Yahoo Mail Cancelled

Well, I've finally done it: I cancelled my Yahoo! Premium email and personalized email address (domain name). I'd actually transferred the domain name to a different service some time ago. I believe Yahoo was still charing $35 a year for the DNS name when most services charge between $5 and $10 (sometimes free). Gmail has far surpassed my premium email account, which also had an annual fee.

I deleted all of my folders, filters, and such and popped down all the email I wanted to keep. Now the account is a plain old Yahoo mail account with ads.

In the mean time, Google just keeps adding services to Gmail. The latest is 20-MB attachments.

Yahoo! certainly set the pace for a while, with the best web-based email service around. There are a lot of people that still prefer it and I'm not planning to cancel the free acount. Their services are more impressive now and the new, fancy email interface is impressive in some ways. However, I simply prefer the Gmail interface. It's incredibly powerful but simple to use.
Gmail is truly a new way of doing mail whereas Yahoo has basically copied Outlook Express, et al.

SmugMug

Since just posting about a blog entry from SmugMug, I looked at their About Us page and found the brief account of their story compelling!

Going with Sun

Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug, blogs about selecting Sun. I think most of his experience and description resonates with our experiences.

150k Layoffs for IBM

Robert Cringley in his column I Cringely writes that IBM may be laying off 150,000 US workers!

Python

Ack!! Okay, I'm learning more Python. I have to admit, it seems fast to write, and the code is more brief. Or maybe more clean. It's notably different looking from Perl.

I've been at it for less than three weeks and have already been able to write a Notification class and have almost finished a DBnc (named-column database) class. Very soon I should have a fully functioning HostDB class (which I just finished writing in Perl last week). With those in hand a production host monitoring script in Python should be ready, maybe today. Again, I just finished the Perl version of it last week.

I feel like I know most of the core of the language but there are some subtleties I'm still not clear on which will probably jump up and grab me at some point. I'm not sure I understand the difference in double- and single-quotes around strings. I'm not sure the meaning is the same as in Perl (or ksh).

I also have the logging and csv libraries pretty well in hand, now, along with mapping dictionaries (which are like Perl hashes). Handling command line args, file I/O, and regular expressions are working in my code.

I'm also trying to figure out how to write class modules, particularly in the area of comments in the code, author fields and such, and I need an expression to pull the CVS version number into the version field.

I've started using the three-double-quote comments/documentation in class and method definitions but I'm not sure how much decorating and such I can do---another thing I need to check into. I want to draw borders around the comments to set them off, using underlines and verticle bars, but I wonder if any tools want to reformat that text.

Learning how to use the setup.py code to install and how to make a distributable package are next on my list. I've already done a couple of installs (and found out you need to apt-get install phython2.4-dev or whatever version you are using, for setup to work correctly).

I've been able to learn almost everything from the Tutorial and the Library Reference. I did spend 20 to 30 minutes in a bookstore reading some of the O'Reilly book at one point (while waiting on the customer service desk to find a reserved book). I've gone searching on Google for the answers to a couple of questions but typically the trail led back to the above two documents.

An any event, I'm having fun with it.

Cool Stuff on Shared Google Reader

Don't forget to look at my Shared Google Reader. It's over there in the right hand column, near the top. A lot of articles and such I would previously have put here in the blog are there on the shared reader, since it's a single click. I add items from time to time here in order to include comments, but most of what I read that I think is interesting, and that I read via the Reader, is over there.

BumpTop

Check out this video of BumpTop, yet another physics-based desktop paradigm. Things are getting interesting, weird, and more weird. There is also more Beryl demon in this post.

I guess this is the actual bumptop site: http://www.bumptop.com/

Quote of the Day

From today's AWAD:

The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don't talk much.

—Germain G. Glien

Mouse Message

Nice! My mouse froze again a few minutes ago on my Edgy Eft - Gnome - Beryl desktop. I thought it was a driver problem or some instability from the above. However, after killing the X session and restarting it, someone (Xorg?) or more likely the mouse driver, told me that my mouse power was getting low and it needed to be “recharged.”

Of course! My Logitech wireless mouse neede new batteries!

A trip to the supply cabinet with help from Jim K solved the problem.

Linux Disk I/O

Here's a very nice description that drills all the way down into the kernel I/O code for a Linux read() call.

Actually the whole document by Andries Brouwer is worth reading.

Where's the Text??

Okay, I want to learn something new. I want to find out about something. More and more lately, I find web sites with links to information about a topic that are videos, flash animations and such. Okay, those are fine but Where is the Text?? Usually I want to READ about a topic. It's faster and I can skip around. I usually don't want to watch a video!!! Lately, I keep coming upon cases where I can't find any text but only video.

The most recent example was this morning at Sun's web site. All videos. Argh!

Maybe the text is there somewhere but it sure is getting harder to find. At least it is in some cases, which are way too many for me.

Real Estate Plot Roller-Coaster

Okay, here's a new idea for plotting data. Taken from the Freakonomics Blog, this is real estate data from 1890 to about the present, plotted as a roller-coaster ride. This is just cool! (It's a 3m41s video).

How Do You Pronounce CentOS?

Since we plan to use CentOS4 on the compute nodes of the new cluster, the various pronunciations I hear in our phone conferences keep bugging me.

I found this discussion which doesn't shed any true light but only confirms that multiple pronunciations are in popular use, and there isn't an official version.

I pronounce it like SIN-toss and continue to prefer that version.

Supercomputing Comes to the Rust Belt

An interesting article on rust belt companies converting to a new business.

Three years ago, when Michael Garvey began looking for ways to revive his family's 85-year-old manufacturing business in down-on-its-luck Youngstown, Ohio, he settled on a surprising solution: supercomputing. For much of a century, the tiny company—originally Trumbull Bronze Co. but renamed M-Seven Technologies—specialized in casting bronze parts for steel mills. But now, it has started making money by collecting and analyzing vast storehouses of data to help larger manufacturers improve their operations.

203 Milllion Linux Phones by 2012

This article in Information Week by Eric Zeman reports on a prediction by ABI Research of 203 million Linux phones by 2012!

Linux Mint

Hmmm. Another distro. This is Linux Mint, based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian, .... So why another distribution?

Here's a summary of what I read.

• Slightly different look and feel. Green/blue instead of orange/brown.
• Multimedia already installed including support for MP3s, video, flash, DVDs, etc.
• Ready Wi-Fi support (they say).

Here's the Linux Mint Home page and this is a brief review.

Linux MCE

Linux MCE (i.e., Media Center Edition, a la Windows) looks very cool. Today, as I post this, their site is down from being, uh, Dugg. However, Digg is pointing to a semi-entertaining and semi-annoying video demo. Actually I continue to be more impressed with MythTV, etc., every time I see it.

Pournelle Comments on Global Warming

Jerry Pournelle comments on global warming in his 5 March View. Excerpting:

There's a lot more gas about Global Warming, but none of it causes me to change my view: yes, the Earth is warming, as apparently is the rest of the Solar System. The warming trend is hardly alarming: we have had warmer periods in historical times including the Medieval Warm Period. Yes, CO2 levels are rising, and since warm water holds less dissolved gas than cold water, any trend that warms the seas will accelerate that. The levels are high, but we don't really know the effect -- CO2 isn't a very efficient greenhouse gas. Water vapor is.

As the seas rise the surface areas become larger; this increases evaporation, which increases water vapor. Water vapor is a rather efficient greenhouse gas. Higher water vapor content usually means more clouds. Clouds are bright and tend to reflect received sunlight, reducing the insolation reaching the Earth. Models reflecting (no pun intended) this are in a very primitive stage and are not incorporated into the computer models that predict doom (doom now being 17 inches of sea level rise rather than Al Gore's 17 feet).

Enough clouds can produce cooling trends.

Ice ages are far more destructive than periods like the Medieval Warm (many say we should be so lucky as to get something like the Medieval Warm). The polar bears seem to have survived the Medieval Warm (proof: there are polar bears).

Pogonotrophy

It's no secret that I've engaged enthusiastically in pogonotrophy for 29 years!

Happy Vernal Equinox

Happy Vernal Equinox which was last night at 20:07 EDT = 0:07 UTC!