Entries by James Valentine

My good friend Heiner has introduced me to the excellent Instapaper concept. The idea is simple: surf the net as usual and when you find something you don't have time to read at that moment, click a bookmarklet they supply and the article is silently added to your Instapaper profile. A side-effect of offering this functionality is that Instapaper can perform statistical analysis on click counts for each URL, working out which are the most popular articles amongst the reading community.

Here's one I've enjoyed. It charts the "discovery" of that difficult period between adolescence and adulthood. I think I'm there right now. Lots of possibilities, not much stability, tons of energy, not much money. Watch this space as I develop my business and do some interesting things in the process. There is time for "setting down" later on. First time I've encountered the idea of synaptic pruning, too. I wonder which bits of my cognition have been lopped off so that other bits can be optimised? What about you? I refuse to feel guilty about enjoying this time in my life. There's a quote at the end from Jeffrey Arnett at the end and some opinion from the article writer, Robin Marantz Henig, which holds some promise for us all:

“To be a young American today is to experience both excitement and uncertainty, wide-open possibility and confusion, new freedoms and new fears,” he writes in “Emerging Adulthood.” During the timeout they are granted from nonstop, often tedious and dispiriting responsibilities, “emerging adults develop skills for daily living, gain a better understanding of who they are and what they want from life and begin to build a foundation for their adult lives.” If it really works that way, if this longer road to adulthood really leads to more insight and better choices, then Arnett’s vision of an insightful, sensitive, thoughtful, content, well-honed, self-actualizing crop of grown-ups would indeed be something worth waiting for.

I'm using a new laptop with an eSATA connector, along with a hard disk docking station. I thought I'd run some hdparm tests to see what the difference in data transfer between the two methods would be.


root@ruby:/home/james# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda6

/dev/sda6:
Timing cached reads: 5798 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2899.53 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 222 MB in 3.01 seconds = 73.73 MB/sec
root@ruby:/home/james# hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb1

/dev/sdb1:
Timing cached reads: 5414 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2707.37 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 270 MB in 3.01 seconds = 89.82 MB/sec

root@ruby:/home/james# hdparm -Tt /dev/sdf1

/dev/sdf1:
Timing cached reads: 5314 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2658.02 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 94 MB in 3.06 seconds = 30.70 MB/sec


The first is the locally installed SATA 5400 RPM 640GB drive. The second is the external 1TB drive connected via eSATA. The last scoring is for the same drive connected via USB. That's quite a drop in throughput we're looking at there when the cache is taken out of the equation.

Follow through with me here.

Marketing calls to individuals on the telephone preference service are illegal. Our fixed-line phone companies (BT, for example) know who just called us. Why, when we get a nuisance call can we not simply pick up the phone and dial a 5-digit code which allows us to report the last call as a nuisance? That would seem to work on a lot of levels: consumers often don't know where the caller is coming from, and shouldn't have to do a lot of work to report these cases. In addition, numbers are often withheld, or the message is recorded. I wouldn't even mind answering, say, three questions about the call by pressing keys on my keypad if it helped with the investigation of this callers.

Sadly, I suspect that phone companies want to make revenue whoever is making the call, whether it bothers the recipient or not.

Taken without permission, but with good faith, from Portrait of an ENFP

Portrait of an ENFP - Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving

(Extraverted Intuition with Introverted Feeling)

The Inspirer

As an ENFP, your primary mode of living is focused externally, where you take things in primarily via your intuition. Your secondary mode is internal, where you deal with things according to how you feel about them, or how they fit in with your personal value system.

ENFPs are warm, enthusiastic people, typically very bright and full of potential. They live in the world of possibilities, and can become very passionate and excited about things. Their enthusiasm lends them the ability to inspire and motivate others, more so than we see in other types. They can talk their way in or out of anything. They love life, seeing it as a special gift, and strive to make the most out of it.

This is what I got back in response to my complaint about the Avatar 3D showing I attended on Saturday.

Just sent the following complaint to Empire Cinemas after my disappointment in Wycombe when I went to see Avatar 3D. Utter madness, and all caused by cost-cutting and bad management.

Just read (and was touched by) this, a few words in someone's sig:

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Plato"

That's so easy to forget. Why do we expect everyone (including ourselves) to be more than human? As Rob Bell says, we were designed to be neither angels or animals, but this odd, hybrid, blessed creature, reborn in the love of Jesus.