Tech Observer: Linux And Open Source

I have been working with freebsd for sometime, I am very interested in this article which goes indepth into the new changes that are made for the new version release:

FreeBSD is back to its incredible performance and now can take advantage of multi-core/CPUs systems very well... so well that some benchmarks on both Intel and AMD systems showed release 7.0 being faster than Linux 2.6 when running PostreSQL or MySQL.

I use this device all the time to console into routers and for serial operations on my Dell D410 Laptop and for both Linux and Windows XP OS's. Works Great!

ok so this is new to me, a supposed replacement for cygwin, since it is a true port of the kernel to windows. hmmmm. check it out.

andlinux

andLinux is a complete Ubuntu Linux system running seamlessly in Windows 2000 based systems (2000, XP, 2003, Vista [32-bit only]). This project was started for Dynamism for the GP2X community, but its userbase far exceeds its original design. andLinux is free and will remain so, but donations are greatly needed.

Nice write up on MySQL and SSH, practically anything that you can connect to can be tunneled over SSH.

Tunnelling MySQL Over SSH

To set up a tunneled connection to a MySQL server at remotehost.com, you can issue the following two commands on any client:

ssh -fNg -L 3307:127.0.0.1:3306 myuser@remotehost.com
mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3307 -u dbuser -p db

The first command tells ssh to log in to remotehost.com as myuser, go into the background (-f) and not execute any remote command (-N), and set up port-forwarding (-L localport:localhost:remoteport ). In this case, we forward port 3307 on localhost to port 3306 on remotehost.com.

Nice bit of writing on some code archaeology. Not definite in it's answer, it provides some illumination of the thinking behind complex problem solving.

float InvSqrt (float x){
float xhalf = 0.5f*x;
int i = *(int*)&x;
i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1);
x = *(float*)&i;
x = x*(1.5f - xhalf*x*x);
return x;
}

Finding the inverse square root of a number has many applications in 3D graphics, not least of all the normalisation of 3D vectors. Without something like the nrm instruction in a modern fragment processor where you can get normalisation of an fp16 3-channel vector for free on certain NVIDIA hardware if you're (or the compiler is!) careful, or if you need to do it outside of a shader program for whatever reason, inverse square root is your friend.

jawr

Jawr is a tunable packaging solution for Javascript and CSS which allows for rapid development of resources in separate module files. Writing a simple descriptor properties file, and using a servlet and a tag library are all the requirements to use it.
[...]
Jawr offers the best of both worlds, by combining a powerful bundling-minifying-compressing scheme for optimal service in production, with a rapid development mode for quick change-save-test cycles.

More ruby stuff, this is a ruby library implementing MapReduce which is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets.

Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key.

skynet

Skynet is an open source Ruby implementation of Google’s Map/Reduce framework, created at Geni.com. With Skynet, one can easily convert a time-consuming serial task, such as a computationally expensive Rails migration, into a distributed program running on many computers.

Amazon has this right now for $7.99 new this is the lowest I've seen it so far.

The Fountain By Darren Aronofsky

I haven't tried this yet, though it looks like exactly what I need to move some video to the new iPod nano that supports video.

Howto: Encode H.264 Video for the iPod using ffmpeg Homer's picture Mon, 05/02/2007 - 6:57am — Homer

Save this script somewhere, e.g. /usr/local/bin/podit, then chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/podit

#!/bin/sh
# Name: podit
# Summary: iPod H264 640x480 video transcoder script.
# Version: 1.1.1
# Date: 2007.07.11
# License: GPL Version 3 or Later
# URL: http://slated.org/howto_transcode_h264_for_ipod_with_ffmpeg

wow take a look at this tight little implementation! Nice concept, rapid return of the image and though it did not ship with sparklines support it will add it shortly...
Google Chart API

The Google Chart API returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts for example. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, and labels.

You can include a Chart API image in a webpage by embedding a URL within an tag. When the webpage is displayed in a browser the Chart API renders the image within the page.

I have a Canon 20D camera and I have used it extensibly since it came out. It is now superseded by the 40D. But I like it still, though I am shopping for some upgrades, browsing through amazon's site, I found out there is manufacturers instant rebate that brings some of the lens and flash down. I have always enjoyed reliable service from my Kingston CF cards for storage and 4Gb has never been cheaper.

I found out this is on sale:

Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM

The 4GB compact flash card is a good fit in digital cameras:

Kingston CF/4GB-S 4 GB ElitePro CompactFlash Card

I'm still on the fence about a flash... I've been relying on quality lens, and willing to loose a shot. But this flash is onsale as well:

Canon Speedlite 580EX II Flash

Anyone else have a 20D???

This a little open source plugin for excel to create sparklines. Works Ok. I experimented with MIN MAX to display a High LOW next to the last line. See also Ask E.T.: Sparklines: theory and practice

TinyGraphs

TinyGraphs is an open source Excel add-in that creates sparklines, mini column graphs, and area graphs from a row of data. It generates beautiful tiny graphics that are as small as a cell and is useful for visualizing large quantities of data, such as stock prices and exchange rates.