August 2011
1 post
The Man and the Stone
Æsop was sent one day by his master Xanthus to see what company were at the public bath. He saw that many who came stumbled, both going in and coming out, over a large Stone that lay at the entrance to the bath, and that only one person had the good sense to remove it. He returned and told his master that there was only one Man at the bath. Xanthus accordingly went, and, finding it full of...
August 2010
1 post
Cum scriu eu românește în MacOS și Linux
Pe scurt, folosesc o tastură US și schimb pe aranjamentul primar din standardul SR-13392:2004 folosind tasta Alt în MacOS și tasta Windows în Linux.
Instrucțiuni de instalare:
MacOS: Romanian - Alt
Linux: Romanian - Alt
Povestea mai lungă e următoarea. Eu am început să scriu regulat cu diacritice prin 2008 după ce am citit un post de pe blog-ul lui Vivi. Pe atunci (ca și acum de altfel)...
February 2010
1 post
The Books
I like Valentine’s Day. I think it’s useful to have a day set aside to celebrate the love for somebody else. In general, I find useful to spend time and think about the people and the things that make my life nicer and enjoyable. A week ago, while unpacking the last boxes from the relocation, I realized, once again, how much I love the books I have. I truly do. Their shape, their...
January 2010
1 post
The Server
Today I had to assemble one more rack in order to finally unpack the last round of boxes. In the process of placing it I had to turn off puppy, my home server. Unfortunately, the power supply started again to misbehave. As before, I open it up and blow the dust. The good news is that, after a few hiccups, it started working again, but the sounds I heard do not predict a very bright future. So I...
December 2009
1 post
The End
October 2009
2 posts
The Zen Master (fictional portrait)
The Zen Master is by far the most remarkable patron of the late gym hours. As expected, the master is the epitome of grace and equilibrium. The master doesn’t come too late or too early and is neither staying too long or too short. The right measure is something deeply embedded in almost everything the master does. The taste in clothing is refined and the few pieces of the gym attire are...
Summary of the Baltimore Running Festival 2009
Today I run the Half Marathon from the Baltimore Running Festival. My finish time was 2:04:50 which placed me on the overall position 2895 out of 7815 (around the top 37% mark). In the Males 30-34 section I’m probably deeper in the bottom half though. :P The average time per mile was 9:32 was better than I expected. One reason might be the fact that going downhill more than compensated the...
September 2009
2 posts
Parlamentul României vs Congresul SUA
Continuând pe direcția din postul precedent iată niște grafice care arată prezența la vot la cele două camere ale parlamentului alături de cele două camera ale congresului SUA.
Diferența între cât de serioase sunt lucrurile la noi și la ei e evidentă. Un lucru interesant de notat e dimensiunea similară a camerelor (332/132 la noi, 443/103 la ei) cât și numărul de runde de votare...
August 2009
1 post
The Story of a Simple and Dangerous Kernel Bug
Among other things, the update for Mac OS X 10.5.8 also fixed an interesting kernel bug related to the way the fcntl call is handled. The bug was identified as CVE-2009-1235 and the first exploit seems to be from June 2008. The variant that I discovered is much simpler and is, as far as I know, the one that really convinced Apple to solve the issue. :-) The oldest kernel I was able to test the...
July 2009
1 post
June 2009
3 posts
A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart →
A very nice quote from the text:
I don’t see how it’s doing society any good to have its members walking around with vague memories of algebraic for hating them.
“At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number...”
– Albert Camus
May 2009
1 post
10BASE2 on ISS →
This was in 2001 though. Last year things got better.
April 2009
3 posts
“Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.”
– Arthur James Balfour
March 2009
12 posts
Timeline of Linux Kernel releases
For the visually incline ones here is a timeline with all the Linux Kernel releases starting with 1.0 and ending with the freshly released 2.6.29. The gray are the development versions and the small ticks from 2.6 are the minor versions. The minor that sticks out in 2.6 is the ‘stable’ 2.6.16. Note also that the proportions between the left (stable releases) and right (development...
AuroraUX →
An ambitious project. I have to say that I agree with some of their goals.
Ext4 data loss →
Very interesting discussion about commit intervals.
The New York Times - API Documentation and Tools →
Awesome thing!
America's Loss is the World's Gain: America's New... →
Very interesting survey!
February 2009
9 posts
Prisoner's Dilemma →
Amazing article!
Richard St. John: Secrets of success in 8 words, 3... →
Pretty amazing 3 minutes. :-)
Wishes
View of a Marathon
Last Sunday somebody I knew ran the Austin Marathon. Below are few graphs summarizing the race. The thin red line from the first one is him. He was damn fast! :-)
The hairy state of Linux filesystems
Slashdot was reporting yesterday that OSes are sliming down. The post was talking about userland stuff like MySQL or CUPS but an obvious question is: how about the internals? Do they get better? One attempt to measure this is to look at the interactions between the various Linux filesystems and the rest of the kernel. When a filesystem is compiled as a module all its (unique) external calls show...
“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.”
– Henry Kissinger
Once is Enough
This is a joke keeps popping in my head when I hear somebody saying that they tried something (usually computer related) and they didn’t like it. :-)
At a resort, a guy walks up to an older fellow who is sitting in the sun, sipping iced tea.
Young guy says, “Hey, how about a round of golf?”
“Nah,” the older fellow replies, “tried it once,...
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
January 2009
40 posts
Kernel Walkthrough: The Boot Process →
Some good entertainment for a Friday evening.
There’s no such thing as nothing, not at all.
It may be really very, very small
But it’s still there. In fact I think I’d guess
That “no” does not exist. There’s only “yes”.
— Yes (2004)
Why Google Employees Quit →
The dark side of the bright side. I still want to get there though. And I think I will like it a lot.
