Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill

Random expat geekery from The Low Countries

Talkback

  • Snowpocalypse: Belgium (1)
    • HUMBERT Liliane: We had the same on thursday, which still stay a little bit in the garden. Raphaël and Laureline had...
  • The Greatest Addiction Ever (5)
    • Gav: Not when it was being bankrolled by the extreme d*ckhead wing of the tory party – no.
    • Paul: Debate in the loosest sense of the word then. That probably shouldn’t surprise me really, should it?
    • Gav: I’m not as surprised. The right wing anti-voting reform pulled out all of the stops. Where I live they...
    • Paul: I think I saw his voting reform video – if it’s the one I’m thinking of, it was very good...

Browsing Posts in Technology

Of clouds and panaceas or: The hype cycle

February 1, 2012 No comments

I like Sean Chandler’s column on the System i Network. He’s been around a bit and tends to take a slightly jaundiced view of the next big thing, discarding the hype and looking for the parts that might be useful. This month its the turn of “The Cloud” and the claim that they can solve all of your Big Data Problems.

Big Data refers to the expanding volume of unstructured data (email, Word documents, PDFs, and so on) that businesses accumulate and – increasingly – are obliged to retain. The problem is twofold; firstly you have to find somewhere to put all of this stuff and, secondly, you need to be able to retrieve it reasonably quickly. For this, “The Cloud” is often touted as a one-size-fits-all solution, often by people who understand marketing better than they understand IT.

Chandler hits exactly the right note when he says:

The key word there is “supplement.” Cloud-based storage doesn’t replace tape storage. It doesn’t replace near-line disk storage. It’s simply another tool in the toolkit. You may want to, for example, move archived data to both cloud storage and tape storage selectively. For instance, full system backups are better suited to tape, but targeted file backups may reasonably go to both tape and cloud storage.

Technologies come, technologies go, technologies are reinvented. When new technologies are announced, or older technologies are reinvented, they are often surrounded by a great deal of hype and an endless array of breathless commentators telling us how this new shiny thing will change the way we work, play, communicate, eat, sleep, or whatever. Nothing ever lives up to this hype, however, and it’s often when the technology goes – or disappears from the headlines – that it begins to become useful. This is the point when the marketing pressure starts to ease off and people can begin to look at how the new or changed technology can be realistically used.

Cloud storage is here to stay. But it won’t begin to become a useful tool until the press stops talking about it.

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IBM i none

Looptastic

January 28, 2012 No comments

While playing around with Dicetastic earlier this week, I started to feel the need to optionally loop the program so that I didn’t have to repeatedly re-execute the command. This is now implemented and the latest and greatest version has been committed to GitHub.

The changes are documented on the Dicetastic page but the shorter version is that if you start Dicetastic with a -l or --loop, it will loop until you attempt to roll 0d0.

As part of this, I have added two methods to the Dicelib library, get_sides and get_count. They are documented, but their usage should be obvious.

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Linux ,

Of GUIs and Command Lines or: The modernisation trap

January 27, 2012 No comments

I have, over the past few months, noticed a bit of an oddity in my IT-related behaviour (I already knew about the rest of my behaviour). I work as an IBM i developer and, over the years, I have jumped on an started using pretty much every graphical tool I can find. Then I go home, boot up my Linux powered laptop, and spend half my evening in the terminal.

So why the disconnect?

I think it comes down to the fact that modernisation has become a hot topic within the IBM i community over the past few years, and it’s a bandwagon that many people jump into without pausing to define what they mean by ‘modern’. The result is that a great deal of emphasis is placed on the application front end with nowhere near enough thought being given to what overheads these tools incur.

Obviously, graphical tools have many advantages. A well designed GUI is intuitive, easy to use and can put a great deal of information onto a screen in an easily digestible form. There is, however, a performance overhead to be taken into account – both in terms of network traffic and the load on the local user’s CPU. For many applications, especially applications aimed at the business end-user, this performance cost is well worth paying.

For the technical user, though, it’s not quite so clear cut.

Once you know your way around an operating system, and the text-based tools that come with it, it is often the case that the command line is a quicker and more effective method of completing a task. In these cases, the GUI approach gets in the way of achieving stuff and becomes a source of noisy frustration (as the unfortunates who share an office with me can attest).

GUI based applications do have their uses, of course, and there are plenty of tasks for which a graphical approach is the most appropriate. But sometimes it isn’t.

The challenge, therefore, when faced with a shiny new tool is to ask yourself this: How will this tool make my life easier?

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IBM i, Linux

Cleaning up some code

January 25, 2012 No comments

It was in the middle of last year that I implemented what I rather ambitiously referred to as a wallpaper switcher for Gnome 2. What Macsen’s Transitioning Background does is generate an XML file based on the images in a selected folder and then let the Gnome background switcher handle the rest.

With the switch to Gnome 3 this functionality is no longer supported. At least, not as far as I can tell.

I do still like the idea of using an XML file to control the background and have been toying with the idea of knocking together myself. As a first step towards this, I have tidied up some of the code.

The latest version of the source can be found on GitHub. The generated XML can be used to power a transitioning background in Gnome 2 and – if I ever find the time – I will start knocking together something that will work under Gnome 3.

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Linux , ,

The perfect tablet user identified

January 25, 2012 No comments

I have often said that I don’t really see the point of the tablet form factor. Android tablets and iPads alike strike me as being devices that are a collection of compromises – less portable than a phone and less powerful that a laptop – and, as such, not particularly useful. However, here’s one that might make me change my mind.

According to El Reg, Inspiration Works are preparing to unleash a tablet specifically targeted towards kids.

The Kurio is an Android-based slate, spruced up with a kid-friendly UI and behind-the-scenes parental controls. While adults can still use the Kurio as a fully-fledged fondleslab, the tablet is clearly aimed at children and it’s the security measures that really matter here.

It’s due to hit shelves in July and there are three models on the way. I will be keeping an eye on this one.

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Mobile, Toys

Unity online or: Ubuntu’s try before you download

January 24, 2012 No comments

Linux distributions already make it easy to try them out without comitting yourself beyond your comfort zone. Most will guide you through partitioning your disk so that you don’t lose what is already installed, and may provide live media which allow you to boot from a CD, DVD or USB stick and try out the distro without any risk whatsoever.

Canonical, the folks behind Ubuntu, have now made it even easier to try out their distro with a virtual desktop online (which I found via +rich scadding).

While Unity is not for me (Gnome Shell FTW) I do think that this is a great idea, and one that has been very well implemented.

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Linux

And, we’re back

January 18, 2012 No comments

And, for the last word on SOPA, here’s a copyright infringing YouTube video that I found via Nina Paley.

The Day the LOLcats died

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Audio, Censorship, Copyright, Trademarks and Patents, Corporate Insanity, Digital, Liberties, Video, Web , ,

Tim O’Reilly on why SOPA and PIPA are bad for business

January 17, 2012 No comments

The supporters of SOPA, and it’s Senate sister, PIPA claim that it will protect content industries. Tim O’Reilly very effectively takes this argument apart.

At O’Reilly, we have published ebooks DRM-free for the better part of two decades. We’ve watched the growth of this market from its halting early stages to its robust growth today. More than half of our ebook sales now come from overseas, in markets we were completely unable to serve in print. While our books appear widely on unauthorized download sites, our legitimate sales are exploding. The greatest force in reporting unauthorized copies to us is our customers, who value what we do and want us to succeed. Yes, there is piracy, but our embrace of the internet’s unparalleled ability to reach new customers “though it may not be perfect still secures to authors more money than any other system that can be devised.”

These bills are designed to protect companies that are unable – or unwilling – to respond to current market demands. Any law that tries to protect unrealistic business models is, inherently, a bad law.

I am aware that SOPA has been shelved. But being shelved is not the same as being killed. And PIPA is still working its way through the Senate legislative process.

I said yesterday that this site is going dark on Wednesday, as is Pulpmovies, in support of the Stop SOPA campaign. This is still going to happen.

Update

It turns out that SOPA has just been unshelved.

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Censorship, Corporate Insanity, Digital, Liberties, Web ,

I’m joining the internet blackout to protest SOPA/PIPA on January 18th

January 15, 2012 No comments

On January 18th, between 08:00 and 20:00 UTC, this little corner of the internet will be joining Identi.ca, Boing Boing, Rasberry Pi, and many others in an internet blackout in protest of the Stop Online Privacy Act proposed in the US Congress and its corresponding Senate bill, Protect IP.

This is a badly drafted bill, promoted by people who don’t understand its impact for the benefit of people who don’t care about your freedoms. It is so widely cast and so badly worded that it will limit what you can say online, regardless of whether you are in the US or not.

You can find more information on the SOPA/PIPA bills, and how they affect you whether or not you live in the USA, at americancensorship.org. And I hope that if you run any sort of Web service or publishing platform, you will join this blackout.

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Censorship, Corporate Insanity, Digital, Liberties, Web ,

Dicetastic: Now with convention conforming goodness

January 13, 2012 No comments

I mentioned yesterday that I had been playing around with Pylint and slowly cleaning up my existing code. The first result of this can now be seen online – I have just just committed the cleaned up code for Dicetastic to my GitHub repository.

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Linux , ,
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