Centauri's Thoughts

I spent another long day learning some graphics tricks for web design. The biggest lesson I learned is that graphics are really fluff, and that content matters more. Not only does content matter, but HOW it is constructed and how concise it is matters too!

I found some awesome sites today, that show examples of good design without being complicated graphically.

Its comforting to know that we have moved beyond the flash and glitz, and that the content and wording itself is what matters.

I have so many links, that it is not practical to list them ALL here, but I will list a few:

for colors

tutorials and good info

web design, CSS, graphics, tutorials

GIMP tutorials

I have seen Tag Clouds in use for about a year or two now, but I believe they have some interesting potential for a visual reference of content in many more ways than is being seen.

One recent app I saw was based on the bio's of your twitter followers: http://twitpwr.com/5vk/

So, armed with that knowledge, I made my own small app that text can be pasted into. It strips common words like a, an, of, the, by, for and so on.

Give it a try at http://www.centaurihome.net/cloud.php

When the information technology guys discover how painful it can be to upgrade their current PC hardware to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows 7 — the successor to the much-maligned Windows Vista — they may be tempted to switch to Linux or Apple’s (AAPL) Mac OS X.

Part of the problem is that you can’t install Windows 7 beta directly from Windows XP. Instead, you have to upgrade to Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later before attempting an install — a process the Channel Web team found to be non-trivial.
Among the scariest quotes in their report:

• “While Microsoft has assured the world that if the hardware works with Windows Vista it will work with Windows 7, the reality is that is misleading at best.”
• “We’ve almost lost count of the number of blue screens we’ve seen in the CRN Test Center during the Windows 7 evaluation process.”
• “We tried to do the upgrade on an Acer TravelMate, but were stopped in our tracks by Bluetooth driver incompatibilities.”
• “On a series of 3-and-a-half year old ThinkPad T43s, an IBM security processor refused to let the notebooks boot up with Windows 7. We needed to crack open a couple of four-year old desktops … to add memory just to try to get a system image.”
• “Across the XP-Vista-Windows 7 landscape, Microsoft has fostered an ecosystem that now holds out the prospect of a mind-numbing number of incompatible drivers, unsupported devices, unsupported applications, unsupported data, patches, updates, upgrades, “known issues” and unknown issues.”

Bring it on! It cant happen soon enough for me to see legions leaving the crippling M$ world and come to their senses.

The entire article can be read at http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/02/25/windows-7-trouble-on-the-upgrade-path/

In Fluxworld, after designing pre-programmed failures into the equipment after some set amount of time (10,000 hrs usually), it became apparent that with all of this built at roughly the same time, it was all failing about the same time.

To slow or change this, a new verb was added for maintainers, called refurbish. It pays almost as well as a true fix, but is based on the MBTF (Mean Time Between Failure) and the actual hours since the last fix or refurbish. If actual time in use is 5,000 hours on something with a 10,000 MTBF then 50% of the fix amount is paid.

This optional verb can be used to clean up some older equipment to prevent a string of failures on the Grid. This also adds to some of the realism of the simulation, as the goal is to keep the grid up and running at capacity or better.

TheGrid always evolves as we add power sources and drains to it, from the solar sources which have to account for daytime and cloud cover, the the windmills which must be ever-mindful of the breezes.

Just learning how to manage the Grid on an hourly and daily basis is useful instruction.

Its been brought to my attention that even unix users can launch attachments from e-mail if they are using a graphical environment (which, I suspect, is most, these days). This is because if something is on the desktop in KDE or Gnome, clicking it can invoke a program called a “launcher”.

Of course, all the standard rules SHOULD apply: you dont execute programs when you dont know what they are. Even if you receive something from a friend, what if they were somehow infected, and it was sent from their system, without their knowledge? you shouldnt run programs you get without expecting to receive THAT program, end of story.

Its also been brought up that while you cannot easily obtain root on a unix system, enough damage can be caused by the primary user of a system, that this doesnt matter too much. The average unix user has the ability to e-mail and do other functions, and this is not something you want a rogue program doing from your name.

reference

Serious flaw in Internet Explorer not fixed yet

The flaw lets criminals commandeer victims' machines merely by tricking them into visiting Web sites tainted with malicious programming code. As many as 10,000 sites have been compromised since last week to exploit the browser flaw, according to antivirus software maker Trend Micro Inc.

Many security experts, meanwhile, are urging Internet Explorer users to use another browser until a patch is released.

I say use ANY other browser and give up on IE completely. Its too tightly bound to windows, and always will be because M$ made it that way on purpose in the Netscape-IE browser wars eons ago.

Reference

You know its really an abuse of all of our time and effort when we have to develop a system like CAPTCHA.

The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, they developed the first CAPTCHA to be used by Yahoo. reference

Spammers have no ethics, morals or respect of other peoples time. They are lazy and greedy, and want the world to provide them a free ride.

We have to spend a lot of time making sure our own software cant be abused by them. e-mail, blogs, forums, comments. anywhere that data can be entered is potentially at risk.

I know I shut down my OWN forums and blogs a few times because of spam.

I have CAPTCHAs now, but this war is far from over.

Since the system rebuild, I had a chance to start some things over, and one of those was getting java and eclipse (using apache tomcat) working on my machine.

This is only the beginning, of course, I have a long ways to go. Luckily, I can learn a lot only by studying code and practicing (as I did to learn C).

Its frustrating to wake up one day, find your PC locked up, only to discover that something is seriously wrong and it wont boot up.

After searching for a way to recover the system (in vain), I took the hit and re-installed linux and re-compiled my apps. One and a half days later I am back with almost ALL the functionality I had before.

This is actually faster than I remember considering the number of apps that were NOT in the install distro.

*sigh*

I ran across some more info for those that think, "Vista isnt that bad". It has the potential to cause increased hardware costs for all of us, running M$ or not (because of agreements with M$ for years to come).

The DRM (Digital Rights Management) is causing problems for legitimate users, and its been talked about before.

Here then, are some topics from the story and at the end a link to the whole paper (which I encourage you to read):

Disabling of Functionality
Decreased Playback Quality
Elimination of Open-source Hardware Support
Elimination of Unified Drivers
Denial-of-Service via Driver/Device Revocation
Increased Hardware Costs

Basically, if M$ even thinks your drivers dont pass the DRM muster, its suddenly disabled. (Look under the 'Denial-of-Service via Driver/Device Revocation' for that one).

The article in its entirety is here as vista cost