Posts by Gordon Henderson 51 publicly visible posts • joined 6 May 2008
I did more or less the same recently on an open source project I maintain. Many reasons, but mostly because of the people who would just wrap my code into their big project without offering their end-users support, but telling them to go to me for support.
This appears to be the way it is these days, sadly, so I fully support what Benjamin Fleischer has done and it would not surprise me if we see more of this in the future.
-G
Nothing stopping you :-)
// circle - the old fashioned way
deg // degrees
origin (gwidth / 2, gheight / 2)
for d = 0 to 360 cycle
plot (sin (d) * gheight / 2, cos (d) * gheight / 2)
repeat
end
(if only there was a code tag ;-)
-Gordon
Ps. Joining the dots is left as an exercise to the user ;-)
Every time I've tried to use their website, I've run into issues )-:
So a while back, I had to re-register - and part of that was to enter my email address twice. Muppets. I pointed this out to them along with the obligatory xkcd on that subject...
So recently, after more issues with them, I had to re-register again - and again I found I had to enter my email address twice - but this time they have modified their code to not allow copy & paste. I pointed this out to them again and requested a PAC due to their incompetence - which they rejected as I'd not supplied the email address I used to register.
This is going to be a long week )-:
-G
It's fine for doing what it needs to do - help people get "into" computing and learn. Modern BASICS don't even need line numbers or GOTOs either. the biggest issue is/will be the teachers now, I reckon. I think I was lucky in that I had some good and keen teachers who really encouraged me.
So having been brough up with the micros of the late 70's and 80's, in a fit of nostalgia, I wrote my own BASIC interpreter a few months ago and have been having great fun with it since! I put in all the graphics I liked (turtle as well as cartesian) and it's fun! runs under Linux and so on myRaspberry Pi too!
In Linux it's called Containers and a package called OpenVZ has been about for a while and the newer LXC is becoming quite popular now. The down-side? Just one kernel running all those containers rather than a hypervisor running individual "PCs" each with their own kernels - that means you can't run 2 different OSs, although with care you can run 2 different Linux distributions as long as they're both happy with the same kernel.
This technique isn't new either - Solaris and FreeBSD have had similar features for a long time and LXC for Linux while part of the stable kernel isn't perfect yet, but it's good enough for me to use in production in the data centre. 100% native performance in each container with none of this virtualisation wastage.
I did something similar a while back - kept getting pestered by a company called (Ironically) "The Listening Company". Anyway, I detected their number coming in on my home BT line and bridged the call back out to their own 0800 number via VoIP... Haven't heard from them since...
I don't recall seeing that screen when my N900 did it's upgrade, but I did get a TXT a few days ago from Nokia (short code 84000) inviting me to repy to it to complete a 2-part survey. (Which I have declined to do)
I did wonder at the time how they got my mobile number, but I had previously signed up for their Ovi Store thing.
Bit sneaky though. Now to check my bill and see if it did send a TXT...
I still like my N900 - it's not perfect, but it does absolutely everything I need in a mobile communications device.
Snapped their car on the A38 some 16 months back thinking they're just doing Exeter then Plymouth, but today I find my rural town just off the A38 in Devon online!
However, they've been back since then - probably last August/September (I know as I had scaffolding round the house then) so maybe they came back to fill in the gaps!
"These infrastructures that we run - and that Google does too - are so large, you can't really rely on individuals to manually make these decisions on an application failing-over from one [data center] site to another. Essentially, it all has to be built into automation software that makes these types of decisions."
Where's the skynet icon?
I've always have Nokia Communicators from O2, on 12-month contracts and they've all come unlocked - I can (and do) put in SIMs from other Mobile Operators - which is handy to get some 3G data in a non O2 enabled 3G location...
So I find it odd that O2 are locking the iPhone - after all, you've signed a contract so they're going to get the money, no matter what, and if you put another SIM in it, then you're not using the O2 network, so O2 ultimately win - they have your money and you're using someone elses network...
But you can keep your iPhone. My next phone will be the Nokia E900 ...
Always seemed to be 2 camps back then - the 6502 one and the Z80 one, or Apple ][, BBC B/Electron vs. The Sinclair efforts... I was firmly in the 6502 camp (even though I had a job writing both 8080/Z80 and 6502 assembler in the early/mid 80's - much prefered 6502!) Still have an Apple ][, but my BBC was stolen. Replaced it with a Arc, but it was never the same...
I already have some Atom based servers I'm co-locating. Great little boxes I put together myself. And for the purpose they're serving - not a hugely CPU intensive function vs. the power they consume, they're doing just fine.
Personally I think we need to get back to the bad old days when we really were cpu limitd (and memory limited) and start to optimise things to eek every last ounce out of the hardware, rather then blindly pour more cpu, memory and electricity to a problem... More and more data centres are now chrging for electricity - what's better - one hulking server sucking 350 watts or a few smaller ones sucking 40 watts each...
So many (many) years ago, being a fan of Gary Larsons Far-Side Gallery, I persuaded the sysadmin at the time to let me name my Sun workstation Thagomizer - After the thing that killed Thag Simmons, of-course.
And still today, the thing that killed the late Thag Simmons is called the Thagomizer...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer
Mines the one with the spikey tail...
I've built and installed a few servers now using the Atom chip - and use one as my desktop. Mostly the dual-core version (with dual HT cores). For most LAMPy type stuff they're extremely adequate, and low power to go - which is always a concern in data centres these days. One thing to note: While the CPU may well be only letting off 4W of steam, the rest of the board isn't... The fan isn't on the CPU, it's on the northbridge chip... Last box I installed - dual core, 2GB RAM, dual 250GB WDC SATA drives sucks about 42W.
I've used Debian as a desktop and server since the very early days - and the one thing I've always enjoyed is stability. Sure, it's a bit "dated" in places, but that's OK for me - I'm no great fan of bloat and feature creep anyway. (And I'm only just now weaning off the fvwm window manager I've been using for the past 16 years onto xfce4...)
I switched to Lenny in the testing stage just after the freeze last summer. Now running it on 2 desktops, 3 laptops (family+business) and looking to upgrade some servers to it over the next week or 2. Long life and long live Debian!
Disclaimer: I sell VoIP and VoIP capable PBXs (But only to businesses)
The biggest issues I've seen are cheapskates who see VoIP as a cheap solution to their telephony issues. It can be cheaper than traditional telephony solutions, but that's just part of what VoIP is all about - Flexibility is what I mainly try to sell to people.
But no matter what, if you want VoIP to work for you, then you absolutely must have a good, reliable broadband connection, and for a business, that means that you should be prepared to pay a few pounds a month more for a good, reliable connection from a reputable ISP, and maybe even consider a 2nd dedicated ADSL line purely for VoIP.
I've (sadly) seen people spend more trying to cobble together a VoIP solution using residential quality broadband and equipment than if they'd stuck to their old fashioned BT wall socket.
Interesting this VoIP question comes up today. On Thursday last week, the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association (ITSPA) celebrated their 3rd year in existence, and held their first awards ceremony. I was there along with - well, I'm not sure as I'm not good at counting - 150-200 other people? These were people representing all aspects of the VoIP industry in the UK - big names (Cisco, BT, Magrathea, Gradwell) as well as some lesser known ones, (Drogon Systems) but all with one thing in common - a vested interest in making VoIP in the UK work.
It's not that easy to distribute low voltage at high currents. 300W at 5V is 60 amps. Multiply that by (say) 36 in a full rack and it's 2160 amps. Now modern systems use more than just 5V, so DC-DC converters are required, or distribute the other voltages too. High current introduces more loss (I^R loss), so dissipates more heat, so you need bigger power rails, more copper and that in itself will cause issues... (And if the total resistance of all that copper was 1000th of an ohm, then the losses at 2160 amps would be 4.6KW) It only gets a lot worse as the voltage drops and the current increases )-:
More efficient chip architectures are needed. (eg. ClearSpeed) but for general purpose server use, I'm switching to Intel Atoms and am eyeing up the AMD offerings too (Eg. 45W for a dual HT Atom core system with 2 x 1TB drives vs 225W for a Dell 2U monster with 1/10 the disk capacity!)
My wife bought an AA1 and is very pleased with it. She has no need of a command-line interface at all - for her, it's a tool to write documents, check her email and do some web browsing when she's out and about. That's what 100% of her colleagues want too. They don't care to lift the lid and get inside- seriously.
I feel that we'll never really get Linux on the desktop as long as we keep on going on about the command-line! (And how many times has my wife run up a CMD window on her XP box? Never)
And this article - aren't you preaching to the converted? We read the reg. because we're already command-line geeks, lets back-off a bit and let then do what they were designed for - portable appliances to get a bit of work done when mobile, and if we want to get inside, then we're geeks, so know how to go it already!
My wife bought one from the local Acer shop in South Brent (Moortek) It was 2nd hand, but the original owner had only had it a day. Anyway, it didn't seem quite right, so I re-flashed it from the supplied DVD and it asked for a password - which turned out to be the root password later on.
She's yet to use the command-line... As a geek, I found it and had a quick poke around, then left her to it. su works to get to root and it has vi. (vim). As a Debian man, I'll re-read this article to find out a bit about yum, but the only thing I want to install on it is Ekiga - to see if it'll use the webcam as a video phone.
Everything else "just works" for her. She can plug in her USB keys, camera flash card, it's on the home Wi-Fi, printers, etc. The only thing she has a gripe about is the same as the rest of us - why no Linux BBC iPlayer! But the streaming one works just fine, and she can catch-up with the Archers from the BBC R4 listen-again site...
I'm now looking at re-building her XP desktop box with a Linux system - maybe xubuntu, but maybe I'll wait for a *ubuntu or Debian Lenny if it will come with openOffice 3...
But that doesn't mean we need to accept it... Eg. right now BT rejects incoming caller ID from abroad because "it can't trust the data presented", so all BT has to do is reject caller ID when someone originates a call from the spook network. Other operators need to follow suit too, so with a bit of luck it could very well be self-regulated and be stamped out literally overnight.
However if (say) an operator were making money out of it - in the same way that ISPs were going to make money out of Phorm, then it might not be in their best interests to block them...
I wonder who Spooks carrier is ...
... but I'm not supposed to...
As a reseller of a wholesale VoIP/PSTN interconnect service, I have the ability to present any number I choose over the network, but I've signed a paper, part of the T&Cs, that says I won't present numbers that don't belong to me (or my customers)
I don't think there's any law involved here, just agreements between telcos.
But this is just extracting the urine. I'm convinced their upstream will pull the plug on them PDQ, especially if they've got the same sort of T&Cs I signed up to.
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