According to a BBC story, Gadget users are becoming increasingly digitally obese. This is based on some guy's idea that a gigabyte is a pickup-truck's worth of paper.
I must therefore be getting quite fit, as when I go in to VUW today I'm likely to be carrying 210 pick-up trucks worth of data:
- 160GB external hard drive
- 30GB (too small!) iBook
- 20GB Rio Karma music player
The paper measurement is obviously crap, as the major reasons I'm carrying so much is because a lot of the data is in the form of images, sound or video. And claiming that a couple of episodes of Enterprise is equivalent to a pick-up truck full of paper is just plain silly.
The Toshiba guy in the article also says "Floppies... have their place." He's right; they do -- in the bin. Or being booted off to install Debian on a machine too old to boot CDs properly, and too messy to set up netboot on.
Demand for Unix skills decreases.
So don't forget: Solaris is not Unix according to Ambit IT&T Recruitment. And if you want a job doing server-side Java, you'd better learn that APIs thing.
Or that's what Computerworld says -- traceroutes from MCS to Paradise cable still seem to be going through the WIX...
In NZ, again.
NZ customs in Wellington were probably the best we had to go through -- they X-rayed everything, unlike Canada, but we got to put everything on trollies, and they took our suff on and off the trollies for us :-)
Left the US on election day, and only heard about the result on the PA system of the plane near the end of the Honolulu to Sydney leg.
Microsoft Research was pretty neat, and it sounds like Ward Cunningham (now of Building Number 5, Microsoft) is doing some interesting stuff.
Mac Office 2004 at the MS employee store was US$60+tax.
Tips, and advertising prices without including sales tax, are really annoying.
I think I preferred downtown Vancouver to downtown Seattle.
The view from Grouse Mountain was nice.
Oh, yeah, and OOPSLA was pretty good too.
I'm here, and have been for a few days. With a Canadian SIM (+1 778 898 8413). Fun, fun, fun.
The Revival of Dynamic Languages workshop is going well. I've had good feedback on ConstrainedJava. The demo tomorrow will be interesting, now that I've realised how the initial abstract, the extended abstract, and the demo itself will probably all be completely different.
Busy busy busy.
Leaving for Vancouver (for OOPSLA '04) at 6.40am on Friday morning. Between now and then, I need to prepare a demo session, which requires getting ConstrainedJava in a demo-able state, and bashing out some slides (and guinea-pigging them on the Thursday ELVIS meeting).
XBOX arrived, but I've managed to not use it too much. Which is good -- I need to work on that bloody demo.
Well. I gave a ~3 hour workshopish thingy on Perl for BIT students this evening. Despite Chris Andreae's claim that it was really good, and that about three people would understand it, it went remarkably well. Most of them ended up with working, if somewhat overly complex regular expressions, and while we didn't get time to force them to write CGI scripts, many did discover that screen.css was the most accessed file on the MCS website.
Thanks go to Chris Andreae and Mark Davies for helping people with their innumerable questions about Perl, and the BIT people in the form of Joel Pauling and Peter Komisarczuk for giving me the opportunity to expose students to something they will hopefully find useful, and eat more pizza :-)
Having access to a box in the US, I thought it would be nice to have some way to automatically serve static files off my websites through it, while leaving the primary server and dynamic content in New Zealand. What I wanted was Akamai. What I didn't want was to pay for it. So it's wheel reinvention time. And therefore, the Patrick-named moo net now has some working code, namely some perl that extracts route lists from the WIX and APE looking glasses, and summarises the routes.
The other major, exciting code is the code that will be called by the rewrite rules to decide which mirror machine to use. It's written in C++ for efficiency. I hadn't written any C++ for a while. And this is STL-using C++, which I haven't really touched since 2001. And it works! The config files it parses are ugly, but I'll survive :-)
Still to be done is configuring squid and apache to run on the mirror boxes, which will require writing a squid URL rewriter (which I will write in perl), and probably making up some hashing scheme so that random people can't use the CDN without at least asking nicely first.
Other stuff to do is making up the mod_rewrite rules, and writing another short C program to generate those hashes to call from it. And to persuade someone with a box near WIX with free national traffic to let me run a mirror node on it. Then the only stuff going out my cable modem will be dynamic content, and static content for the mirrors. Which will be nice.
So that's why their service is so slow. In fact, I'm sure it was faster during my trial period a month ago. But now, when I post a set of DVDs to sunny Nelson it takes five days for them to return to Wellington. Which means that if I want to get three a week, I have to watch them all during the weekend, or copy them and send them back immediately. Grr.