At ftrain is a Unicode table where you can see the decimal value and character shape. Slide the mouse pointer over a character to see the hex value and the name of the glyphs. See Wikipedia for a history and description of the system.
There are sliders at the top of the table to page by hundred, thousand, and ten thousand. If you ever thought an alphabet was a simple thing, take a browse and see what happens when you try to accommodate the world in a structured manner!
Planet Debian described Bohrbugs: OpenOffice.org won’t print on Tuesdays and that lead to Wikipedia and Unusual software bug.
I didn’t know they had names!
Maxwell’s Equations & Light demonstrates the path from Maxwell’s equations to a wave equation that the propagation of radio waves (and light) in space.
from
to
To a physicist, I imagine being the first human to see that equation must have been like being struck by lightning. This equation is just the old and venerable wave equation. Maxwell’s equations imply that the electric field can travel along in space as a wave. The same steps lightly modified give the exact same expression for the magnetic field. The two waves are intimately interleaved, creating each other and traveling outward. There’s more. The wave equation says that the speed of the wave is 1 divided by the square root of the constants in front of the time derivative. Plugging in (and feel free to try it yourself!), Maxwell saw that the speed of these electromagnetic waves matched the value of the speed of light.
OK. you need to figure out grad and curl and some other calculus type stuff but, still, E&M like this has a pleasing ethic all its own.
Modern Linux kernels have removed the performance penalty of a swapfile. This means you can simplify your drive partitioning by using a swapfile rather than a dedicated swap partition. If you run multiple versions or copies of Linux, a partition might still be a good idea as each bootable copy (including a USB live system) can use the same swap area. Otherwise, a swapfile is convenient. I like to put it on the root partition after I have set up the drive for a 12 GB root and remainder as home. The process here is from Techie Buzz.
as root:
You should make the swapfile at least as large as your system memory, especially on machines that might be put into a power saving mode that moves memory to the swap to power down. The dd command example copies 1048576 bytes as 1000 blocks (1048576000 total) from ‘dev/zero’ to the swapfile. /dev/zero is a special file that provides as many zero byte values as needed. It seems that ‘bs=2GB count=1′ might work as well, or better, than the example given for a machine with 1GB ram installed. A drawback is that, unless you have a current swapfile, you might get an out of memory error. Double the count for 2 GB if needed.
There are so many options for making an Ubuntu boot USB memory stick now that it becomes a convenient method to propagate a new system to several systems with a clean install. Most fairly current machines will boot off USB but sometimes there are problems. Whatever. If you already have Ubuntu installed with GRUB on the hard drive, you can boot the USB without having to change BIOS settings or fussing with the BIOS bootability of the USB device,
This should boot the system you have installed on your USB memory device.
see the Grub manual command section for more about these commands. The Ubuntu Guide describes this process and some alternatives for USB booting.
There are some folks who prefer listening to vinyl records run through a tube amplifier rather than a CD with a modern amp. There is a similar situation with video that is starting to show up with high definition fast refresh displays. Help Key: Why 120Hz looks “weird” at Crunch Gear takes a look and, in the process, provides a good rundown on telecine and the problems inherent in the display of frame by frame video.
The problem is that video captures a time series of images. When these are displayed in sequence, your brain interpolates between them to help you see a continuous scene with motion. The display technologies do what they can to help your brain in its process of smoothing the transition from one image to the next. What is happening now is that there is a technology from 24 images per second movies to displays that can show 120 or more images every second.
TV was a step in this technology. It provided 60 images per second by each image was only half of a full image. That is where interlace technology was used.
A modern 120 Hz LCD TV can show five images in the time its source puts up one. What should it do? Show the same image five times and then switch to the next? Fade out one image and fade in the next? Insert a black image or two between successive images (like movie projectors do)? Use the new technologies inherent computing power to make a series of interpolations from one image to the next to smooth the transition?
This last option may smooth things out but it is different from what people are used to like vinyl records and tubes are different from modern sound systems. The smooth interpolation technique produces what is called a ‘soap opera’ effect. Things look just too good to be true.
The comments to the blog post have some other good thoughts about how media is changing. Going from film to electronic media gets into changes in film grain, gamma, depth of field, and all sorts of other things. That, in turn, requires media producers to think about things differently. That kind of different thinking is starting to show up in subtle ways that will influence viewers in different ways.
Thom Holwerda get it. In ‘The Windows Vista Era Never Quite Happened’ he takes off on an article about why Windows Vista failed. In his critique, he illustrates how people often see just the surface and forget that most of what is important in computing technology is out of sight.
Vista’s failure can be explained much more easily. Windows Vista was an overhaul of the entire Windows operating system, top to bottom, with every framework being overhauled or completely re-written.
Vista did indeed introduce fancy new desktop eye candy and it was, perhaps, pushed out the door a tad early. I think it a bit hyperbolic to say Vista has failed but that kind of approach often seems to plague anything Microsoft. The source article, Sixteen Reasons the Windows Vista Era Never Quite Happened, mentions this as several of the reasons for a supposed failure. That all boils down to end user perceptions and attitudes rather than the quality of the product. It is a fact, though, that perceptions and attitudes of the market can make or break a product.
Where the ‘push to release’ problem did create hassles was in the nature of drivers. In this case, Microsoft had to lead those writing drivers and hardware access software from the isolated PC paradigm to that of the modern network model. That has been an ongoing process as software has been moved from owning its machine to that of being just another user process. That change is full of nuance.
It is that nuance that Thom gets.