Open Hatch

Archive for the ‘Blather’ Category

I’m home sick, surfing randomness on the internet when I’m not in bed coughing and reading THE HERO OF AGES. Almost done with that book. (Loving the series, and this third book in it, so far.) I’d link to it on the web, but guess-what? Your Internet is not spoiler-free. You can’t even count on the back-cover of this book to avoid spoilers relating to the first two. Read MISTBORN first. And that is very highly recommended.

Anyway, some of what I’m running across in said surfing.. Oh My Weirdness.

Below is the advertisement that introduced the world to the original Apple computer, in 1984.

This ad pays homage to the sci-fi novel 1984, and the film adaptation of it, in which Big Brother, mythical/quasi-real figurehead of the totalitarian state Oceania, is betimes represented on giant, uh.. telescreens. Obviously, this represents Apple shattering all that Big Brother.. whoever he is/was in real life.. embodies. Then, presumably IBM; later Microsoft.

(Other reading today: Google as Big Brother. Scroll down to the list. After a read-through, I think one must admit it is at least a bit scary, or else one must be declared, possibly, slightly careless. Maybe I don’t care. But I probably do. I am at least delighted and entertained, conceptually, by many of the things posted at google-watch.org.)

My take: anywhere that technology does things against your will, or affects you in ways you might not choose, without informing you, it’s Poorly Conceived technology, and is probably working in some ways Against You. Combine this with attempts by those who produce the technology to have the means of creating or delivering the technology entirely closed and proprietary, forever, insofar as they can assure.. and you have Technological Oligarchy.

This model still holds the day [citation needed], and perhaps it will, in its scope, forever.

I’m not really a fan of the model, but I think going toward an open-standards, open-source, free-everything approach can tend to an opposite extreme. I’m not sure where information-technology democracy is embodied or idealized, or even if it can or should be, and I’d offer snarky or ranting comments for or against this or that, uh, technological thingie, but mostly, I think.. I’m getting by.. I never really attended any of the screeds for or against this or that technology at this or that Hate Week in this or that Oligarchy. But if any of these pretentiously conceived technological oligarchies causes me duress, I may, uh.. let you know..

In the following, I may be guilty of posting, for the first time in many months at this blog, a post which is.. snarky? It’s hard to help.. what I find here is so hopelessly at odds with itself it’s just.. almost funny. If this bears penance, the next post will be an, erm.. positive.. post about a game hack.

I’m setting up a 3D render farm at home for hobby work, and installing Windows 7 on new hardware as a base for farm nodes.

As part of installing Windows 7 on these “nodes”, I’ve examined remastering tools, like RTSe7enLite, that allow you to (theoretically) drastically reduce the installed size (and therefore make more efficient the loading and running) of Windows 7. (I’ve had mixed results with RTSe7enLite, and I’ve mostly given up on it for now.) This has led me to discover that a certain folder in Windows 7, \winSxS (for “Windows Side by Side”) takes up almost half of the installed operating system (Windows 7 lands on your hard drive at a whopping ~10 Gigabytes; this is an operating system? No, it’s a cow that ate the whole pasture and is ready to die and/or explode!), all for the sake of managing compatibility with applications and operating system components I will most likely never use on a render farm.

(More interested in Linux now. Linux can be very, very lean and mean..)

There are mixed reports that you can harmlessly remove or drastically reduce the size of the winSxS folder, so I’m looking into that. This led me to a web page which directly quotes from two different Windows technical developers:

• Windows Server Core Team Developer #1:

All of the components in the operating system are found in the WinSxS folder – in fact we call this location the component store.. The WinSxS folder is the only location that the component is found on the system.. Let me repeat that last point – there is only one instance (or full data copy) of each version of each file in the OS, and that instance is located in the WinSxS folder.

• Windows Server Core Team Developer #2:

In practice, nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard link” to.. files elsewhere on the system—meaning that the files are not actually in this directory. For instance in the WinSxS there might be a file called advapi32.dll.. however what’s being reported is.. the actual file that lives in the Windows\System32..

They’re talking about slightly different things: the former, Windows Vista, and the latter, Windows 7, but these two operating systems have largely (or entirely?) the same architecture.

So are you still with me? Are we still speaking the same language or did your brain fill up with mud? Technical Developer #1 is emphatic that all “components” in the system reside in WinSxS; says he:

“Let me repeat that last point – there is only one instance.. of each.. file.. and that instance is.. in the WinSxS folder.”

.. while Technical Developer #2 explains how WinSxS points to files in many different places:

..nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard link” to.. files elsewhere.. the files are not actually in this directory.

Which is it? Are the files in the folder, or not? Says Developer #2:

The fact that we make it tricky for you to know how much space is actually consumed in a directory is definitely a fair point!

It’s sounding like users aren’t the only ones for whom it is tricky to determine what is actually used and where..

I moved a bunch of posts related to my (pricey education in) investing to my unofficially titled Obnoxious Profiteering Blog, updating a few links and comments as necessary. If you miss any of the posts (not likely, given my education in marketing, my loathing of marketing to anyone I know, and my traffic here), old links to the posts here redirect there (thanks to a handy WordPress plugin that handles redirects).

I ran across this site, foursquare. That link is to an anonymous (to me) user who volunteers exactly when and where he is, at any and many times. Specific times and addresses, and all of this is completely public. It is creepy enough knowing the founder of Facebook makes breathless declarations about how (allegedly) outmoded privacy is, and how easily people could be burglarized as a result of tweeting about their vacation (or updating their status in any of a variety of social media).

WARNING: very foul culture exposed in the first link to follow – avoid if you’d rather not know.

[link 1 - link 2 - link 3.]

The article at the first of that group of links explains how easily you can locate any stranger’s house by connecting, as an example, geotags from a flikr account to an individual. But this foursquare service provides all that in one glance, in addition to time information in one glance, for anyone to look up. Any burglar (or worse) who wants to find a target doesn’t even need their name. Time and location is enough.

mindlesstweeter plane landed! did u see my tweets about my new expensive electronics? pls burglarize me!

goods4me @mindlesstweeter: in ur house raiding ur expensive electronics! u cannot find me my accnt is behind anonymus proxy hahaha

I am downloading so many gigabytes of abstract art animations from where someone has uploaded their repository of Electric Sheep movie files (I’m in contact with this person; I’ll be uploading the ones I have for him – and for you! – to access). As I do this, the download eventually runs into an error: out of hard drive space.

Yoink!

I’ll need to move what I’ve downloaded to an external hard drive to free up space. So I connect the drive and start doing this. The computer hangs (several high octane applications open, music playing, and many high octane data transfers will do this – if your computer is a few years old). No usual attempts to unfreeze it succeed. Finally it occurs to me it’s the data transfer that is probably the real holdup; I’ve seen this setup unfreeze before if I simply disconnect the external drive to interrupt it. I disconnect it, and the instant I do so, everything else on my computer is freed up, including my music player, which proceeds to the next song in my queue, which it happens is not a song, but a video game sound effect, and this sound effect besides:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

How appropriate.

If you have not enjoyed this happenstance, you may take reprieve in the idea that it is possible you may not be a nerd. And/or that you have never played (or fully understood, as it becomes any human beings’ divine duty to understand) EARTHBOUND, the classic among classic Super Nintendo video games from which this sound effect comes, at a moment at which a very important something (someone), a bee, dies. Like.. like.. like a failed data transfer. Oh, the poetry.

At opentochoice, “choice matters”:

“..the Web browser has become one of the most critical and trusted relationships of our modern lives – with nearly perfect knowledge of everything we do.”

Um, no.

.. And I’m thankful for the Mozilla Foundation, and search engine optimization, and my search engine ranking, and Firefox plugins.. and please bless that Google will stop nagging me to opt-in to Google Wave..”

The ‘net is great (even arguably crucial), but this sounds like.. actual worship. Wrong god. Idol Fail.

(I actually am thankful for the Mozilla Foundation, though.)

You may find this useful as the days get warmer. Click the image for a much larger version. Here is the original Photoshop format file for you to mess with, and here’s a .pdf version for easier printing, too.

Here’s a shout out to the variants of my domain name I never managed to secure, openhatch.com and .org (I only secured this here .net).

Clearly the term “Gay Mechanics” in the article’s subject is a typographical error; Same Gender Attracted professional mechanics are never mentioned in the article, neither the assortment of alternately male-ended or female ended shafts any mechanic may often find himself, uh, handling, neither indeed the assortment of gruff, bear-like fellows they may find themselves among.

I know at least several gay mechanics, and I’ve learned to stop worrying and start loving them.

But oh, by dag nab, dontcha wish I’d gotten my hands on those domains now?

[If the subject in the linked article reads not "gay" but "game", it is because the poster of the article corrected the error.]

Improbable Research, a university organization devoted to highlighting the absurd in real-life scientific research and development, is today radio broadcasting their annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony, which awards this farcical prize for the most improbable scientific work of the year.

This short YouTube video from a series the organization assembles is a fine example of some of their hilarious findings.

This is their page about the broadcast today, linking to the NPR listing of local carrier schedules of the broadcast and Science Friday’s web broadcast page.

For my area I’m tuning into KUER-FM 90.1 from noon to 2 for the broadcast.

I’ve been overhearing one of the audiobook recordings of A Series of Unfortunate Events, as my wife listens through it with our children, and she paused it and talked to them about it:

They’re laughing at the circus freaks because they think they’re better than them. But is that right? .. No, it isn’t, is it?

And this just got me thinking: We’re all freaks.

Which leads to:

All we like freaks have run away; we have run every one and joined our Circus; …

I was at Buy Low in Provo this evening, looking at toilet paper. I saw what seemed like a good bargain to me, and as I started to grab a package, an old woman driving an automated cart arrived, and held up a package from her cart.

This one’s got a thicker weave, but it’s softer, it’s easier on your buns. You get six in a package for four dollars, and it’ll last you longer.

Ya gotta shop when the right folks are around to help you out.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (34.0MB)

See my description and the YouTube upload here.

Only a few months ago, researchers at Yale unveiled the first Electronic Quantum Processor.

It operates on two qubits, which exist in multiple states simultaneously (that’s the quantum mechanical aspect). When they add more qubits, they’ll be able to calculate multiples of multiple states in one processor cycle.

Excerpt:

Because of the counterintuitive laws of quantum mechanics, however, scientists can effectively place qubits in a “superposition” of multiple states at the same time, allowing for greater information storage and processing power.

For example, imagine having four phone numbers, including one for a friend, but not knowing which number belonged to that friend. You would typically have to try two to three numbers before you dialed the right one. A quantum processor, on the other hand, can find the right number in only one try.

“Instead of having to place a phone call to one number, then another number, you use quantum mechanics to speed up the process,” Schoelkopf said. “It’s like being able to place one phone call that simultaneously tests all four numbers, but only goes through to the right one.”

What is the potential? Here’s a way to spell it out mathematically, going off Wikipedia’s article on the topic:

A classical computer has a memory made up of bits, where each bit represents either a one or a zero. A quantum computer maintains a sequence of qubits. A single qubit can represent a one, a zero, or, crucially, any quantum superposition of these; moreover, a pair of qubits can be in any quantum superposition of 4 states, and three qubits in any superposition of 8. In general a quantum computer with n qubits can be in an arbitrary superposition of up to 2n different states simultaneously (this compares to a normal computer that can only be in one of these 2n states at any one time).

Where that describes a pair of qubits (two) in a superposition of 4 states, this means the qubits are in 4 different states at the same time. Following this, a trio of qubits (three) are in a superposition of 8, so that it follows the order of exponents or powers, which proceed like this:

• 2 qubits = 2 to the second power (2^2) = superposition of 4 simultaneous states
• 3 qubits = 2 to the third power (2^3) = superposition of 8
• 4 qubits = 2 to the fourth power (2^4) = superposition of 16
• 5 qubits = 2 to the fifth power (2^5) = superposition of 32..

With each additional qubit, the simultaneous states (or superpositions) doubles, so that:

• 8 qubits = 2 to the eighth power (2^8) = superposition of 256..
• 16 qubits = 2 to the sixteenth power (2^16) = superposition of 65,536..
• 32 qubits = 2 to the thirty-second (2^32) = superposition of 4,294,967,296..
• 64 qubits = 2 to the sixty-fourth (2^642) = superposition of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616..

What is that last extremely large number leading with an 18? That’s eighteen quintillion – going from thousands, to millions, to billions, to trillions, to quadrillions, to quintillions. More precisely, almost 18-and-a-half quintillion.

What does this all mean? Current computers operate in Gigahertz, meaning a billion calculations in one second; a computer processor with a speed of 3 Gigahertz runs around 3 billion calculations in one second.

(This is staggering, just by itself.)

When they create a sixty-four qubit quantum computer, it will be capable of running a calculation requiring around 18 and a half quintillion guesses in a few clock cycles (only a few millionths of a second).

Carl Sagan, eat your heart out.

Don’t get too excited yet. They haven’t figured out how to even build a computer around this yet. It’s only a processor.

But it’s a quantum processor. A two-bit quantum-processor, with quantum logic gates and a quantum bus.

With this kind of power, you’ll be able to find the 39-digit number which, when you run it through an image processing algorithm, will by algorithmic decompression happen to exactly match a digital image which without compression takes 1 gigabyte to store, but once you find the one out of 5 duodecillion 39-digit “fingerprint” numbers that match the image, you’ll be able to losslessly “compress” the image to only several hundred bytes. I don’t necessarily know what I’m really talking about here, but it will be something like that.

You live in a Star Trek universe.

One day, possibly in your future, this will look something like this article.

This was reported almost three months ago, and I haven’t heard a peep about this from the wider press.  How can this be?

“Galactic cosmic rays carry with them radiation from other parts of our galaxy,” said Ed Smith, NASA’s Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere will diminish in size and strength. If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system.”

Great, now we’re ruining not only the ozone layer, but we’re putting holes in the heliosphere way out beyond Pluto!  We have to stop polluting our planet – no, our solar system! I demand legislation to stop this now!

This find is delighting and making me chuckle this fine Christmas Eve Day.. Morning.

Book Of Time 3D Screensaver – This screen saver is a philosophic approach to the process of time. The book, which has next moment on each of its pages. On the one page it has the past on the next the future comes. Where is the present then? Maybe somewhere between these two ones. This screen saver makes it possible to behold the enigma while the time is turning over on the shabby old book’s pages. Do you want to look through the book till the end?

Sorry, but my $14.95 can get me better passage of my time.  Thanks for the chuckles though, Chucky!

Also:

Skull and Bones 3D Screensaver – Guard your desktop with this awesome screen saver. Bet you have never seen such lovely skull on your screen. You will see rotating skull and crossbones – the symbol of real threat. Molten metal effects and cool sunglasses combine perfectly with sinister background. Impressive 3D graphics along with tense urban sound effects will really amaze you. Download this screen saver now – it not only saves your screen, but also the entire computer.

Ar!  But can it save me from Engrish?  Never mind.  I need the laughs.