Four Horsemen of the Apostrophe

For some time I struggled with an annoying screen tearing problem during video playback on my home PC. I have a 22 wide screen LCD monitor, NVIDIA 7300GT, and I use to run KDE on every Linux distro that I use. I use mplayer to playback my videos.

It happens so, after I upgraded to Ubuntu and used gnome for awhile, I have found the reason for the tearing problem. KDE's translucency feature. This feature, that I have turned on awhile ago (just to play with), seems to cause the problem. It probably changes some fundamental property of the X server once it is activates. Since I don't know how Nvidia implemented their proprietary driver, I can't peer in and see what's causing it.

Anyway, I'm glad this problem is gone.

I hope this post serves useful to whoever finds it.

For a long time, I was wondering if Google Trends can be used to predict the behaviour of large groups with respect to the stock market. Let's see if it could have been useful in predicting the stock market crash of January 2008.

Here is the graph of the Dow Jones in the last 12 months:




And here is the Google Trends output:




Notice that just before January, there are a few days where the amount of news article regarding "recession" dramatically increase.  Just a few days later, the Dow Jones dropped hysterically. You can argue that the correlation is accidental and is not reliable for future trials to "time the market", but for me this connection is too obvious to ignore.

It's "old new" already, but I'm obliged to say that on Wednesday IBM has finally announced that they are buying XIV, where I held a position for the last 28 months. It has made major headlines here in Israel, and I got my picture on the newspapers (it's the second time. the first time was unexpectedly with Cooperative Linux).

The Israeli media were fond of twistingly trying to compare the deal to the storyline of a popular TV show of the recent year (מסודרים - ויקיפדיה), and kept trying to dig up information about how much money was involved in the deal (luckily, without success). Unlike in any other country that I know of, when a company is acquired in Israel, they often use the word "exit" to describe it (i.e. for 'exiting the business' with a large personal fortune) in a sense that emphasizes greed, rather than just use the word 'purchase', 'buy', or 'acquire'. I don't support this greedy kind of vocabulary...

XIV's flag product is Nextra, and it is based on a Linux cluster. For the last 28 months I am responsible for maintaining Linux patches and various drivers that surround it. In a gradual shift during the following weeks I'd become an IBM employee. I'm quite excited about it.

Okay, so I sent a patch for the audio adapter in the ALSA-project mailing list.

Everything works great now.

I also switched my Debian distro to x86_64.

Yesterday I received a newly purchased computer to replace the old aging one that I used during the last 3 years.

It has a fabulous Abit AW9D-MAX board (running at 1060Mhz), with 2GB of RAM (667Mhz) and Intel Core Due 2 E6600 (2.4Ghz with 4MB internal cache). It also includes an Nvidia-based GeForce4 7300GT card.

So far I got everything working, except the on-board 7.1+2 audio adapter. It's a Realtek ALC882 chipset that exhibits some problems in Linux 2.6.21-rc6 although this chip is supposedly supported. I'm currently trying to investigate this issue, though I am not an ALSA expert. Maybe I'll manage to hack a fix for this driver by myself - I'll see how it goes. Anyway, I posted a bug report in the ALSA's bug tracker.

So, except of a soon-to-be-fixed audio issue, this board seems to be quite Linux-friendly.

I'll also try to switch my Debian distro from i386 to x86_64 with his box. Quite enjoyable :)

Looking back at the end of 2003 and the first few months of 2004 following the release of Cooperative Linux, a lot of things have changed.

Cooperative Linux was created as a hack to overcome the expenses of Linux virtualization under Windows. It generated a lot of attention simply because it managed to introduce a lot of Linux newbies to the OSS community. Back then, there were a few commercial products that provided Linux virtualization, and some free but sub-optimal VMs (bochs, qemu).

Back then, I was contacted by numerous folks saying that they are happy that they don't have to buy VMware and instead they can use coLinux. So, it was seems to me that coLinux was taking some small (or insignificant?) market share from VMware.

Since 2004 two important things happened:

• VMware have made a few changes to their marketing strategy and decide to release some of their products for free. There are several pages on the Internet that tells you how to "exploit" VMware's free vmplayer to your advantage, despite all of the 'missing features'.
  
• Hardware-assisted virtualization have made itself main-stream which made it quite easier for applications to run an emulated Windows under Linux and vise-versa.

With these two big changes, the cheap and "dirty" Cooperative Linux is much less needed nowadays. BTW, "dirty" is actually the word Linus Torvalds used to describe Cooperative Linux to my ears back in OLS 2004 (not that I feel insulted in any way, actually I agree with him).  Every CS major can (hopefully) tell you that cooperative virtualization is not the academically 'nice' approach to virtualization, therefore coLinux is simple just a hack, and I completely agree with that. It was correct 3 years ago, and it is especially correct now, considering that hardware virtualization is available.

Back when coLinux started, VMware was acquired by EMC, so assuming that VMware A.K.A. EMC lost some sort of market share as a result, it wouldn't be the first time that I have aided in a market share loss of EMC.

Ever since September 2005 I have been employed at XIV as a Linux specialist. XIV develops a high-end storage systems that compete both in performance and price against EMC's products. XIV is already selling, and it has a great potential to take market share out of EMC.

If you want to read about XIV, you can check this news article (Hebrew), forwarded from The Marker finance Israel magazine, stored on Walla, one of the biggest Israeli news site, which also happens to be a customer of XIV.

I was one of the second million users of ICQ when I registered back in 1997. This week however, after I was careless enough not to update my account's long forgotten E-Mail and password, someone managed to hack it and make my account unusable.

So I was forced to re-register an ICQ account, well into the 420th million.

It's worth to mention that the old account has received a generous amount of spam messages and that got pretty annoying. I guess that when you submit your ICQ account to sites like livejournal, it gets picked up by spam bots.

I'm not going to publish my new number. If you want to look it up, search my name - I'm pretty sure you won't find two of me matching 419xxxxxx.

It also seems that ICQ accounts turned into some sort of a virtual real estate, as short (6-digit) UINs are being sold on eBay..

This is the second time I pay a handful of bucks for a computer technician at a computer store to assemble a computer I order from that store.

This time, Pandas are the so-called "professionals" behind the masterpiece.



All the juicy details at my website (Hebrew): פנדה מחשבים - איך לא להרכיב מחשב

For your information, Steorn coverage continues at a dedicated journal that I've opened: Steorn - is it for real?

It would either end with "Steorn's wonder energy device debunked" or a shocking "Scientists approve Steorn's claims, academia in self-reckoning turmoil", but that's only if we reach April 1st 2007 and nothing new about this turns out.

A short article about steorn appears today at The Observer

If the invention is bogus and the purpose of this whole stunt is to extract investors' money, then accepting investors with wide arms may indicate exactly this. Otherwise, if the invention is genuine they wouldn't want to further jeopardize their credibility. Therefore it would be a smart decision not to accept investors anyway

They say the invention was tested in the last 3 years by themselves. Does this mean they already have enough money from previous work and they really don't need investors' money? Perhaps.

The writers at the Walla news portal site did it quite well when they coined the Hebrew acronym for Digital Rights Managment as נז"ק. For those who don't know Hebrew, נזק can also directly translate to the word that stands for 'damage'.

So, Kudos to Walla, or whoever originally came up with this acronym.

The Walla article refers to this this blog entry of a blog named "A Copyfighter's Musings". According to this entry, the DRM technology of many legal music download sites has been cracked which means that all the media downloadable from any of these sites (such as PlayForSure and Napster) can be distributed freely on P2P networks after applying the removal of the DRM protection.

If you want to read some insightful posts about Copyright and the sorry state of it, you can check out the first posts at Eyal "Lotex" Lotem's blog..

People who read the news lately might have noticed an article about an Irish company named Steorn, that claims they have invented a device that generates energy out of nothing, which is known to be impossible according to what globally believed are the laws of Physics.

This story came out on August 18 when these people posted a full-page ad in the Economist magazine in order to persuade all the skeptics to come and check their claims. Of course, it could be a source of embarrassment for the average scientist to go actually question the basic laws Physics is established upon, but it appears that 3000 have already registered and 12 of them will be chosen to come to Steorn's labs and examine the patent-protected invention.

I developed a special interest in the energy topic after reading Richard Heinberg's "The Party's Over" last month. It became clear to me that we must get rid of oil and coal as sources of energy, not only for ecological reasons but also for political ones.

Back to the main issue - claiming the invention of a 'free energy' device or a 'perpetual-motion machine' is not something not done before. It was done by several parties in the last hundred-or so years, and all of them were either debunked or forgotten about. What is different with the Steorn story? Currently, nothing much, except that they appear to be quite serious about this, claiming that they have tested this invention for 3 years already.

Currently most articles in the Internet about this topic are copies of each other, but once in a while an actual news item with new details will show up. I'll try to follow the development of Steorn's claims. Following interviews of Sean McCarthy, Chief Executive of Steorn to various news source, today I've came up with these two:

* PESN, August 25, 2006
* SciScoop, August 25, 2006

My stance on this issue is that while the law for the Conservation of Energy is firmly established in Physics, it was never really proved. Actually, all the laws of Physics were only proved in respect to each other and never in a absolute universal sense. Only God (if exists) knows the right laws of Physics. Therefore we should always remain skeptical to some degree regarding Physics, especially if we want to find more laws, and to refine and rectify the laws that we thought we have already figured out.

By the way, I'm not sure if the currently exercised model of Economics and Capitalism works in a world where the cost of energy is zero, but that's another issue to discuss about.

This journal wasn't being updated for over a year, my fault.

Not that there's nothing to update about.

I've spent the last year working in a small firm working in the data storage field. Most of my work involves the Linux kernel. I spend all of my time at work during the week and during the weekend I have other activities.

Last month I travelled to OLS2006 and also spent some time with relatives in New York. I haven't selected any pictures to upload yet, but when I do it will show up in my flickr page (accessible from monatomic.org).

Lukewarm wind, spirals of it, spedding at my back while I took a walk about the neighborhood. The better part of the year is here, a slight chill as if escaping us every morning since September 22, prudently punctual. Thoughts came to mind about the last two months -- my memoir of events, unfulfilled expectations, surprises and changes that I have never delt with before. Everything could have been easily anticipated, though I did not think that I'd miss them so soon. Realizations - for once I have thought I had know myself completely, only to discover that I really don't, and it's only the beginning.

Reflecting on my reliability to finish things that I've started, my short-span interests has been exempted in and out of my mind's scope showing signs of unsettling boredom and seeks for new sources of creativity. It has been a year since I've visited Japan, and its inspiration is creating a longing to visit there again, some day. This time of year I can't hold away from the reminiscence, feelings of harmony and peacefulness that has engulfed my mind through-out the stay in that remarkable country.

Okay, enough with the literaturic babble. It seems that reading lots of books has reflected a linguistic level change. In case you have wondered, I'm now going through the Amber series and I have also had one instance of Agatha Christie's books being explored.

My newly acquired high-tech job is satisfying - I've almost completed one month of work, and it has passed quite fast. Progress in other areas have subsided, to whom it may concern.

I am trying to switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout.

It took 3 minutes to type the sentence above.

I type slooooooooooow....

Since January 21 2001 until yesterday (July 19 2005) I served in the IDF in accordance to a 4.5 years contract.

My civil state was restored. I'm now a free man and I don't have to explain anything to any authority when I'm invited to other countries. I had a lot of trouble with this issue last year.

On September I'll start working at a local Israeli start-up company.

Recently, I noticed that my CPU's idle temperatures are around 60 celsius. That's pretty high for an idle state. During busy states such as compilations, the temperatures rose to 90 and the computer slowed down because Intel makes sure that the CPU stops until the temperature goes below a certian threshold.

Disturbed by the fact my computer will die in a few weeks' time if I don't do something about it, I took the liberty to take apart the fans. The CPU's fan had hugh amount of dirt between itself and the processor. I did not realize how much dirt was there until I took it apart. The case's big fan was sluggished and didn't rotate at all when the computer was turned on.

I cleaned and oiled the fans, then replaced them back to their places.

End result is that now the idle temperature is around 37 celsius, and even 30 celsius if I turn the air condition on. The busy state temperature doesn't get above 50.

The case's front leds are not fading anymore.

The CPU's temperature now appears on my KDE's panel so next time I'll take care of these stuff sooner.

Today was my first attempt ever playing bowling.

In the first 7 throws the score was 0.
In the eighth throw the score was 7.
In the ninth it was Strike.

However I didn't won the game.
If I have only kept the trend...

Should I keep this blog strickly professional?

Or...

Would you like to read about interesting and bizarre events that happen in my personal life as well?
You'd probably discover that I'm even weired than you think.

No, I didn't drink.

The font panel LEDs of my computer's case (Antec Piano Black) started to twinkle and wan today, I guess it's not a good sign. It probably means that the power supply module is not supplying regular current. On the other hand, I don't mind that these LEDs will turn off completely, since their appearance is quite annoying when I'm trying to watch movies with the lights off.

On other news, after watching Season 4 of "24" I picked up my favorite quote:

"With all due respect, sir, you don't need a programmer. What you need is a decision-maker who knows how to stack up protocols"

Hey, good programmers know how to stack up protocols too - TCP, IP, etc... :)