Posts by Robert Moore 778 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2007
Everything old is new again.
When we finally get enough power on the desktop, we start moving the processing back into the data centre. I am still trying to figure out how this will not just recreate the problems of the dumb terminal/mainframe architecture of yesteryear.
Any bets on how long until we start moving everything back out of the data centre and back on to the desktop?
Over here in Canada, I was into the Dragon 32s brother the Radio Shack TRS-80 Colour Computer.
Sadly I let all that old stuff go, and am not paying a fortune to buy back pieces of what I once had.
I now have:
COCO 3, with drive controller, no drives. (Looking for them)
Model 100
Model 200
PC-2 with thermal printer.
The COCO 3, cost me nearly what they sold for when they were new. :(
Nostalgia is expensive.
There is no money in cures. Treatments on the other hand are a great source of revenue.
HIV might be the exception, due to the high fear, and the fame one would receive for a cure.
I had a good friend die from AIDS in the early 80's before anyone really knew much about it. So I still hope for a real cure.
Reason I use vi.
I figured sooner or later I would encounter a broken system without my preferred text editor, and EVERY *nix system has vi.
It happened about 3 months after I made the decision to embrace vi. An old Solaris system that I had inherited with the job, decided to fail on a Wednesday afternoon. Payroll was run on Thursday, and of course the payroll system was tied to that Solaris box in a way no one understood anymore. (System was built by the guy who left before the person I replaced.)
Took me a couple of hours to figure out what was going on, correct the issue, and get a working system again. It would have been a much longer process if I had not gotten comfortable with vi.
I was a hero to the payroll people. :)
vi for ubiquitousness.
I bought one. Yesterday as a mater of fact.
I really have not had much of a chance to play with it yet, but I am fairly impressed with the speed to cost ratio.
I am however less than impressed with chrome. I think I am going to dual boot it. But I am going to give Chrome a few days to see what I really think.
I am looking to get a new phone soon, so I have been paying attention lately.
This is what I see in an average day.
iPhones Nearly half of the phone I see
Various android phones Probably close to 30% (Increasing rapidly)
Blackberry I would say about 15% and falling.
Non-smart phones 10%
I have never seen a windows phone in the wild.
Full disclosure. I have an iPhone 4, and am probably replacing it with an Android phone.
I for one can hardly wait for self driving cars to hit the market (No pun intended.)
The reason is that the people who would be first in line to buy self driving cars will be a lot of the people you don't want driving. Partial list below:
My mother. (Slow, and unobservant.)
My sister, (Aggressive.)
My brother, (Drinker.)
In fact when the price gets reasonable, and if I can get a deal on insurance, I might think about getting one myself, for the boring commute to and from work. I wouldn't mind taking a nap in the back seat.
Keep my real car for when i can actually have some fun with it.
If you are going to do it more than three times, script it.
OK, maybe cron.
If you are getting good at bash scripting, and want to use cron to run them at scheduled times for some reason they run fine when you run them manually, but fail when run by cron change the first line in the script to:
#!/bin/bash -l
The -l argument specifies a login shell. If your usual login sets a lot of environment variables this can quickly sold a multitude of strange problems.
(Very useful for scripting oracle schema exports/imports.
It is about the price.
At $35 (Sorry Canadian here.) if I break a Raspberry PI while working with it, I use some profanity, and go order a new one. At $100 I worry about breaking it and don't try to use it to build a heads up display for my car.
This is the same thing that happened with netbooks. the first one came out at a very good price, but every time a new model or competitor came along it was bigger, more powerful, or had new features, and of course the price went up.
I hope this doesn't happen. I hope people are smart enough to stick with the Raspberry PI, because it is the best bang for your buck. Plus the community that has developed around it is fantastic.
It seems to me that 50% of all searches that these vendors will get access to will be something like "disable amazon in ubuntu searches"
Here is my thinking.
One search for "ubuntu install PACKAGENAME" or "ubuntu configure FEATURE"
Some profanity.
One search for "disable amazon in ubuntu searches"
No more results.
Annoying, but hardly the end of the world.
Why not trigger the launch when the balloon breaks.
It seems simple to me. Have a switch as the connection point to the balloon, when the balloon breaks, a spring flips the switch to the on position, and the rocket fires.
Simple toggle switch, with a hole drilled through the toggle.
Connect the balloon to the toggle.
Spring pressing down on toggle.
Tension from balloon holds the switch in the off position.
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