bkil vs. programming

While it may sound like utter nonsense at first, on second thought maybe it really is: cron.standard: please provide configuration facility to avoid given filesystems Someone should really be thinking more about a serious reminder system. I've put together an iotop oneliner that logs disk actions with timestamps which pointed me to anacron. Daily mlocate updating was easy to reproduce and fine tune: simply add your HDD mount points to tho PRUNEPATHS variable of /etc/updatedb.conf . On the other hand, it took a few more attempts and many days in total to track down what causes the HDDs to still start up. When trying to further examine the issue by hand, /etc/cron.daily/standard didn't start them up on first look, perhaps because of caching. However, today after randomly testing things again, it finally did, which took me to adding CHECK_LOSTFOUND=no to /etc/default/cron . It's a pity though, that I'll have to use an alarm clock from now on.

Anybody knows what music they played on Astra in the 90s in the background on the information channel where they showed new satellite launches? Not sure, but I think it was the Ariane series vehicle. I recall the composition mostly used a single bowed string instrument, maybe a cello.

Crowd workers are not online Shakespeares, but Carnegie Mellon research shows they can write "(...) the research team led by Aniket Kittur, assistant professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), found that the crowdsourced articles compared favorably with articles written by a single author and with Simple English Wikipedia entries." Programming crowds "In the MIT researchers’ experiments, Soylent recruited turkers to perform two different tasks: one was to copyedit a document of roughly seven paragraphs; the other was to shorten a document. (...) the researchers found that $1.50 per paragraph would elicit good results within 20 minutes; the cost would go down to about 30 cents per paragraph if the user was willing to wait a couple hours." Mind you that the first research itself has a bit xkcd feel to it in the ingenious sense. These are milestones which are worth remembering, because it'll only get steeper in the coming years -...

A JavaScript solution to show formulas smoothly and correctly everywhere without extra fonts or plugins: http://www.mathjax.org/

Runs very nice, at about 30-40 FPS on laser sniping, but only when the settings are adjusted correctly ! Out of box experience is garbage, performing something between 5 to 10 FPS on a random map, but of course a lot depends on the specific map. After going through hoops of tweaking, I went as far as uninstalling the game and completely giving up. That was until recently, as on second thought, I simply couldn't believe that such simple polygon graphics advertised to support legacy PC's chokes on a 3D accelerator. I gave it another try, and as how it generally goes, your calm mind works much better on the same problem after having left it get organized by your brain subconsciously over time. All in all, after literally toggling every option available from the GUI, I had to conclude that it wasn't the 3D effects which were holding back the computer or even the antialiased radar map in the corner - it was the overlayed bitmapped text ! At first I couldn't believe my ey...

It was developed by CMU students, inspired by TIM, The Incredible Machine . Here's a short video clip of the cute game mechanics . I've discovered this pearl when browsing the Open Source Versions of The Incredible Machine wiki at project Butterfly Effect.

Some years ago, I've found a few bad sectors on my WD10EARS Caviar Green drive not too long after purchasing, but I decided to simply partition around it. Actually, I can't remember now when that was, but I've either used up a major part of the disk and had nowhere to back up everything by then, or I've deliberately planned to extend the warranty by a replacement... The original purchase came standard with 3 years of warranty. The drive didn't store too precious data in general, but no attention was given to the issue for years. The fault seemed to propagate by a few dozen bad sectors over the allocated 1GB margin, injecting a few macroblock errors to 5 of my unimportant home recordings. Actually this spreading was really slow, as occasional slowdowns were indeed experienced when randomly accessing some of the files in the past, but the fix was never a priority. For serious use, I'd like to point out the importance of data scrubbing for protecting against b...