Now, weave in our recent thread about consumer eugenics and designer babies. If consumer eugenics becomes cheap and ubiquitous, as I suspect it will, won't religious people want their offsprings' genes tweaked to make them religious, too? With the result, if those differential birthrates hold up, that the world will become more religious generation by generation?
I can think of few more things more damaging to religion that the discovery that it is even partly genetic in origin and readily manipulable. If your belief system can be set by simple genetic tweaking, as Derbyshire would have it, then it seems to be of no more significance than blue eyes or brown.
I'm not greatly concerned by this, but I think that those in favour of religion should be.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:32 AM
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Bleh
I've been down with a cold all week, which is why I've been less active than normal. I'm trying to finish translating Minx from the proof-of-concept model to the production design, but that's hard to do when your head is all squishy.
Worse, I think the cough that took me out for three weeks last October is coming back. Well, it's nothing like as bad yet, but it feels similar. Or maybe it's just a cough; I don't know.
I'd go back to bed except that it's nearly 30 degrees here at Pixy Central even with the air conditioner running non-stop.
I'd eat some ice cream except that seems to aggravate the cough.
I'd drink some of my nice iced tea except I already drank it all.
I'd go to the shop and buy some more except that it's even hotter outside, and as I said, my head is all squishy.
Meanwhile, I was doing some testing, converting all the munu blogs to Minx using my automagical converter program. Two problems cropped up:
First, it took 50 minutes to convert everything, which seemed a bit slow. It's less than 15 seconds per blog, and that involves pulling the data out of the old database as well as putting it into the new one (this is a direct db-to-db transfer rather than an export/import function) - but that's still slower than I'd hoped.
Second, the resulting database was nearly twice the size of the original Movable Type one. I know I have a lot of new fields to account for the extra functionality, but I was very careful about how and when and where they were added, so I was extremely disappointed to see that they caused that much bloat. Essentially, that would mean I'd need twice the memory on the database servers to handle the same number of users, which makes for a lot more expense.
And then I discovered a leetle bug in the conversion program. That caused it to copy each blog twice. Which would account for 50% of the slow and 100% of the bloat.
My head feels a bit better now.
Update: Well, it fixed the size problem. The speed problem, not so much. The code isn't the issue; 45 minute run time vs. 4 minutes CPU. I'll move on to the import routine and see if it's the pull/push nature that's slowing it down.
Update: The dread cough of doom seems to be in hiding. Let's hope it stays that way. It's also set to be a lot cooler the next few days, with predicted maximums of 23 to 23 degrees, where today it was as I said 30 degrees indoors with the air conditioner running...
Now if I could just lose the headache, I'd be almost happy.
(At the risk of gloating... I had a cold this week too. I had to clear my throat several times a day, and once I coughed 3 or 4 times! Easily the worst cold I've had in years. Hehe. )
Posted by: TallDave at Saturday, January 13 2007 04:59 PM (odS+4)
Your headache is probably due to caffeine withdrawal.
If you're using 4 CPU minutes on a 23-minute program run, I would bet it means you're disk-bound. Changing your disk cache settings might improve it considerably.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, January 13 2007 07:03 PM (+rSRq)
3
I hadn't really been sick for ages up until October.
And yeah, being sick is a pain. Bad enough when you're sick and working for someone else, but being sick when you're self-employed really sucks.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 14 2007 11:06 AM (GaSFI)
Yeah, I found that out myself when I went independent several years ago. There are no sick days working for yourself, just days you didn't make any money. Chronic illness = bankruptcy.
That's about when I started my Vitamin C kick. I can't be sure it's not all in my head, but I feel better. Seem to help along my recovery from laser surgery, too; my body was absorbing a lot more C after the trauma of the surgery, and the doc was surprised how fast I healed.
Of course, it could also be all the green tea exctract or curcumin or the million other things LEF puts in my mix. Hard to do empirical study on one's self.
Ditto on the caffeine withdrawal; the only time I get headaches anymore is when I am inexplicably and onforgivably out of tea.
Posted by: TallDave at Sunday, January 14 2007 06:27 PM (odS+4)
Steven: Some of the issues you raise are major plot points. Some of them aren't, but are nonetheless resolved satisfactorily by the end of the series. Some of them are ignored as the action heats up, but some of them come to the fore just as the action heats up.
Just to comment on what Steven has written about P2P:
First, I'll be getting my anime OP/ED site back up shortly, but initially it will be direct download. I have the bandwidth to spare, and I can manage the interface nicely with the current version of Minx, but I don't have BT support working yet.
Second, on BitTorrent itself. BT is different from most P2P applications (or at least the older ones) in that it's a file-swarming protocol rather than a file-sharing system. If you look at the standard BT client (which is open-source, and written in Python), it downloads one file at a time, and shares only that file with others, and only while you leave the program running. You can certainly end up uploading more than you download, particularly with the way I had the site set up before. With 50 or so torrents active, I could only allocate a limited amount of bandwidth to each, so downloaders would preferentially get data from other users (if there were any).
If you use a program like Azureus or μTorrent, it looks more like a traditional P2P app, but still has a difference: Only the torrents you specifically have active are shared. You can't share your whole anime directory; the programs just don't support doing that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, January 10 2007 04:37 PM (+rSRq)
2
The wide screen is essential. Just about every show is widescreen these days. Crescent Love is widescreen, and it won the worst animation honors with the cantalope (or did it?). So it's the killer feature. The rest is rather unimportant for me, and of course I regret paying for the telephone handset electronics which I am not going to use ever. But it's not all that much premium.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wednesday, January 10 2007 05:17 PM (9imyF)
B-b-b-but Pixy, you don't need a stylus! *rolls eyes* And you can prank-call Starbucks with it!
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, January 10 2007 10:39 PM (CJ5+Y)
5
I think Pete was referring to the TV box with his "wide screen" comment.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, January 11 2007 12:10 AM (+rSRq)
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I meant the iPhone, and by the way, its resolution is far higher than that of any Pilot, at least in DPI figures. But it was brought to my attention that the memory capacity is miniscule on the device (4GB). I'd need to put all anime on SD cards. This makes it suck harder than PSP, which can do the same today, costs 2 times less, and has a bigger screen (physically bigger, not in pixels).
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, January 11 2007 12:33 AM (9imyF)
7I meant the iPhone, and by the way, its resolution is far higher than that of any Pilot, at least in DPI figures.
I double-checked. Both are 320x480. My Palm Pilot has a 3.9" screen, as against 3.5" for the iPhone, so the iPhone is 10% better on DPI. That's higher, but not far higher.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 11 2007 01:17 AM (GaSFI)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 11 2007 08:23 PM (GaSFI)
10
If you don't want the phone, but want the other goodies, just be patient. I'd guess not much more than a year before the next gen ipod launches.
In the keynote, Jobs made a big deal about the three devices in one (iPod, Phone, internet communicator) I don't doubt that one day there will be an iPod that is also an internet communicator that is not a phone.
Posted by: Stephen Macklin at Thursday, January 11 2007 10:42 PM (Z3kjO)
11
Well, the iPhone is six months away in the US and probably a year away for Australia, so we may very well get the video iPod first.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 12 2007 01:46 AM (GaSFI)
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I, for one, welcome our new telephonic overlord.
Buy one. Become "cool". Conform ......
Posted by: Kristopher at Friday, January 12 2007 11:49 AM (jcvPd)
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And apparently you can't install your own software on it because you might break Cingular's network or something.
Yay.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 13 2007 08:22 AM (GaSFI)
I still haven't figured why I got a phone with a camera in it when that was the Next Big Thing. Maybe it was the horror in the eyes of the Radio Shack guys when I told them I won't buy a new phone more often than once every 4 years.
GPS is the frst useful feature I've wanted in a cellphone since the belt clip.
Posted by: TallDave at Thursday, January 18 2007 10:12 PM (odS+4)
I should have guessed: There must be four dragons. The third dragon is only revealed in volume 10 of the manga (just released this month), so this trailer contains spoilers even if you're up to date with the manga.
Also contains tipples. So NSFW, if your work frowns on that. (Actually, it's a pretty crummy trailer. There may be a better one available; I'm downloading it now.)
It looks like it continues on from the first series, which is problematic because they kind of mangled the plot in the first series so that they could have an "ending". I don't remember if the dragons showed up in the anime at all.
Okay, the trailer I downloaded is just a higher-quality version of the one at YouTube. I'll upload it later.
Suggested retail price of $399; the Seagate 750GB drive sells for around $340, so that's a pretty good deal. Seagate launched the 750GB back in April at a price of $559.
This is good news, because I need a bunch of these. And SoftLayer do use Hitachi drives. (I just checked: Akane has Hitachi drives; Nabiki has Western Digital. Ranma, which is hosted at LayeredTech, also has Western Digital.)
The new drives are 5-platter models, so they don't actually represent an advance in areal density, but they do represent an advance in the amount of storage you can jam into a 1U server.
I was --><-- this close last night to pulling the trigger on buying a handful of 500 gig drives last night to stick in a media server. Glad I waited.
(not that I'd buy a handful of these right off the bat -- I just want them to drive down the price of the 500 gigers!)
In a 1U server do you just mirror drives? On that note -- out of curiosity, what do you do for backups? I retired all our tape drives in favor of just copying two redundant copies of all our data on all the different servers on two JBOD boxen, but I can't help feeling that my way is somewhat schleppy.
Posted by: bkw at Saturday, January 06 2007 01:55 PM (bRLba)
2
RAID-5 for files, RAID-10 for databases. (The 1U servers I use have four drive bays.)
And yeah, I back up my files by copying everything onto another computer. (Or archive it onto DVD-R if it's static data.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 06 2007 08:51 PM (GaSFI)
Just finished watching Full Moon wo Sagashite. Recommended, even if it made my head hurt. (That might be more due to the fact that I need new glasses than anything unique to this show, anyway.)
For those of you who have already seen it, Will at Criminally Weird has some thoughts. (If you haven't seen it, he still has some thoughts, but big spoiler warning.)
1
If it's any consolation, I half-watched a good portion of Full Moon wo Sagashite in fansub over my sister's shoulder, and it made my head hurt too.
It left me with an impression that it was a good show, a few songs that are still stuck in my head, and the addition of the phrase "and then I'll unleash a horde of cyber-ninja upon Tokyo" to my vocabulary. (The last being part of my reaction to what I recall as being increasingly disproportionate plots on the part of the rival girl to destroy Full Moon's career.)
Oh, and it left me with a burning desire to write a fanfic entitled "Sailor Moon wo Sagashite", but that's another story...
Posted by: Aaron Nowack at Saturday, January 06 2007 12:32 PM (EYox2)
