August 2007
Monthly Archive
RSS VS Email
Posted by Michael on 29 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: blog
Whilst I do get some (regular) visitors, it surprise me that the RSS feed is low on subscribers.
I guess the reason is that most people don’t even know what RSS syndication is for…I could explain that, but I’ll leave it for a future post.
What EVERYONE should understand, is….drums roll….90s-ish EMAIL SUBSCRIBE!Want to be alerted whenever a new post appears on Signal-Eleven?
Put your email in the box below or in the sidebar on the right, and get an email in your inbox (that should be emptied and processed to zero, right? ;-) ) with the latest story here on Signal Eleven.
(Privacy Policy: I won’t sell your address to anyone. I think I won’t be even allowed to see it, the email service is provided by Feedburner!)
When computation gets tough, researchers get game.
Posted by Michael on 28 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: news, massmedia, software
It’s old news, but in July, the Chinook team announced on Science Magazine that they improved their draughts playing software to the point it won’t lose a single game.
What does this mean? Well, basically it means that it’s mathematically proven that a game without mistakes can’t end in anything else than a draw.
It took 18 years, and a discrete amount of computation to get to this conclusion.
I picked up on the net and on the media a great deal of criticism about this news. It’s ok. People love to criticize. I do that A LOT ;)
The main complaint is “Couldn’t they spend 18 years doing something useful instead?“. I smile to this kind of objection.
What’s so special about games? Why people spend hours figuring out algorithms to solve efficiently the Hanoi Tower, or the Canadian Traveller Problem (”Problema del commesso viaggiatore” for the Italians).
A game is nothing else than a model. You crack the model, and you cracked the reality that maps to that model. “What’s the point in studying the best path in a connected graph”, someone could have asked 50 years ago. Then the Internet came around. And routing problems.
I must admit I was a bit disappointed reading the editorial of the August issue of “Newton“, an Italian scientific paper magazine (yes! I read on paper! :-) ). The director, Giorgio Rivieccio, judge the research “a waste” and “something to be archived, and forgotten in a closet forever”. He adds that the prospective of a “universe”, like the draught universe, where nothing is left to discover “depresses” him. And thanks that life is much more complex than a draughts game.
Maybe he just wanted to be poetic, with the comparison between life and a game. But the tone is not what I would expect in an editorial of a science magazine.
Stay tuned, more to come.
Italian newspaper with mixed up ideas about space
Posted by Michael on 28 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: massmedia, italy, space
I learn from my friend Alessandro (http://csidnc.altervista.org/blog.php?entry=entry070824-144120) that there is no end to the ridiculous.
On Friday the 24th, the local pages of La Stampa, a national available italian newspaper, had an interesting mini-article about a mysterious “Orbital Lunar Observatory“.
You can read the article below, of course in italian. But here’s a translation.
What the hell is the “Lunar Orbital Laboratory” for crying out loud?! How on earth is one supposed to think of the ISS after reading that title?
Plus, from a source that I’m not going to name, but I encourage to post a comment, even anonymous, I learnt that the…journalist (and I think I just found an improper use of the word ‘journalist’) found out about the iss lunar transit transit some weeks ago. The ISS has manouvered since then, and the transit (not all that rare) simply didn’t occur, at least not in the ground stripe descripted in the article.
And I’m not even going to comment about the errors in the writing(but you find them in the translation).
I’d like to know who’s behind the initials R.L. Is mr. (or miss, or mrs.) R.L. too shy? Or too ashamed? La Stampa readers deserve to know who are they wasting their money on!
This is one of many examples of how the space is presented (when is presented) on the italian mass media. Kinda makes one wonder about what do they tell us when they talk about politics, war, economy, medicine, you-name-it. E.g., when it comes to Computer Science, they often oversimplify and end up changing the meaning of the news or over-inflate problems to add drama, or bash on technology. This is the same.
Two clues make an evidence?What do you think? How do the mass media cover your area of expertise? Let me know in the comments!
Stay tuned, more to come.
Aug 28th - UPDATE: well, turns out that the author defends himself by saying that the titles aren’t decided by the authors but by the editors. And I believe him because it makes sense.
But the point remains, the charge aren’t dropped, they’re just moved from R.L. to someone else. The title is wrong, the article is not precise. This is no way of doing information. No way.
Stay tuned, more to come.
Vinton Cerf on future of TV and the Internet
Posted by Michael on 27 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: software, television, stumblings, video
Although non really tecnhical, this is a good example of what it’s like to be the “father” of a technology that changed our life and having a “vision” of the future.
I like what Vint says about TV. My family can confirm, having heard me saying the exact same thing over and over in the last few years, since I got a broadband access in my apartment. TV as we know it is nearly dead technology. When you realize that 85% of TV programming is NOT LIVE, it suddenly seem SO stupid that you have to sit on your couch at a predetermined time, for a defined amount of time, to watch something that is been recorded, edited, postproduct, and stored on digital media.
You must have the option to watch it when you can and want. And don’t “you already had the VCR” me. It’s not the same, even if that was a first step in the right direction.
To be coherent with my opinions, I ditched TV at home since January this year, and haven’t regretted it for a minute.
News? I can read them online, or listen them on the radio. Even better, radio on the web! And most tv news are streamed from the tv website on demand. Still regular TV, but the way it should be.
As for sports (yeah,of course, soccer. Is there something else in Italy? ;-) ), instead of paying a yearly subscription or a enormous fee of 5€+ per game, I grab my bike, head to the bar, have a beer and chat with other supporters. You know… socialize. Scary uh? :-)
Want a peek of what TV will become if things go the way they should? Check out www.joost.com
And if you need a beta invitation, feel free to ask in the comments. I don’t know if I got unlimited invitations, if not, first come first served.
I’ll blog about Joost in the future, so as always…
…Stay tuned, more to come.
Inbox Zero
Posted by Michael on 19 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Productivity
I want to share with you faithful readers this nice talk about Inbox Zero.
Inbox Zero is a 43Folders series focused on (quoting) “the skills, tools, and attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way”.I know it’s an hour long video, but you can safely stop before the Q&A section, although it offers some nice insights and I recommend you watching it. Plus I might return on the topic in the future, so even my lazy super busy readers can get a glimpse of the whole thing.
I’m sure that some of my “followers” deal with a definitely higher volume of emails that I do, and I shouldn’t be teaching anything to them on this topic, but bear with me :-)
Nonetheless, I sometimes (like in very active moments when starting a new project, such as my thesis work, or my involment with BEST) find myself on the verge of hitting the reasonable threshold of sustainability of email flow, and I developed “tricks” that resemble this kind of approach. It’s a pleasure to see an even better way of dealing with the information flowing daily in my inbox, explained in such a clear fashion.
If you prefer, an alternative to the video is the actual first issue of the series. Find it here.
http://www.43folders.com/2006/03/13/inbox-zero/
P.S. Gotta *luv* the way this guy (Merlin Mann) writes!
Stay tuned, more to come.
Please, leave a message after the beeeeeep
Posted by Michael on 09 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Michael, blog
Sorry for the non-activity of these days, I know you’re not checking the site too eagerly (after 2 days without posts the traffic drops to nearly zero)…but of course it’s because you’re all top tech readers using RSS and syndication…
I’ve been in semi-vacation, hangin’ out with friends that were flying by Milano for a few days, and now it’s my turn to fly out for a little while, to Budapest, HUN, to be exact.
I’ll come back with some new content, after the break.
Want to keep the site alive during the stop? Did you try win-get ? Leave a comment about that topic and see if other people found it useful.
Ok you got me, I’m shamelessly begging for comments :-)
Stay tuned, more to come.
[TOOL] Package management system for windows (sort of): win-get
Posted by Michael on 01 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: tools, windows, software, stumblings
Have you ever used “apt”, or “rpm” under some flavor of Linux? O a portage system?
In case you didn’t, I’ll explain briefly what’s the purpose of a Package Management System.
A package management system is a solution that allows the automatic search, location, download (or retrieval from other media) and installation (or upgrade) of software.
Often, a PMS goes in pair with a Dependency Resolution solution, that allows to detect packages that are necessary to run the desired program and download and install them accordingly.
Believe me, once you get used to the idea, it’s hard to go back to regular “installations”, if not for special purposes.
Now, it’d be great if such a tool existed for Windows, as we all have to deal with that pain in the ass operating system every now and then.
win-get (http://windows-get.sourceforge.net/index.php) gets at least *part* of the job done
say you want the latest version of firefox: you just fire up your “run” dialog, or command prompt and command:
win-get install firefox
No, it won’t check for upgrades, see if you need other dependencies, or aid in the removal of the application, but it does download the installer of the latest version and fire it up for you to install, saving you the hassle of opening the browser, look for the program page, and dowload the installer.
It has in catalog most of the free (at least as in “free beer”, but also many free programs, free as in “free speech”) programs you might need, firefox, tunderbird, alchool…you name it, it’s probably there.
Go get your free win-get copy (and the wget utility it uses to download the programs) at the link above and slam them in your c:\windows for easy running from the run dialog.
I’m not encouraging anyone to keep using windows if frustrated by it lacks of feature, but as many of us must stick with it, let’s try to minimize the hassle!
Got any other trick to survive Windows mediocrity? Let me know in the comments!
Stay tuned, more to come.
“Why Signal Eleven?”
Posted by Michael on 01 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Michael, blog
This is a question I got quite often (read: 2 or 3 times) in the past few weeks.
The answer is not easy, because most people asking it are friends or family (non computer savvy) that found the URL on my IM status or in my email signature.
Let’s start with “what (is a) Signal Eleven“. Caveat lector: it’s boring.
I tend (somehow improperly) to mix and use the expression “Signal Eleven” and “Segmentation fault” interchangeably.
According to Wikipedia:
“a segmentation fault occurs when a program attempts to access a memory location that it is not allowed to access, or attempts to access a memory location in a way that is not allowed”
In some systems (Posix compliant, but if you’re reading this, it’s not going to tell you much :)) this is notified to the program via a “message” (a signal) called SIGSEGV, that is, usually, signal number 11.
Now you got the “what” .
The “why” is much simpler. This is a frustrating error a new programmer encounters during his experiments with programming, and may have security related implications.
Well, I am a programmer and I’m interested in security. The name reminds me (and my geek readers) of an anomalous situation, like those that I blog about sometimes.
In short: I really liked the name.
