazer o usuário passar raiva, porque é CERTEZA que algum desavisado hora ou outra iria dizer “mas pensei que era de brincadeira” e querer correr atrás do prejuízo? Ou seja, limar o Social Roulette é questão de segurança para evitar dores de cabeça posteriores ao Facebook, até porque quem quer deletar o perfil de verdade vai só clicar no botãozinho ao invés de tentar a sorte num aplicativo que, depois dessa, sabe lá o que fazia com os dados do usuário.
Fonte: TNW.
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Se existe marmotagem maior do que a expressão “mundo sem fio” eu não conheço. Trocamos cabos de rede por cabos de força, agora até nossos óculos têm carregadores. Ir para a cama com um livro, se você não tem um Kindle exige puxar uma tomada para manter o iPad vivo, pois COM CERTEZA você esqueci de novo de carregar a desgraça durante a tarde.
Por isso esse NUPLUG é excelente. Não é um filtro de linha para você prender toda sua coleção de gadgets e brinquedos (não clique). É uma extensão que você leva pela casa quando precisa de energia e não quer ficar esticando cabos.
Ele foi projetado para ser preso temporariamente a móveis, vem com duas portas USB com potência suficiente para carregar iPads e tablets Android de verdade (não aqueles microtablets horrendos) e duas tomadas normais.
O NUPLUG é um projeto via Kickstarter, já arrecadou US$ 35 mil dos US$ 75 mil solicitados, é provável que consiga atingir a meta. Imagina-se que não passe muito de US$ 35,00 quando começar a ser vendido. Tem até um vídeo bonitinho:
Fonte: GM
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Em um quadrinho clássico do Dilbert o vendedor da empresa chega todo animado pois conseguiu convencer o cliente a não comprar a versão atual do produto, e sim a nova, pagando o dobro. Em seguida ele pergunta aos engenheiros quando a versão sairá. A resposta: Em dois anos.
Isso já aconteceu comigo de verdade, não foi tão divertido, mas é pior quando vem de gente grande como a Samsung.
O 4G ainda não é uma realidade na maior parte do mundo. Diabos, no Centro do Rio meu Vivo cai para Edge, 3G se torna luxo, que dirá 4. Ainda há briga de frequências, os pacotes são em sua maioria insanos e a latência da rede anula boa parte da vantagem da velocidade.
Mesmo assim 4G É o grande ponto de venda do momento, os heavy users querem aparelhos de última geração inclusive para servir como uma parada segura, as compras de smartphones top estão diminuindo, muita gente deixou de trocar de celular a cada seis meses, dá para viver bem por um ou dois anos com um topo de linha.
Que não é mais topo de linha. A Samsung anunciou que está desenvolvendo tecnologia capaz de velocidades de 10 Gb/s, prontamente batizada como 5G. Pior: Deram até data: Em 2020 a tecnologia estará disponível.
Eu sei, vai demorar bastante, mas psicologicamente não funciona assim. Não é uma curiosidade de laboratório da Microsoft Research ou da IBM, que pode ou não virar um produto, como o Surface Surface. É a Samsung transformando uma pesquisa em algo comercializável, de forma absurdamente prematura, drenando valor de toda sua linha de produtos.
Agora sabemos que nossos aparelhos ESTÃO desatualizados. Os smartphones que você comprar, principalmente da Samsung, até 31/12/2019 serão comprados deixando na boca gosto ruim de coisa velha. A empresa será mal-vista por levar seis anos –uma eternidade em tecnologia- para desenvolver algo que´anunciaram como favas contadas.
E mais: Mesmo que eles lancem o tal 5G na data certa, mesmo que seja realmente possível baixar um filme em um segundo (DO VI DO) se a Samsung fizer isso não terá feito mais que a obrigação.
Inovação anunciada com antecedência não é inovação, é dever de casa.
Fonte: TNW
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Parceria do programa Ciência sem Fronteiras com a Academic and Professional Programs for the Americas (Laspau), instituição filiada à Universidade de Harvard, nos Estados Unidos, concede bolsas de doutorado pleno para os próximos três anos.
Atenção: O conteúdo desta postagem é automática e contém o resumo diário das minhas atividades nas redes e recortes de outros sites ou blogs.
Syndicated 2013-05-16 02:32:10 from ValessioBrito.com.br » Blog
Sounds Like a Map
I love maps — something that became clear to me when I was looking at the tag cloud of my bookmarks a few years back. One of my favorite blogs (now a book) is Frank Jabobs’ Strange Maps.
So it’s no coincidence that a number of my favorite MIT Mystery Hunt puzzles are map based. Trying to connect the two worlds, I sent Jacobs a write-up of the hunt and of a particularly strange sound-based map puzzle called White Noise that I worked with Don Armstrong to solve in the 2006 hunt. While I wasn’t paying attention, Jacobs did a very nice writeup of my writeup of the puzzle for Strange Maps!
Syndicated 2013-05-15 15:15:48 (Updated 2013-05-15 16:50:57) from copyrighteous
Excerpts from Coders At Work: Peter Deutsch Interview
I've been reading Peter Seibel's excellent book, Coders at Work, which is a transcription of interviews with a dozen or so very well known and impactful programmers. After the first two interviews, I found myself itching to highlight certain sections, and then I thought, heck, why not post some of the bits I found most interesting? This is a book everyone should be aware of, and it's surprisingly readable. Highly recommended.
This is the second of my blog posts. The first contained excerpts from Seibel's interview with Joe Armstrong.
The excerpts below come from Seibel's interview with Peter Deutsch, who is (among many other things) the creator and long-time maintainer of Ghostscript.
My comments are labeled 'CTB'.
Seibel: So is it OK for people who don't have a talent for systems-level thinking to work on smaller parts of software? Can you split the programmers and the architects? Or do you really want everyone who's working on systems-style software, since it is sort of fractal, to be able think in terms of systems?
Deutsch: ... But in terms of who should do software, I don't have a good flat answer that. I do know that the further down in the plumbing the software is, the more important it is that it be built by really good people. That's an elitist point of view, and I'm happy to hold it.
...
You know the old story about the telephone and the telephone operators? The story is, sometime fairly early in the adoption of the telephone, when it was clear that use of the telephone was just expanding at an incredible rate, more and more people were having to be hired to work as operators because we didn't have dial telephones. Someone extrapolated the growth rate and said "My God. By 20 or 30 years from now, every single person will have to be a telephone operator." Well, that's happened. I think something like that may be happening in some big areas of programming as well.
CTB: This seemed like interesting commentary on the increasing ... democratization? ... of computer use.
Deutsch: ...The problem being the old saying in the business: "fast, cheap, good -- pick any two." If you build things fast and you have some way of building them inexpensively, it's very unlikely that they're going to be good. But this school of thought says you shouldn't expect software to last.
I think behind this perhaps is a mindset of software as expense vs software as capital asset. I'm very much in the software-as-capital-asset school. When I was working at ParcPlace and Adele Goldberg was out there evangelizing object-oriented design, part of the way we talked about objects and part of the way we advocated object-oriented languages and design to our customers and potential customers is to say, "Look, you should treat software as a capital asset."
And there is no such thing as a capital asset that doesn't require ongoing maintenance and investment. You should expect that there's going to be some cost associated with maintaining a growing library of reusable software. And that is going to complicate your accounting because it means you can't charge the cost of building a piece of software only to the project or the customer that's motivating the creation of that software at this time. You have to think of it the way you would think of a capital asset.
CTB: A really good perspective that's relevant to scientists' concerns about software and data.
Seibel: So you don't believe the original object-reuse pitch quite as strongly now. Was there something wrong with the theory, or has it just not worked out for historical reasons?
Deutsch: Well, part of the reason that I don't call myself a computer scientists any more is that I've seen software practice over a period of just about 50 years and it basically hasn't improved tremendously in about the last 30 years.
If you look at programming languages I would make a strong case that programming languages have not improved qualitatively in the last 40 years. There is no programming language in use today that is qualitatively better than Simula-67. I know that sounds kind of funny, but I really mean it. Java is not that much better than Simula-67.
Seibel: Smalltalk?
Deutsch: Smalltalk is somewhat better than Simula-67. But Smalltalk as it exists today essentially existed in 1976. I'm not saying that today's languages aren't better than the languages that existed 30 years ago. The language that I do all of my programming in today, Python, is, I think, a lot better than anything that was available 30 years ago. I like it better than Smalltalk.
I use the word qualitatively very deliberately. Every programming language today that I can think of, that's in substantial use, has the concept of pointer. I don't know of any way to make software built using that fundamental concept qualitatively better.
CTB: Well, that's just a weird opinion in some ways. But interesting, especially since he has been around and active for so long, and his perspective is obviously not based in ignorance.
Deutsch: Every now and then I feel a temptation to design a programming language but then I just lie down until it goes away. But if I were to give in to that temptation, it would have a pretty fundamental cleavage between a functional part that talked only about values and had no concept of pointer, and a different sphere of some kind that talked about patterns of sharing and reference and control.
Seibel: So, despite it not being qualitatively better than Smalltalk, you still like Python better.
Deutsch: I do. There are several reasons. With Python there's a very clear story of what is a program and what it means to run a program and what it means to be part of a program. There's a concept of module, and modules declare basically what information they need from other modules. So it's possible to develop a module or a group of modules and share them with other people and those other people can come along and look at those modules and know pretty much exactly what they depend on and know what their boundaries are.
...
I've talked with the few of my buddies that are still at VisualWorks about open-sourcing the object engine, the just-in-time code generator, which, even though I wrote it, I still think is better than a lot of what's out there. Gosh, here we have Smalltalk, which has this really great code-generation machinery, which is now very mature -- it's about 20 years old and it's extremely reliable. It's a relatively simple, relatively retargetable, quite efficient just-in-time code generator that's designed to work really well with non type-declared languages. On the other hand, here's Python, which is this wonderful language with these wonderful libraries and a slow-as-mud implementation. Wouldn't it be nice if we could bring the two together?
Deutsch: ... But that brings me to the other half, the other reason I like Python syntax better, which is that Lisp is lexically pretty monotonous.
Seibel: I think Larry Wall described it as a bowl of oatmeal with fingernail clippings in it.
Deutsch: Well, my description of Perl is something that looks like it came out of the wrong end of a dog. I think Larry Wall has a lot of nerve talking about language design -- Perl is an abomination as a language. But let's not go there.
CTB: heh.
Syndicated 2013-05-13 22:00:00 from Living in an Ivory Basement
I just signed this -- will you?
Syndicated 2013-05-16 13:20:00 (Updated 2013-05-16 13:20:44) from proclus
I just signed this, you should too.
Syndicated 2013-05-15 14:02:00 (Updated 2013-05-15 14:02:25) from proclus
Wed 2013/May/15
Iago has written a fantastic blog post explaining his and Dape's work getting WebKitGTK+ and Epiphany to run on top of Wayland. They've even cooked a nice demo! You should check it out if you haven't already, it's hot stuff.
Syndicated 2013-05-15 08:53:00 from Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog
Changing your ssh server’s port from the default: Is it worth it? | major.io
Changing your ssh server’s port from the default: Is it worth it? | major.io.
Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "In statistics, the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (sometimes referred to as the PPMCC or PCC,[1] or Pearson's r) is a measure of the linear correlation (dependence) between two variables X and Y, giving a value between +1 and −1 inclusive. It is widely used in the sciences as a measure of the strength of linear dependence between two variables. It was developed by Karl Pearson from a related idea introduced by Francis Galton in the 1880s.[2][3]"OpenPGP User ID Comments considered harmful
Most OpenPGP User IDs look like this:
Jane Q. Public <jane@example.org>This is clean, clear, and unambiguous.
However, some tools (gpg, enigmail among others) ask the user to provide a "Comment:" field when they are choosing a new User ID (e.g. when making a new key). These UI prompts are evil. The savvy user knows to avoid entering anything in this field, so that they can end up with a User ID like the one above. The user who provides something here (perhaps even something inconsequential like "I like strawberries", due to not being sure what should go in this little box) will instead end up with a User ID like:
Jane Q. Public (I like strawberries) <jane@example.org>This is bad. This means that Jane is asking the people who certify her key+userid to certify whether she actually likes strawberries (how could they know? what if she changes her mind? should they revoke their certifications?) and anywhere that she is referred to by name will include this mention of strawberries. This is not Jane's identity, and it doesn't belong in an OpenPGP User ID packet.
Furthermore, since User IDs are atomic, if Jane wants to change the comment field (but leave her name and e-mail address the same), she will instead need to create a new User ID, publish it, get everyone who has certified her old key+userid to certify the key+newuserid, and then revoke the old one.
It is difficult already to help people understand and participate in the certification network that forms that backbone of OpenPGP's so-called "web of trust". These bogus comment fields make an already-difficult task harder. And all because of strawberries!
Tools like enigmail and gpg should not expose the "Comment:" field to users who are generating keys or choosing new User IDs. If they feel it absolutely must be present for some weird corner case that 0.1% of their users will have, they could require that the user enters some sort of "expert mode" before prompting the user to do something that is likely to be a mistake.
There is almost no legitimate reason for anyone to use this field. Let's go through some examples of this people use, taken from some examples i have lying around (identifying marks have been changed to protect the innocent who were duped by this bad UI choice, but you can probably find them on the public keyserver network if you want to hunt around):
John Q. Public (Debian) <johnqpublic@debian.org>We know you're with debian already from the @debian.org address. If this is in contrast to your other address (johnqpublic@example.org) so that people know where to send you debian-related e-mail, this is still not necessary.
Lest you think i'm just calling out debian developers, people with @ubuntu.com addresses and (Ubuntu) comments (as well as @example.edu addresses and (Example University) comments and @example.com addresses and (Example Corp) comments) are out there too.
John Q. Public (Johnny) <johnqpublic@example.net> John Q. Public (wackydude) <wackydude@example.net>Again, the information these comments are providing offers no clear disambiguation from the info already contained in the name and e-mail address, and just muddies the water about what the people who certify this identity should actually be trying to verify before they make their certification.
John Q. Public (Work) <johnqpublic@example.com>if John's correspondents know that he works for Example Corp, then "Work" isn't helpful to them, because they already know this as the address that they're writing to him with. If they don't know that, then they probably aren't writing to him at work, so they don't need this comment either. The same problem appears (for example) with literal comments of (School) next to their @example.edu address.
John Q. Public (This is my second key) <johnqpublic@example.com> John Q. Public (This is my primary key) <johnqpublic@example.com> John Q. Public (No wait really use this one) <johnqpublic@example.com>OpenPGP is confusing, and it can be tricky to get it right. We all know :) This is still not part of John's identity. If you want to designate a key as your preferred key, keep it up-to-date, get people to certify it, and revoke or expire your old keys. People who care can look at the timestamps on your keys and tell which ones are the most recent ones. You do have a revocation certificate for your key handy just in case you lose it, right?
John Q. Public (Old key, do not use) <johnqpublic@example.com> John Q. Public (Please only use this through September 2004) <johnqpublic@example.com>This kind of sentiment is better expressed by revoking the key in question or setting an expiration time on the key or User ID self-sig directly. This sentiment is not part of John's identity, and shouldn't be included as though it were.
John Q. Public (none) <johnqpublic@example.com>sigh. This is clearly someone getting mixed up by the UI.
John Q. Public (3092 bits of RSA) <johnqpublic@example.com>This comment refers to the strength of the key material, or the algorithms preferred by the user. Since the User ID is associated with the key material already, people who care about this information can get it from the key directly. This is also not part of the user's actual identity.
John Q. Public (no comment) <johnqpublic@example.com>This is actually not uncommon (some keyservers reply "too many matches!"). It shows that the user is witty and can think on their feet (at least once), but it is still not part of the user's identity.
I'm sure that such cases exist. I've even seen one or two of them. The fact that one or two cases exist does not excuse the fact that that overwhelming majority of these comments in OpenPGP User IDs are a mistake, caused only by bad UI design that prompts people to put something (anything!) in the empty box (or on the command prompt, depending on your preference).
And this mistake is one of the thousand papercuts that inhibits the robust growth of the OpenPGP certification network that some people call the "web of trust". Let's avoid them so we can focus on the other 999 papercuts.
Please don't use comments in your OpenPGP User ID. And if you make a user interface for OpenPGP that prompts the user to decide on a new User ID, please don't include a prompt for "Comment" unless the user has already certified that they are really and truly a special special snowflake.
Thanks!
An interesting documentary
A couple of weeks ago I was reading an article about Israeli politics and found myself turning to Wikipedia to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge. Approximately 200 Firefox tabs later I found myself watching orthodox Jewish women’s headscarf howtos on Youtube, learning about Third Order Franciscan monks and nuns, and — eventually — watching documentaries about Anabaptist sects in North America.
This is one of the most interesting I found:
It’s a 1-hour documentary about Amish family life. A single Amish family went against their church’s teachings and allowed a British documentary crew to come and film them over the course of a year. However, things get really interesting about halfway in, when we find out that they’re part of an underground movement within the Amish community. I wonder what happened afterwards, and whether their church found out?
Typing gem on windows:PS D:\Users\berend.deboer> gem
The term 'gem' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spellin
g of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
At line:1 char:4
+ gem
+ CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (gem:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException
Same on Ubuntu:# gem
The program 'gem' can be found in the following packages:
* rubygems1.8
* rubygems1.9.1
Try: apt-get install <selected package>
Really, Windows just feels like an abandoned house, does anyone do any kind of development on this OS? Maybe all using Visual Studio, never leaving it?
Some good, some bad
Today my main machine was down for about 8 hours. Oops.
That meant when I got home, after a long and dull train journey, I received a bunch of mails from various hosts each saying:
Slaughter is my sysadmin utility which pulls policies/recipies from a central location and applies them to the local host.
Slaughter has a bunch of different transports, which are the means by which policies and files are transferred from the remote "central host" to the local machine. Since git is supported I've now switched my policies to be fetched from the master github repository.
This means:
In other news I've fettled with lumail a bit this week, but I'm basically doing nothing until I've pondered my way out of the hole I've dug myself into.
Like mutt lumail has the notion of "limiting" the display of things:
Unfortunately the latter has caused an annoying, and anticipated, failure case. If you open a folder and cause it to only show unread messages all looks good. Until you read a message. At which point it is no longer allowed to be displayed, so it disappears. Since you were reading a message the next one is opened instead. WHich then becomes marked as read, and no longer should be displayed, because we've said "show me new/unread-only messages please".
The net result is if you show only unread messages and make the mistake of reading one .. you quickly cycle through reading all of them, and are left with an empty display. As each message in turn is opened, read, and marked as non-new.
There are solutions, one of which I documented on the issue. But this has a bad side-effect that message navigation is suddenly complicated in ways that are annoying.
For the moment I'm mulling the problem over and I will only make trivial cleanup changes until I've got my head back in the game and a good solution that won't cause me more pain.
Django Templating: how to access properties of the first item in a list - Stack Overflow
Django Templating: how to access properties of the first item in a list - Stack Overflow: "{{ thelist.0.propertyName }}"Google fête les 37 ans du jeu Breakout d’Atari avec un « Easter egg » – PC INpact
Atari Breakout
via Google fête les 37 ans du jeu Breakout d’Atari avec un « Easter egg » – PC INpact.
It’s Been How Long Since My Last Blog Post?
Time flies when you’re having fun. How about a quick summary of what’s been going on around here in the first half of 2013. I’m spending more time on two aspects of my photography interest: photographing models and Vivitar historical research.
I’ve turned a spare room at the office into a makeshift studio, complete with strobes found on craigslist and a cheesy backdrop hanging system. Believe it or not it all works and I’m learning a lot about lighting. My first shoot in the new studio was with Serena and I’ve since shot with Karla, and Lexy. More to come I’m sure.
My Vivitar research has been productive too. I’ve made contact with a half dozen ex-Vivitar people including John C. Best’s son and a former president of the company. I’ve got a backlog of Vivitar lenses and gear that I’m slowly working my way through. Don’t be surprised if you see me wandering around Deep Ellum photographing random people and things with weird old Vivitar equipment.
I finally made the jump to a modern smartphone this year, trading my ancient Samsung flip-phone for a Google LG Nexus 4. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. There are only a handful of choices when it comes to smartphones: the Apple iPhone or one of the hundreds of phones running Android, a phone OS based on the Linux kernel. (ok, technically, there’s also Windows phone out there that has a tiny fraction of market share but seriously, who’s going to buy a phone that runs Windows?!) Anyone who knows me, knows I’m unlikely to buy anything made by Apple if I can avoid it. Apple has made an art of taking away people’s basic software freedoms. Android isn’t completely free of course, there are varying amounts of proprietary software depending on which phone you get. I chose the Google LG Nexus because it’s the least encumbered, with a high percentage of free software, no phone company mandated bloatware, and it’s unlocked, so I can switch providers any time I want.
I got a Nexus 4 for Susan as well and she loves it. She almost never used her old flip-phone because the interface was so non-intuitive. With Android she’s now regularly calling, texting, taking photos, reading the news, even playing Angry Birds.
Dallas Makerspace is still growing like crazy and just expanded to around 6,400 square feet. I’m really only an occasional visitor at this point, having cut back my DMS and DPRG time to a minimum to make room for all the other stuff I’m doing these days. I’ve joined the Irving Art Association and will hopefully be joining the Dallas Camera Club in the near future as well.
Susan and I are trying to get out hear interesting speakers as much as possible too. We went to Joel Hodgson’s talk at the Texas Theater in January, Art Spiegelman at the DMA in February, Andrei Codrescu at the Kessler Theater in March, and just a few days ago Pecha Kucha Vol 12 at Lakewood Theater.
I’ve got a backlog of books to review too. Maybe I’ll post one of those soon if I find time.
Syndicated 2013-05-14 02:18:27 from Steevithak of the Internet
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
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