Object orientation and code readability are mostly mutually exclusive.

This weekend (I think, maybe earlier), Slashdot published some statistics about the most active people. Apparently I am in the top four most active commenters for the past month and the past quarter. This is quite depressing.

In happier, and unrelated news, my FreeBSD commit bit was approved this weekend, so I can now cause untold destruction on the Internet at large...

Ever increasing storage capacity is making me lazy. In years gone by, when resources were more limited, a full filesystem would be cause for investigation, to find out why it had become full, and what could be done about it. These days, the easy option is to just extend the volume a bit more and grow the filesystem. I'm running a bit low on free PV space, so last week I didn't grow my home filesystem by as much as I normally would when it filled up. But even so, I was a little surprised to find out that within a couple of days it was already full again. That's not normal. It turned out that a single log file was continually growing and had taken up nearly a third of the total space on that filesystem. But because the default assumption is that I have more disk space than I'll be able to use, I hadn't been keeping an eye on what was taking up the space. D'oh! So a single rm has taken me back to having loads of free space.

Yes, yes and more yes.

My current phone is a Nokia N80. I've had it a few years and I'm reasonably happy with it, but it has a fault with the charging circuit and it's pretty bulky, so I'm thinking about replacing it. Unfortunately, there seem to be about 3,000 different options with no competent way of way of working out which one is sensible.

I mainly use my phone as... a phone. So, the most important feature for me is the ability to make and receive calls. Because I am a cheapskate, this includes SIP (and WiFi), since my SIP provider charges a lot less than my mobile provider when calling landlines. I really like WebOS in terms of UI, but that seems to rule the Pre out because the only WebOS SIP client is alpha quality and doesn't integrate with the address book. This is something that Nokia does really well - the SIP client is fully integrated, so I can just select someone from my address book and select Internet Call to make the call. No extra skill required.

Beyond that, the only thing I really need is to be able to sync contacts via bluetooth and to use it as a modem via bluetooth - both pretty standard features, I'd assume, since my last three phones have had them.

In terms of smartphone features, I'm not that bothered. A programming environment that supports native code so that I can port my ObjC runtime would be nice - I have no interest in VM-based crap - but aside from that I don't have any strong requirements.

I would, however, like decent battery life and a small size, and ideally a nice camera. The bulk and poor battery life of my N80 means that I quite often leave it at home.

So, any suggestions?

So Libya has cut itself off from the net. This isn't an entirely unexpected move. But it has the side effect of screwing over anyone with a .ly domain. The main loser there is probably bit.ly. It still seems to be up at the moment, but I'm guessing that DNS caches will expire soon enough and then they'll be in trouble.

But somehow I just can't find it in me to feel any sympathy for them. At the time they launched, I pointed out that they were putting themselves at the mercy of the Libyan government. But it seems they preferred the two digit .ly ccTLD to the three digit .com domain they could have used instead. There are times when convenience trumps reliability. But this wasn't one of them. I wasn't expecting it to go wrong as quickly as it did, but I was aware of the possibility. It seems they either weren't aware of it, or chose to ignore the risk. That wasn't the wisest move in the world, even without the benefit of hindsight.

Maybe it'll act as a warning to those who have jumped on the .co bandwagon recently. But I doubt it. So I won't be surprised if the Colombian government screws them over at some point, in the same way the Libyan government has just done. And I won't have any sympathy for them, either.

Err... what? It seems that twitter requires you to have Javascript enabled in order to view 140 characters of someone's worthless drivel. Otherwise you get a blank page. The mind boggles.

A little while ago, someone on Slashdot pointed me at the Sale of Goods Act in relation to purchased electronics. The act, for those unfamiliar with it, requires that goods be 'suitable for the purpose for which sold.' This is a fairly broad term, but it basically means that they must be able to do anything that the seller claims that they can do. Under this law, you have 6 years from the date of purchase to file a lawsuit if the item does not match the claims.

This was relevant to me because my MacBook Pro is now out of warranty and the battery is dying. Looking in the System Profiler, its full charge capacity was showing up as 1476mAh after 56 charges. When new, it was 5500mAh. These numbers don't mean anything by themselves, but Apple claims that their batteries retain 80% of their full charge capacity after 300 charge cycles. Claiming this means that a battery that does not retain 4400mAh after 300 charge cycles is not suitable for the purpose for which sold, and they are legally required to refund or replace it (irrespective of the time that has elapsed, although I can only sue them if they don't within 6 years of the time of sale).

I called their support line and was put through to an Indian woman, who explained that the warranty had expired. I quoted the relevant parts of law to her, and (after being kept on hold for a bit), was transferred to someone senior. He very quickly agreed to send out a replacement battery.

Interestingly, he did not ask that the original battery be sent out, nor that I provide a credit card number where I would be billed if the battery turned out not to be defective. I've had two batteries replaced in warranty, and this was standard procedure then, so apparently I get better service out of warranty. I don't have a great deal of use for a battery that only lasts about 35 minutes on a full charge, but I'll probably keep it as a spare.

As always, it pays to know the law. It's a shame that Apple, which claims to be a customer-focussed company, doesn't educate its support team about this though. Possibly the Indian call centre deals with people from everywhere English speaking, while the Irish one only deals with people in the UK and Ireland, so the people there are more familiar with British law, but if I had not quoted the relevant act then I would have been charged £99 for a battery, on top of the £1.50 it cost to call their support line for half an hour.

Once you've been around computers for a while, you get to recognise certain sounds. Such as the pop followed by the spinning down of fans, and the ominous silence that emanates from the box that's supposed to be your fileserver. Arse. I was off work yesterday due to a nasty cold, and the last thing I wanted to be doing was rebuilding the server. Fortunately, it turned out to be just the power supply. I'd been worried that it was going to have taken out the motherboard too. It did take a hard drive with it on the way out, but fortunately that wasn't fatal. The RAID rebuild ran OK overnight, and now we're back to normal.

Does anyone know of a good solution for zooming/panning static images for turning into a video? The so called Ken Burns effect? It must work on Linux, and should ideally be open source. The pan in openshot doesn't seem to work, and the zoom is too jerky to be useful. I can write my own fairly easily if I have to, but I'd rather not reinvent the wheel if I can avoid it.

Today I learned that my window manager hotkey to bring the focused window to the front doesn't work when the thing that's obscuring the window in question is a post-it note on the monitor. D'oh!

http://www.webmproject.org

It's what we were all hoping for, and I'm pleased that it's come to pass. It's not perfect, and I don't agree with all of their decisions. However, even an imperfect alternative to the current H.264 situation is a massive improvement. I'm pleased they've gone for a full stack solution of not only VP8 but also Matroska(-ish) and Vorbis, too. If nothing else, it's likely to mean that a) Vorbis will be shipped by default on most platforms[1], and b) hardware support for both VP8 and Vorbis should be widespread in the very near future. Further, there's a commitment to transcode all of the existing videos on YouTube. That's a massive endorsement. Of course, the risk with that is the reduced quality that will come from three or more lossy transforms, but given that they've announced it, they're clearly not too concerned about that. The future's looking very bright indeed.

[1] Or will it? I've yet to see any official response from Microsoft or Apple on this. But it's going to be hard for them to ship something that won't play YouTube videos by default. Of course, in the short and probably medium term, YouTube will continue to offer videos in other formats as well. But we'll see how it plays out in the long term.

I went to an interesting talk by Eng Lim Goh of SGI on Thursday, demonstrating their Ultraviolet systems. Very cool. While there are bigger and faster computers on the planet, they're all technically clusters rather than a single computer. The SGI machines can have 4096 CPUs and 16TB of RAM running under a single Linux kernel. Nice.

Also interesting to see the stats on when their systems were delivered to McLaren and Brawn, and where the performance of those cars was afterwards. I know there's more to F1 than CFD, but it certainly plays a large part these days.

Some time around 2005, Slashdot ran an article about a new hosting company, MacMiniColo that was taking advantage of the new machines that Apple had just released to offer cheap hosting. I got in contact with them, and a little while later, I had a Mac Mini, sitting in a rack somewhere, running OpenBSD and acting as my dedicated server. A 1.42GHz G4 CPU, 512MB of RAM, and an 80GB disk was (and still is) more than adequate for my needs. The biggest load on it is eJabberd, and even that only used under 1% of the CPU.

I had really great service from these people. The hard drive failed a little under a year after I bought the Mini, and Apple refused to honour the warranty because they couldn't find the records of the sale (then, a few weeks later, they could, but by then it was out of the warranty period). MacMiniColo replaced the disk for me at their own expense.

After five years with them, however, I had a little look around and noticed that VPS hosting has gone down in price a lot. I've written a book on Xen, so I thought I might try a Xen-based VPS now that FreeBSD has Xen support.

GigaTux only claims to offer Linux, but I dropped them an email and they were happy to install FreeBSD for me. I still haven't tried the Xen-enabled kernel yet; they installed the stock x86-64 kernel in an HVM domain for me and performance has been fantastic.

I'm sharing a server with 64 other guests and in spite of that performance tends to be better than my ageing Mac Mini. I was getting 1000IOPS while untaring the ports tree, which is far more than the Mini's old 2.5" laptop drive could handle, and is amazing considering that it's going via the slow, QEMU-derived, emulated device, rather than the fast PV driver. I've been installing software from ports, so everything is compiled on the machine, and even that has been fast.

And my Mini? They found someone else who wants it, and offered me about a third of what I paid for it originally - not bad depreciation after five years of constant use. Shipping it back to the UK would have cost almost as much as buying one on eBay, so I sold it on. Hopefully someone else will get some good use out of it.

As an aside, I've been really impressed by how well OpenBSD works on Mac/PowerPC hardware. If you've got an old Mac Mini lying around, chuck OpenBSD on it and you've got a reasonable low-volume server. The newer ones, of course, are x86 hardware, so will run just about anything.

The UK's Information Commissioner has ruled that research data must be made public. I have little sympathy for the likes of Keenan. But I have even less sympathy for so called scientists who refuse to make their data available for others to study. This isn't just about climate change, either, but about science in general. The recent spate of falsified results in Chinese and Korean papers should be ample evidence that data needs to be made public so that results can be independently verified. That's what science is all about.