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Showing posts from June, 2009

Unintentionally formatting your system drive is a bad idea

One day, I was playing with a chroot jail. This whole incident has taken place some months ago. I wanted to test if I could install software from user mode because my apt-get was doing a system update. Well, building from source via "apt-get -b source" would have also solved the issue, though dependency handling in this case is not automatic if I understand correctly. In order for this process to take as little overhead as possible, I wanted to simulate a manual copy-on-write filesystem by creating links to the parts that are common with my root system, and recreating directories which are partially different. I first tried to use symbolic links, but I had to realize that relative links that point outside the sandbox were dysfunctional. Hence I made a hardlink for my root in the chroot. Well, it was a read-only bind-mount to be more exact. Note that I did succeed previously with a different system and kernel (Gentoo 2005.x) by using symbolic links, that's why I gave it a

Wooden house good idea after all

I had a conversation with a friend of mine some years ago about buildings made out of renewable material. Well, it wasn't actually a healthy argument, as I scared the guy off with a few tongue-in-cheek expressions, like the example of Tom and Jerry. :) I wanted to continue, but sadly, he said he was convinced and changed his mind. Nowadays, I myself consider this an ever more viable alternative, given the low ecological footprint and the numerous successful projects in this area. Note that while I have not analyzed the per-year cost of these less durable materials yet, renewable by definition is almost always better than non-renewable. The following links (and many others) seem to imply the same: Build Your Own Affordable, Eco-Friendly House by Dr. Owen Geiger Natural Resources & Sustainability Environmentally Friendly Homes by Adam Downing Wooden Eco-buildings - energy efficiency in LCA perspective

Social interaction is prime

Who would have guessed that even mathematical logic is not a pure expression of general intelligence, but rather a device evolved directly out of simple reward-punishment and social exchange? wiki: Wason selection task Okay, perhaps the amount of practice done in this area by most humans could also provide part of the explanation.