There is a very funny post from Techdirt on the RIAA’s assertion that file sharing caused a decrease in record sales.
May 052011
Sam
May 042011
Popular Science had an interesting blog post on how the change in manufacturing of Pyrex made crack production more difficult:
When World Kitchen took over the Pyrex brand, it started making more products out of prestressed soda-lime glass instead of borosilicate. With pre-stressed, or tempered, glass, the surface is under compression from forces inside the glass. It is stronger than borosilicate glass, but when it’s heated, it still expands as much as ordinary glass does. It doesn’t shatter immediately, because the expansion first acts only to release some of the built-in stress. But only up to a point.
It’s an interesting story, and the video is pretty great.
[Story via Schneier on Security.]
May 042011
When I left Time Inc. in 2007, I built a new computer from parts purchased at Newegg.com. Over the years, the parts gradually broke: some of my memory was DOA, the video card went bad, the power supply died, and the back fan broke. Finally, a couple of month ago, the last of three hard drives decided to kick the bucket. (This was probably related to the back fan breaking.) I decided to buy a new computer; I’ve very happy I did. The new machine has some pretty great components:
- GIGABYTE GA-P67A-UD4-B3 LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 This is one of the newer motherboards on the market.
- Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) This is a quad-core CPU. With hyperthreading, it appears as eight cores.
- Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1 2.5″ 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive I purchased two solid state drives. They run cool, make no noise, and are quite fast for random IO operations.
- G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) The 16-GB kit is more expensive than two 8-GB kits, but it is tested and guaranteed to work together.
- Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB I also picked up a hard drive from Amazon–fast free delivery. The drive is for photos, music, and backups. I can’t believe a 2TB drive is under $80.
This is a pretty great machine. It takes less than a minute to fire up a web browser from when I turn on the machine, and I haven’t had any real issue at all.
A friend of mine at Microsoft used his employee purchase plan to get me an affordable copy of Windows 7 and Office. I also purchased an upgrade to the latest and greatest full version of Photoshop. I’ve installed all sorts of developer tools, and I’m looking fun to playing around with new applications at home.
May 022011
Forgive me friends, it’s been over a year since my last post.
I’ve been busy over the past year. As I noted before, Google changed how Blogger published. I want the control of hosting the posts on my site, so I had to switch off of Blogger. I’ve done some work in porting my blog to WordPress; hopefully the transition should be relatively seamless. I’ve also been busy at work the past year. The size of my team has almost doubled in the past year.
I’ll try to post more regularly in the future. This blog gets around 30 page views per day when I changed nothing; I hope not to disappoint my dedicated readers.
Apr 272010
Work has been keeping me very busy recently, which is why there haven’t been a ton of posts on the blog. (Not to mention keeping me from hanging out with friends a lot.)
I’m going to need to do some maintenance over the blog and email systems this week. Dreamhost recently disabled shell delivery of mail, which ended up killing all of my procmail filters. So instead of 100 messages in the spam file for a day, I’m seeing 1500 messages in several hours. And Google has decided to disable FTP publishing to blogger. So I’m going to have to migrate the blog to another system–Wordpress seems like the best bet.
I hope to have more photos and posts posted soon. Stay tuned!
Feb 082010
Cool time-lapse video of the A320 recovery in the Hudson:
Posted on Kontain.com – [Flight 1549] from David Martin on Vimeo.
[Link via User Friendly.]
Jan 072010
36 is a perfect square
The sum of its digits is also a perfect square.
Wikipedia also has good information about 36.
Jan 022010
Tim Bray wrote some good advice for someone who wants or needs a website for either personal or professional reasons: After Branding. I agree with all of the points he makes, and websites that don’t follow his advice tend to frustrate me.
Dec 312009
Unfortunately, it’s already starting to turn to rain….
Dec 242009
There's six fire trucks on 2th Street off of Lex across the street i Trulli. Apparently some smoke was spotted at the back of the building.