Changing my mind

WordPress is great; don’t get me wrong. But for some strange reason, I feel like moving back to Google blogger. It just feels more like home to me. So in the future I will be posting there.
byroniac.blogspot.com

Apple ][e on Linux (Sorta)

OK. Well, not really. Sorry, I lied. Well, the Linux part is true (grin). I found out that I can alter the screensaver settings even under Gnome (don’t get me wrong: I love Gnome, but I’m not especially fond of the default “hide everything possible from the user and automatically select default settings for assembly-line/mass-production” design paradigm). Along with that discovery came the information that yes, my Apple2 screensaver module can also serve as an anachronistic-appearing Apple ][e simulated display terminal, complete with ability to run a command shell, such as bash. Yes! And this is the command I used.

/usr/libexec/xscreensaver/apple2 -text -fast -program 'bash'

More information is found on the man page (man apple2).

NOTE: This actually runs in a window and not in true screensaver mode (explaining how to actually modify your screensaver settings under Linux in Gnome is beyond the intended scope of this blog entry. In other words, yes it’s a pain in the neck!)

The Birth of AJAX – An Amazing Story

The Birth of AJAX – An Amazing Story.

Fedora Solved

If you use Fedora Linux, try Fedora Solved for solutions. Also, try Fedora Unofficial FAQ (currently up to Core 5). These are great sites. The folks on IRC network irc.freenode.net in channel #fedora have been very helpful, as well.

The Best Little Archiver You’ve Never Heard Of

7-Zip is the best little archiver you’ve never heard of. Enough said.

The Folks At Mozilla Have Been Busy

They released a whole slew of updates recently that sneaked right under my radar. As of this post, Firefox 2.0.0.1, Thunderbird 1.5.0.9, and SeaMonkey 1.0.7 (a 1.1 beta is also available to show off upcoming new features) are now available. So head on over to Mozilla.com and Mozilla.org and get yourself updated. You have no excuse now.

Upgrading to Reality 2.0 Not Entirely Smooth

Well, moving the old blogs from Blogger to WordPress went mostly smoothly: it transferred all the posts and comments in record time with no difficulty (color me both amazed and impressed). The only problem is: I used the titles in Blogger to externally link to other sites or items of interest, whereas WordPress uses links in the title to point back to the blog entry itself. Oops! So I’ve lost a great deal of my links, and most of my old posts are useless (through no fault of WordPress; strictly my own—I should have embedded the links in the actual blog entries themselves which is the proper blog netiquette to boot too I’m sure. Oh well. Live and learn). So, I’ve left links to the old blogs because I don’t have the time to convert all the entries yet. Perhaps someday. Rule of thumb: anything before December 18, 2006 is best found on the old blog; anything newer will be here. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause (if anyone even notices!).

A Linux For Every Day Of The Week

Well, I’m not there yet, but I’m getting closer. I’ve added the Ubuntu Blog to the blog roll because I am a fan of Ubuntu. Fedora Core (6, now) is my favorite distribution of Linux, currently, but I have found a lot to like in Ubuntu as well. I’m particularly enamored with the Ubuntu Live CDs (especially the 6.10 Edgy Eft as of this writing). The entire Live CD concept is great; when borrowing a machine (as I am with my aunt’s currently) it lets me avoid Windows without restructuring the hard drive. Of course, there are limitations to doing it this way, and for the most part this concerns installing optional and temporary components in my case. At any rate, I don’t hate Windows (I still like it, in fact) but I love Linux (it’s like popping that red pill in Matrix; you can’t mentally prepare yourself beforehand for the enlightenment that follows, but if you’re thinking correctly, you’ll never want to return to your old perspective of reality—reality will be a lot cooler in many ways, though admittedly more difficult). Linux is like candy for the brain. It should have a warning sticker on it somewhere: use of this product can be addictive.

I Took The Red Pill

Only it was chewable, and slightly bigger than average. I didn’t know what to expect, really. Well, to be perfectly honest, I was expecting Cherry but got Cinnamon instead (which added to the effect of surprise). Seems like the Matrix universe got upgrades again, even after most people have forgotten about it and gone on with what they perceive to be reality.

OK, actually what happened is this… I’ve moved my Blog (again) without warning (again) to (this time) WordPress, so all future blog posts will be at byroniac.wordpress.com. Hopefully reality will continue twisting itself into an incomprehensible yet still enjoyable pretzel there.

By the way, the Blue Pill is now chewable, too (so I hear), but I’ll never get to know what it tasted like.

man 7 units

In Ubuntu Linux, and probably in most Linux systems, you should be able to read the following man(ual) page on “Units.” In my case, I enter the command “man 7 units” to pull up the following page, which has a lot of helpful and very relevant information on the use of digital measuring units in the computer industry. Read it and see for yourself.

UNITS(7) Linux Programmer’s Manual UNITS(7)

NAME
units, kilo, kibi, mega, mebi, giga, gibi – decimal and binary prefixes

DESCRIPTION
Decimal prefixes
The SI system of units uses prefixes that indicate powers of ten. A kilometer is 1000 meter, and a megawatt is 1000000 watt. Below the standard prefixes.

Prefix Name Value
y yocto 10^-24 = 0.000000000000000000000001
z zepto 10^-21 = 0.000000000000000000001
a atto 10^-18 = 0.000000000000000001
f femto 10^-15 = 0.000000000000001
p pico 10^-12 = 0.000000000001
n nano 10^-9 = 0.000000001
u micro 10^-6 = 0.000001
m milli 10^-3 = 0.001
c centi 10^-2 = 0.01
d deci 10^-1 = 0.1
da deka 10^ 1 = 10
h hecto 10^ 2 = 100
k kilo 10^ 3 = 1000
M mega 10^ 6 = 1000000
G giga 10^ 9 = 1000000000
T tera 10^12 = 1000000000000
P peta 10^15 = 1000000000000000
E exa 10^18 = 1000000000000000000
Z zetta 10^21 = 1000000000000000000000
Y yotta 10^24 = 1000000000000000000000000

The symbol for micro is the Greek letter mu, often written u in an ASCII context where this Greek letter is not available. See also

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html

Binary prefixes
The binary prefixes resemble the decimal ones, but have an additional ’i’ (and “Ki” starts with a capital ’K’). The names are formed by taking the first syllable of the names of the decimal prefix with roughly the same size, followed by “bi” for “binary”.

Prefix Name Value
Ki kibi 2^10 = 1024
Mi mebi 2^20 = 1048576
Gi gibi 2^30 = 1073741824
Ti tebi 2^40 = 1099511627776
Pi pebi 2^50 = 1125899906842624
Ei exbi 2^60 = 1152921504606846976

See also

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

Discussion
Before these binary prefixes were introduced, it was fairly common to use k=1000 and K=1024, just like b=bit, B=byte. Unfortunately, the M is capital already, and cannot be capitalized to indicate binary-ness.
At first that didn’t matter too much, since memory modules and disks came in sizes that were powers of two, so everyone knew that in such contexts “kilobyte” and “megabyte” meant 1024 and 1048576 bytes, respectively. What originally was a sloppy use of the prefixes “kilo” and “mega” started to become regarded as the “real true meaning” when computers were involved. But then disk technology changed, and disk
sizes became arbitrary numbers. After a period of uncertainty all disk manufacturers settled on the standard, namely k=1000, M=1000k, G=1000M.

The situation was messy: in the 14k4 modems, k=1000; in the 1.44MB diskettes, M=1024000; etc. In 1998 the IEC approved the standard that defines the binary prefixes given above, enabling people to be precise and unambiguous.

Thus, today, MB = 1000000B and MiB = 1048576B.

In the free software world programs are slowly being changed to conform. When the Linux kernel boots and says

hda: 120064896 sectors (61473 MB) w/2048KiB Cache

the MB are megabytes and the KiB are kibibytes.

Linux 2001-12-22 UNITS(7)