Brainwaves / moreilly.com

Mac OSX just turned 10. Windows 3.0 is old enough to buy its own drinks. MS-DOS is a venerable 30 years old. And UNIX, that lovely old bag, is of an age equivalent to the Answer to the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. These are well-established, mature operating systems, full of amazing advanced features and wonderful embellishments.

So can someone please tell me why the ‘copy’ function in ALL of these OSs hasn’t made any significant improvements in, well, EVER?? Why does the same horribly inefficient, serial, unresponsive, fault-intolerant file copying mechanism that was present in UNIX in the early 1970s persist today? Why can’t I find a single article on the Internet that asks this question? I can’t believe I’m the only one who has noticed that we’re (metaphorically) racing our flying cars through the sky with hamsters under the hood…

I am not, and never will be, a programmer. So I implore anyone who reads this to think about it, and if you have any programming skills, make a NEW copy function that actually incorporates some of the revolutionary ideas we’ve come to expect even from lowly FTP applications in the past 40 years! If you need ideas about what features to include, here are a few:

-queuing: Why does the OS try to start each copying operation on top of the ones already present, even when it cuts performance for both by 60% or more? If I want to ask the OS to copy a set of files when another copy is already in progress to/from the same source and/or destination, it should at the very least ask me if I’d like the copy to start after the current one has finished.

-report on errors: I just love it when I have a batch of hundreds of files which need to be copied or moved to a new location, and it fails about 80% of the way through… Instead of a “failed while copying file x” or worse, just a cryptic error code, why can’t the OS keep track of which files WERE successfully copied, and tell me in a detailed report WHY it failed on that file?

-fault-tolerance: Let’s take the last point a step further. If I have a batch of files to copy and it fails on ONE, is it too much to ask to have the copy operation complete ALL of the rest, instead of allowing the error to interrupt the whole process? Inform me of the error, but don’t just stop – the OS should finish as much of what I’ve asked it to do as it can, without any further input from me.

-resume: If I need to interrupt a large copy operation to take care of something else, why can’t I resume it later? A batch copy is nothing more than a series of tasks, yet ALL modern OSs treat it as if it were a single task with a binary outcome. Give the user some control and knowledge about the parts of the process instead of just a window into an FMbox that way it is now.

-regexp: Since we’re already dreaming, why not add some advanced functionality that would be REALLY useful? How many of you UNIX admins have written a regular expression utility to handle file copies already? (I bet it’s most of you.) And how did you do it? By getting a file list from some other output, parsing the filenames you want from it, and passing those file names to the copy operation. What a waste!! Why isn’t there a filter built in to the copy function itself? And wouldn’t it be nice to have a quick-and-dirty GUI interface for it when you don’t want to interrupt what you’re doing in the command shell…?

-direct-remote copying: Imagine you’re using a remote terminal to access server A. And for some reason, you can’t xterm or remote control servers B and C, but you need to copy a 500GB virtual disk from B to C. (I’m using a real-world example here, drawn from experience). So you map their drives onto server A, and begin the copy operation. What happens? In Windows, the file(s) is/are copied from server B to server A, then from server A to server C. Instead of 500 gigabytes being passed over the network, it’s a TERABYTE. Taking protocol and routing overhead into account, it ends up being more than twice the bandwidth than is necessary. So why not just have the ability to affect the copy directly from B to C instead of incurring all the extra? I know this is the most complex feature of these to implement, but it would be awfully useful…

So what do you say? In these days of 3D home televisions, floor-sweeping robots, and electric cars, can we please put the 1970s mimeographs away and get ourselves a nice new, 2011-ready ‘copy’ program?

…or at least cross-posting… This is from my facebook status a while ago. Didn’t want to risk losing it, so I’m posting it here as well.
====================

Mattcelt thinks this is an incredible word: pulchritudinous. It’s practically anti-onomatopoeic. Does that make it reflexively ironic?
June 4 at 4:07pm · Comment · Like
Jim B* likes this.

Devon B* at 4:09pm June 4
look dude, my brain already hurts enough at this point in the work day! lol

Sara L* at 5:01pm June 4
this is my favorite status ever.

Erika S* at 7:04pm June 4
You could also just say, “She’s purty.” (on a steeeeek)

Katie F* at 7:31pm June 4
You made my brain go ouchie.

Mattcelt at 11:42am June 5
What’s the term for words like this that have a meaning that’s the opposite of what you’d expect?

Erika S* at 11:56am June 5
Ask Inigo Montoya.

I have a thorough respect and appreciation for the police. Several members of my family are or were police officers, as is my best friend. Police perform a vital role in society, and U.S. police are traditionally some of the crème de la crème in the world.

But in recent years, many police departments have begun fostering an “us-versus-them” mentality, where anything out of the ordinary is a threat until proven otherwise. This is a frightening way of thinking, and unfortunately lends itself to the abuse of power by people in positions of authority.

Fortunately, the citizens of this country have a good deterrent against these types of abuse: cameras. The right to photograph and take video in public places is an ESSENTIAL tool in holding law enforcement (and any other authority) accountable for their actions.

Specifically, actions like these, in which an Albuquerque police officer – without provocation – attacks a photojournalist. (Warning: the video is quite shocking.)

I’m not sure if it was a typo, or true engrish, but you can find it describing the HUGE (and slightly scary) stuffed steam buns here.

“Expectsed”. I love it.

Arrogance is telling other people how good you are. Confidence is letting them discover it for themselves.

Arrogance is forced. Confidence is earned.

Arrogance is a turn-off. Confidence is a turn-on.

  

So don’t tell me how good you are. Show me.

I ran across this quote today reading a story about corporate security (at the Dilbert website, of all places). It was post by someone with the handle “DRAM”.

“The greatest form of tyranny is petty tyranny. It’s also the easiest to amass unnoticed.”

I’m not sure I agree with it 100% yet – it’s going to take some time to parse – but I thought it was interesting enough to put here. What do you think?

My friend Erika has coined a new term for the nonsense results you regularly get from searches on the Internet:

googledegook (n). – the detritus left behind as a result of a Google Bomb.

I like it.

Hello there, Matt here. This is my first attempt at blogging, so bear with me. Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t know that what I’m trying to do is actually blogging, in its purest sense – I’m imagining it as more of a journal of sorts, and external record of the frenetic state of my mind, since I don’t think I do enough real exploratory web browsing to feel the need to log my web experiences the same way a trekker in the Andes would.

That said, how about my first thought:

I’ve often wondered what it was that made Plato, Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, and a whole lot of other very memorable thinkers so…. well, memorable. And I realized, long ago, that a very important factor of their memorability was that they wrote things down. I have also known, for a great long time, that I very intensely dislike writing, at least in the traditional pencil-and-paper sense. I’m fairly sure that this can be attributed to a) the fact that I’m left-handed, b) my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Coffee, who forced us to hold our pencils a certain way, which I to this day find uncomfortable*, and c) my absolute inability to keep track of any piece of paper. I regularly find things I wrote 10+ years ago tucked in some obscure corner as I try to get rid of a stack of outdated papers.

But that highlights the beauty of computers, IMHO. I actually can enjoy typing, and knowing that I can do a quick text search among thousands of scraps and snippets to find the battered remnants of some stream of consciousness so I can pick it up at a later time and, heaven forbid, actually finish a thought process.

So while I won’t show the inhumility (is that really a word?) of trying to place myself in the illustrious company of those amazing philosophers and inventors, and I won’t indulge the fantasy that I might actually be counted among them one day, I do rest a little easier knowing that at least I won’t risk having my horrible aversion to writing be the sole impediment to eventual worldwide recognition across the ages of my greatness.

*Have you ever tried to change the habitual way you hold a pencil? It’s a holy terror. I had to do it once when I was in Kindergarten (I didn’t develop my rebellious streak until much later, unfortunately) and I haven’t been successful changing it back since.

[Semi-random thoughts for the day:]

Never let school get in the way of your education. Never let religion get in the way of your faith. And never let life get in the way of living.

The chief source of power for the evil is the complicity of the weak.

So have a great day, hope you liked your visit, please come back soon!
Matt

The folly of English orthography
Achieves heights of linguistic pornography
when the fish that you fry
is spelled ghoti
For pleasure instead of cryptography.

A girl who weighed many an oz.
Used language I dare not pronoz.
For a fellow unkind
Pulled her chair out behind,
Just to see, so he said, if she’d boz.

There was a young girl in the choir
Whose voice rose hoir and hoir
Till it reached such a height
It was clear out of seight,
And they found it next day on the spoir.

A fellow who lived in New Guinea
Was known as a silly young nuinea.
He utterly lacked
Good judgment and tacked,
For he told a plump girl she was skuinea.

One day I went to the znu
For I wanted to see the old gnu;
But the old gnu was dead
And the nnu gnu they said
Was too nnu a nnu gnu to vnu.

A right-handed fellow named Wright,
In writing “write”, always wrote “rite”
Where he meant to write right.
If he’d written “write” right
Wright would not have wrought rot writing “rite”.

I wrote the first, but can’t take credit for the rest. The authorship is unknown to me, but I got them from the “More Ludicrous Lymericks” page.

In honor of the tenth anniversary of the release of The Kermit Principle, God arranged for a rainbow last night and let me take pictures. ;-)

They can be found here: Part I and Part II.

Oh, and for the curious, here is the original CD cover from the album. (Thank goodness for The Internet Archive!!! Please support them!)

I wishwishwish I could take credit for this quote myself:

< <The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data.’> >

This little quip signifies (quite succinctly and elegantly) the problem of confusing personal experience with scientifically acquired empirical evidence. It is brilliant, and will become part of my own arsenal against the adamantly ignorant.

A friend brought his Wii to my party last night, but it was set up for his HDTV in progressive scan mode and wouldn’t display properly on my regular-definition television. Further, he only brought his Wii component cables, so we couldn’t use the ‘plug in the composite cable’ trick to reset it.

After much searching and exploring dead-ends, I came across this
forum thread.

The last entry in the post had the most simple and elegant solution (and the only one that worked!), which I’m copying here so that hopefully it will occupy a more prominent place in the search engine rankings.

Unplug the component cables from the Wii, turn it on, press A and pass the intro screen, put the component cables back in and voila.

Of course, you should change the settings right away to 480i, because running any other application will cause the screen to go back to 480p.

Thank you so much, IceIpor – you saved us a whole lot of time and frustration.

(The direct link to the post is here.)

I try not to generalize about people, and I always recognize that there are exceptions to every stereotype. But there is a class of people who are known as “Maryland drivers” who I believe can be generally characterized as…. BAD AT DRIVING. They are, as a group, the worst drivers I have ever experienced. I would rather drive in Mexico City (a frightening place, vehicle-wise) than most places in Maryland.

-Many Maryland drivers insist on driving in the leftmost lane, driving in the blind spot of the car to their right, which itself is driving in the blind spot of the car to its right, and all are driving 5 mph under the speed limit, clogging the whole road and preventing anyone from passing.

-Many Maryland drivers get belligerent when prevented from doing something dangerous and illegal. I once had a woman try to run me off the road for two miles after I refused to let her (blatantly and deliberately) cut me off at a stop light.

-Many Maryland drivers will try to pull off sophisticated and difficult driving maneouvers in dense traffic. These nearly always result in an accident or near miss, as they are missing the requisite skills to perform the task.

-If a Maryland driver is in the left-hand lane, they will not move for a car that wants to pass them on the left, and they give a dirty look if they get passed on the right.

Let’s put it this way: Maryland drivers have New York attitudes… and Florida skills.

“If it’s not a good time, it’s a good story.”

“If it wasn’t a good experience, it was a learning experience.”

“It either takes a genius or an O’Reilly.”

All are attributable to Chel O’Reilly.

Most people are their own worst critics.

Not me, I have a sister for that.

Wisdom is (for the most part) the application of the principle to the practical.

While it’s important to live in the moment, it’s equally important to remember that every moment is linked to every other. When you lose context, the moment becomes meaningless.

Never let school get in the way of your education;
never let religion get in the way of your faith;
and never let life get in the way of living.

(Mark Twain wrote the first line, and I the rest.)

Here’s the link for all you die-hard fans. Every time someone listens to my stuff there, I’m eligible for royalties, so get the word out! And you can always download the full mp3s from last.fm or from my site here. Thanks for listening!!

http://www.last.fm/music/Matthew+P.+O’Reilly

Matt

John Adams, the second president of the United States, wrote, “There are only two creatures of value on the face of the earth: those with the commitment, and those who require the commitment of others.”

And I have often said that something is not perfect when nothing more can be added; something is perfect only when nothing more can be taken away [without changing its fundamental nature].

I have spent many long hours trying to discern what fundamental requirements for being a ‘good person’ are, trying to strip away the requirements that are subjective, circumstantial, or not universal. In essence, trying to figure out what is the set of ‘perfect’ requirements for being a ‘good person’. And to date, I have found only two that I can’t seem to do without when describing such an individual: commitment and compassion.

So defined (by me):
Compassion is the dynamic counterbalance which consistently stabilizes perturbations in the equilibrium of society, without which every civilization would inexorably and excruciatingly tear itself apart.

Commitment is the act of dedicating oneself to an idea or process unwaveringly for a period of indefinite length.

Can anyone think of others that might not be covered under these auspices?

Take a frog, and yell JUMP!
The frog jumps.

Now, cut off one of its legs and yell JUMP!
The frog jumps, but not as far.

Now, cut off the other leg and yell JUMP!
The frog does not jump.

Conclusion: The amputee frog is deaf.
Abstract: For centuries, science has been mystified by how frogs hear without ears. Our recent work has at last resolved this long standing mystery by showing that in frogs, the ability to hear is closely correlated to the number of legs present on the frog. The hearing organ’s location in the frog’s legs explains the absence of any ears at their expected location. In future studies, we will determine if the frog’s hearing apparatus is in fact located on the frog’s feet, as is suspected from their ear-like morphology.