Fast Fourier Transform

Here is a funny pic involving FFT.

DIY: Add kerberos support to Slackware 13.1

I created this webpage to document a project I have been working on. I also posted for comments to aols here.

The Exodus at Microsoft

I saw this link to an interesting blogpost on the front page of Slashdot yesterday.

OK, you say that's just small fry, but you've got to take notice to this story that appeared later in the day.

Ray Ozzie, chief architect of Lotus Notes, hired away from IBM by Microsoft is now "leaving" the post of "Chief Software Architect." As I understand the Microsoft culture, they are very fond of the quote from Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with an alternate predicate. I am sure they are all roaming the campus, "We don't need no stinking Chief Software Architect." It will be interesting to see if he was forced out, or if Ballmer thinks he can pilot the ship himself. Get ready for more Zunes and more Kins.

Update: 2010-10-26Ray Ozzie asks Microsoft to think about life in a "post-PC" era.

Misc. Usenet Post

I wrote this general advice in comp.os.linux.setup

Update: 2010-10-18
This is another separate thread with some more general advice to a potential new GNU/Linux user,
comp.os.linux.misc

BSA to EU : Kill Open Standards

This again is remincient of the "Knife the baby" tactics which Microsoft (now puppet BSA) are so very famous for.

Here is Slashdot's
headline

Here are the fsfe's arguments against BSA

Utah Open Source Conference - 2010

I attended and thoroughly enjoyed this year's conference. I first attended last year, which was also great and informative. I may make some more notes on this page, but I want to "highlight" the presentations I attended for my own reference.

Day One
CTO Breakfast
Nmap
FreeBSD Jails	link
Torque	[3]
ioMemory
Keynote Address by Fedora leader, Jared Smith
Day Two
Write your own domain specific language	[1]
The opensource model applied beyond software	[2]
Extending Puppet
Linux backup strategies	[4]
Keynote Address by Opensource advocate, Karsten Wade
Automated Deployments of Linux	(scales up to datacenter deployment)
Day Three
Keynote by Howard Tayler
Beginning Gimp
Getting started with GNU/Cash
Monitoring with zenoss

Footnotes

[1]
A. Star Trek, TOS
Spock: I am endeavoring, ma'am, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bear skins.

B. Star Trek, TNG variant
Barclay: Tie both consoles into the Enterprise main computer core, utilizing neural-scan interface.
Enterprise Computer: There is no such device on file.
Barclay: No problem. Here's how you build it.

[2] This included a video presentation about the Open High School of Utah. As far as I can tell, this is a high school with a "virtual campus" only. The faculty are endeavoring to create an online curriculum which will be open sourced as it is developed. They are using open source software tools whenever possible.

[3] This presentation centered around a real time demo of using many machines to solve "embarrassingly" parallel problems. The demo used about 5 networked computers with dual processor cores to queue up and re-encode wav files to ogg files. This tool allows creating "on the fly" compute clusters without going to a more formal solution, such as a Beowulf cluster design. Another tool for managing multiple systems was described, dancer's shell.

[4] Amazon S3 offers "storage in the cloud" at very reasonable rates.

xkcd on Social Networks

I have made a few (mostly negative) comments about social networks on this blog. Maybe, that's because I have never been much of a "joiner." For example, I have never felt the need to "join" Slashdot, even though I have read its postings from near the outset and it continues to be a major source for news for me in the tech field. Now, the genius behind xkcd takes on the state of social networking, circa 2010. I looked hard and found my "communities" centered in a tight "cluster." Note highlighted regions:
here

By the way, I have used IRC somewhat, but not nearly as much as the others, otherwise, the highlighted cluster could've been much larger.

CPU Comparison

Here is a rough bar chart
.

showing the relative performance of some of the CPUs in systems that I have built after the introduction of Core 2 architecture. According to the graph, the E8400 outclasses the other systems by a wide margin. In actual experience there isn't that much of a difference between a E6600 and E8400 because the entire system specs must be taken into account. Also, I am not sure I agree with the graph that the E7200 is better than an E6750. The E6750 has a better instruction set. The E8400 still offers a lot at the $160 level. Lately, I have been testing an E2180 CPU which has very good performance and very good "bang for the buck" ($33 on EBay).