Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Saturday, October 19, 2002

Discover yourself -- Comment()
When we want to know who we are (or were), it is enough to search the web with Google. I run into my own posting from seven years ago while looking for something else. At first I didn't regognize the writing as my own. Was I at some point discussing things in the Usenet discussion group on mathematics? It seems to be so.

Who knows, a few years from now on it may be commonplace to use the web as part of your personal memory.

Hello, world -- Comment()
Check out ACM Hello World collection for examples of different programming languages. Sad to say that the Fortran example is based on the old standard:

PROGRAM HELLO DO 10, I=1,10 PRINT *,'Hello World' 10 CONTINUE STOP END

How would this look like in Fortran 95? Something like the following:

PROGRAM hello_world IMPLICIT NONE INTEGER :: i DO i = 1, 10 WRITE (*,*) 'Hello World' END DO END PROGRAM hello_world

If you know Finnish, check the Fortran 90/95 textbook, which is available in PDF format.

-- Comment()
The Finnish Ministry of Interior has published a report on XML technologies (availabe in Finnish and in PDF format). This report gives an overview on electronic exchange of information. (The report also contains the obligatory SWOT analysis.)

Hype in web services -- Comment()
Web services architectures: Easier said than done is a thought-provoking article by Mayank Prakash. A quote: "... it is fair to say this is the era of Web services hype. As a marketing phenomenon, the Web services hype is riding on a wave of XML hype, which in turn is helping to promote Microsoft's .NET hype. From inter-enterprise integration to software as a service, to whatever else suits your fancy, you can find someone promoting Web services as the ideal solution. As you might have guessed, I believe the truth lies somewhere in between."

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Worm's Use of Copper Could Point to Novel Material Designs: "...the marine bloodworm may help scientists design new materials that are hard and durable yet lightweight. [...] it represents the first instance of a copper biomineral discovered in a living organism. In addition, the way the element interacts with proteins within the worm could serve as a prototype for novel material design." [Scientific American]

-- Comment()
Star Clinches Case for Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole: "The discovery of a star orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy provides compelling evidence that a supermassive black hole lurks there." [Scientific American]

-- Comment()
As I wrote earlier today, I changed the HTML template for this weblog to conserve disk space. Another benefit of this is that the pages load faster than previously.

I looked at the size of the blogroll. The blogroll is about 100 kB of HTML code. This means that posting each day to 6 categories the repeated blogrolls conserved 0.6 MB of disk space. In a month this would have resulted in 18 MB of disk space lost to blogrolls alone.

-- Comment()
Lucky Green vs. Palladium: "Lucky Green [...] is attempting to force the issue surrounding MS's Palladium Gambit using a very creative method involving patents. If his patents are granted, MS will be unable to use Palladium to enforce software licensing. If MS challenges his patent, then we all know thier true intentions." [Privacy Digest]

-- Comment()
Canon EOS-1Ds vs. EOS-D60: 'Dave over at Imaging Resource has just posted a side-by-side comparison of the eleven megapixel EOS-1Ds and the six megapixel EOS-D60 posing the question "How much difference does it make?"' [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]

-- Comment()
Chess challenge ends in stalemate: "Man and machine take equal honours as world champion Vladimir Kramnik ties 4-4 with computer Deep Fritz." [BBC News | WORLD]

Using iPod for one day -- Comment()
I have been using the iPod I received yesterday quite a lot. The user interface is nice. Small details are carefully thought out. For example, the FireWire cable acts conveniently as the power cord. I have 3772 tracks on the iPod, and have been using it outside while walking.

The sound quality is good when connected to my Sony hi-fi system. Sometimes it takes a few seconds (up to 5) for the track to start playing, but that was to be expected when using a hard-disk based system (probaly the disk goes to sleep to save power). Often the playback starts immediately. So far there hasn't been a single problem. I managed to move my music and start using the system even without reading the (very short) user guide.

The only problem with iPod is really understanding that all my music is in that little box. Should I get rid of the original cd's?

Digital commons -- Comment()
Seb's Open Research points to Building a digital commons:

Kevin Kelly on Copyrights©. As Jack Valenti, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, has pointed out, digitizing films is expensive. "Who is going to digitize these public domain movies?" he asks.
I have an answer: movie buffs. Not only have fans moved almost all of music into the digital era, they have been busy moving hundreds of millions of documents onto the Web and are producing millions of pages of daily reporting and news in Weblogs. And without the help of paralyzed publishers, avid readers have already converted nearly 20,000 books in the public domain. [Smart Mobs]

Seb adds: "Wikipedia is another fine example of ordinary folks taking charge of building a digital commons."

Running out of Radio disk space -- Comment()
I was running out of Userland disk space. I got several tips for conserving disk space. I eliminated 7 of my 11 categories, and this helped a bit.

The biggest reason for the large disk use was my blogroll, which I had listed on the home template using the blogroll macro. Because there were 133 news sources in the blogroll, the size of the HTML files grew up.

I cut down my disk use a lot by creating a separate "story" of my blogroll. In this light it is somewhat suprizing that so many sites carry listings of the blogrolls on their pages.

With these modifications I have some blogging time left until disk space becomes a problem again. Now I have 71% free of the available 40 MB. But I'm looking for a nice-looking template which would minimize the disk use even further.