Viewsonic VG2436wm-LED

My awesome new Viewsonic VG2436wm-LED monitor (pics pending). Another fantastic gift to myself ;-) Thanks Ros! No problem, anytime Ros.

24" 1080p, colours look vibrant, contrast ratio is high. Viewing angles are no great shakes, but no worse than other monitors. The most stand-out feature is pivot support (rotation) so that monitor can go into portrait mode. This is great for reading long articles, and should be fantastic for writing long functions when I get around to programming again. I have only tested this function on my laptop so far with Intel drivers, works great! Simply put mouse pointer on screen you desire to be rotated and then use the CTRL+ALT+arrow-direction keyboard shortcuts to rotate to desired screen orientation, very quick and easy to apply. The height can be adjusted to quite an exteme to allow for easier rotation, it makes the unit a little prone to shaking about slight vibration though, and may need a sturdy desk/worktop surface.

All in all, a nice little number, and the cheapest 24" monitor with pivot adjustment support built in and decent screen specs.

[UPDATE]
New monitor in action:

OCZ Agility 3 60GB

Santa's been! Actually I bought this one myself. I have a Lenovo R400 Thinkpad, it takes about 4/5mins to boot up and hard drive always seems to be thrashing. Seemed to be getting 40-60 MB/sec moving large files off the hard drive which is pretty shit. Bought myself an OCZ Agility 3 60GB and fuck me it's fast! Seem to be getting impossible speeds. It has SATA 150 interface (i.e. 150MB/sec theoretical upper speed limit) but testing with numerous softwares are getting figures of 200MB/sec and over???

It's booting and shutting down breathtakingly fast, i'm actually stunned as to how fast it is, PLUS the drive is designed for SATA 600 interface! I have SATA 300 in my main PC, i will run some tests on that machine at a later date, but stunning results so far! SSDs really do live up to the hype!

[UPDATE]
In retrospect, clearly the Lenovo spec sheet was wrong. Laptop must have SATA300 interface. Getting contiguous large file reads of 250MB/s during testing, but have recorded burst rates of ~298MB/s by monitoring actual system performance using HDTune Pro. Impressive stuff! Alas now, in the inevitable race ever upwards, I am noticing the limiting factor of my laptop's CPU power, and my once proud RAID disk system is beginning to feel a little challenged, regular defragging is now needed and the once seemingly quick boot times seem to take an age as I restart my laptop several times for fun as it does one single boot..

Funny

Google this "what defines an english person". First hit, hilarious.

Dennis Ritchie is dead. Long live UNIX and C!

Sad news and no fanfare for the passing of this s/w giant =(

Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, Passes Away At Age 70

Virgin Media Business study

A Virgin Media Business study found that 70 percent of smartphone owners would rather give up alcohol than be without their phone.

Are you a smartphone owner and which would you choose?

Ditch Irish for Chinese

Teaching irish language in irish schools is a quaint idea for keeping the language alive, but lets face it, it's useless. When will u ever use it? Anytime i've spoken irish to an irish person (with my extremely limited vocabularly) ppl just give me that confused vacant stare because they know even less irish than me after 14 years of force fed gaelige. Chinese on the other hand is going to be the lingua franca of international business if current trends continue. Any other nationality already has a head start on us by learning a widely used international second language from the beginning of schooling. The mandatory teaching (notice i didnt say learnning) of irish language is in fact a hindrance to the prosperity of irish ppl. Anyhow, enough raggin on irish everyone knows it already, but what about teaching chinese to toddlers eh?

food crisis update!

There are now twice as many obese ppl than those dying from starvation according to the red cross. Good news no?

Meteor mobile broadband.

hooked my laptop up to my phone with a usb cable. so i now have internet at home, wahey!
here are my stats from speedtest.net, bathe in their glory ;-)



Hot shit no? My emails are blazing down in mere minutes!

Actual picture of electron orbitals in a molecule!

Here is what the molecule looks like in theory:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentacene

Here are the real imaged/measured(!!!) views of the molecules electron orbitals:
news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/molecules-imaged-most-intimately.html

Be amazed! Those weird looking orbital lobey things you may have seen in chemistry class actually exist like that in real life AND we can look at them. We can now look directly at the orbitals that electrons take.

(All the more fantastic for me as i was never really sure that i believed in them.)

Ouroboros in the Flesh!

"Plato described a self-eating, circular being as the first living thing in the universe—an immortal, mythologically constructed beast.

The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to him, being of all the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All the other six motions were taken away from him, and he was made not to partake of their deviations. And as this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created without legs and without feet." - from Plato's Timaeus

If it wasn't for The Second Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy) this would be a little more beautiful to me, personally I don't believe the eventual universe, a static, homogeneous, vast field of radiation really counts as a living thing anymore, more of a remaining smudge of a long deceased corpse.

Makes me think of this scene from Lars Von Trier's Antichrist:

Entropy is sometimes expressed (slightly ambiguously in my opinion) as the amount of chaos (disorder) in a system, meaning the dispersal of energy around the system after spontaneous changes (tending towards equilibrium). Nonetheless the fox rips himself apart as he eats and while there is circular movement the end is inexorable and 'Chaos reigns'. Ya dig?

VIOLENCE STARTS IN BARCELONA

pretty gay shit going on


"The POLICE (Civil servants) were ordered to ATTACK the Civilians in my city this morning during the completely peaceful and very well organised protest and sit in that has been going on for a week now in the main Squares of every major city in Spain.

We are fine and attending this protest daily, just want to make sure you are all aware whats happening here."

UNPROVOKED POLICE BRUTALITY VIDEO

SIGN THIS PETITION

Live streaming of Plaza Catalunya - Barcelona

Manifesto (Translated)

Firefox v4

Upgraded to Firefox v4 there last night. Seems to want to crash all over the shop. It's also using
a whopping 400+ MBs of ram. I'd recommend any Firefox users delay their upgrade until next
incremental release, at least (version 4.1?). Other than that, the GUI interface
now resembles Google Chrome. There is also built-in support for roaming browsing, i.e. save
your tabs+history+watever to a server so they open up on whatever machine your using. I also
have a lot of custom settings in "about:config" which have been left unchanged by the
upgrade. That is good =) I haven't snooped around much apart from that.

--

Droplets colliding

Some cool lookin shit.

700GB of data gone :-(

The hard drive in my Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive (hmnhd) has died with the loss of 700GB of data. This is extra annoying as i was in the middle of collecting data from all of my machines into the one place (the dead drive) with the idea that i'd then make a backup of that. Suffice is to say i'm gutted. This is the first hard drive that has completely gone on me with catastrophic data loss. FML.

This just keeps making me laugh

L0UI5 TH3R0UX - \/\/estboro Baptist Church "The mo5t h4ted f4mily in am3rica"

L0UI5 TH3R0UX's first documentary on the \/\/estboro Baptist Church "The mo5t h4ted f4mily in am3rica". Apologies for the semi-1337 but I'm attempting to hide the link.



Part 2 just aired and is available from the usual sources e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ticxD0GfewA

'Karak' Out Soon!

Hairy malaysian ghosts n shit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kGxFgnxIHM

Anarchists for Fianna Fáil

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yieS7jWWdB8

Alternative to "The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie"

Found a great book for learning C. Lesson 1 is the usual "hello world", but literally the next example dives into using it as a CGI script. It teaches all the usual C console output stuff, but concentrates on web programming with C and apache web server. This is great, as the terminal is a bit boring looking for the uninitiated, and most ppl are used to booting up and instantly firing up the web browser to click aimlessly on social networking sites.

It includes clean code examples, and moves rapidly on to interacting with mysql and creating images on the fly, while still learning about loop structures etc. At 84 pages of breakneck speed learning, I'd love to hear how a novice gets on with this book. I'm a relatively seasoned C/C++ programmer and I'm still getting mileage out of it.

"C Programming in Linux" by David Haskins.

Download pdf & examples (for free!) here: http://bookboon.com/external/computerweekly/it/c-programming-in-linux
(If your not a UK IT student just put "abroad" and "other" in drop downs).

Dijkstra & Mathematics Inc.

Pretty funny, this is swiped from the Wikipedia entry for Dijkstra. He's a pretty important figure in computer science.

"One of Dijkstra's sidelines was serving as Chairman of the Board of the fictional Mathematics Inc., a company that he imagined having commercialized the production of mathematical theorems in the same way that software companies had commercialized the production of computer programs. He invented a number of activities and challenges of Mathematics Inc. and documented them in several papers in the EWD series. The imaginary company had produced a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis but then had great difficulties collecting royalties from mathematicians who had proved results assuming the Riemann Hypothesis. The proof itself was a trade secret (EWD 475). Many of the company's proofs were rushed out the door and then much of the company's effort had to be spent on maintenance (EWD 539). A more successful effort was the Standard Proof for Pythagoras' Theorem, that replaced the more than 100 incompatible existing proofs (EWD427). Dijkstra described Mathematics Inc. as "the most exciting and most miserable business ever conceived" (EWD475). He claimed that by 1974 his fictional company was the world's leading mathematical industry with more than 75 percent of the world market (EWD443).[7]"

SSD Storage Porn

A little techno-porn. Industrial raid-array replacing SSD storage drive.

http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodriveoctal/

6.0 GB/s read!
4.4 GB/s write!
5.4 TB data.

Price? 5 figures at least I imagine.

A quick precis of everything