brainstorms

Thursday March 31, 2005

stross quotes

some charlie stross quotes from the past...

Black and white make for a poor spectrum to view the world with.

In my experience there are two types of writer: those who do it as a way of working out what they feel, and those who do it as a way of communicating with other people.

Once systematized, any bureaucracy established for any purpose renders its initial purpose secondary to its real mission -- self-propagation.

Lem has a reputation in Poland for being extremely funny and erudite at the same time. If the translator loses the humour, you're left with lead-footed pedantry. If they lose the erudition, you're left with fluff.

gurgle, drool, iterated function system, yibber, Barnsley, non- linear dynamics, eep!, waah ...

Hi! I am another example of the memetic .signature {phage. Insert me into your .sig file} virus. Isn't that neat? Copy me into your .sig file now!

Monday March 28, 2005

deteriorata from the past

[just found a version of deteriorata from late nineties. that reference to solaris could only be for the memorable 4.0 version. it must have seemed funny at the time...]

Go mousing amid the webpages and news, and remember what comfort there may be in owning a homepage. Avoid aix or any version of windows unless you are in need of sleep. Garbage collect. Speak glowingly of geeks faster than yourself and heed well their advice even though they be zombies. Know what to boot and when. Consider that two wrongs don't make a right but that three in c++ do. Wherever possible put people on hold. Be comforted that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment and despite the changing fortune of time there is always a big fortune in the information superhighway. Remember Solaris. Strive at all times to hack, break, obfuscate and rm. Know yourself: if you need help, call Eliza. Exercise caution in your daily e-mail, especially with those newbies nearest to you. That lemon on netcom.com, for instance. Be assured that walking through the ocean of most programmers' perl code would scarely get your toes numb. Fall not in love therefore; it will stick to your keyboard. Gracefully surrender the things of youth, plan9, clean air, dolphins & berkeley; and let not the sands of time get in your diet coke. Hire people with hiking boots. For a good time, visit www.slashdot.org, click here. Take heart amid the deepening gloom that your screen is finally getting enough color; and reflect that whatever collection of bugs may be your lot, it could only be worse in Microsoft. You are a throwaway code of the Universe; you have no right to be here, and whether you can hear it or not the Universe is recompiling behind your back. Therefore make peace with your God whatever you conceive It to be: Richard Stallman, Miss Piggy or Vint Cerf. With all its hopes, dreams, ipv6 promises and telecommuting, the world continues to deteriorate. Unplug!

notes on logo books

after a reasonably fresh and successful first volume, logolounge 2 is a big yawn [audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure. -- edward r. tufte] and a disappointment. what is with the intel, fedex, dell, microsoft, disney, coca cola, 20th century fox, shell, john deere logos? designing member name dropping? [if i just wanted an arbitrary pile of tired classics, i would get carter's big book of logos.] note to the editor: do away with the now-annoying "logo search" chapter header. it was cute in the first volume, two years ago.

actually, in a limited-budget situation, one could give up on the logolounge volumes altogether, and choose los logos and dos logos instead. sure, not nearly as stylish and colorful, but classic clothbound, edgy and international. more oxygen, less pomp.

[note to self: avoid reviewing books not near the keyboard. going over los/dos logos again, i will restate: they are brilliant. a working graphics/logo designer will get much more out of these two, even though lounge books include some very fine logo designs. save your money.]

exercitato artem parat.

Monday March 21, 2005

velvia, d2x, d70...

just as i was planning to do my own velvia vs digital tests, i came across rollin verlinde's excellent no nonsense review of d2x. this is an eye opener. [i guess i will not bother with my own tests for now.]

i downloaded his carefully photographed moss crop samples, color matched the velvia scan and the d70 image against the d2x colors and compared the details. at higher magnifications, velvia image is a loss. a real surprise is the d70 image: once it is resized (bicubic smoother) to match the d2x sample, i cannot tell the two images apart.

long time ago, i had calculated that given best 35mm optics at around 100/lpmm resolving power, i would want a 10-12mp camera to switch to digital. i realize now all one really needs is a modern raw-capable 6-8mp camera and a good interpolation algorithm...

[this last bit reminds me of helmut dersch's ingenious interpolator quality tests.]

[addendum: here is a short essay that confirms my current impressions: digital image quality]

Sunday March 20, 2005

google open source...

google now has open source. pleasantly surprising: it had been very closed until now. [google and open source in one sentence still feels somewhat awkward.]

looked at the sparse hashtable code already; it is very interesting, and more importantly, jolts most programmers' expectations about hash tables; we are really used to simple tables that use chaining. [written in c++ alas. this should probably be re-written in a living language, like java or c.]

i wonder if the google file system code will be opened up.

Wednesday March 09, 2005

anda's game

doctorow's latest reworking of a well-known SF work is anda's game. from his o'reilly interview:

It's a story of little girls who are pressed into working in sweat shops in games, who spend all day doing repetitive grinding tasks like making shirts, which are then converted into gold and sold on eBay. It's about the first union organizer who goes into cyberspace to organize these little girls.

Friday March 04, 2005

solaris white album: essential papers

about a decade ago, a group now far, far away, put together the white album, a cherished collection of important technical papers authored by sun engineers until that time. with the release of solaris 10, i decided to revisit and revise that collection. here is a reasonably up-to-date version of the white album. it contains OS-related entries only, and many of the papers come from usenix. [which is of no surprise] almost all entries below are linked from citeseer to provide context and depth.[there are a few papers i could not locate in machine-readable form, but working on it. additions, corrections, suggestions welcomed.]

• Shared Libraries in SunOS
• Virtual Memory Architecture in SunOS
• SunOS Virtual Memory Implementation
• Realtime Scheduling in SunOS 5.0
• SunOS Multi-thread Architecture
• Beyond Multiprocessing: Multithreading the SunOS Kernel
• Implementing Lightweight Threads
• Symmetric Multiprocessing in Solaris 2.0
• Vnodes: An Architecture for Multiple File System Types in Sun UNIX
• Evolving the Vnode Interface
• Efficient User-Level File Cache Management on the Sun Vnode Interface
• Extent-like Performance from a UNIX File System
• Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem
• The Sun Network Filesystem: Design, Implementation and Experience
• Virtual Swap Space in SunOS
• Profiling and Tracing Dynamic Library Usage Via Interposition
• tmpfs: A Virtual Memory File System
• The Translucent File Service
• The Automounter
• The Automounter: Solaris 2.0 and Beyond
• The Autofs Automounter [i would appreciate a link to a postscript version of this paper, if it exists]
• Enhancements to the Autofs Automounter
• Removable Media in Solaris
• Zero-copy TCP In Solaris
• The Process File System and Process Model in UNIX System V [link not found]
• Evolution of the SunOS Programming Environment, Proceedings of the Spring 1988 EUUG Conference, Cascais, Portugal, 1988.

• Implementing Berkeley Sockets in System V Release 4
• Secure Networking in the Sun Environment, Usenix Conference Proceedings, Summer 1986
• Fast Consistency Checking for the Solaris File System
• System Isolation and Network Fast Fail Capability in Solaris
• CPU Time Measurement Errors
• Solaris Zones: Operating System Support for Server Consolidation
• Solaris Zones: Operating System Support for Consolidating Commercial Workloads
• The Slab Allocator: An Object-Caching Kernel Memory Allocator
• Magazines and Vmem: Extending the Slab Allocator to Many CPUs and Arbitrary Resources
• Automatic Performance Tuning in the Zettabyte File System
• Existential QoS for Storage
• Postmortem Object Type Identification
• Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems
• FireEngine - A New Networking Architecture for the Solaris Operating System

[musical recommendations: we will not bother with the obvious, even if it is beatles. so it is a toss up between joss stone's the soul sessions and talking heads' sand in the vaseline, depending on the mood.]

[2006.03.06: added a few more papers.]

[2006.03.08: Gary Riseborough kindly supplied some of the missing links. thanks gary.]

[2006.03.09: added bmc's type ident paper]