ReelChaos Blog

Just wanted to have a nice private conversation... Until the police stepped in.
http://www.websequencediagrams.com is cool
Here's my source:

note over Alice,Bob: Want to have a secure conversation
note over Bob,Frank: Roommates
Police->Alice: Taps Alice's line
Bob->Police: Pays off
activate Bob
Police->Bob: Informant
deactivate Bob
Bob->Alice: Stabs
note over Alice: Dies
Alice->Bob: Falls Down onto
Bob->Frank: Asks to borrow shovel
Frank->Bob: Lends shovel
Bob->Alice: Buries Body
Alice->Alice: Decomposes
Frank->Police: Calls the Authorities
Police->Bob: Arrest

Labels: comic, links, pages, web

I would first off like to state that I am not "into" recycling.  I do not believe in purchasing a canvas bag because I think that I'd always leave it at home.  The only time my consumer waste makes it into the recycling bin is when the trash is too full for it,  or when there is a large stack of it and it is convenient.  I just wanted to get the truth out there so that after reading this post you will have no questions as to what kind of "Eco" person I am.

 

All that being said there is something that I noticed as "Massive Waste" that I felt it important to bring to light.  I view the tech industry to be highly wasteful.  "How's that? Besides the obvious." you say?

 

When looking up one of my old laptops on HP's website I found a listing for 3 dozen different laptops with greatly varying features, in processor as well as in motherboard.  "Where's the waste? I'm sure that HP came out with those models in a economical fashion as possible" you say.  The waste and the harm of having multiple models occurs in the very notion of having "multiple models."  While I do realize that some tech creations are radically different in price because the actually cost more to manufacture,  what about the thousands of artificial costs created by just separating product into groups. 

 

Just look at the processors alone dozens and dozens of different grouping of different speed processors.  Each processor grouping and speed step is priced out differently in order to maximize profit.  It is not a giant leap to think that Intel has processors designed years into the future.  If Intel for example was to publish its latest off the bench processors as ready to use imaging how many processors thousands of ton's of processors sitting in landfills four years from now would be saved.

 

Right now, technology is created with the mentality "Tech for profit's sake,"  could you imagine if a radical shift of principal to "Tech for tech's sake" occurred.  This shift of principal is highly idealist,  not just idealist but altogether impossible since profit drives the creation of the next and great processor.  I recognize this idealist disconnect; however that does not mean that these tech companies in order to be "Eco Responsible"  could not implore some of this "tech for tech's sake" principal. 

 

How?  I do not have that many great ideas on this front.  However I do think that instead of an upper level manager asking an engineer by asking him "what do you think the next marginal upgrade to this product which makes us money?"  That  manager should be asking  "What will be our next great product?"

 

Think about that shift in manufacturing principals next time you decide between the 8400 and the 9650 video cards or the 500gb hard drive and the 1.5TB hard drive, or the next thing you buy.

 

Also part of me wrote this because I want tomorrows processor today!

Labels: editorial, Enviorment, opinion

Lets say that you want a list of network apps running in windows at a given time. I have written a simple script in Powershell to handle this:

function global:get-netapps
{
$myfile = (& netstat -abno )
$mymatches = $myfile -match "\[(?.*\.exe)\]`$"
$results = ""
foreach ($line in $mymatches)
{
if ($results.Contains($line.Replace('[','').Replace(']','')) -eq 0)
{
$results += $line.Replace('[','').Replace(']','') + "`n"
}
}
$results

}
Set-Alias lsnetapps get-netapps -Scope "global"

just run: get-netapps or lsnetapps

Labels: Powershell, Script, tips

So I thought I'd create a simple JavaScript progress bar/ percent bar to keep track of my progress on various things, its not complete for main use but it wouldn't take more than a minute to modify the code to be used on anyone's page, so if you are looking for a quick progress bar that is ie7 ff2 compatible (I didn't care to test on any other browser).

Take a look

* The Following does not necessarily apply to code (as I do like nice wide code lines)*

So I was wondering why my girlfriend has been using her tablet-pc in wide screen mode instead of collapsing it to portrait. Not just wide screen mode but collapsing the power point presentations she studies off of to 1/4 of the screen. This seemed an odd behavior to myself who has at any given time made it a point to take up as much screen real estate as possible for the task I am on. So i asked her (this post is a retrospective on that conversation)...

Why do newspapers still use Column Typography? And what do those narrow columns have to do with your screens real estate. Well as it turns out your eyes get tired of moving back and forth over too long a line. Also if a line is too long, as your eyes scan the line and move to the next, it is more challenging for them to find the correct next line (don't you just hate when a large list of information is not alternate-highlighted). This effect impacts the amount you take back from the viewing area in question. The same concept in perspective is why I have always chosen to sit toward the back edge of a theater, so that my eyes are not constantly scanning the action on the screen and that the screen is confined to a particular viewing area. This allows one to "take in" all of the information simultaneously.

It has a lot to do with character recognition: Pretend you are zoomed in seeing a farmer walking through a "folded corn husk" phenomena. As you zoom out you see plainly that he's standing in a crop circle. When you read a word like "board" your brain processes the "b" first and then the "d", the "oar" is filled in by you brain as you read rapidly. The "oar" does not even need to be complete. When you read "b[]ard" quickly and move on to the next word you don't even feel the letter "o" changed to "[]" affecting your speedy read.

The spacing matters because the horizontal span of the word has to be small in your visual field in order for you to recognize these letters ("oar") as a character group and preform a rapid recognition of that word ("b" + "d" + "oar"), if the horizontal span is too long (i.e. the letters/spacing is too big: " b o a r d ") you are forced to sound out the word letter by letter or at very least group character recognition is slowed.

The moral of this story is that if you are trying to take in a large bit of information quickly shrink that pdf window down to a readable scale (small book print, or whatever your eyes are good with) and don't rely on your full screen 17 laptop let you soak it in quickly.
So let come the time of smaller fonts (but not too small), higher resolutions (but not to high), higher dpi screens (way way higher!), and tiny screens (but not too tiny)!

A little further proof:

Labels: GTD, Mind Hacks, Studying

This will my homage to Usenet.
Background:
NZB files are like Torrent files in that they outline where you can get the files you are looking for usually alt.binaries.something.
A Usenet client connects to a server which a user pays for e.g. (giganews.com), it then requests from the server the files which were outlined in the .nzb file. It downloads it pretty fast (800KB/s in my case) which means a typical 800mb documentary can be had in around 20 minutes! What downloads is lots of .rar .r01 .rNN, as well as .par2 files.
Par2 files are parity files which will allow a .rNN file to be repaired or regenerated depending on how complete your download is.
Now I download a lot... So I like it all to be extracted and dumped into a folder when extracted.
My simple scripts to automate this:
Repair all:

for i in *.par2; do par2repair $i; done

Remove all:

rm *.PAR2
rm *.par2
rm *.nzb
rm *.r*
rm *sample*

Move all:

for i in *.avi; do mkdir ${i/.avi*}; mv ${i/.avi*}* ${i/.avi*}/; done

Other titles for this blog post include but are not limited to:

Qualitative review of top Operating Systems, My way of showing that I heart Server 2008, Another way to review Operating Systems, Post your own Operating System Review, How I learned to stop worrying and love Microsoft.

Okay now for the post:

Recently I built myself a "Hackintosh" and even as I'm writing this the spellchecker is prompting me to change it to Mackintosh. A post on how it was built will follow. This means that I now have all the major OS's running all around me: Vista, Leopard, XP, and Server 2008. Because of this I realized that this "qualified" me to write an operating system review in which I compare benchmarks and other highly quantitative figures till I'm blue in the face and you're bored of reading this post. On the topic of reading this post, I didn't think anyone read my blog until a few comments appeared on some of my older posts… well this post should take care of that. Anyhow, I decided not to review these OS's quantitatively but rather qualitatively. By that I mean how irritating these operating systems are.

Notes: These images reflect my opinion; if you don't agree please feel free to make your own review with the templates posted toward the bottom. The red line depicts my "developer" opinion of irritation on the operating system, and the black line a more user centric opinion.

Windows Vista
– It's been pooped on a lot by everyone…but I still use it

Leopard Mac OS 10.5 – It is user friendly but irritates like all the rest

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn – I have the most amount of fun running this and I get the least amount done

Windows Server 2008 –Wow, just wow

The truth is that on all operating system there is a "getting used to it" period, a "wow" period and an "I hate this" period. It comes down to the fact that all operating systems have their quirks and you just get used to them… Except Windows ME – whata peacea junk. Oh... and you start swearing by them (os's) and become an annoying forum troll who's only purpose is to keep osnews.com in business (j/k I love osnews).

Well there you have it, as I am sure this review will become the new standard in testing operating systems on users below are the templates, I would love to see your graphs and comments linked in the comment section.

Labels: linux, mac, Operating Systems, review, ubuntu, windows