2011 April 12 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for April 12th, 2011

Third Time Lucky

Published by Robert Pogson April 12th, 2011 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

The third search for the wreckage of AF447 that crashed in the Atlantic in 2009 has been found.

There is some hope of retrieving the tail section which is somewhat intact and on a flat region. That is where the two flight recorders were attached and if data can be recovered there is hope that the cause of the crash could be discovered. There is hope this finding can bring some closure to friends and relatives of the dead and save lives in the future.

see Air France crash: Tail section found on Atlantic seabed (BBC)

How Some People Live

Published by Robert Pogson April 12th, 2011 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I came across a news item about a community in which I had taught. If anyone is curious about life in such communities, take a look at the video. The story is about subsidizing food in remote fly-in communities. In the old day folks lived off the land and many still do but the population has grown too much for everyone to do that and air is the only way to get perishable foodstuffs in. The issue of new item is water from which the subsidy has been removed. The north is rich with water but with high concentrations of people in communities the local water supplies need processing to be drinkable. Many northern communities have water treatment for only part of the community so water is often transported by truck but it is not a particularly efficient, reliable or safe method. Getting communities, local, regional and federal governments to paddle in the same direction is not easy or it would have been done decades ago.

- Robert Pogson

Videos

Published by Robert Pogson April 12th, 2011 in technology. 2 Comments

I am getting the hang of the generation of videos. I tried several different applications, codecs, microphones, etc. and found a combination that works pretty reliably. For screen capture, I now use ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -f x11grab -s 1280×800 -r 20 -i :0 -f alsa -i hw:1,0 -ar 44100 -bufsize 4000k part_something.mpeg

That pulls in my webcam/usb microphone which I have to shield from echoes with a blanket, like a recording booth. The acoustics are terrible in the room where I am set up. Other applications I tried include vlc which works pretty well and recordmydesktop.

I use Pitivi for editting. With the screen capture method, there is often the need to cut at both ends because it takes a bit of time to switch contexts. On Part3 I managed to do everything in one take… but I was 6 minutes over the 15 minute limit of YouTube so I cut out ~~all~~ many of the hesitations/flubs. I did stupid things like typing .ort instead of .org and I left out “ssh -Y terminalserver” in front ot a command. I got “file not found” and ran around a bit before figuring out what went wrong. Chuckle. All in all, making videos is a humbling experience. I am a novice/idiot savant all at the same time. I find it very hard to talk/think/type simultaneiously.

It’s been fun and I will do more. I have a page with all the links at http://mrpogson.com/videos/ and Google works, too.

- Robert Pogson

Refreshing IT

Published by Robert Pogson April 12th, 2011 in technology. 6 Comments

A survey found the average age of a PC in UK business was 5 years. The survey rightly finds users are dissatisfied with the speed and reliability of their IT. What the survey was not intended to find and indeed those surveyed may not have been aware of is that many of those machines ran XP, an OS that was obsolete in 2001. Upgrading to “7″ is out of the question for many old PCs because of resources and drivers for hardware. GNU/Linux on the other hand gives old machines respectable performance, particularly if they are used as thin clients.

see Past-it PCs cause data loss and damage productivity.

For example, one of the images in the article is an old PC with a BSOD. See The Conclusion.

I accept that old computers eventually die but, unless it is the CPU or motherboard, a quick swap of parts usually brings a desktop back to life. ATX motherboards can be swapped too. It costs perhaps $100 for labour and $100 for parts to replace a motherboard and you get top-notch performance or you can use a low-end motherboard and use the thing as a thin client of a modern server. That’s cheaper than buying a new box. Putting GNU/Linux on it costs $0 for parts.

- Robert Pogson

Intel Moves On

Published by Robert Pogson April 12th, 2011 in technology. 5 Comments

Intel, the other half of Wintel, is moving on. At IDF (Intel Developer Forum), Intel laid out a road map emphasizing small cheap and mobile computing. They will form a partnership with Tencent, China’s largest Internet company and third largest in the world. Tencent made its name on the QQ instant messenger which has a penguin as mascot… Intel’s partners will release a string of Atom-powered devices in May offering choice of OS: Android/Linux, “7″ and MeeGo.

“During her keynote, James discussed Intel’s transition from a semiconductor company to a personal computing company, and emphasized the importance of delivering compelling user experiences across a range of personal computing devices.”

see IDF Beijing 2011: Executives talk evolution of computing

That sounds like Intel is moving on from dependence on M$ for its whole livelihood. The move from x86 into mobile/small cheap computing is in self-defence against the move of ARM from embedded devices to all forms of computing and it includes Linux in a big way.

See ITWorld

I find it interesting that Intel is aiming at good performance per watt for mobile at 22nm in a couple of years. By then, ARM will run on body heat.

- Robert Pogson