c0t0d0s0.org

You may have recognized the out-of-focus blur in images when you take photos with an open aperture. This effect is called bokeh. Some people at the MIT Medialab use this for a really intriguing concept: Bokode. At first it looks like a LED transmitting just a red light, but by putting the LED out of focus you see, that this light contains information.

This bokeh-code or Bokode is a barcode design with a simple lenslet over the pattern. We show that an off-the-shelf camera can capture Bokode features of 2.5 microns from a distance of over 4 meters

Especially noteworthy is the simple idea how to measure distance and angle just by analysing how many and what barcodes you see. You will find more information at the webpage of the project

Ich habe zu lange heute versucht, einem Konzeptpapier, das ich momentan verfasse, die Schwächen auszutreiben und habe dabei vergessen, das sich mein Kühlschrank im postwochenendlichen Leerzustand befindet. Lust vor die Tür zu gehen habe ich auch nicht. Egal ... wozu gibt es Bringdienste. gäbe es einen Wettbewerb für den blödesten Pizzaservice der Welt,hätte ich einen sicheren Kandidaten für den ersten Platz dieses Wettbewerbs. Ich habe ja schon mal geschrieben, das der Pizzaservice beim ersten HHOSUG-Meeting die Pizzen für die Gäste zu mir nach Hause geliefert hat anstatt zur Geschäftsstelle. Nun, seit dem ich zu den HHOSUG-Meetings größere Mengen Pizza ordere, landen meine Bestellungen für daheim regelmässig in einem Wagen Richtung Sun-Geschäftsstelle, aus dem mich dann ein verwunderter Fahrer anruft, das da gar niemand ist. Ja, was wunder auch um halb neun ....

The information about Power7 are still a little bit sparse, but it at least some fragments are public. So: It looks like, you are out of luck, when you expect to upgrade your pSeries 520/550/560/575 systems to Power7. According to this statement of direction there are just upgrades for the Power570 and 595. I find this a little bit strange, as the p560 and p570 are not that different from a technology point of view.

The eWeek reports in "JRuby Team Leaving Sun for Engine Yard" that core developers of JRuby leave Sun:

Not sure of the future of their project at Oracle, the JRuby team is leaving Sun Microsystems to join the development team at Engine Yard, a company that specializes in Ruby and Ruby on Rails development and application hosting.

That aren´t good news, but at the end JRuby existed before the both joined Sun and it will exist further when the both leave Sun. But´s important that it will further exist, as it´s a good way to show that the JVM is more than just Java. I even think that JRuby with Glassfish (for example) is a much better place for Ruby as it´s native environment.

Tron was one of my favorite movies in my youth. I assume i just looked Strange Days and the both movies of Ghost in the Shell that often. It looks like i´m knowing at least one movie i will look in 2010 or 2011. I just found the teaser trailer at Youtube.

(click on image)

A reader that wants to be anonymous (thus he use such a pseudo in his comments) asked an interesting question: How do you do secure deletion in ZFS? The standard mechanism to it, is to overwrite data with zeros, ones or a data pattern to ensure that the data is deleted as normal delete would only delete the metadata and not the data itself. This is a little bit hard with ZFS. Why? ZFS is a copy-on-write filesystem, thus the zeros are written somewhere else, as active data is never overwritten by ZFS. There are hacks to solve this problems: For example overwriting all sectors on the free list. Or you can implement code to overwrite the data directly in a kind of secure delete. But from my point of view this wouldn´t really help.

Just heard on N24, that the Luftfahrtbundesamt found the reason for the go-around with touching the ground in the last year in Hamburg. The Spiegel (a german magazine) will report it: They call it a computer problem. Well ... i´m not so sure of that, and i´m sure that the Luftfahrtbundesamt said something different in their report. Why do i think different? Well ... i remember the last crash with fatalities of the Lufthansa on 14. September 1993 in Warsaw. At that time the Lufthansa Airbus A320 crashed into a small "hill" at the end of the run-way. The reason: The computer of the Airbus didn´t think that the Airbus is on ground and thus it didn´t brake.

At this time the computer programm for the brakes was modified and the activation of the brakes was coupled to an pressure of 2t instead of 12 tons on the landing gears and the airbrakes and the reverse thrust isn´t coupled to the landing gears at all and i´m sure that many landing were more secure of this decision.

When i look at the video of this attempt to land it looks like that both gears touched the ground and thus the Airbus switched in the ground mode. Looks as "works as designed". That isn´t a computer problem. This circumstances was just out of the specification. But as usual ... i´m waiting for the final report.

But i find something strange about this: When even a computer guy like me know about this situation, why does a pilot know about it, as the Hamburger Abendblatt reports it. Okay, i´ve read a lot about it to explain in meetings and seminars about the fact that the ability to specify requirements is finite. There will be always unspecified circumstances.

But well ... the Hamburger Abendblatt wrote, that the Spiegel will report about this. And the Spiegel is pretty well known for being overly negative in regard of Airbus. I remember they have declared the death of Airbus when Boeing announced the 787 They have even the old story about the Airbus being a computer controlled plane, but i assume you can´t talk with a journalist about direct law, alternate law and normal law.

A few days ago there was an announcement of a new SPARC processor. No, not the 1.6 GHz N2. There was a second announcement. Atmel announced the Atmel AT697F AT697F Fully Radiation-Hardened Processor. It's SPARCv8 compatible proc for usage in space where you have to live with high radiation levels. This CPU was testesd with a dose up to 300 Krad. So: SPARC is everywhere ... even high above your heads

Ich finds ja garkeine schlechte Idee, das es bei Philips Geräte zur Beziehungspflege (komisch, früher nannte man das Vibrator) gibt. Philips braucht auch neue Geschäftsfelder. Aber liebe Namensentwickler, musstet ihr den Teilen unbedingt so hocherotische Namen wie HF8430 geben. "Schaaaatz, verwöhn mich doch mal mit dem HF8340" ...

Wichtig auch: Die Webseite gibt die Möglichkeit ein Datenblatt herunter zu laden, in dem dann auch so wichtige Daten wie Geräuschentwicklung geschrieben sind (Geräuschpegel (Durchschnitt): 32 dB, Geräuschpegel (max.): 43 dB). Auch wird genau spezifiziert, mit welcher Frequenz die Beziehung gepflegt wird (Frequenz (max.): 95 Hz). Ist ja wieder mal typisch Grosskonzern. Alles genau spezifiziert. Wahrscheinlich hat das Teil auch eine spezifizierte MTBO (Mean Time between Orgasms) und MTBF (Mean Time between Failure ... aeh ... no Orgasms) und eine garantierte Zahl von Partnerpflegevorgängen bis zum Defekt. Aber die Daten konnte ich bisher nirgens finden.Und das Beste: Man kann das Gerät auch auf der Webseite registrieren lassen.

Es wird da übrigens auch von einer Ladeschale gesprochen. Mein Verdacht ist ja, das das ein vom Design verunglücktes Schnurloses Telephon war, bevor man auf die Idee gekommen ist, daraus aus Produkt zur partnerschaftlichen Pflege zu machen. Frage ist, was passiert, wenn man das Teil versehentlich in die Ladeschale des Telephons steckt. Und hoffentlich haben die die Telephonfunktion ausgebaut.

Ich hab ja zunächst geglaubt, das waere eine Fakeseite ... aber ich habe das Teil auch bei Amazon gefunden. Es scheint das Teil also wirklich zu geben.

(via: widhalm.or.at)

There was an interesting article at Reuters about the upcoming Power7 CPU. I don´t want to talk about the point, that his announcement was well times to our announcement about the 1.6 GHz. I don´t want to talk about the announcement, that systems will be available in 2010 when you take into consideration, that the last rollout of Power6 took almost a year.

No, i want to hint you on an interesting fact in this article. But at first you should take into consideration that IBM tries to tell the world, that per core performance is the most important factor at all. Now look at the following paragraph the Reuters article:

It also said POWER7 will be more efficient than the POWER6, which was launched in May 2007, capable of two to three times performance while using the same amount of energy.

Two to three times the performance ... sounds nice. Well ... it doesn´t sound that nice, when you do some math on the numbers. Let´s assume the Power6 is a 2-core system. Let´s further assume, that Power7 is a 4 core architecture. Then Power7 delivers the same performance per core than Power6 ... just more cores. Nice, but nothing earthshattering. But it gets even more interesting. Back in July 2008 Ashlee Vance wrote in the Register about Power7:

IBM looks set to join the seriously multi-core set with the Power7 chip. Internal documents seen by The Register show Power7 with eight cores per processor and also some very, very large IBM boxes based on the chip.

Okay, let´s do the same math again: Let´s assume the Power6 is 2-core, let´s further assume that Power7 is a 8-core design. Obviously a single core of the Power7 has just half the performance of the Power6 core. Hey, that will be interesting talks for the IBM sales people explaining that they were incorrect with the assumption that speed per core is the only interesting metric.

I wrote a text about the GNU tool set Polariscope 200x.y few days ago. Just to make it clear at first: I don't like the decision but it was made, so i have to live with it. In discussion I've used the same arguments: Portability! Standards!

But we have to face the reality. There is a prominent Unix derivate out there that doesn't think about standards and portability isn't an issue for this derivate. It's called Linux, it got a large market share somehow and most people use it for the development of open source software. There is a make defined by standards, but most open source software insists on using GNU make. Often the only well tested makefile is the makefile for Linux, often you have luck for Solaris, but don't try it on IRIX. I have the impression that portability comes just into mind, when some users ask about a different operating system.