Wonderfully to-the-point article in the Guardian (of all places):

Pay attention, civilians. Actor Charlie Sheen has been focusing his mind on the official explanation for 9/11. And you know what? He’s not buying it. “It just didn’t look like any commercial jetliner I’ve flown on any time in my life,” the Hotshots Part Deux star told a US radio station this week, “and then when the buildings came down later on that day, I said to my brother ‘call me insane’, but did it sorta look like those buildings came down in a controlled demolition?"

You’re insane. Next.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:37 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 131 words, total size 1 kb.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:43 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 24 words, total size 1 kb.

Well, of course it was, but that's not the conspiracy that Fisk and a small army of other deeply confused individuals are thinking of. No; planes full of jet fuel could not do it; it had to be controlled demolition involving explosive charges

Never mind that this is completely impossible for a thousand reasons, such as, for example, the fact that there weren't any such charges. Logic and fact mean nothing to these people; if you explain all the reasons why explosives could not have been put in place without it becoming open knowledge, they will suggest (this is a real example) that the explosives were mixed in with the concrete when the towers were first built.

...

What we are dealing with here is people who are blindingly stupid and wilfully ignorant, to the point where they are in effect functionally insane. That is, they are unable to apprehend or deal with the world as it is, and instead attempt to deal with the world as the imagine it to be. I mean, we knew that already; Fisk's conspiracy ramblings are really just a case of running an orange highlighter over a significant paragraph.

Given that Robert Fisk is quite obviously crazy, his broad popularity with the left is yet another indication of the deep and growing separation from reality on that side of the divide. I have no particular insight on what to do about this. Making fun of them seems to offer the best return on one's effort, though it is of course lost on the targets themselves. I'm open to suggestions.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:34 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 292 words, total size 2 kb.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:14 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 19 words, total size 1 kb.

This seemed terribly significant at 4 am.

* Actually Cold & Flu + Cough capsules. Two diseases and a symptom all for one low low price!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:57 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 56 words, total size 1 kb.

Some people criticised the benchmarks, but they have been redone independently, and while not especially painstaking or comprehensive, they do seem to be showing a real and very significant performance jump.

So how has Intel managed to suddenly leapfrog AMD with what is, basically, a souped-up Pentium Pro?

Easy.

For some time, both Intel and AMD have supported 128-bit short-vector instructions, performing two 64-bit or four 32-bit floating point operations at once. Except that neither one actually had a 128-bit FPU; both required two passes through a 64-bit unit.

So Intel fixed that, and as a result they are ahead of AMD. For as long as it takes AMD to double the width of their FPU, something that they were already working on anyway.

Lots of geeky details here.

* New as in not available for another six months.
** Traditionally as in for the past two or three years.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:44 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 187 words, total size 1 kb.

go2url.be have now sent us more trackbacks than we have posts. And we have a lot of posts.

How's that spam thing working out for you, guys? Improved your Google ranking much?

Heh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:10 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 41 words, total size 1 kb.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:54 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 13 words, total size 1 kb.

Pause.

Hey, there's no codeine in these things! I wuz robbed!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:17 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 15 words, total size 1 kb.

Well, most of the time.

But when someone calls up and offers you compensation on something that you had written off as a loss years ago - and we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars here - it can really brighten an otherwise poopy day.

It would certainly pay for that Xbox 360.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:55 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 101 words, total size 1 kb.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:02 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 40 words, total size 1 kb.

(You need to scroll down a little to get to the good stuff.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:59 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 25 words, total size 1 kb.

It's Python, so it's good, but it's Microsoft, so it's evil. I haven't determined the exact good/evil balance as yet but given that it's a one meg download, you can't go too far wrong.

Update: So, I can embed IronPython in my VB.NET application, which is great. But can I then access SQL databases from IronPython via the Python DB-API? Because then I can do... Uh, something that I would really like to do. I can do ADO.NET calls from IronPython, but that would mean I'd have to either write two versions of all the database queries or write a wrapper myself.

Okay, here's what I'm trying to achieve. Everyone knows I'm developing a blog/forum/wiki/portal/community application called Minx. What I haven't said much about - because I haven't gotten anywhere with it - is a client side application called Miko, which is supposed to let you easily manage your Minx sites. To do this properly, I need to embed parts of the Minx server engine. I hadn't found an easy way to do that previously short of writing the whole thing in Python, and I didn't want to do that because then there are problems with distributing the thing.

But if I can write it in VB and embed IronPython to handle the parts I've stolen from Minx, then I'm half-way there. But the Minx template system has SQL calls right inside it; it was designed to work with pretty much any SQL database but it doesn't have a separate storage API. And IronPython doesn't seem to have any way of using the Python DB-API. Still, writing a layer that translates to ADO.NET calls is probably a better way to spend my time than rewriting the template system in VB. (I'll just bundle it with SQLite for people who don't already have MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, SQL Server and DB2 installed.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 313 words, total size 2 kb.

Great. Now piss off.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 10 words, total size 1 kb.

But for desktop apps, and for developing desktop apps, it's not too sucky. Still sucky, yes, but at a level one can deal with while retaining some shreds of sanity and self-respect.

Except for the virtual memory system, which as far as I can tell has survived unchanged since the release of NT 3.1. Back then you were likely running with 16MB of memory; these days if you're doing anything remotely serious you have at least a gigabyte, even in a notebook. A virtual memory system tuned to work well with 16MB of memory is a festering pile of crap when you have a hundred times that amount.

There are two things that need to be fixed in Windows. One is the networking, which I thought they swiped from BSD, but doesn't act like it. Windows has the most thoroughly screwed up network behaviour of any operating system on the planet. Look, Bill, just go back to BSD and swipe their TCP stack again. Easy enough, surely.

The other thing they need to do is steal /proc/sys/vm/swappiness from the Linux 2.6 kernel, so I can set it to 0. Every time I copy a large file you swap my applications out. Stop it, you morons!

Two little things, guys. Then no-one will care if it takes a decade to push Vista out the door.

* Aero Glass

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:18 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 321 words, total size 2 kb.

Now, when you click on the "hide comments" link, what is the least irritating behaviour?

1. Just make the comments disappear, and pull all the text upwards to fill in the gap.


2. Make the comments disappear, and reposition the browser so that the bottom of the post is visible.


3. Make the comments disappear, and reposition the browser so that the top of the post is visible.


4. Make the comments disappear, and reposition the browser so that the bottom of the post is at the bottom of the page.*


5. Too hard. Just lose the hide comments link.


6. Other.

(The reason I'm asking is that Minx does as much as possible inline, including editing if you want that. But while popping something up in the middle of a web page is easy enough, taking it away again is fraught with irrits.)

* Note that I have no idea how to do this.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:04 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 204 words, total size 1 kb.

* Which is to say, I've inlined my comments.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 40 words, total size 1 kb.

No, really! VirtualDub is the program I use to create all those little anime clips (or almost all of them). It makes the process insanely easy; I can just mark the start and end of the piece of video I want, hit F7, and it gets saved into a file.

Without uncompressing and recompressing anything.

So instead of taking several minutes to create the typical file, it takes four or five seconds, limited by the speed of the disk. (Even faster on my desktop, which a SATA RAID array.)

But the blog? Well, Phaeron (the author) hates property grids, loves 68000 assembler, added asynchronous disk I/O to AMOS, wrote his own rational arithmetic library just to handle AVI frame rates properly... Okay, yes, it's only interesting if you're a geek, but if you're a geek, it's interesting. He's a programmer's programmer and seems to be a sensible guy in general.

Also, he notes that Microsoft have released the Express editions of their development tools as free downloads. Neat. I've hit the links for the ISOs, because download utilities? Bah! And I'm getting 1.3MB/second.

Earlier today I snarfed the free edition of DB2, which looks very nice indeed. I grabbed both the Windows and Linux versions, of course, and I'll be installing both on my notebook, since it runs both Windows and Linux, thanks to the free VMWare Player. I also grabbed a copy of Paint.NET, which is a pretty good little paint program - that is, about two orders of magnitude better than Microsoft Paint, but still considerably short of Photoshop. A great program though if you're on a budget and are seriously pissed off with Corel.

While I was at it I copied all my UFO Princess Valkyrie files onto my notebook as well, so that I could (a) watch them and (b) make little video clips to upload. Oh, and on Friday I copied my Minx development environment from Windows to Linux - all still on my notebook, of course - including the SQL dump of the munu blogs and forums that I'm using for testing.

Which is to say, I think I need a new notebook. One of these with two of these and one of... Okay, one of those 160GB Seagate 2.5" drives that nobody seems to sell. That should hold me for a year or so.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:12 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 402 words, total size 3 kb.

Holographic display? Gimme!

I'd probably put it to better use, too:

Hey! Even Raine has one! No fair!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:58 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 30 words, total size 1 kb.

Leaving aside the pretentious name, it's a video player with a built-in file manager, BitTorrent client, and RSS thingy. What this means is that you can grab various RSS feeds and have it automatically download the files via BitTorrent as they become available. Just add a channel, copy and paste the RSS link, and off you go.

Remember that it is BitTorrent, so it will use your upstream bandwidth to share the videos while you have it open. It uses the standard BitTorrent ports too, and in the current version there seems to be no way to change that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:45 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 127 words, total size 1 kb.

Males have a lot of trouble not looking at
breasts. What is worse, males cannot look at breasts and think at
the same time. In fact, scientists now believe that the primary
biological function of breasts is to make males stupid. This was
proved in a famous 1978 laboratory experiment wherein a team of
leading male psychological researchers at Yale deliberately looked
at photographs of breasts every day for two years, at the end of
which they concluded that they had failed to take any notes. "We forgot," they said. "We'll have to do it again."

— Dave Barry

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:03 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 124 words, total size 1 kb.

What I'm talking about is the inability to turn your brain off. An engineer is someone who comes out of The Matrix and says "That part about humans being used as batteries was really stupid. Humans are net consumers of energy. Now, if they'd said that human brains were being used as computation and memory units by the robots..."

(As an aside, there's a tendency to diagnose engineers, or rather engineers-to-be, as having high-function autism, or Asperger's Syndrome, or PDD-NOS, or whatever this weeks fashionable term is. To which I say, piss off you over-socialised wankers!)

Uh, where was I. Oh yeah. So, an engineer who happens to like, just to pick an example at random, silly little anime shows, will tend to over-analyse them, assuming (or hoping) that said silly little show will fully address the implications of the situations in which it has placed its characters.

Now, when you're dealing with something like The Matrix, or more contemporarily V for Vendetta, you know that this sort of analysis is almost certainly a waste of time. You're dealing with late 20th / early 21st century Hollywood, the place where dreams go to die.

But the Japanese are different. The less seriously they take themselves, the more likely they are to tackle complex ideas and deal with them well. (Maybe not so different as all that; one of the biggest problems Hollywood has these days is that it takes itself far too seriously.) We saw that with Popotan; a sillier, littler series you would be hard pressed to find, and yet the last few episodes are amazing.

And so we come to UFO Princess Valkyrie. The show has a gun that turns women into cat-girls, for crying out loud. And yet...

STEVEN, DO NOT CLICK HERE!!!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:54 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 538 words, total size 3 kb.

(That ranking doesn't mean they've sent us 32880 trackbacks [or whatever the number is when you see it]; it's subject to geometric decay, and they've been at it for hours, so it means they've sent us considerably more than 32880 trackbacks. Dickheads.)

(And what is it with Belgium and evil rat-bastard trackback spammers?)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:43 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 94 words, total size 1 kb.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:33 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 18 words, total size 1 kb.

Then the entire storage industry ran head first into a wall.*

For perspective, if that growth rate had continued until now, you would be able to buy a 3.2 terabyte disk right now. It would cost $500, but you could buy it. The largest disks actually on the market today are only 500 gigabytes.

At roughly the same time that the rotating rust makers hit the wall, though, flash memory was taking off. Since 2001, flash memory densities have doubled every year, with a 16 gigabit chip from Samsung due to hit the market later this year. 16 billion transistors on one chip.

If they continue at this pace, the capacity curves (though not the price curves) will intersect next year. Samsung has already announced a 32GB solid-state 1.8 inch drive; the largest 1.8 inch disk currently available is 60GB, not quite twice as large. And despite the promises of perpendicular recording, disk drive capacities have been growing at a glacial pace - relative to the expectations of the computer industry, anyway.

What this means is that within a few years, there will be no more scrik scrik scrik scrik, no more whirrrrrr-PAKLUNK, no more The disk in drive C: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?

And not a minute too soon, I say. Not a minute too soon.

* Not long after that, the CPU industry also ran into a wall, but that's another rant for another day. And besides, the CPU guys are working their butts off to go around, or over, or under the wall, with notable success; I don't doubt that the disk drive engineers are also hard at work, but they have less to show for it.

Incidentally, the 1.2GHz Athlons mentioned in that post ended up at the office as my development machines. One good thing about the lack of improvement in processors is that a five year old machine is still useful.**

** Five year old memory with a cascade of single bit errors is much less useful.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:45 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 403 words, total size 3 kb.