It seems as if there is a system to track all incidents around nuclear power generation. Which is great. It’s also very good that this information is public. It’s not that easy to use or understand. And in all that data the real juicy details might be well hidden. But it’s still a great concept to make the operations accountable to publish their results. I would guess that Iran does not have such a system for their similar activities. But I am afraid that that the current regime in the US would not install a similar system themselves.
Month: May 2007
I am usually not a big fan of performance art. The whole ‘let’s put a human in a Zoo’ situation is so predictabiliy of interest.
This art installation combines it with a painball gun controlled over the internet, which isn’t new either, and makes it actually interesting. Horrible too.
no comment on the ending. OK. Maybe just one: lol. Of all people why are those saying this? They are the worst offenders of what they critisize.
images of fast food: ads vs.reality
I would not be surprised if you would ask people what they just ate and showed them both pictures they would pick the one from the advertisement. Not the one from reality. The romans left their vast cities for centuries to people that had no clue how you could make such things. The Colosseum was actually a housing complex for most of the 2000 years it existed. Our civilisation will leave billions of silver discs with all sorts of ‘realities’. Like movies, TV shows and games. People might not be able to make new ones, but they sure will inhabit our cultural spaces. Fake or not: we don’t care today. We eat the burger from the billboard rather than the one in our mouth. Why should people care more in 200 years when realities might have deterioated even more.
Want fries with that?
So I kicked BlogsNow back into existence. There will be a twist to it in a couple of weeks.
Here the things I found so far:
writing seems to be the thing today:
and this:
McLuhan anybody?
Somebody managed to send an email out that the iPhone would be delayed. In the following hours that it took the official Apple PR machine to react and ‘catch the bad meme’ the Aaple did go down by a couple of dollars. Then it rebound. Somebody could have made 3% in a couple of hours.
update 5/17/07:
techcrunch says that the false engadget news wiped of four billion dollars in market cap in six minutes. New travels fast it seems.
Saw the Audi A5 today. Actually lots of them. Audi must have had some press event where they put people into brand new A5s and CLKs, BMW 3 coupes and drove them (let them drive?) in groups of 3 cars over some roads where I grew up. Pretty roads those are. That was a good choice. To me the A5 looked interesting enough to ask my wife to floor it so that I could have another look. Little I knew that A5s would be in such ample supply on those roads today. I really liked the shape. An Audi, a coupe, but still interesting. But, I also liked the Mercedes CLS at first for being different. Now I think it’s just a Car to squeeze as many petro dollars out of the E class that possible. They seem to need it: German news paper headline today: “Mercedes gives away Chrysler”
Just finished one phase of a bigger network job. The client probably did spend more money on engineering time than on what those ten network switches would cost. Yet, it was worth it. The guy I was working for is probably one of the most gifted engineers I have ever met. That of course was 90% of the reason of the success of the project. In the end we were able to get a gigE backbone in place, where there was none before. Despite the fact that the hardware existed, connections simply were done in such ways, that there were a couple of gigE islands (many as small as one switch) inside some very convoluted hundred base T soup. Valueable lessons I have learned:
– working with good people makes everything fun. Crawling up on racks @ 3am in the morning is perfectly OK under those circumstances, since the job will be finished
– the mess that accumulates over time in network topologies is huge. And damaging. Network switches are actually very brave in dealing with circular routes and all kind of crazy and unintended ways to connect things.
– snmp can be a great tool. It’s worth getting managed switches just for that. Apple’s Airport Base Stations require -of course- some extra care and work. All other network gear I used behaves very much alike. No matter which vendor. Of course Apple thinks they need to ‘think different’ even when they shouldn’t.
– Dell uses cross over serial, while Linksys uses straight ones. Xon/Xoff in Zterm on Mac does not work as advertised. Linksys latest srw2024 firmware will break the switch. It simple will no longer boot. (see comments) Linksys support is trying to help but is in general a clueless waste of time. Managed Linksys switches like the srw2048 or srw2024 I can not recommend.
– Hardware cost is in no relationship to the cost of configuring things. There are ample parameters to configure and tune your network. I doubt that the knowledge how to do this widely exists. I understand maybe 5% of what a 600 US$ managed switch can do and how it really works. Applying what happens with network to cars would mean that people drive around without tires. On their rims. It’s loud. Traction is lousy. So they buy a Ferrari (without tires) since the Porsche did not do so well (since it missed tires) and the rims were grinded down. And, yes, with a Toyota and some rubber around your RIMs you can be the fastest kid in town.
– crawling around racks I realized how much wire their used to be for Video and Audio. And just a couple of Cat5e cables can replace so much of it. What a concept that you need a different piece of copper depending on what kind of content would flow over it! Sure, realtime and all. But at what cost? Converter boxes, routers, distribution amplifier, patch panels, spliters. And then you are locked into, let’s say NTSC. It’s ridicolous, and much of it will go away. Writing a telegram was a great way to communicate. Once upon a time.
With managed switches, snmp and the dns database we had before we can now find the port / switch for every machine in the building. There are ample uses and applications for this. Looking at network traffic. Finding uptime. Hell, one could even track peoples work hours by that. Or at least give them access to it, so they can use their MAC address’ existence in the network as evidence for them being at work.
of course, it has 4 million views, so chances are you saw it already:
I miss BlogsNow. I used to see this kind of thing when it had 4,000 not 4 million views. It’s nice either way.
And I can reply with ‘thank’s that’s cool’ to emails that send me nice things, instead of having to say “knew that one” over and over again.
So, you would think that calling something testDontShare would be kind of a strong hint what not to do with it. And of course, since I am typing this here, that’s exactly what happened. Funny, since I caught it before it really got shared. But should be a lesson for me: there will always be a bigger idiot. Always design things so that even the President of the USA could use it. I know, it’s hard. But that’s how foolproof things need to be.