Back From Rome; Lovely Tech Surprise
I returned from Rome a week ago last Friday. I’ve been busy with work non-stop since then, so the detailed debrief post will have to wait until later this weekend.
I shot 1000+ photos, plus whatever Rebecca shot, and I even geocoded them all with the sweet geocoding feature in Google Picasa. Why, then, haven’t I posted them? Read on…
I awoke Monday morning to the soothing tone of one of my UPSs on overload. Upon further investigation, the culprit was the APC BackUPS XP 900 that keeps aenea my 1TG SATA RAID NAS box going.
I powered down all the connected devices (a CRT, aenea, and boromir, the direct-to-disk backup of aenea), and figured I’d worry about it when I got home from work. When I got home (12 hours later) I tried to power on aenea, only to find that a few seconds after power on, her power would go dead, LEDs would go out, and fans would spin down, then a few seconds after that power would come back on, and of, and on, etc. It doesn’t take a genius to peg this as PSU failure.
aenea is in an Aspire X-Alien case, which came with its own Aspire-branded 430W PSU. It seemed ok, but then again, in over 10 years of hardware hacking this is the first time I’ve had a PSU fail, so I obviously wouldn’t know. I thought about whipping out my multimeter, measuring voltage on the rails, maybe power output in the few seconds when it will boot, but I didn’t see the point. So, I ordered a Thermaltake 500W PSU and waited.
Yesterday it arrived, and I dropped it in without incident. It has a 120mm fan, and nicer cables than the OEM PSU that came before it, plus its quieter. aenea suffered some file system damage as a result of the outage, but it was nothing a little fsck couldn’t cure.
Now, at last, after that yak-shaving expedition, I can actually get around to posting my photos, which are stored on aenea (yes, they’re backed up on boromir, but it’s the spirit of the thing). That, and watching my evaluation-purposes-only DVD rips from my friend the guy who uses BitTorrent…
Cloudmark SpamNet ne Desktop sucks
A few years ago I signed up for CloudMark’s distributed anti-spam solution, then called ‘SpamNet’ and now called ‘Cloudmark Desktop’. I stopped using it long ago, as it was inferior to SpamAssassin, and also cost me $4/mo. I forgot to cancel it, so for the last two years I’ve been paying Cloudmark $4/mo for nothing.
I finally got around to cancelling it today, and was infuriated at the crap I had to go through. You can’t just go to a web site and send a cancel request; no, you actually have to install their shitty Outlook toolbar, and from there send the cancelation request. Not cool. I installed it in one of my VMs so their shit doesn’t cruft-up my primary machine, but I was nonetheless offended by the hoops I had to jump though.
Expletives in source code
Source code is in many ways a private hangout for developers. End users and management seldom if ever see the code, and when they do it’s so inscrutable they tend not to linger long.
As a result, developers are able to express themselves in source code with little oversight, apart from occassional reviews by fellow developers. This was demonstrated somewhat amusingly when the Windows 2000 source code was leaked, revealing ample profanity.
Now that Google has released a search engine for source code, open source developers can now be subject to the same scrutiny. It didn’t take long for someone to use Google code search for profanity. Some of my favorites:
- From
xscreensaver-3.02/hacks/xscreensaver-sgigl.c:If it dies, but the window ID is still valid, then that means the sub-process has forked itself (as those fuckwits at SGI are wont to do.) In that case, this process should go to sleep, and set up a signal handler
- From
iproxy-0.0.0/autogen.sh:#Running bash because /bin/sh is a complete piece of shit on solaris #I wonder how long it will take the fuckwits at Sun to wake up
- From
prboom-2.4.4/src/hu_stuff.c:message_on = false; message_dontfuckwithme = false; message_nottobefuckedwith = false;
I’d be lying if I said I’ve not done worse in my code now and again.
Natural Language Search!? Wow!
The breathless bubble trade press has been giving alot of attention to PowerSet, the latest Google-killer to enter the search space.
What’s their pitch? I’ll let them tell you:
Our unique innovations in search are rooted in breakthrough technologies that take advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language. Using these advanced techniques, Powerset is building a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search. By making search more natural and intuitive, Powerset is fundamentally changing how we search the web, and delivering higher quality results
If you think that sounds like natural language search, you’re right. By God!, searching using natural language. Brilliant! That’ll change everything.
Except…Hasn’t this been done before already? In the computer industry, certain memes recur every few years as a silver bullet solution to intractable problems. These include tools to allow business users to develop their own software, flawless speech recognition, and of course, natural language processing which includes search. The tech press knows this, of course, but that doesn’t stop it from propagating these memes time and time again.
I for one am shorting Google right now.