Skip to content

2007

  • 1 min read

FooPlot – looks quite cool!

<!-

body { font-style: normal; font-family: Lucida Grande; font-weight: normal; font-variant: normal; font-size: 11pt; line-height: normal }
->

Check out this
post from Ajaxian:

"Dheera Venkatraman has released Fooplot,
a new website that plots any function, and supports Google Maps-style
panning around.

Fooplot is currently using SVG and VML to do the rendering and canvas
support is coming for Safari.

For good SVG browsers like Firefox and Opera, 3D plots work too.

In the future, it will communicate with Google spreadsheets and
interact with server-side scripts that do curve fitting and other
tasks.

Fooplot

(from: Fooplot:
function plotting)

  • 1 min read

Technie note: Ethernet vs. USB-2 External Hard Disk

I am enhancing the backup methodology here at BlogBridge Enterprises and was selecting a new 500Gb external hard disk. One choice I made was whether to get an Ethernet , i.e. network attached, hard disk or connect one directly to my Mac via USB-2 or FireWire.

Admittedly being too lazy to do calculations I guessed that the limiting factor on speed of a hard disk would be the hard disk transfer speed itself not the speed of Ethernet-100 vs. USB-2.

Not sure if this is actually correct, but I opted for the convenience of being able to place the hard disk anywhere rather than having yet another contraption attached to my computer.

I had lunch with a bunch of guys who know about OS virtualization and other hard-core systems issues and put the question to them: what would the performance difference be?

Here 's what I learned: one major difference is that the Ethernet connected hard disk has to use the Mac's TCP/IP stack which will eat a lot of CPU. I hadn't thought of that. Excellent point, and proven to be true now that I received and have started playing with my new disk (A LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini.)

Next post will be on my evaluation of Backup software for Mac OS X.

  • 1 min read

Freakonomics Blog on stealing in supermarkets

<!-

body { font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 11pt; font- style: normal; font-family: Lucida Grande; line-height: normal }
->

Check out this
post from Freakonomics Blog:

There's an interesting news
brief in today's N.Y. Times about a report just
issued by the Food Marketing
Institute about shoplifting in supermarkets. In previous years,
health and beauty products were the most frequently shoplifted items,
making up 23% of all stolen items in 2000. [snip…]

"The report also suggested," Mindlin writes, "that self-service
checkout lanes, where customers scan and pay for their purchases
themselves, are surprisingly theft-free. Of the roughly 5,400 stores
in the survey with self-checkout lanes, 63.6 percent reported no
increase in theft rates."

(Read the whole thing! Stealing
in Supermarkets)

  • 1 min read

What planet is scoble living on?

<!-

body { font-style: normal; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Lucida Grande; line-height: normal; font-weight: normal; font-variant: normal }
->

Check out this
post from Scobleizer - Tech Geek
Blogger:

As a comparison, I have three PCs. Two of which have never crashed in
their entire lifetimes. And I use my PCs nearly around the clock. I have
two Macs too and haven't seen this problem on those.

(from: Apple
rebooting problem hits us…)

Huh? two PCs who haven't crashed in their entire lifetimes? Must be
something that happens only at Microsoft (yeah, I know he's not there
any more.) Or he got those two PCs for Christmas. 2006.