lizard_SF's Xanga

Long Time, No Blog

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 19:06:15 GMT

Ah, it's a brand new year.
I resolve to not post any resolutions, task lists, hopes, dream, projections, fears, or any other folderol here.

Mostly, I've been working. Day job, review job, tech writing job, assorted amusing financial issues, the various holidays and the havoc they play with scheduling, etc, etc, etc. Also, yesterday, in order to glom onto the tax credit, I grabbed an iPod Touch. Now comes the endless process of buying/downloading/etc software for it. 32 gig is a lot ofspace for things.

Today's Thought On Dwindling Tech Prices

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:22:06 GMT

One of the major moments in the Collapse Of Tech Prices was when hard disks broke the "Dollar a megabyte" barrier, when a company began offering a 1 GB drive for 999.00. This was 1994.

Yesterday, in Wal-Mart, I saw a 1 TB drive for 99.00.

At 1000 dollars/gigabyte, that drive would have cost (Dr. Evil voice) One....millllion.....dollars. (First person to point out that a gigabyte 1024 MB, not 1000, gets looked at disdainfully for missing the point.)

So in 15 years, storage has gone from ~$1.00/MB to ~$0.00009 megabyte. It's also become much faster and more reliable; to buy a drive in 1994 with the kind of quality and error protection that a modern drive has would send the price even higher.

A few seconds research (and let us not pause to try and remember when, precisely, the time between "Hmm, I wonder what..." and "Oh, OK" became equal to the time it took to type the question) shows that while there's no absolute clear answer on the storage capacity of the human brain, estimates go from a low of 1-10 TB to a high of 300-500 TB. Let's just say it's a petabyte, giving a lot of room for error.

So, today, about 100,000.00 worth of storage -- less, really, as economies of scale, yadda yadda, means the cost of 1 PB is going to be at least a bit less than buying 1000 1TB drives from Wal-Mart. But it's a nice round number.

Assuming the current progress in sotrage density increases, which it may not -- limits will eventually be reached -- that means a brain-sized storage unit will be available, around the time I turn 60, for about a hundred bucks, assuming today's cost-per-megabyte will be 2025's cost-per-terabyte. Except, wait, the math's wrong... the cost of storage hasn't dropped one thousand fold, it's dropped ten thousand fold -- from 999/Meg to 99/gig. So 1 PB should cost 9 bucks; 99 should get me, roughly, 10 PB.

As an amusing side note, according to this page, the printed collection of the library of Congress is a measly 2 TB.

Thinking a little more on this, a typical movie on DVD is about 2 gig, so a 1 TB drive could hold 500 movies, or about 1,000 hours of entertainment. This would be enough to hold, say, every episode of every "Star Trek" series, plus Buffy, Angel, Babylon 5, Firefly, and a few others. A 1 PB drive, in turn, could hold 500,000 movies. While a definitive number of movies ever made is apparently very hard to come by, Netflix claims some 75,000 titles, which includes TV season box sets and lots of other things not quite 'movies'. IMDB has ~500,000 entries. So, allowing for a lot of variance, while it might not be quite possible to get "Every single movie ever made" onto a 1 PB disk, you could get, very easily, "Every single movie, TV show, book, and piece of music any individual human being might ever want to see, and far more than they could actually see within their lifetime". (Assume 12 hours per day of doing nothing but consuming entertainment; assume you start doing this at 21, assume you live to 77. This about 245,000 hours of slack-jawed staring at the screen, or 125,000 2-hour movies. That's 1/4 of the capacity of a 1 PB drive. A much more reasonable assumption of 2 hours of "slack jawed drooling" per day, 5 days a week, for the same time gives you a measly 14,500 or so hours of entertainment time; this is 14 TB. Feel free to juggle the numbers as you wish.)

But then the RIAA would send ninja assassins to kill you and anyone who knows you. So it goes.

Well, that's that. Mostly.

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:33:03 GMT

Three hundred sixty seven pages (as formatted by Word 2007, using default fonts and styles and margins.) One hundred fifty seven thousand, one hundred twenty seven words. At an average writing speed of about 750 words an hour (figuring I vary from 500 to 1000 words an hour, overall), that's around 210 hours of work, spread over around 18 months. I figure I still have one to two thousand words of additional text to add in throughout the thing to bolster foreshadowing, close some holes, build motivations and emotions. However, that part doesn't count. What does count is that the final sentence has been written and everything else is editing. Medic is done.

Smurf Hunting 101

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:46:05 GMT

("Smurf" REALLY should have been the Generic Offensive Racist Epithet for the Na'vi. I'm just sayin')

Warning: This may arguably contain "Avatar" spoilers, though most of the plot points I mention here are fairly obvious from the trailer. Despite some mockery, it really wasn't a bad movie, albeit painfully predictable in many places. Plot-wise, we've seen it more than a dozen times before. Effects/scope/spectacle wise.... wow. One of the most incredible movies I've seen in terms of SFX. CGI has finally climbed out of the Uncanny Valley, at least as far as Smurfs go... and I'm not sure which scenes with humans were CGI and which weren't, it was THAT GOOD. I really did not believe I was seeing CGI for most of the movie, even when I knew I *had* to be. Instead of trying to suspend my disbelief and having my hindbrain constantly telling me "This isn't real... I can tell by the pixels.", I had my hindbrain saying, "Yup, they filmed some real live aliens having Smurf Sex", and my forebrain saying "No way, hindbrain, this has to be CGI." I think the 3-D actually helped, rather than hurt. Once again, we see someone using the most advanced technology industrial capitalism can produce to whine about the evils of industrial capitalism (but not to the extent of, say, not letting McDonalds, of all things, be a major corporate sponsor!). ("Hey, here's our movie about how our corporate greed and arrogance has left the Earth a blighted wasteland so we have to go kill some smurfs on a distant world... be sure to get all the toys at McDonalds!" (There's probably a Wal-Mart exclusive toy, too.)

Anyway...

The list!

Things I Will Do If I Ever Have To Put Down An Army Of Uppity Smurfs
1)I will make sure my copters-of-doom have bulletproof (and thus, arrowproof) glass. If the Business Weasel won't spring for it, I'll tell him he will have to direct all military operations from the front line or I take my troops and go home. I will get my glass.

2)I will remember these things called "turrets", that put the gun on the outside and the GUNNER on the INSIDE.

3)If my goal is to bomb the big magic tree, I will not land ground troops who will then be vulnerable to said uppity smurfs.

4)If my goal is to bomb the big magic tree, but there's some magic hoo-hah field that shuts down my long range remote control and targeting, I will remember that the Germans figured out how to guide rockets for hundreds of miles with considerable accuracy using purely mechanical, 1945 level, technology.

5)If I'm going to be committing genocide anyway, and I can grow half-human, half-smurf, bodies at will, odds are I can grow Smurf Ebola.

6)Speaking of viruses, if there's some kind of organic planetary internet, I will find a way to hack it. See if Jeff Goldblum is available.

7)Even if I can't launch rockets, gravity itself is a pretty good way to deliver high explosives, and copters-of-doom can fly higher than any native animals. "Nuke 'em from orbit -- it's the only way to be sure." Who said that, again?

8)It's a lot easier to kill Smurfs if there's no trees in the way. Agent Orange is my friend.

9)Speaking of which... napalm is also my friend. (OK, we may be out of cheap oil by then, but there's always some equivalent you can mix up.)

10)I will study my history. Especially the part where wiping out the natives is easier if you get Tribe 'A' to shoot Tribe 'B', then mop up what's left of Tribe 'A'. What, they have a peace treaty at the moment? Trust me, if they hated each other in the past, you can make them hate each other now. No matter how big a threat I may be to everybody, it will take a while before they hate a new enemy more than they hate the enemy they've been hating for generations.

11)If someone is escaping from my Corporate Compound of Evil in one of my copters-of-doom, I will order my SEVERAL HUNDRED OTHER copters-Of-Doom after them, not just shoot at them with my handgun.

12)Magical hoo-hah fields might scramble radio waves but they don't stop light. Why does this matter? Because if 21st century satellites can read your license plate from orbit, hiding your stolen copter-of-doom from 23rd century satellites is going to be darn near impossible. Even if I can't remote-control a missile there, once I know the coordinates, I just fly above the magical hoo-hah field and drop a bomb. (See 7). While this might not be pinpoint accuracy, all I really have to do is hit the right timezone.

13)I will read the Evil Overlord list, especially anything pertaining to *listening* to the eggheads I hired. (See 6)

Oh, Let Us Dance The Schadenfreude Dance...

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 02:43:43 GMT

Is there anything more joyous than the failure of someone you despise? Is there any emotion more pure and proper than the happiness one feels when someone else suffers?

I say thee NAY!

So let us dance the schadenfreude dance over the grave of the National Institute on Media And The Family, a bunch of far-right book burning fascist pigs whose only positive contribution to the world was their annual list of "Cool Games To Buy RIGHT NOW!", though, for some reason, they called it the "Report Card On Game Violence". Go figure. But thanks to the wretched economy, there's just not much money in the book-burning trade anymore, and let's face it -- saying "Don't buy these games!" is pretty much the equivalent of saying "Put someone out of work!" It's not just censorship, it's downright bad for business.

For those who don't know what "Schadenfreude" is...

Chuck Norris Is A Communist

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:47:03 GMT

Warning: Politics ahead. Serious politics. "Piss off everyone I know, probably", politics.

Too bad. Sometimes, a man's gotta say what a man's gotta say. My conservative friends/readers/associates will be annoyed I'm not anti-abortion, my liberal friends/readers/associates will be annoyed I'm anti-Communist, and my libertarian friends/readers/associates probably don't exist. :)

So, according to Chuck Norris (yes, that Chuck Norris), if Obamacare passes, Mary would have aborted Jesus. Or something. What's telling, to me, is this isn't standard boilerplate "Obama gonna kill yo' babbies!" right-wing paranoia/lunacy. This is something quite different.

This is Communism.

No, I'm not kidding.

What is the essence of Communism? That the individual has no rights, that the sole function of the individual is to live, work, and die for the collective. It's fine, even noble, to make the few suffer for the sake of the many -- and a moral person (under the Communist ideal of "morality") is one who willingly, even eagerly, marches to sacrifice himself -- his happiness, his desires, his wishes, his life -- to the needs of others. An immoral man is the man who says, in the words of Number 6:"My life is my own."

So what is Chucky-boy's argument? Not that some sort of Biblical Obamacare would have FORCED Mary to abort, but, God forbid (pun intended), it would have given her the CHOICE, by making it cheaper and easier. That she could have, as he himself puts it, "avoid(ed) the ridicule, ostracizing, persecution and possible stoning because of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy".

I just want to make this perfectly clear. In the "mind" of Chuck Norris, allowing a young, frightened, teenage girl to avoid shame, ostracism and very likely death (just as young women in Islamic nations still face) would have been a BAD THING.

Just roll that around in your mind a little bit. I'm going to say it again. To Chuck Norris, and, I presume, other mainstream conservatives -- this is from NATIONAL FRACKIN' REVIEW, people, not some loony-tune fringe site -- ALLOWING A YOUNG GIRL TO NOT BE KILLED BY RELIGIOUS FANATICS IS A BAD THING.

I'm also tempted to say it a third time. It's just that mind-blowingly stupid.

WHY is it a bad thing? Because if Mary had been allowed to avoid this fate -- or even been given the CHOICE to do it -- other people, people not yet even ALIVE, would have suffered. And lest anyone think this is a special, exceptional, case -- one could argue that, maybe, just maybe, keeping the savior of all mankind alive long enough to.. er... die... might justify a hint of Marxism, needs must when the Devil drives (pun intended, again) and all that -- note that Chuck goes on to say that "Imagine all the great souls who could have been erased from history and the influence of mankind if their parents had been as progressive as Washington's wise men and women!"

And imagine all the serial killers, rapists, robbers, and just plain useless bums who might have been erased. But, really, whether we lose Karl Marx or Groucho Marx (I'll give y'all one guess which I'd consider the greater loss, and the greater gain), isn't the issue. The issue is that Chuck is saying women should be forced to suffer, so that maybe, just maybe, their unwanted child grows up to be of some benefit to humanity. Or their grandchild, or great-great grandchild.

Most conservatives, at least those with two brain cells to rub together, make the somewhat more defensible argument that a fetus is a person and, as such, has rights the State is obligated to protect. I disagree with this, too, but at least there we're arguing about the much more difficult and complex issue of personhood, and what happens when the rights of individuals come into conflict. We're in agreement that the defining standard of moral behavior is preserving and protecting the rights of the individual. But Chuck isn't making that argument. He is making the argument -- and he is very clear about it, there is no ambiguity or room for interpretation -- that the individual should sacrifice their happiness for nebulous, unknown, unborn, and undefined people yet to exist.

That, folks, is Communism, and NRO should be deeply ashamed to be supporting it.

That whirring you hear? It's William F. Buckley spinning in his grave.

So. We Have A New Coffee Pot

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:58:37 GMT

Apparently, I've become very used to lukewarm coffee, because the new pot keeps the coffee HOT. As in "Oh gods, my TONGUE!" hot.

In other news, I'm writing an overly complex system to define error messages and display them, in the hopes that building a robust error handling framework now will keep me from having a grossly inconsistent and unmanageable framework later. Basically, I've already found a good 3 or 4 different ways to tell a user "Something bad has happened", and I'm trying to consolidate them. Mostly, I want to be able to specify details in a variety of areas without a lot of custom code -- that is, there's a lot of error conditions which fall into the general category of "The following X items are in error", and others where you have "The following three unrelated things need to be fixed.", and, of course "This one big thing is wrong, I'm going home now. See ya!". Every routine that does error checking currently has its own unique and individualistic way to tell the user what it found. I'm tearing all of that out and replacing it with a single error management/display system. In the future, this will make code much simpler. For now...

Productivity....

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:06:28 GMT

Let's see, today I:
Implemented bi-directional sorting on a data grid. (Thus learning about ViewerSorter objects).
Added "Open in Excel" and "Open in Text" features. (Thus learning about launching apps.)
Got my "dynamic query building" code to work, finally.
Put in a bunch of UI logic to enable/disable controls based on selections.
Fixed a bunch of small bugs.
Started looking at the Status class for use with the Error dialog in JFace.

This beats "spun my wheels trying to figure out why a simple bit of code isn't working". None of the above was exceptionally complex or difficult, but it represents a lot of added functionality on a section I've been working on for a while, which has now gone from "proof of concept" to "I'm using the section as a tool to debug other parts of the code".

Still No Cure For Cancer, But, Who Cares?

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:17:24 GMT

So here I am, coding, and somewhere between
"rsLoans=stmt.executeQuery(getQuery()+" from \""+JDBCTable+".csv\"");"
and
"allSqlErrors.add(error);"
I noticed that my coffee had sublimated from "pleasantly warm" to "useful for cryogenics and/or molecular gastronomy". So it occurred to me... why not a USB powered coffee cup warmer? I could get rich!

Sadly, if an idea occurs to one geek, it's probably occurred to other geeks. To a LOT of other geeks.

Truly, we live in an age of miracles and wonders.

This....

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:36:58 GMT

....is the world's first webpage.

Oddly, it does not contain an animated .GIF of a little man with a pickaxe.