uRandom

Sat 28th Feb 2009 @ 23:24 2009: The First Emoticon... earlier than you thought!

Tradition has it that Scott Fahlman invented the emoticon on 19th September 1982.

However, it now seems that Abraham Lincoln used ";)" back in 1862, 120 years earlier than previously known:

Mon 23rd Feb 2009 @ 23:37 2009: The Pirate Bay

The PirateBay are publishing a cartoon (click to enlarge) about the threat that modern technology brings to the creative industries.... from Radio, to TV, to Audio tapes, to VHS, to the Internet.

Thu 19th Feb 2009 @ 00:57 2009: Print to other people's printers

Here are random unsecured HP Printers.

Presumably, the printer will be capable of logging your IP address, so if you start randomly printing garbage to other people's printers, they would (in principle) be capable of tracing you.

PS. I find myself uncertain as to the placement of the apostrophe in "peoples"; I know that "childrens'" is irregular, but what about "peoples'" vs "people's"? Anybody confident enough to provide a definitive statement on that?

Thu 12th Feb 2009 @ 00:06 2009: 1234567890 is nearly upon us!

I have only just become aware of this....

UNIX (and therefore various other) systems count the current date relative to midnight, 1st Jan 1970. This date is known as the Epoch. Negative dates can go back before then, positive dates after:

$ date -u -d '@0'
Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 UTC 1970
$ date -u -d '@1'
Thu Jan 1 00:00:01 UTC 1970
$ date -u -d '@-1'
Wed Dec 31 23:59:59 UTC 1969
$

$ date -u -d '@1234567890'
Fri Feb 13 23:31:30 UTC 2009
$ date -u -d '@1234569600'
Sat Feb 14 00:00:00 UTC 2009
$

Tue 10th Feb 2009 @ 23:29 2009: Shell Script: GetCluster

Sun's Solaris OS provides various options during installation, one of which is that you get to choose one from a set of installation "clusters" - sets of packages which go together to create a functional minimal install, or additional packages useful for an end-user, or programmer, up to "install the whole lot" (which doesn't actually install everything; some packages are only installed if you choose certain language options). It calls these "software groups":


The split is not very clearly defined, and I have yet to find an online list to say what packages will be installed for a given package cluster.

This shell script does not address that problem.

But it does address something quite similar.

For some work I happen to be doing at the moment, it is quite useful to be able to find out what installation options will be sufficient to get a certain package installed. If I want (say) the Apache 1.3 packages, this will tell me that I need SUNWCprog, SUNWCall or SUNWCXall. With GNU Grep, it is rather more informative - it describes each installation cluster in more detail, and gives package and version details for the selected package:

$ ./getcluster.sh SUNWapchr
SUNWapchr is in cluster SUNWCapache
Apache Web Server
The Apache Web Server
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
1.3.9

=> Installation Cluster(s):

SUNWCXall
Entire Distribution plus OEM support
A pre-defined software configuration consisting of all software included in the operating system release, plus OEM platform support.

SUNWCall
Entire Distribution
A pre-defined software configuration consisting of all software included in the operating system release.

SUNWCprog
Developer System Support
A pre-defined software configuration consisting of the typical software used by software developers.

Mon 2nd Feb 2009 @ 00:53 2009: Darwin "vs" God

I'm watching David Attenborough's Darwin programme. (Interestingly, in searching the BBC website, this was the second result; the first was Sir David Attenborough says he has received hate mail from viewers for not crediting God in his nature programmes).

This programme is particularly frustrating as it cites scientific observations (such as that two different species cannot mate), and Darwin's conclusions (that if they did, other species would occur) with no evidence. I am happy that there can be different breeds of dog - Attenborough goes to Crufts to show the variety, but acknowledges that the only obstacle is mechanical; any dog can impregnate any other.

A horse and donkey can make a mule, but it can't propagate.

These fundamental things seem to be inadequately explained to the public, if they are indeed true. Please, if these tenets are true, and the best that Darwinism can find, can somebody find a more convincing way to explain it.

If there is any evidence - and I want truly provable scientific evidence - would I be wrong in wanting it? for one species to somehow turn into another, please provide the evidence. It can't be hard, surely?

That is all before we get into the assumption that "one thing changing into another thing" must be against the Bible; who put that assumption up in the first place?

The New International Version (NIV) is the most commomnly-used English translation of the Bible; Genesis 1 is here: Verses 24-28 say:

24 And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so.
25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."

Sun 1st Feb 2009 @ 01:02 2009: Two Years From Now...

Stewart Smith makes some 2-year and 5-year predictions for PC technology:

http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2008/11/09/technology-predictions/

I won't address the 5-year predictions; that is too far to make any sensible judgement. As for the two-year (2011) predictions:

• the majority of consumer bought machines (which will be laptops) will have SSD and not rotational media
  
  Disagree. Spinning disks will remain popular because we already have them, and trust in SSD will take longer than 2 years to gain.The majority will be laptops, though.


• At the same time, servers with larger storage requirements will use disk as we once used tape.
  
  Agree. This has been happening for a long time with SAMFS/QFS


• At least one Linux distributoin will be shipping with btrfs as default
  
  Agree. At least one Linux distro will be shipping with "*" as default, where "*" is whatever you care to choose. I doubt that one of the big 10 (top 10 of distrowatch.com) will use btrfs by then.


• OpenSolaris will be looking interesting and not annoying to try out (a lot more “just work” and easy to get going).
  
  Agree. OpenSolaris is already starting to look pretty amazing.. I have yet to play with ZFS-on-root and memory issues, which are apparently much better already, but it is something that Sun have to keep working on in order to stay relevant in the OS market.


• Unless Sun puts ZFS under a GPL compatible license so it can make it into the Linux kernel, it will become nothing more than a Solaris oddity as other file systems will have caught up (and possibly surpassed).
  
  Disagree. ZFS wouldn't get into the mainstream Linux kernel in 2 years if Sun GPL'd it all tomorrow. Ext4 looks to be a strong improvement on ext3, but reiserfs is likely to lose focus, and who else is seriously working on new filesystems for Linux?


• There will be somebody developing a a MySQL compatible release based off Drizzle.
  I have no experience of Drizzle; it doesn't seem to have any features making it very likely to become a "top-ten" factor in the next two years.


• Somebody will have ported Drizzle back to Microsoft Windows… possibly Microsoft.
  Ditto. This seems even less unlikely than Drizzle becoming a major player by 2011.


• X will still be used for graphics on Linux, although yet another project will start up to “replace X with something modern”, get a lot of press and then fail.
  Agree. The X Windowing system is not perfect, but it would have to be a far better system to replace it.
  On the one hand, this is similar to the incumbence of MS Windows; being "better" is not enough - to replace X, you have to be better, and compatible, without losing any applications on the way.
  The MS/DoJ trial called this the Applications Barrier to Entry, and it applies to X11 just as it applies to Microsoft.