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Programming

Submission + - A universe simulation in 200 Python lines :-) (ece.ntua.gr) 2

Submitted by ttsiod
ttsiod writes: I've always been fascinated by space — ever since I read "The Family of the Sun", when I was young. And I always wanted to simulate what I've read about Newton's law of gravity, and see what happens in... a universe of my own making... :-) Well, I'm happy to report... that I verified the "Big Bang" in less than 200 lines of Python (using pygame to plot the... celestial objects). OK, OK, I am just a geek goofing around... so what? Enjoy!
Programming

Submission + - Corporations, IT, and a decent rant (ece.ntua.gr)

Submitted by ttsiod
ttsiod writes: 5 years ago, I was yet another drone working in a huge disaster of a project — that eventually went down in flames. The project took place in a large telecom operator, and had already become a joke for those of us who had the clarity to see it for what it was — that is, a huge waste of shareholders money (not that they ever got wind of it). I wrote a rant back then, but decided not to publish it, letting myself cool a bit and see it rationally years later. Well, years later, it still makes sense — perfect sense. And it has proven itself time and again. I share it with my fellow Slashdotters, inviting their own stories in the comments...

Comment Re:How Could they (Score 1) 11

by ttsiod (#29772277) Attached to: Why isn't Google allowing searches over HTTPS?
Sorry mate, you're wrong. You can happily get unsecured content from any place you like, store it on your server and then serve it to anyone you please over HTTPS - from your *own* servers. This is what Google does when you click on "show me the cached content". Do you really think that the summaries written under the search results are obtained in real-time from the original servers and "woven" into your results the moment you search? No, the content IS scanned daily by Googlebots and stored in Google's machines - they are already serving the query RESULTS from their own servers, and this is what I am talking about - simply returning the RESULTS over HTTPS - whether you'll click on them and proceed over HTTP would then be your own choice. Regardless, some Slashdot moderator closed this thread - I can't for the life of me understand why, I think it's a valid question, and one many tech people would love to talk about...

Comment Re:How Could they (Score 1) 11

by ttsiod (#29771925) Attached to: Why isn't Google allowing searches over HTTPS?
I insist: we are talking about what they are *already* displaying in their result pages... why not serve it over HTTPS? I would understand performance issues, but I doubt they would pose a significant problem for Google... they do the same with GMail every day for millions of subscribers.

Submission + - Why isn't Google allowing searches over HTTPS? 11

Submitted by ttsiod
ttsiod writes: I don't know why I've never thought about this before, but... why isn't Google offering its search engine over HTTPS? Try it, you'll get nothing. Google for it, 8 hits! What?!?... It's true that privacy advocates have a point when they claim that Google is in a position to store personal search queries, but it seems to me that we should be far more worried about ... "regimes" inspecting our queries while they travel from router to router, or our ISPs (who actually *know* who we are) gathering each and every search we have ever made, since it travels in plain, human-readable cleartext. Should I be worried if I live behind the Big Firewall and my browser sends a bad packet? Why don't we have an option (like we do in GMail) to use HTTPS and have only one thing to worry about, that is Google giving the records itself?
I know that HTTPS places a lot more load on CPUs and networks, but clearly this would not be much of an issue for Google's amazing armies of machines ...

What do you think?

Comment If you use ZFS, don't forget --inplace (Score 2, Insightful) 272

by ttsiod (#29452811) Attached to: Best Backup Server Option For University TV Station
I also use rsync and OpenSolaris/ZFS to keep daily backups. BUT - important: If the content is made of big files that change slightly each day (e.g. VMWARE/VirtualBox disk images), make sure you also use "--inplace" when you do the rsync, so that you take advantage of the copy-on-write semantics of ZFS. For example, I am using rsync to back up a VMWARE server to an OpenSolaris/ZFS fileserver, where the virtual disks are huge "vmdk" files - in the order of 10GB each. These huge files change only a little each day (less than 1%) - rsync would indeed realize this and only copy over the network the parts that changed, but it would store completely new copies in the backup server for each day! (I am assuming here that you would ZFS-snapshot each day). If instead you use the --inplace option of rsync, rsync will not only send the blocks that changed, but it will also only write the blocks that changed - thus, your ZFS will be able to host many years' worth of daily snapshots of these "vmdk", a truly marvelous thing, if you think about it...
Programming

Submission + - Con Colivas BFS faster at video encoding by 70%

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Quoting from this: As an x264 developer, I have no position on the whole debate over BFS/CFS (nor am I a kernel hacker), but a friend of mine recently ran this set of tests with BFS vs CFS that still doesn't make any sense to me and suggests some sort of serious suboptimality in the existing scheduler.... Executive summary: On a quad core machine, Con's BFS scheduler encodes x264 video with speed gains up to 70% (compared to the existing Linux scheduler)!
Education

Submission + - Simple, portable physics simulations (softlab.ntua.gr)

Submitted by
ttsiod
ttsiod writes: "I want to 'lure' my nephews/nieces towards Science and Engineering (to whatever extent that's possible, in the age of consoles). To that end, I have coded simple physics simulations, like falling snow, exploding fireworks, and 1D/2D wave simulations. My efforts are here, in the form of portable SDL mini-programs (GPL code, compileable under Windows, Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, Mac OS/X and basically every OS with GCC and SDL). Try them out, and do offer any suggestions on other programs that can trigger scientific interest in young minds... Myself, I am teaching them Python, so that they can code "fireworks" on their own..."
Data Storage

Submission + - Windows backups with rsync and Volume Shadow Copy (softlab.ntua.gr)

Submitted by
ttsiod
ttsiod writes: "I wanted a free backup strategy for my Windows boxes, that would utilize only open-source and Microsoft tools. I also wanted it to (a) be fast and hassle-free (b) be executed automatically (e.g. on a daily basis) (c) allow instantly accessible history for as many days/weeks/months as storage permits, with only the modified and new files actually reserving space on the backup device (d) work just fine with open files (registry hive, SQL server data, Outlook mailboxes, etc) (e) use cheap hardware. I searched for something like this and found many solutions that had some of the desired features... but none that had them all... so I decided to improvise. Enjoy!"
Graphics

Submission + - Coding software-only real-time 3D renderers (softlab.ntua.gr)

Submitted by
ttsiod
ttsiod writes: "I know we live in the age of GPUs with billions of transistors; but I really enjoy coding software-only real-time 3D renderers, just for the heck of it... I am not the only one who appreciates the freedom that comes from not being tied to graphics chips... Give me a PutPixel(x,y,color) and I am set! And in the coming age of architectures with 32 cores or more (like Larabee), software rendering might come back with a vengeance..."

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