You are currently browsing the archives for the Computology category.
May 24, 2008 by ignatiof.
I do backups regularly. I have a two-tier system. One backup transfers essential files, password protected, to a distant location. The other backup makes backups of all my personal files to a USB hard disk. Also, my pictures are stored on flickr, which acts as a backup of sorts.
Unfortunately, the only things I forgot to backup were the backup scripts that I wrote. And guess what happened? That’s right - I lost them. I was attempting to run a full backup, which was supposed to change directory to my USB hard drive and delete all contents. The change directory command failed. But the script carried on, wiping out everything in the directory where my backup script was stored. At least that’s what I assume happened. I no longer have the backup script so I can’t exactly review the logic.
Now I gotta write the damn script over from scratch…
Posted in Computology | Print | No Comments »
April 9, 2008 by ignatiof.
Before you get out your fly-swatters and bug bait, lemme clarify what a 50-year bug is. Tis not a bug that lives to 50 years old. (Now I’m not a bugologist, so I can’t be sure that bugs don’t live that long.)
No, I’m talking about computer software bugs. These are the bugs that are extremely rare. The ones that happen on average ‘every 50 years’. Good luck debugging one of those SOBs.
I found a bug a few days ago that happened in some code I wrote, but only once in every 50-100 years of simulated execution time. It was pretty cool. I was simulating seasons of a soccer league, and it would crash after running for quite a few seasons. It took a while to track down the culprit. I assumed it was a problem with the way I was storing stats or extracting stats. After all, that’s where the crash happened.
At the end of every simulated season, my program would advance the calendar by one year. What I forgot to do, and the core of the bug, was reset the month. So if the first season started in February and ended in June the next year’s season would start in June. That worked fine for a while, until the playoffs were eventually scheduled to start on January 1st. The program would attempt to get the standings for the calendar year to set playoff seedings, and would crash because the regular season has happened the previous year. Ooops.
I’d like to say I learned something from this experience, but I didn’t.
Posted in Computology | Print | No Comments »
February 26, 2008 by ignatiof.
According to Wikipedia, the Commodore 64 sold 30 million units during its lifetime. Each of those units came with 64 kilobytes of RAM. Today’s home-use machines have 1-4 gigabytes of RAM.
64-kB = 65536 bytes
1-GB = 1073741824 bytes
That’s a ratio of 16,384 times. For 4-GB it goes up to 65536. In other words a machine with 4 gigabytes of RAM has the equivalent RAM of 65,536 Commodore 64s.
All the C64s in the world had a total amount of RAM equal to 30,000,000 times 65536, which is: 1966080000000 bytes, or about 1.8 terabytes. Some consumer hard drives are at the 1-TB mark now - the same amount of storage as the RAM in about 15 million C64s. I can see the day coming when my personal laptop will have more memory than the total from all the C64s ever made.
Posted in Computology | Print | No Comments »
February 17, 2008 by ignatiof.
I’ve done it. After 14 years of using Windows, I have switched to an alternative. I’m now running Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on my main computer. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, so it wasn’t as drastic a change as it could have been. (I’m still running Windows XP on an older machine for games.)
Of things that matter to me, there are only a handful of things better about Ubuntu than Windows:
Beyond that, everything else is pretty minor. There’s a few oddities here and there, but the same could be said about Vista. As far as what I can do with it, there’s not much difference.
Posted in Computology | Print | 1 Comment »
January 31, 2008 by ignatiof.
Microsoft has been given a hard time over the years for its repeated theft of other institutions’ innovations. I feel that they have not been given enough credit for the many innovations that they have made, so I have compiled a list of all Microsoft technologies that I consider to be original. Here they are, in alphabetical order:
There ya go. That’s the whole list.
Of course, I’m kidding. They have done more than that. Here’s the real list of Microsoft innovations:
Posted in Computology | Print | No Comments »
December 16, 2006 by ignatiof.
Wait til June
Posted in Neat Stuff, Computology | Print | No Comments »
November 21, 2006 by ignatiof.
Consider this possible scenario:
Time: late 80s/early 90s
Alice: Bob, do you own a computer?
Bob: Why yes Alice, I do. It’s a 286.
Flash forward a bunch of years to 2006
Alice: Bob, do you own a computer?
Bob: No, I just have a 286.
Funny huh? It’s the same machine, but it used to be considered a computer, and now it’s not. Even funnier is my use of Alice here just as a placeholder, and the fact that Bob no longer has a computer, while the percentage of households with computers in the world has risen dramatically. Bob is obviously some sort of angry backward society-hating Unibomber type chap hell bent on destroying civilization as we know it, and he should be stopped at all costs. I suggest sending in a tag team of Superman, Batman, and the pink Power Ranger.
Posted in Computology | Print | 1 Comment »
November 12, 2006 by ignatiof.
Iit iis just a week from the release of the new Niintendo console, and Ii’m fiinally gettiing pumped. Thiis one iis goiing to be great. Ii am really lookiing forward to usiing the controller as a liightsabre, a tenniis racket, and a mediieval sword. Not to mentiion that iit iis goiing to play all of my old Gamecube games so Ii don’t need more space on my shelf for a new console. Gamecube comes out, Wiiii goes iin. Beauty.
Now to deciide what game to buy wiith iit.
Posted in Neat Stuff, Computology | Print | 1 Comment »
October 5, 2006 by ignatiof.
Recently on a post here on my blog I extoled the virtues of the Nokia N93, a fantastic little (big) phone with a sensible digital camera, camcorder, WiFi, and a kitchen sink.
Now however, Nokia has topped even themselves. I didn’t buy the N93 because of the price, but Nokia has gone ahead and built something better. Are you surprised? Don’t be. It’s the N95. This one has an even better camera (5 megapixel), and a different form factor (slider instead of foldie). I think it’s probably somewhat smaller but don’t quote me on that.
Can’t wait to see the specs on the N97…
Posted in Neat Stuff, Computology | Print | No Comments »
September 4, 2006 by ignatiof.
This is my first post about a new piece of utility software that I’m working on. I’ve tentatively named it PSP Companion, and unlike most of the other PSP software out there for video, images, and music, this one is for managing web articles for offline reading on the portable device.
It’s a Windows-only application, written in C#, which means it uses the .NET framework. You can download that here.
Here’s the link (40kB) to download my application. There’s no installer yet; just the application. It will create a file called ’settings.txt’ in the same folder that it runs from. When you run it you will see a screen split in four pieces. The left half is the hard drive section. The top is the list of web pages on the hard drive folder you are working from. The lower half is a web preview of the page if you have the Preview button turned on. The right side is the PSP section, with the list of files at the top and the web preview at the bottom. You can move files between lists using the Move buttons, and you can Delete with the Delete button. Whenever a file is moved, a new ‘index.html’ is generated on the PSP side which indexes all the articles.
To ues the index articles on the PSP, make a folder under the PSP folder on the memory card for storing articles. In the web browser, set up a favourite to the index page and there you go. Any questions, leave a comment.
Posted in Neat Stuff, Computology | Print | No Comments »