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06/24/09 PHD comic: 'Film Crew, pt. 5'

2009-06-12T10:17:05Z

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com

title: "Film Crew, pt. 5" - originally published 6/24/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

Jörg Tauss wird Pirat

2009-06-21T20:34:31Z

Shared by Fatih
Almanyadaki SDP medya uzmani partisinden ayrılıp, Korsan partiye destekleceğini açıklamış. Ne günler görüyoruz be :)

Der SPD-Medienexperte Jörg Tauss, gegen den wegen des Verdachts des Besitzes von Kinderpornografie ermittelt wird, hat seinen Austritt aus der SPD erklärt. Er kündigte zugleich seine Unterstützung der Piratenpartei an. (Internetsperren, Vorratsdatenspeicherung)

Films made with post-it notes

2009-06-12T07:22:22Z

Shared by Fatih
Harika ya, kesinlikle izleyin

Is there nothing these most common of office supplies can't be used for?

Turkey: The Most Engaged Online Audience in Europe

2009-06-04T14:35:07Z

A Turkish blogger posts:

comScore 27.05.2009

Internet Users in Turkey Spend More Time Online and Consume More Pages than Users in Other European Countries

London, U.K., May 27, 2009 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its first report examining the online behavior of Internet users in Turkey, based on data from the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service. In April 2009, more than 17 million people in Turkey age 15 and older accessed the Internet from a home or work location, consuming an average 3,044 pages per visitor.

Seventh Largest Online Population in Europe

Of the 17 European countries individually reported by comScore, Germany’s online audience was the largest with 40 million visitors in April 2009, followed by the U.K. (36.8 million visitors), and France (36.3 million visitors). The Internet audience in Turkey was the seventh largest with 17.8 million visitors, making it the second largest country in Eastern Europe behind Russia (31.3 million visitors). Internet users in Turkey were also found to be the most engaged users in Europe, spending an average 32 hours and viewing an average 3,044 pages of content per month.

Who is a mathematician?

2009-06-09T08:49:07Z

“A mathematician, then, will be defined in what follows as someone who has published the proof of at least one non-trivial theorem.” — Jean Dieudonné; from the book ‘Is Mathematics Inevitable? A Miscellany‘ (2008), edited by Underwood Dudley.

Bing Arama Arkaplan Fotoğraflarını Gezelim

2009-06-11T11:03:21Z

Bing arama ve karar verme motorunu sanırım artık hepiniz duymuşsunuzdur. Microsoft’un bing beta duyurusunu yaptığı günden itibaren bing ile ilgili olarak görüşlerimizi ortaya koymuştuk. Bing’in arama motoru piyasasında alacağı yer ve insanların tercihini nasıl etkileyeceğini zamanla göreceğiz. Tabi Microsoft’un yeni arama motoru bing ile tanıştığımız günden itibaren Bing ve Google karşılaştırması kaçınılmaz bir şekilde yapılmaya devam ediyor.

Bing ve Google arasında arama sonuçları ile ilişkilendirmeden söyleyebileceğimiz en büyük fark herhalde Bing’in hergün sunmuş olduğu arkaplan resimleridir. Bing, duyurulduğu ilk günden itibaren hergün için farklı bir ülkeden farklı bir fotoğrafı anasayfasında arama kutusunun arkasına yerleştiriyor. Bu arkaplan fotoğrafları her ülkedeki kullanıcılara farklı bir şekilde gösteriliyor. Yani Türkiye’den Bing araması yapmak isteyen kişi Santorini adası ile karşılaşırken, Amerika’dan Bing araması yapmak isteyen birisi ülkemizden Kapadokya fotoğrafı ile karşılaşıyordu.

Tüm özellikleriyle kullanılabilen bing arama sayfasındaki fotoğraflar, bir sonraki güne geçildiğinde geçmişte kalıyor. Bing arama arkaplan fotoğraflarını gezebilmek için bing fotoğraf arşivi oluşturulmuş. Fotoğraf sevenlerin, geçmişte Bing arama anasayfasında yer almış olan fotoğrafları gezebilecekleri bu siteleri aktaralım.

1. Bing Homepages : Bing Homepages, wordpress ile oluşturulmuş ve Bing anasayfasında yer alan her fotoğraf için ayrı bir başlık açılmış. Bu fotoğraflar için etiketler atanıyor ve yorum bırakılabiliyor. Örnek olarak Kapadokya fotoğrafının olduğu Hot Air Balloons – Turkey yazısına bakabilirsiniz.

2. Bing Image Archive : Bing Image Archive – Bing Resim Arşivi ise bir takvim havasında hergün yayınlanan Bing arkaplan fotoğrafını oluşturuyor. Fotoğraf üzerine tıkladığınızda lightbox ile açılan fotoğrafın altında fotoğraf bilgilerine ulaşabiliyorsunuz.

Yukarıdaki iki bing fotoğraf arşiv sitesinden Bing Homepages, hem yorum bırakılabilme hem de gezinme açısından benim daha çok hoşuma gitti. Bing arkaplan fotoğraflarını sergileyen veya toplayan başka siteler bulursanız yorumlarınızda belirtebilirsiniz. Ona göre bu yazıyı güncelleyebiliriz.

Bu Konuyla İlişkili Yazılar:

The Air France Crash: More Questions Than Answers

2009-06-08T11:28:00Z

The crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on the last day of May is bad news for a number of reasons. The deaths of all 228 people on board make it the worst air disaster since 2001. And while advancing technology has enabled investigators to recover a limited amount of flight data through a remote data link that was operating at the time of the crash, the deep waters where the plane went down may prevent the recovery of the "black box" containing voice and detailed data recordings.

What do we know today, eight days after the crash? There were thunderstorms in the area that night, and early speculation centered on the possibility of a lightning strike to the plane. Although lightning hits planes hundreds of times a year, relatively little damage usually occurs and most modern aircraft can be considered essentially (though not totally) lightning-proof. Evidently, there was a satellite or other radio-mediated data link which was continually feeding certain types of flight data to the ground. Examination of this data shows that the flight speeds during the last minute or so of the flight became "incoherent," followed by a loss of cabin pressure and failure of electrical systems. While this information will be helpful in deciphering what went wrong, it apparently lacks the detail that flight data recorders can preserve. One can imagine a day when such radio links will take the place of, or at least duplicate, the capabilities of flight data recorders so that mechanical recovery of the black box will no longer be so urgent. The black box is designed to emit a sonar signal for 30 days after the crash, so the underwater recovery crews gearing up to find it are operating under tremendous time pressure, not to mention the water pressure at depths exceeding 20,000 feet. The box may never be found.

Recent news reports have focused on the fact that the plane's Pitot tube, the device that measures airspeed, had not yet been replaced with a newer model as the plane's manufacturer Airbus recommended. A Pitot tube is a small tube that faces directly into the airstream. The difference in pressure between the air inside the tube (which is blocked off and registers what is called "stagnation pressure") and the ambient or "static" air pressure, is an indication of airspeed, which is the most important kind of speed to know about when you are trying to fly a plane. These days, when most parts of a flight except for landing and takeoff are under automatic control, the airspeed data from the Pitot tube forms part of an elaborate computer-controlled feedback loop that maintains constant speed, altitude, and other flight characteristics.

The old saw about computers regarding "garbage in, garbage out" goes double when a feedback loop is involved. If enough ice forms on a Pitot tube to plug up the entrance, the indicated airspeed goes way below what is actually the case, and either the automatic pilot guns the engines inappropriately or the real pilots may take incorrect action based on faulty airspeed data. This is exactly what happened to an Argentine DC-9 flight in 1999, which resulted in a spectacular crash, killing all aboard.

Although I have no independent information on this, I hope that modern aircraft such as the Air France A330 that crashed have more than one means of measuring speed: either a second Pitot tube (which of course would be just as likely to ice up as the first one), or other means such as radar altimeter and speed measurements or GPS-based airspeed indicators. But whether the autopilot takes all these other inputs into consideration, and whether the real pilots do too, I don't know. Clearly, if the Pitot tube was involved in this crash, the right thing to do in the circumstances wasn't done.

All flight-critical Pitot tubes have heaters to prevent icing, but evidently the one on Flight 447 was deficient or non-optimal in some way, or else Airbus wouldn't have recommended replacing it. Of course replacements can be recommended for all kinds of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with safety. All that will come out in the investigation report, which will take months or more to complete.

Despite this crash, the general trend in air safety has been a positive one. More people fly every year, and so the safety record per passenger mile is even better than the raw statistics on crashes would indicate. But this record can be maintained only through the painstaking work of investigators, engineers, regulators, inspectors, and the pilots and crews who actually do the work. Most of the time the system works well, and the silver lining in every accident is the fact that it carries with it potential answers to problems that need to be addressed to improve safety even further. I just hope they are able to recover the flight data recorders in order to develop a complete picture of what went wrong, and to teach us how similar situations can be avoided in the future.

We will revisit this accident when more information is available, and in the meantime, our sympathy is with the relatives and friends of those who lost loved ones in this tragedy.

Sources: I drew on reports from Fox News at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525117,00.html and an Associated Press report obtained from Yahoo News at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/brazil_plane, as well as the Wikipedia article "Pitot tube."

Closing the Gap for Good

2009-06-10T16:05:54Z

New research shows that gender disparity in math skills is due to culture, not biology

For as long as girls and boys have been attending co-ed schools, there has been a perceived gender gap in mathematical abilities that has seemingly led to a deficit in the number of women who will go on to study higher levels of math and to pursue careers in mathematically-related fields. This has always been attributed to an innate biological tendency of men to have the capacity to excel at mathematical reasoning, a tendency that was assumed to be lacking in women. However, a recent report from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison proposes that the reasons for this disparity are in fact purely cultural, suggesting that it may be possible for our society to lessen or even close the gap completely.

Janet Mertz and Janet Hyde, two Wisconsin professors, were puzzled by the fact that a gender disparity in math skills is not present in certain countries and cultures, particularly those in which a large degree of gender equality exists. In analyzing data from various tests and studies of male and female students at various educational levels, “the Wisconsin researchers document a pattern of performance that strongly suggests that the root of gender disparity in math can be pegged to changeable sociocultural factors. Such factors either discourage or encourage girls and young women in the pursuit of the skills required to master the mathematical sciences.” In other words, society is the cause for any and all disparities in skill level, and the commonly held belief that women are less capable in mathematics is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Photo courtesy of www.lovetoknow.com

Much of the evidence for the argument that boys are naturally inclined to be better at math stems from past studies that show greater variability in the skill levels of males, meaning that they are more likely to exhibit extremely high or extremely low skill levels in the subject. However, Mertz and Hyde prove in their research that this is not the case in some countries, several of which can boast of girls scoring in the 99th percentile in math skills at the same rate that boys do.

In the United States, girls are now performing on par with boys at all levels of math and are just as likely to choose advanced math classes in high school. Moreover, the gap is narrowing between the number of mathematically gifted boys and girls, suggesting that we are perhaps moving closer to achieving the results of those countries with a higher measure of gender equality. The number of female doctoral-level mathematics students has climbed to 30% from 5% in 1950, most likely a result of changing perceptions of the role of women in mathematical and scientific research.

Though hopeful, these results appear dim in comparison to statistics regarding gender disparities as well as overall mathematical skill level in other countries, particularly those of East Asia. Here, girls consistently reach the gifted level just as often as boys do, and both sexes exhibit median scores that are higher than those of the top ten percent of US students. In their report, Mertz and Hyde emphasized that “the future of the U.S. economy depends upon American society doing a better job of identifying and nurturing mathematically talented youth, regardless of gender, race or ethnicity.” Leaving women out of the equation will have devastating effects on the growth and development of the United States and will severely hinder our efforts at achieving global economic competitiveness with those countries which foster mathematical abilities in all their students.

For more information on this research, check out the article Culture, Not Biology, Underpins Math Gender Gap at ScienceDaily.com.

What we can't imagine

2009-05-29T13:27:00Z

When James Bond used miniature cameras in the 60's and 70's the thought of a wireless phone that can take pictures and send them to just about anyone in the world, fits into the palm of your hand and even plays high quality music would have been so preposterous (even in a Bond movie) that audiences would have thought it was a joke. Now we struggle to imagine a world without our mobile phones and all of their accessories.

[Cellphone cameras came into being when Philippe Kahn wanted to instantly share photos of his daughter's birth with friends and family.]

40 years ago it was hard (impossible?) to imagine the solutions that we have available to us today. Some of the things we think will have happened in another 40 years time probably won't, and other things that we have no idea about will be in existence. Hard working engineers and scientist will have discovered and created all kinds of new things.

What can you imagine that no one else can?

How chaos rules complex systems and our existence

2009-06-09T04:56:32Z

We must know, we will know

David Hilbert believed that pure mathematics was black and white and absolutely clear. He and a lot of other mathematics set a goal to create a formalization of mathematics that would eliminate all the problems, especially the paradoxes that Bertrand Russell found in set theory. For around 30 years Hilbert, John von Neumann [father of the modern computer] et.al. worked very hard on this.

The thing they didn't know was that the problem they tried to solve was unsolvable. In 1931 Kurt Gödel proved that their efforts were a waste of time and they would either end up in an incomplete system or a system that includes contradictions. Kurt Gödel's findings shocked the mathematics world, especially since his proof was based in elementary number theory, in arithmetic. Gödel's incompleteness theorems are hard to explain, but the book Gödel, Escher, Bach does an effort on explaining them. I don't want to explain how he proves it, but the thing to remember is that he proves that formalization of elementary number theory would end up in an incomplete system or a system that includes contradictions.

Alan Turing proved in 1936 that the halting problem was unsolvable for the turing machine (which basically is an abstraction of a computer). The halting problem is a simple decision problem that is stated in an following way:

given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input.

There are MANY unsolvable problems - unsolvable problems are unsolvable no matter how much time, space or speed you have. Rice's theorem states that any non-trivial statement about a program is undecidable.

You can read more about the history in Historical Introduction - A Century of Controversy Over the Foundations of Mathematics.

The incompleteness theorem and the halting problem are related

Wikipedia's page on the halting problem explains how Gödel's problem can be reduced to the halting problem:

The weaker form of the theorem can be proved from the undecidability of the halting problem as follows. Assume that we have a consistent and complete axiomatization of all true first-order logic statements about natural numbers. Then we can build an algorithm that enumerates all these statements. This means that there is an algorithm N(n) that, given a natural number n, computes a true first-order logic statement about natural numbers such that, for all the true statements, there is at least one n such that N(n) yields that statement. Now suppose we want to decide if the algorithm with representation a halts on input i. We know that this statement can be expressed with a first-order logic statement, say H(a, i). Since the axiomatization is complete it follows that either there is an n such that N(n) = H(a, i) or there is an n' such that N(n') = ¬ H(a, i). So if we iterate over all n until we either find H(a, i) or its negation, we will always halt. This means that this gives us an algorithm to decide the halting problem. Since we know that there cannot be such an algorithm, it follows that the assumption that there is a consistent and complete axiomatization of all true first-order logic statements about natural numbers must be false.

It's much worse than that...

Gregory Chaitin postulates that mathematics have a much bigger problem than the one Gödel found:

In other words, it's not just that Hilbert was a little bit wrong. It's not just that the normal notion of pure mathematics is a little bit wrong, that there are a few small holes, that there are a few degenerate cases like ``This statement is unprovable''. It's not that way! It's much, much worse than that! There are extreme cases where mathematical truth has no structure at all, where it's maximally unknowable, where it's completely accidental, where you have mathematical truths that are like coin tosses, they're true by accident, they're true for no reason.

quote from Historical Introduction - A Century of Controversy Over the Foundations of Mathematics

Where does this leave us?

Mathematics was believed to be pure - to be ruled by simple rules. But as it can be read above there's something very fishy about mathematics and it's that the system is not pure and we can't find a set of axioms (basic facts) that defines mathematics!

How can a relative simple system like mathematics be unclear? How come we can't find a "theory of everything" for mathematics? How come mathematics seems to be ruled by randomness, by controlled chaos?

Today we try hard to find a theory of everything in physics, something that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena. But I believe that this isn't possible. The thing to remember is that the physical world is much more complex than the mathematical world - - and it's also ruled by randomness, like those found in quantum physics. I.e. how can we find a theory for everything for the physical world when we can't find a "theory of everything" for a simple system like arithmetic?

I have some ideas on these matters that I am currently thinking about. I can't present it right now thought as my theory needs more thinking and more structure.

All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
- George Box

Dusty Phillips: Todo List

2009-05-17T16:10:52Z

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the proper way to design a calendar and to-do list application. The irony: I never got around to putting ‘write to-do list application’ on my to-do list.

The best to-do list I’ve seen was designed by Kim Hoyer with input from myself and another developer. Its part of Kim’s proprietary Pursuits XRM System, a comprehensive sales and company management system. Oprius also has a terrific to-do and appointment management system. Google’s Calendar, on the other hand, seems to have done everything all wrong, by my standards.

I’ve read about several of the web-based options and discarded them for various reasons, usually too much complexity. Remember The Milk is a notable exception in that its complexities can be easily ignored. However, its still due-date based, and that’s not the way I work.

Stephen Covey’s well-known ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ describes a slightly over-engineered, but otherwise workable paper-based to-do system that really jives with the way I think.

I’ve tried numerous solutions and always fall back to writing stuff on a scrap of paper. I’ve been actively monitoring exactly how I really do things (instead of trying to imagine how I should do things) in the 5.5 months since getting a day-book for Christmas. I’m ready to design a to-do list. I’d probably have sat down and started coding by now if I didn’t have this blog thingy to lay out some ideas. Just a little groundwork.

Day-oriented, not due-date oriented

When I plan what I want to do, its always about what I want to do today. I don’t care that the due date of a task is in two weeks, I care only about choosing whether I am or am not working on that task today. When I’m done working on the task today, I cross it off my todo list, even if the task isn’t complete. If its not complete, I add a NEW task for the next day. Its good to break big tasks into bite-sized sub-tasks, but often I just write the same task down for each day that I work on it.

Only plan a few days in advance

I need to be able to add, reorder, and move tasks between all days, but typically I won’t have tasks listed for something more than a week in advance. Unless I’m specifically meeting someone or planning a vacation, I don’t have stuff filled out for two months from now.

Area for planned but scheduled tasks

I currently add tasks I intend to do in the future for other days and then ‘move’ them by crossing out and rewriting under another day. This is suboptimal. I want a separate section for tasks that I don’t want to forget. It needs to be easy to move them into a specific day.

Recurring Tasks Suck

Most of the tasks I do on a recurring basis don’t happen at the same date and time each week. I just know I need to do them once a week. Having them auto occur makes me easily ignore them.

Instead, I need an area (possibly same area from previous point) to store tasks that I do repeatedly. These would be generic tasks and whenever I need to put one on a specific date I can just select it and add a date.

Super minimalist

I don’t need to attach much info to a task. I don’t need priorities, descriptions, notes, durations, locations, contacts. This shit clogs up the interface and the task name itself usually helps me recall all I need to remember about this stuff. Maybe if I was a sales person with 90 contacts per day that I can’t remember their names and faces I’d need those details, but in my life, its just extra cruft.

Task Ordering

On any given day, I want the completed tasks at the bottom of the list. Uncompleted tasks are at the top in a semi-ordered fashion. Currently when I sit down at my daybook, I cross out the last item I did and pick another one based on my current priorities. Sometimes I draw numbers beside them to note the next three things I’m going to do. In software, I want to use either drag and drop or tap-to-raise to easily order the next few things I plan to do. When I finish one, I want it to be easy to change my mind about what I’m doing next. Keep it agile!

My Phone

I expect I would make this a web app in the long run so I can access it anywhere, but I definitely need to be able to access it on my phone (Android Dev Phone). Since I want to play with the android APIs anyway, my first attempt is going to be for Android. Later I’ll tie it up to a mobile-oriented webapp similar to Choncho.

Dusty Phillips: The Lost Art Of Proofreading

2009-05-27T16:35:45Z

I am an amateur proofreader; I would like to be a professional proofreader. To date, however, all my work has been volunteer and includes several MSc theses, a few academic papers, numerous Arch Linux newsletters, and two unpublished novels. I enjoy the process of proofreading, of axing unnecessary words, of caressing, cajoling, or cursing the right sound into a written sentence. You see, proofreading is not just about grammar. Its about cadence, flow, style, and rhythm. Above all, its about communication.

And it’s a lost art. I estimate that at least 90 percent of articles on the Internet these days are posted without review or revision. While this is obvious in youtube comments and web forum postings, it also includes countless articles by professional journalists from well-known news agencies. Indeed, some of the worst writing I read each day arrives via Google news results. Independently authored blog articles may be better; they can range from quick thoughtless posts to elegantly crafted prose. Sadly, the majority of authors simply write their article and forget about it.

We are always in a hurry to get information to the masses. News isn’t news if its not new. Why proofread when the information you’re posting is going to be irrelevant in a few hours? First Post! McDonalds has taken over our writing. I want that burger in 43 seconds. Don’t worry about the taste, just serve it quicky. No no, I don’t care if its healthy, I don’t have time to think about that. I’m in a hurry, you see.

I have to get this article posted before my coffee cools down.

It’s a race, a race to provide new information or insights before anyone else. A race that ignores, discards, even condemns quality. A race that defines our society.

Have you ever read something and thought to yourself, “I love how that’s worded. It’s beautiful”? Possibly not — I could be peculiar that way. More often, though, I end up thinking, “What a lovely sentiment; too bad they butchered the wording.” There need to be more beautiful essays. Essays that are a joy to read, and not just a chore to understand.

Style matters.

In four posts to this blog, I have covered an introduction, a software concept, a technical article, and a social discussion. These articles have but one thing in common: I wrote and posted each one immediately. I didn’t proofread them. Sure I read through them once, maybe twice before clicking “Publish”, but that’s not proofreading. Proofreading involves letting the essay marinate for a few hours, maybe days, before posting, then carefully revising — from a reader’s perspective. I didn’t do that.

But this time I will. This post can wait a day or two to be consumed by the public. From now on, that ‘Save Draft’ button is going to get a lot more use.

If you’re not looking to hire a semi-professional proofreader/editor for your next written work, maybe you should think about it. If you think about it, think about me. I’m available and I’m sure we can agree on a rate.

The right tool for the job

2009-05-31T07:48:43Z

A general problem developers have is they become slaves of the tools they use. Read on the net and you'll see thousands of people defending Lisp, Ruby, Python, Java, ... - claiming their programming language is GOD's gift to developers. The same can be said about editors (for example Church of Emacs), operative systems or anything in between.

A major problem with this kind of thinking is that it blurs the judgment. If you think Ruby on Rails/Lisp/Emacs/VIM is the best for all jobs, then it's really hard to evaluate anything else - - and you may end up doing some very bad calls.

The solution

be more open-minded
don't be fanatical
don't attach emotions to the tools you use
don't be a slave of your own patterns

A real master sees a tool as a tool, not as a religion or something a master is emotionally attached to.

Beyond RAID

2009-05-27T07:59:59Z

I've always been leery of RAID on the desktop. But on the server, RAID is a definite must:

"RAID" is now used as an umbrella term for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate data among multiple hard disk drives. The different schemes/architectures are named by the word RAID followed by a number, as in RAID 0, RAID 1, etc. RAID's various designs all involve two key design goals: increased data reliability or increased input/output performance. When multiple physical disks are set up to use RAID technology, they are said to be in a RAID array. This array distributes data across multiple disks, but the array is seen by the computer user and operating system as one single disk.

I hadn't worked much at all with RAID, as I felt the benefits did not outweigh the risks on the desktop machines I usually build. But the rules are different in the datacenter; the servers I built for Stack Overflow all use various forms of RAID, from RAID 1 to RAID 6 to RAID 10. While working with these servers, I was surprised to discover there are now umpteen zillion numbered variants of RAID -- but they all appear to be based on a few basic, standard forms:

RAID 0: Striping

Data is striped across (n) drives, which improves performance almost linearly with the number of drives, but at a steep cost in fault tolerance; a failure of any single striped drive renders the entire array unreadable.

RAID 1: Mirroring

Data is written across (n) drives, which offers near-perfect redundancy at a slight performance decrease when writing -- and at the cost of half your overall storage. As long as one drive in the mirror array survives, no data is lost.

Raid 5: Parity

Data is written across (n) drives with a parity block. The array can tolerate one drive failure, at the cost of one drive in storage. There may be a serious performance penalty when writing (as parity and blocks are calculated), and when the array is rebuilding.

Raid 6: Dual Parity

Data is written across (n) drives with two parity blocks. The array can tolerate two drive failures, at the cost of two drives in storage. There may be a serious performance penalty when writing (as parity and blocks are calculated), and when the array is rebuilding.

(yes, there are other forms of RAID, but they are rarely implemented or used as far as I can tell.)

It's also possible to generate so-called RAID 10 or RAID 50 arrays by nesting these RAID levels together. If you take four hard drives, stripe the two pairs, then mirror the two striped arrays -- why, you just created yourself a magical RAID 10 concoction! What's particularly magical about RAID 10 is that it inherits the strengths of both of its parents: mirroring provides excellent redundancy, and striping provides excellent speed. Some would say that RAID 10 is so good it completely obviates any need for RAID 5, and I for one agree with them.

This was all fascinating new territory to me; I knew about RAID in theory but had never spent hands-on time with it. The above is sufficient as a primer, but I recommend reading through the wikipedia entry on RAID for more depth.

It's worth mentioning here that RAID is in no way a substitute for a sane backup regimen, but rather a way to offer improved uptime and survivability for your existing systems. Hard drives are cheap and getting cheaper every day -- why not use a whole slew of the things to get better performance and better reliability for your servers? That's always been the point of Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, as far as I'm concerned. I guess Sun agrees; check out this monster:

That's right, 48 commodity SATA drives in a massive array, courtesy of the Sun Sunfire X4500. It also uses a new RAID system dubbed RAID-Z:

RAID-Z is a data/parity scheme like RAID-5, but it uses dynamic stripe width. Every block is its own RAID-Z stripe, regardless of blocksize. This means that every RAID-Z write is a full-stripe write. This, when combined with the copy-on-write transactional semantics of ZFS, completely eliminates the RAID write hole. RAID-Z is also faster than traditional RAID because it never has to do read-modify-write.
But far more important, going through the metadata means that ZFS can validate every block against its 256-bit checksum as it goes. Traditional RAID products can't do this; they simply XOR the data together blindly.
Which brings us to the coolest thing about RAID-Z: self-healing data. In addition to handling whole-disk failure, RAID-Z can also detect and correct silent data corruption. Whenever you read a RAID-Z block, ZFS compares it against its checksum. If the data disks didn't return the right answer, ZFS reads the parity and then does combinatorial reconstruction to figure out which disk returned bad data. It then repairs the damaged disk and returns good data to the application. ZFS also reports the incident through Solaris FMA so that the system administrator knows that one of the disks is silently failing.
Finally, note that RAID-Z doesn't require any special hardware. It doesn't need NVRAM for correctness, and it doesn't need write buffering for good performance. With RAID-Z, ZFS makes good on the original RAID promise: it provides fast, reliable storage using cheap, commodity disks.

Pardon the pun, but I'm not sure if it makes traditional hardware RAID redundant, necessarily. Even so, there are certainly fantastic, truly next-generation ideas in ZFS. There's a great ACM interview with the creators of ZFS that drills down into much more detail. Hard drives may be (mostly) dumb hunks of spinning rust, but it's downright amazing what you can do when you get a whole bunch of them working together.

We should coin a name for non-geeks

2009-05-18T14:50:53Z

I’ve been thinking that we should come up with a name that would collectively describe non-geeks. The mainstream culture already has a label which they can use to refer to us and the things we like. They can say “geeks” or “geek culture” and everyone knows (or pretends to know) what they are referring too. I noticed that we don’t have a word like that to describe them - the people outside out circle of interests.

You know who I’m talking about, right? The simple folks who are easily confounded by technology and keep insisting that you fix them computer. People who think that software engineer, web developer and systems administrator are just fancy names for a “PC Technician”. People who actually enjoy watching all these horrid Reality TV shows. People who won’t watch a show or a movie if it is labeled as Science Fiction, but love shit like LOST (which is pure time traveling SF lately). People who have never actually even seen a RPG rulebook but who think it is stupid because they once saw a D&D game unfavorably depicted on some sitcom.

We could collectively refer to them as “the mainstream society” but that’s a bit unwieldy. It would be best to have a short word we could apply to them - just like geek applies to us. Of course it does not have to have a negative connotation either - cause we don’t want to be elitist or anything.

I mentioned this to a few people and we came up with a list of words that could apply here. Someone brought up the term Muggle as a primary candidate. My initial instinct is to reject it though, because it was popularized by J. K. Rowling. The term Muggle refers to a non-wizard in the Harry Potter universe. It is really a very close match to what we are looking for and some people have started to use this word to describe non-geeks. Sadly, I feel the term is a bit inappropriate. There is nothing more mainstream than Harry Potter books and movies. I mean that is all these people read. Well, that and Twilight.

J. K. Rowling books are so popular because they appeal to the lowest common denominator. I’d describe them as mediocre at best. I do see the irony of using a term found in such a book to the mainstream society as a whole. But I don’t like the fact that the word is so tightly associated with Harry Potter fandom.

Another suggestion was to call them Norms, normies or Normans. I don’t like it because it suggests that it is not normal to be a geek. That’s not the type of message I can really get behind.

A slightly better word in the same vein is Mundanes. Unlike “Norm” it actually casts a positive light at us geeks. It suggests that we are extraordinary and exceptional. Mainstream people are simply average, uninteresting and not special the way we are. It underlines the main difference between a geek and non-geek. A geek embraces technology, thrives on new ideas and dares to dream. A non-geek tends to be satisfied by the status quo and stays away from things that he/she does not understand.

Still, I’m not 100% happy with it. The slight negative connotation will probably prevent it from being widely adopted.

Here is my idea - and I’m just throwing it out there knowing full well that it won’t actually catch on - Streamers. Just think about it, it works on multiple levels:

It’s actually a shortened version of “mainstreamer” (which is not actually a word, but who cares)
Indicates a person who follows of flows with a stream (or direction) of thought
Rhymes with “dreamers” which sort of suggests the nature of their condition - the mainstream people are captivated by their own fabricated dream filled by Hollywood gossip and biased, non-journalistic, ratings driven media reporting.
The White Wolf Mage games used to label the non-mages as “sleepers”. In that world everyone was capable of magic, but only certain people would “awaken” and discover their magical potential. The same may be said about being a geek - anyone has a potential for it, but only certain people actually embrace that side of their personality.
It sort of has a cool ring to it - so people might not even get offended by it

It also could allow us to create brand new phraseology to go with it. Let me give you some examples:

in-stream - a geek thing that became accepted or embraced by the mainstream culture. A good examples of stuff like that are Twitter or Rick Rolling. Both originated as geek-only past times, but crossed over to popular culture and are often discussed in mainstream media.

out-stream - any in-joke or technology so far removed from mainstream that it won’t be understood by an average “streamer” without an in-depth explanation. Examples would be obscure internet memes or stuff like emacs vs vi arguments.

What do you think? Do you like any of the terms above? Do you think we actually need a word to describe non-geeks? If you have an idea on how to name them, I’d love to hear it in the comments!

9 Oldest Text Editors you probably have never heard of

2009-05-23T18:12:22Z

If you still think that Microsoft Notepad or EMacs were the first Text Editors ever known to the mankind then you are so incorrect. There had been Text Editors even before them, some were Free and others were either licensed under some License or were proprietary.

History of Text Editors starts from early 70’s era. With very basic functionality, those editors didn’t have many features to format your text. Time has really changed now. Editors like XEmacs and Notepad++ are one of the favorite text editors due to their exhaustive features, customizations and support for extensibility.

Okay, let’s not dig deep in to the history. Below are the list of 9 oldest Text Editors (sans Emacs and Notepad) and brief history about them.

Ed is one of the oldest and standard Text editors of UNIX operating system. Ed is the first Text Editor to have implementation of regular expressions. Without any visual feedback, its error messages were in the form of a question mark (”?”).
With coming of so many advance editors, nobody uses Ed these days but sometimes it is very useful when there is no support available for any other Text Editors or you are writing some simple shell script.

JOE

JOE is an acronym for Joe’s Own Editor. It is a terminal based text editor for UNIX. It was the first text editor which incorporated built in help system which had a reminder on the screen of how to use it.
In many Linux distributions of that era, JOE was the default editor which is the reason why it was so popular then. The editor is still available with advanced features. You can download it from its sourceforge project page.

SlickEdit

SlickEdit was the first advanced editor that supported features like syntax highlighting, refactoring code and keyboard shortcuts customizations. It is a cross-browser platform which is still available with much more advanced features. Latest version of SlickEdit was released in March 2009. You can download it from their website.

CRiSP Editor

CRiSP is yet another cross platform text editor popular among programmers. Early features of CRiSP also had syntax highlighting, keyboard bindings and code navigation and refactoring features.
CRiSP can also handle huge multi-gigabytes of files. The editor is still very much available for download with improvements. You can download it from their website.

Epsilon

Epsilon was the popular text editor among programmers. It was a shadow of Emacs with its default key bindings and layout too. Epsilon is supported on MSDOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and OS/2 and has support for Unicode too.
Epsilon is not free. It can be bought from its website.

VEDIT

VEDIT is a text editor for MS Windows and MS DOS. It was one of the first Visual Text editor which could also handle files of huge size. Since it is written in Assembly Language VEDIT is extremely fast Text editor when compared to other editors.
It also supported editing of remote files via FTP and was able to detect DOS, Unix and Mac files before editing them.
VEDIT is also commercial software and you can buy it from its website.

Sam Editor

Sam was the first editor that supported multiple files editing. Initially it was designed for UNIX terminals and was later ported to other systems too. Sam is the favorite text editor of many distinguished people like Bjarne Stroustrup, Brian Kernigham and Ken Thompson (Ed editor)
Sam Editor is also available for Windows. You can download Sam directly from Bell Labs’ website’s software
directory.

NEdit

NEdit stands for Nirvana Editor. It was another popular visual text editors as well as source code editor used by programmers. Its interface quite resembles to Mac and Windows editors. It was one of the first editor that supported automatic indentation on the basis of code language that you are editing.
You can download the recent version of NEdit from their website

mined

Mined stands for MINIX-Editor. Min-ed is a terminal based editor that is available for Unix, Linux, Windows and MSDOS. It was one of the first text editors to support Unicode inside a terminal. It also had implementation of smart quotes and had extensive support for Unicode.
You can download mined from its sourceforge project page.

This is a guest post from Himanshu, who writes about Tech Tips and Internet on WHibb.com

Jack Bauer Müslüman oldu ey ümmet-i Muhammed!

2009-05-25T19:52:24Z

Türkiye yine gündeme bomba gibi düşen bir haberle yankılanıyor ey vatandaş! Daha seçimlere çok var; o yüzden ART filan gibi “marjinal” televizyonlar hariç, “gemicikleri” konuşan, “hehehühü ay Ergenekon mu, hani nerde bea nihahaha” diyen pek yok. “Önümüzdeki sıcak yaz günlerinde” gündem daha bir light artık (sanki diğer konular değil!), ne bileyim, yedikçe zayıflamak, yoga namazın [...]

05/20/09 PHD comic: 'Research topics guaranteed to be picked up by the news media'

2009-05-21T16:37:12Z

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com

title: "Research topics guaranteed to be picked up by the news media" - originally published 5/20/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

05/18/09 PHD comic: 'Science News Cycle'

2009-05-19T11:23:34Z

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com

title: "Science News Cycle" - originally published 5/18/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

Grafik tasarımı sanat mıdır?

2009-05-12T17:31:13Z

Aylardır süren ve binlerce oyun kullanıldığı ‘Is graphic design art?‘ anketinin sonuçları insanların grafik tasarıma bakış açısını gösteriyor. Buna göre oy verenlerin %63′ü (10387) ‘Grafik tasarımı sanattır’ derken, geriye kalan %37’si, ki muhtemelen 6191 programcı :), buna karşı çıkıyor. Siz de siteyi ziyaret edip kısaca oyunuzu verebilirsiniz.