Thought I’d get into the Christmas spirit with a festive cartoon.
Ho, ho, ho!
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Inspiring quote from Paolo Coelho
It’s Christmas time and as usual books are on the wish list. I was reading through an old Paolo Coehlo book recently and stumbled across the following great quote. Definitely words to inspire
“A warrior accepts defeat. He does not treat it as a matter of indifference, nor does he attempt to transform it into a victory. The pain of defeat is bitter to him; he suffers at indifference and becomes desperate with loneliness. After all this has passed, he licks his wounds and begins everything anew. A warrior knows that war is made of many battles; he goes on. Tragedies do happen. We can discover the reason, blame others, imagine how different our lives would be had they not occurred. But none of that is important: they did occur, and so be it. From there onward we must put aside the fear that they awoke in us and begin to rebuild.”
The Fifth Mountain – Paolo Coelho
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Where old computers go to die :(
While I was typing the last entry I wondered if there were any websites devoted to old PC technology. My sense of nostalgia overwhelmed me when I visited Old-Computers.com. In particular this article on the IBM PC AT brought it all back. I remember using one of these in school when I was younger. It had the 286 processor (which really kicked ass in its day) an outlandish 1Mb of RAM and 16-bit expansion slots, of course. This had a type 2 mobo with 4 standardised 256k slots instead of 128.. Those were the days.. when computers were dumb, real men used DOS, we played footie in the park, jumpers for goalpsots…
Apparently the 128 k slots were a bit weirder than they seemed initially.
The first AT used 128 k chips, which appeared to be two 64k chips stacked. It used two DMA chips, which tended to fail in tandem. It also used a second IRQ controller. If the AT had more than 640 k of RAM, the CMOS would only allocate the first 512 as Convential, the rest as Extended.
Only 17 hard drive type were supported in the CMOS, causing no end of headaches when Seagate realsed their 40 meg half height. The 1.2 meg floppy drive could read and write 360’s, but if you formatted one, it couldn’t be read by a regular double density drive.
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Ban P2P applications
Perhaps not. I’ve commented in the past about the effects that P2P networks have upon the ISP traffic topologies (timing, upstream/downstream biases etc.) and we all know they can be used to illegally share copyrighted files. However, I strongly believe that P2P applications are the prototype for the next generation of highly resilient and scalable internet applications. In my former job as a telecomms researcher at TSSG we came up with quite a novel approach to integrating active networking and peer-2-peer apps at the top of the stack. I’m not sure what became of that work but my faith in the technology hasn’t waivered.
I guess that’s why I was so fascinated by the following post on boing-boing about 2 Princeton researchers who’ve cooked up a P2P app in 15 lines of concise Python code. The original post is located on Ed Felton’s blog. It was damn funny to see someone hack up a Perl version in 9 lines. Without disrespect, the python implementation is more legible but the Perl code wins my “tight code” Award for 2004. Matthew Scala has a well used styrofoam cup with an strategicaly embedded 1/2 fried 2Mb Dimm (circa 1993) winging its way to him at this very moment. Enjoy! What a prize and what a hack 😀