2007-07-02

Improving graphs

Posted in Computers, Personal, PlanetDebian at 13:02 UTC (+0000) by sven

In Improving simple charts, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote a nice little summary how to produce “nicer” charts using R. However, in my opinion, the charts he provided as alternate options to the original, purely linear graph are less readable for the average person. If anything, using a logarithmic scale on the original Y axis (number of packages not built after a specific date) would be of use, but the other graphs only hide the original point of the post Dirk replied to (How old are our (Debian’s) packages?). The point was that 94% of all packages had been rebuilt since the release of Sarge or, if you want to put it the other way around, 1264 (6%) were built before Sarge was released. This relationship is hidden from immediate recognition by the reader of the graphs. I admit though, that Dirk’s second graph (Number of packages against age in days with the age being on y logarithmic scale) is also insightful. The other two graphs he presents might make sense in a scientific publication if some point in the “more detailed” areas of the graph needs proving, but for this specific problem, they really don’t make sense to me. Actually, I would question their use even in scientific publications, since they distort the original data a lot. Scientists are pretty much used to logarithmic scales these days, but I couldn’t work out how the scales work on those two graphs. And another note on the second graph (logarithmic age): The way the X axis is labeled (10, 20, 50, 100,..) is also pretty non-intuitive to me. I’m much more used to something like 5, 10, 20, 40, 80, 160 and so on, which gives the same distance between each label and seems a lot more usable to me..

(edit: Fix spelling of Dirk’s surname)

2007-05-29

blood donations

Posted in Personal, PlanetDebian at 13:52 UTC (+0000) by sven

Hi.

Recently, on planet.debian.org, there were quite a few posts relating to blood donations. I must say that I really only live thanks to people donating blood. As many might know, I had a freaking motorcycle accident about 9 years ago. Well, apart from loosing my right leg in the weeks following the accident (irreparable damages to tissues led to amputation), I also lost a lot of blood after the accident. In the six hours following the accident, I got no less than 65 blood infusions (approximately 24-30 litres or 6-8 US gallons). As you can imagine, this is about 3-4 times as much blood as my body normally carries around.

At least I can say that I didn’t receive blood without giving some before, though certainly I wasn’t able to give that much blood (I donated about 10 times, approx. 0.45 litres each time). However, due to the medication I now need, I can’t donate blood anymore. Anyhow, I strongly suggest to anyone who is capable of donating blood to do so.

And regarding Thijs comment about the frequency of donation and payment: This is highly depending on the area you live in and the organisation who manages the donations. For example, while I donated blood in Dortmund, Germany, I had two options to donate blood: German Red Cross, who would accept a donation every 6 weeks, with free sandwiches, drinks and chocolate but without payment and the city-owned hospital’s blood bank, which allowed a donation every 3 month, with free drinks and a 50DEM (approx. 25EUR/30USD) payment. This sounds as if the city-owned blood bank could attract homeless and junkies who were in for the money, but from my experience, the blood bank did far stricter pre-donation tests (I can’t tell what they did after donation for either organisation) than the red cross. And knowing how much money can be earned with the blood donated, I certainly think that payment is fair, though not strictly necessary. And the blood bank people did a much better job when applying the needle than the red cross people did, which might be because they were used to taking blood from people with bad veins (mostly patients donating blood for themselves for use in a later, planned surgery). But to be fair: I know from other people who had very good experiences with the red cross staff in this respect.

Once again: Please donate blood if you can. If you are uncomfortable with the choice you made on your first donation, check out other options for donations. For example, if you almost collapsed when donating blood, try out the plasma donation if it is offered. They usually take the plasma, but give back an equal volume of a substitution, so your circulation isn’t disturbed as much as by taking approx. 0.5 litres from it within an hour. If you feel that the person who applied the needle did a bad job, ask for someone else next time or try a different organisation altogether.

cu,
Sven

2007-03-16

40% nerdy?

Posted in Personal, PlanetDebian at 15:33 UTC (+0000) by sven

Hmm, following up to a post by MJ Ray, I found out that I’m 40% nerdy:


You Are 40% Nerdy

You’re a little nerdy, but no one would ever call you a nerd. You sometimes get into nerdy things, but only after they’ve become a part of mainstream culture.
How Nerdy Are You?

2007-01-08

Personality test results – questionable.

Posted in Personal at 05:46 UTC (+0000) by sven

Odd test result. Though I think I can easily think with the viewpoint of the opposite sex.

You scored as Either. You brain is neither specifically male, nor female in the way you perceive your surroundings. As bad as this may sound to some, it can easily mean that you are capable of combining both gender aspects to your advantage. Rather than being genderless you are possibly able think freely. This does not mean that you are bisexual or androgynous or indecisive, but it might.
Either
68%
Female
54%
Male
50%
Neither
29%

Should you be MALE or FEMALE?*
created with QuizFarm.com

2007-01-03

Microsoft Windows Vista – They did it all wrong

Posted in Computers, IT-Security, Personal, PlanetDebian at 19:49 UTC (+0000) by sven

Note: This post grew larger than originally intended. It drifted away from Vista to general rants about Microsoft and the content industry towards the end of the post, so just skip the rest if this is not of interest to you.
The latest thing I heard about Vista is that Microsoft bribes bloggers with Vista notebooks. As the article points out, this is plain wrong. Apart from crossing the line by not only giving away their own product to reviewers for free, but by actually providing an additional benefit (in the form of the notebook), they also did it wrong because – as the article on tech.blorge.com linked above points out – they don’t understand the way blogging “works”. Too many will be more or less angry because they didn’t get a free notebook (if anything at all).

In my opinion though, this is by far the least important mistake they made with Vista. All their content protection stuff is far worse. It basically does what current copy protection mechanisms already do, but to a much larger extend: Bother the legitimate users while users of pirated copies are uneffected. I don’t think they can avoid pirated copies for a minute. A friend already has a nice HD video player (HDDVD IIRC) and a nice HDCP capable TFT-display, both bought in december. Problem is that the HDCP protected connection resets every few minutes, causing a dropout in both video and sound for a few seconds each time. Seems HDCP compatible player and HDCP compatible display doesn’t necessarily mean that the two work together. Fortunately, in this case, there is some “secret” code you can enter on the players remote to disable HDCP completely. Of course, technically, this is not legal use, but if he didn’t use that hack, he wouldn’t be able to watch his legitimately bought video with his legitimate player and display. Given this problem, I can only shudder when thinking what will happen on Windows Vista with all those encrypted and signed communication channels (drive->memory->videocard->display, just to name the most obvious ones). And there is also the degradation of totally unrelated audio and video stuff while some “premium content” is played. Assume that I play some premium audio stuff. According to the hardware and driver specs for Vista, the availability of any premium content means that any non-encrypted channels need to be turned off or artificially degraded (like downsampling video from 1080p to VGA and upsampling it again since the display might be limited to only display 1080p). This is oh-so-stupid.
And there is also their EULA, as reviewed by Ed Foster. I won’t go into details here, but let’s just say that the EULA is the final nail in Vista’s coffin for me. I’ve been a Windows user since Windows for Workgroups came out (though I’ve used Linux on my machines since 1993 – and almost exclusively since 1998), but I won’t buy Vista, not even when it would be included with a new PC.

By the way: This also most likely means that I won’t buy any HD video stuff at all, since the Vista content protection stuff was mostly dictated by the big Hollywood studios.

Seems like I will be saving quite some money over the next years. (Which I actually need to do anyway.)

Other interesting links regarding Vista:

I said they did it all wrong because they forgot that they are selling Windows not to the content industry but to the consumers. Sure, the consumers want to see what Microsoft calls premium content, but I’m also sure that they don’t want all that content protection nonsense Microsoft built into Vista for the sake of the content providers. They lost the balance between avoiding pirated copies (which I think the content protection stuff will have no big effect on) and bothering users of legitimate copies.

Heck, I already use “pirate” copies of most of the (Windows-based) games I play because I don’t want to be bothered by their original-CD-checks, even though I own at least one legal copy of all the games I play. Would I need to download pirate copies of the HD movies I want to watch because I don’t want to be bothered by whatever side-effects VCP will have, even if I own legal copies of the same movies?

Dear Microsoft, dear Content-Industry (TimeWarner, Disney, whoever), please re-think who you want to sell your content to. I already avoid DVDs which carry additional copy protection (apart from CSS), and if they were available at all, I would prefer to buy DVDs without even CSS. The same is true for CDs (except that they obviously don’t have CSS). Consequently, I’m likely to avoid buying HD videos which impose unpleasant restrictions on me, including those that disable the S/PDIF output of my player (no matter wether PC or standalone) since I paid a lot of money for decent HIFI equipment two years ago and I sure as hell won’t want to by new equipment within the next few years. Luckily, I didn’t yet buy any HD video gear, though my notebook, when equipped with a HDDVD or Blueray drive should be capable of playing HD video – if MS and the content industry wouldn’t impose stupid restrictions.

2006-10-25

New to planet.debian.org

Posted in Personal, PlanetDebian at 21:35 UTC (+0000) by sven

Since I just started my blog and added it to planet.d.o, I thought I should introduce myself a little. I’m in my mid 30s (ouch), working as a sys/net admin (Linux based, mostly Debian these days) in a nice little company. I first encountered Linux back in the 1990s, before the 1.0 kernel got released. Back then, I used Slackware (which, surprisingly, seems to still be around), later switching to Mandrake. About 5 years ago, I got introduced to Debian and immediately liked it for the ease and clearness of administrating it (apt+dpkg+dselect was so much better than rpm used to be at that time). For about two years now, I’m contributing to Debian, including some involvement in the earliest pre-implementation phases of the volatile repository (mainly advocating a few ideas that actually led to it’s implementation, BTW thanks to those who did the work in the end), some small packages I maintain and involvement in some small teams. Mainly the cyrus-imapd packaging team, but also (to a much smaller degree) in the cyrus-sasl, initscripts-ng and (extremely little, since noone bothered to add me to the alioth group for it yet) the php packaging teams.
Letting computers aside, my interests are quite diverse, they range from wheelchair-basketball to books (SciFi and Fantasy mainly) and RC helicopters, among others.
More interesting posts will probably follow later.

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