Lestat taking a nap ;-)
Short blog today, I just wanted to go over something I found from Google. It’s called ‘The Story Of Send’, and it’s pretty nifty. If you’ve ever wanted to follow an email’s journey from the moment you hit send to when it arrives at it’s destination, and learn some pretty awesome things about Google’s infrastructure in the process, check out The Story of Send.
http://www.google.com/green/storyofsend/desktop/
See you tomorrow :-)
Filed under Technology, The More You Know, Webtech
Those who know me in real life know that at the end of college a few years ago I was…a bit heavy. 330 pounds (roughly 149 kilograms or 23 stone) heavy actually. I couldn’t really go up a flight of stairs without breathing hard, and just sitting in a room at 71°F caused me to sweat. It’s one of the reasons I liked the room cooler than most people: All that extra weight caused my body to be better insulated. I tried every diet you can think of. Protein diet, South Beach Diet, Detox Diet. They all seemed gimmicky, and the science behind most of them was…flimsy. It’s the same part of my brain that doesn’t let me enjoy shows like CSI or Bones.
Yeah. Right. My BS meter starts tripping and from that point forward I hate the show.
(As a completely unrelated side note, I may not be able to stand bones or CSI (ENHANCE ENHANCE!), but shows like Stargate are perfectly fine..they get some details wrong, but a giant ring that creates a wormhole between two points doesn’t trip the BS meter…it’s SciFi and, if not technically possible with today’s knowledge, could theoretically be possible.)
I’d totally go through the Stargate.
So, I’d go on the diet with it’s weird, random rules about Eat Fish for the First Week, Then you can eat Cabbage and Fish for 3 days 2 hours, then drink nothing but Sugar Water for about…a week. Then I’d be off the diet. And my weight increased. It doesn’t take a genius to also realize that 99.999999% of all “diet” stuff is really marketing. Worse, the “Diet” food marketing and diet plan marketing is preying upon people..We don’t want to hear that losing weight is hard work, so we buy the cheap gimmicky stuff that promises to make things easier. But all diets must abide by The First Law Of Thermodynamics.
Also called the Law of Conservation of Energy, it suggests that energy can be transferred from one system to another in many forms. Also, it cannot be created or destroyed. Thus, your body must, at all times, be following this simple law. Food comes in (energy input), work is done (your body digests it, you work out, and you burn energy just by sitting in your chair or sleeping), and energy leaves the system (yep.).
Simply put: To lose weight, you must burn more energy, per day, than you take in, per day, over time. We measure this energy in Calories. A pound of fat (.45 kilograms) is roughly 3500 Calories. Thus, to lose 1 pound, per week, you must burn 3500 more calories than you take in, per week. You can accomplish this in several ways, but the easiest (laziest) route is to simply eat 3500 Calories less per week. Your body will burn between 2000 and 2200 calories per day, just by existing :-) Thus, to lose 1 pound per week, you’d need to eat 1500 to 1700 calories per day. That’s it.
I hated weighing myself. I’d be “losing” weight fine, and then, without changing anything, I’d step on the scale and be 5 pound heavier. Oh My! Needless to say it shot my confidence. Unfortunately, I wasn’t actually thinking like an engineer at the time. You can’t take your weight at an singular point and time and get anything meaningful out of it..your body weight actually varies pretty dramatically due to water retention. This variation needs to be mitigated/factored out.
That’s where the Hacker’s Diet comes in. Written by the founder of Autocad, it treats the human body as any other mechanical system. It doesn’t make weird BS reasons for the fat in fish releasing free particles as to why you lose weight..*AND* it comes with a free online tool that will factor our your daily weight shifts due to water.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/
That link goes to the literature for the Hacker’s Diet. Give it a read. It’s free, and public knowledge.
https://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/HackDiet/
That link goes to the online tool to measure how much you’re gaining/losing while factoring out weight shifts due to water or other things. You’ll need to enter several days worth of data before it will become accurate. In essence, you weigh yourself at the same time each day, don’t think about the number, and plug the number into the tool, which will then tell you if you’re losing or gaining weight.
It’s free, it works, and I’ve lost over 100 pounds with it with zero exercise. I’m a programmer..I’m pretty well slaved to the PC for 9 hours a day. But now I can go up and down stairs. I’m light enough to where I can start thinking about exercising (If you weight 140 pounds, strap on 190 pound backpack and see how much exercising you can get done. It’s embarrassing to go to a store and measure how much weight I’ve lost in Whole Turkeys).
I’ve developed several tricks to help myself over the past year, and if anyone would be interested or has issues or questions, please feel free to comment or email me and I’ll be more than happy to answer. :-)
Filed under The More You Know
I worked several years as a Computer tech at a California university. *Every Single Semester* some poor soul would come crying (not figuratively crying) to the help desk that their massive report/project/whatever was lost. They would start the paperwork, it would work its way through the system, and eventually I’d be talking one-on-one with them. I wasn’t the only one who helped with Data Recovery, but I had a 100% success rate, *if* the drive was spinning (or I could get it to spin [I can’t do much with a drive that won’t spin]). There are many tricks one can do to try and get the data off a dead/dying drive, but all of those hours spent trying to weasel the drive to release it’s data or coax the bits of a deleted file from the drive were preventable, if the person had taken even a cheap flash drive and backed up their paper/project.
Repeat after me: Backup Backup Backup Backup.
As is frequently the case with Doctors being the worst patients and what have you, I had no backup solution in place. Worse: my current data storage needs top over 6TB of data representing hundreds of hours of work.
Okay, so very few people have backups of their data, although the number of folks who do is steadily rising (usually because they get burned by losing all their data once). Take a moment and think about all the data you have, family photos only on your hard drive, music from iTunes, work documents, tax returns, etc. If your computer was lost/stolen/went up in a fire, how would you feel for the data? Ideally, all this data backup should require no effort from you when it’s up and running right? I mean, I know that if I had to click a single button to backup all my data, I’d forget to do it and it’d never get done..even a single button click is too much effort when it comes to backing up your stuff. Lets go over a few models for how we *could* backup our data, after all, no one solution fits everyone’s needs.
Solution 1: Cloud Backup.
In this solution, we’ll backup everything we have to cloud as much as possible. Google is great for this, as you can backup your documents to Google Documents, and your photos to Picasa. You can also backup your music files to Google Drive.
The Pros:
* Usually free
* Computer independent. Switch computers, upgrade computers, have your computer stolen. The data is all hosted on Google’s hard drives somewhere random in the world.
* You can usually set them up to automatically grab photos and upload them, and Google drive will backup any file in it automatically. No effort involved beyond setting the service up.
The Cons:
* Storage limits. Picasa has a 1GB limit (although it doesn’t count small files towards this limit), Google drive is 5GB, and similarly other services *usually* have limits of some sort.
* Need more storage? That usually costs $.
* No internet connection? Slow internet connection? Have an internet cap? Too bad..depending on the amount of data, you can easily break your bandwidth cap (if you live in Canada for instance, they have caps of 25GB…meaning if you go over 25GB in a month of traffic, $$$). If you’re in an area without internet connection, you might not be able to access your files/photos.
* If you have large amounts of data, backing up everything to the cloud can be cost prohibitive/bandwidth prohibitive. Try backing up 6TB of changing data to the cloud. Eeek.
Solution 2: Backup only the important stuff
In this solution, we know what data we can’t live without, it’s a relatively fixed size, and we will backup only that data. Everything else we will just live without if it goes away one day. My father’s business uses this approach. He only really cares about a relatively small amount of data, and bought a handful of cheap thumb drives. He lines them up, starts at one end of the line, and uses that thumb drive for the day. The next day, he uses the next in line, creating a rolling, cheap backup.
The Pros:
* Generally cheap. Since we know the size of the data we’re backing up, we can usually get by with one thumb drive, or maybe a small external hard drive.
* Usually fast. Thumb drives and external hard drives can backup at about 25 megabytes per second, so even large datasets won’t take prohibitively long. A 500 GB external drive, if filled to capacity, might take all night.
* Software is available that will auto-detect thumb drives/external drives when they attach and start the backup of your selected folders without having to do anything. You can also configure it to auto backup once a day/week/anytime there’s a change/etc.
* No internet? No problem, all the data is held locally.
* External media makes it trivial to store the data off-site…stash a long term backup at a friends house or the bank, so that even in a house fire you still have your important data.
The Cons:
* If you have larger amounts of data, you’ll still lose some of it if the worst happens.
* You must identify and setup the backup software to grab the data you want. If you forget to do this, or add more important data later, but forget to modify the backup software to grab the data, you’ll be in trouble.
Solution 3: Backup everything automatically
The Pros:
* Lose a drive, and you still have all your data.
* No internet? No problem, all the data is held locally.
* Software is available that will automatically backup your data to your external drives. My system is currently configured to backup my DataDrive1 to the DataDrive1Backup disk automatically any time there is a change on DataDrive1. You can also configure it to backup once a day/week/etc.
* External media makes it trivial to store the data off-site…stash a long term backup at a friends house or the bank, so that even in a house fire you still have your important data.
The Cons:
* Doubles your hard drive costs. I have 6TB of data? Need 6TB of backup storage.
* Large datasets can take a long time to back up initially.
There are other solutions out there, and nothings preventing you from taking a hybrid approach (saving your important pictures to Picasa, your music to an external drive). Just, please, take a step back, look at your data, think about what would happen if your lost it all. Have a plan to back it up, otherwise you’ll be rolling the dice that you can recover it for cheap (pro data recovery services can generally recover data even from crispy hard drives that were in a fire….for a price.) I generally don’t recommend using DVD’s or CD’s to backup your data…external thumb drives or hard drives are cheap, and far more reliable.
Please feel free to share your specific strategy in the comments for others. I’ll be going more in depth with my particular solution later, and, if there’s an awesome solution someone’s running, I’ll do theirs in depth too :-)
Filed under The More You Know
!!!!!
What are Ethernet cables, what are the differences between them, and *why you should care*, especially if you’re a homeowner or going to be a homeowner. What we classically consider “Ethernet” cables are actually part of a family of cables, each with different properties, and stratified into categories. I like to think of these as Data cables, to give a bit of separation vs. power cables.. Depending on how old your home/apartment/condo is, you probably already have Data cables running throughout your apartment.
Most older homes are wired for land-line telephones. You’ve probably got wall jacks all over the place for telephones, one or two per room.
Something like these
Traditionally, these are wired with Category 3 cable. Lets set aside what exactly Cat3 cable *is* for a moment to make clear my point. All modern houses were wired when they were built/renovated to carry, at the time, the primary data cable for the common man. Telephones! But, today, we have much more strict data needs, and if you have the opportunity to change out the telephone cables in your walls with better cables (which, by the way, you can still wire as telephone jacks if you really want), you should. It’s easily one of the cheapest ways (if you have the walls open, or the builders were smart and ran the cable via conduit) to up the resale value of your property.
Okay, enough rambling, *what are* these cables, and why should I care?
Sorry for the blurry picture, I couldn’t find a better one and don’t actually keep Cat3 cable in my apartment. This is Category 3 cable. It’s 4 pairs of wires that are loosely twisted. The wire itself isn’t “shielded” (which means it can pick up interference from any random source). This is your telephone data cable :-)
Traditionally these cables are terminated (the ends of the cable are fit into) RJ11 connectors.
These connectors support a maximum of 3 twisted pair (or six individual wires). But, wait, the cable has 4 twisted pair? In telephony (I don’t care if this is a real word ;-) each twisted pair would be a separate voice line. This would allow one telephone to support three separate telephone lines. But this category of cable isn’t shielded, and the twisting is not very tight, so you end up getting “cross-talk”.
What is Cross Talk? In a nutshell, each cable has a certain amount of electricity (Direct Current commonly) flowing in it. Which cable carries which direction of DC power isn’t important, but what is important is that when you have DC wire sending power one direction, and you place *another* copper wire next to it flowing power in the same direction, they will both contaminate each other..the data will “jump” from one cable to another. Ever heard someone faintly on the phone with you while you’re talking to someone else?
The higher the power flowing through the cable, the more noise or cross talk is generated. The faster you vary the data flow (by alternating the dv voltage), the more cross talk you get. Cat3 cable is poorly suited for high-speed data transfer, but you can make a poor-man’s Ethernet cable out of it. It won’t support fast speeds, but you can terminate a cat3 cable and make a 10Base-T connection. (We’ll cover what 10Base-T is later).
You’d terminate with an RJ45 connector, vs. the Telephone’s RJ11 connector.
Category 5 cable is the current standard in Ethernet wiring. All Cables from here out terminate with RJ45 connectors, instead of Rj11. As you can see, there’s not much *physical* difference between it, and the Cat 3 cable. The primary difference is in the twist rate of the wire pairs. Compare the above photo with the Cat3 cable. This extra twist eliminates most of the cross-talk, and allows for 100Base-T communications.
Okay, that’s the second time I’ve used this weird notation of XBase-T, so here’s the long and short of it:
10Base-T means that between two computers, or a computer and a switch or router (don’t know the difference? I’ll be doing a blog on these wonderful things later), a maximum connection of 10 Megabits per second can be maintained. 10Base-T actually is an abbreviation for: 10 Megabits per second, Baseband, Twisted pair. Engineers love boring, but descriptive names. 10Base-T is the slowest “normal” Ethernet connection between two computers. By todays standards, it’s woefully inadequate. As a small aside, my current *internet* connection is 15Megabits per second down..so if my network was 10Base-T, I couldn’t utilize a full 1/3 of my internet connection!
The higher the data rate, the better, as we can move more data!
100Base-T follows the same pattern as above, but supports 100 Megabits per second, or 10 times the data rate.
1000Base-T, also called Gigabit Ethernet, supports 10 times the data rate as 100Base-T.
10GBase-T, also called 10 Gigabit Ethernet, supports 10 times the data rate as 1000Base-T.
So, to recap, Cat 3 cable can support telephones, and 10Base-T. Cat 5 can support 100Base-T, the minimum networking level you should have for a wired network.
There is an “upgrade” to Cat5, called Cat5e. It’s the same cable as pictured above, but manufactured to tighter tolerances, and it allows 1000Base-T. As a side-note: You *can* get Cat5 to do 1000Base-T. I’ve done it, it works, but you will have some Cat5 cable that’s too loose in it’s tolerances and won’t do it. Given that Cat5 and Cat5e cost the same (or cat5e is cheaper), just buy Cat5e if you’re thinking Cat5.
Continuing the trend, the only real difference between Cat5e and Cat 6 is the twist rate. There’s a couple other differences that you can’t physically see, such as the copper inside the wire being held to a stricter quality control, but this cable is the one you should be wiring your house with. It supports 1000Base-T, and costs only slightly more than Cat5e. It can, technically, support 10GBase-T, for short distances. There’s an upgraded Cat6, called Cat6a, that’s expensive, but it will support 10GBase-T for longer distances. But here’s where we hit the wall as far as how much cross talk we can eliminate with just twisting the pairs of wire. Lets go to Cat7.
This is the first cable that is structurally different than the previous cable. Cat7 is not only shielded (that silvery mesh), but the individual twisted pairs are shielded inside the larger shield. You’ll also notice that the twisted pairs have a looser twist rate than cat6, as the cross talk is handled with shielding instead of twist rate. *IF YOU CAN AFFORD IT*, this is the cable to wire your home with. Whereas Cat 5e cable and Cat 6 basically cost the same, Cat7 is almost 3 times, or more, than Cat6.
Here’s a quick recap:
Cat3 is what most homes were wired with. If you have the opportunity, rip it from the walls and burn it like the plague spawn it is. It supports 10 Megabits per second.
Cat5 was cool, but don’t buy it. It’s been supplanted by better cable. It supports 100 Megabits per second, and depending on the phase of the moon, Gigabit per second.
Cat5e is cheap, but don’t buy it. The days of Cat6 are here. It supports Gigabit per second.
Cat6 is what you should wire your home with and be happy. It’s cheap, and is easy to use. It supports Gigabit per second.
Cat6a is what you could wire your home with. It’s more expensive, but supports 10 Gigabit per second. But, as long as you’re willing to pay double Cat6 prices…why not go one step further and get Cat7. Almost all consumer routers and computers *do not* support 10GBase-T. This would be future proofing.
Cat7 is what you could wire your home with if you have lots of money. It’s the future. It’s fancy-pants. Almost all consumer routers and computers *do not* support 10GBase-T. This would be future proofing.
A last word on Cabling your home: Don’t use regular staples, and don’t let whoever installs the cable use regular staples. They can “punch” through the cable, ruining it, or will shred the cable over time as the cable flexes due to temperature. There are proper plastic mounts with zip-ties at Home Depot, make sure your electrician or whoever is installing is using them. Cable shielding and sharp metal are *not* friends. Always use plastic grommets when you drill through wood. Don’t bend the cable more than 90 degrees. Don’t Exceed the minimum bend radius of 1-inch. Don’t use force and Yank on a cable. Don’t run the cable over with hand trucks or step on them if you help it. Knowledge is Power. Power Corrupts Absolutely. Be Evil, Learn all you can..
Filed under Technology, The More You Know
Edit: Sorry about the “test” post earlier. I was trying an offline publishing tool that totally failed. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog:
480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p. 24fps, 30fps, 48fps, 60fps. AHHHH
K, IM GONNA HALP
Lets talk for a moment about what video actually is. Video, be it TV, a movie, etc, is really two separate things. One is the audio stream, which can get horrifically complicated on it’s own and will be the subject of another blog post, and the video stream, which we’ll focus on. The video stream is really just a collection of still images arranged in such an order that when played at a fast enough rate, they produce the illusion of motion.
A good example of this is the “flipbook”…remember those from childhood?
So, a video is really a stream of audio, and a series of images presented in order very quickly to make is think there is motion. Now, there exists primary two different ways to present this series of still images to you: What’s called Interlaced Video and Progressive Video. In our quest to understand High Def Video, we’ll need to know what each is.
Interlaced Video is the older method of presenting Video to an audience. It’s the method of broadcast television, and is actually a nifty hack with some very definite drawbacks. Back in the day, engineers were attempting to send the largest image size (larger image sizes means sharper quality) for the available bandwidth (broadcast TV was sent via microwaves. Only so much data can actually be jammed into these radio waves. The amount that can be jammed into the radio wave is called it’s bandwidth.)
To increase the apparent resolution and apparent smoothness of the image, engineers took advantage of the human eye and split the image into two images. Each image was divided into “fields” or lines. Each frame (or image), would display the Even lines, blacking out the odd lines, and then display the odd lines, blacking out the even lines. Confused? This image might help:
This is what’s called an interlaced image. To get the original image, you need to deinterlace, or combine the odd and even lines, to produce the original image. This allowed for a “larger” resolution to be sent, but it’s not without it’s downsides. Consider fast motion and interlacing:
Have you ever seen something like this? Where it appears to “ghost”? This is an interlacing artifact..and there is no way to get around it.
The other way to display images is called progressive. Progressive images display the image in sequence. It’s more like the flip book, the image is drawn from the top to the bottom ( or bottom top, or right left, it doesn’t really matter, but top to bottom is 99% of the cases), and then a new image is draw from the top to bottom very rapidly. This prevents the above interlace artifacts.
So, Progressive Images look better under motion than interlaced. What about resolution?
480 represents a video resolution of 480 pixels high, and was the original video signal. This is a relatively small image, as you can see from the above graphic. 480 pixels, interlaced, was the maximum image that could be transmitted via microwaves to home television sets back in the day. The problem with such a small resolution is that, unlike on CSI, you cannot simply make an image look sharp as you increase it’s size. This wasn’t a problem for old TV’s, as they were small, and so no one noticed, but as you get larger and larger screens, the stretching that occurs as you try and force a small image onto a larger surface becomes apparent.
But, the situation gets better! 480 interlaced actually is only 240 lines every refresh. The other half of the data isn’t present (it’s blacked out). So 1080i actually only displays 540 lines of image per cycle, compared with the 720 lines of a 720p image. No wonder 480i looks like trash on larger display…you can’t add data to the image that never arrived to begin with!
So, lets recap:
Progressive is better than Interlaced, as it prevents “tearing” or interlace artifacts. It also presents a much crisper image, as your mind doesn’t “fill in” the missing data. This causes less “blur”.
In order of image source quality, we want 480i, 480p, 1080i, 720p, 1080p.
Now, lets get into refresh rates.
Refresh rates refer to how often the image actually gets displayed on the screen. Old broadcast media was displayed at 60 *Fields* per second, which means that it displayed 30 frames per second. Progressive video comes in two flavors here in the US, 24 *Frames* per second, and 30 Frames per second. This is still far too slow for moderate to heavy action in the video, and leads to “blurring” or “jittering”. In addition, on larger video such as 1080p, 30 frames per second is far too low, and in fast motion can lead to disorientation. Thus, there exist 1080p 60 *frames* per second displays and video. This smooths the action out tremendously, and can be seen with a PS3 on certain games.
Confused? Don’t be. Here’s a recap of refresh rate:
In Interlaced signals, such as 480i and 1080i, FPS stands for *Fields* per second, not Frames. So divide the number by half to get Frames Per Second.
In Progressive signals, such as 720p and 1080p, FPS stands for Frames Per Second. Higher is better here for your display or source.
Most movies are moving to a higher frame rate than 24 frames per second, as the lower frame rate leads to blur and flicker. So get a TV or display that can handle 1080p at 60 Frames Per Second on your next purchase ;-)
Filed under Technology, The More You Know, Video
Programming Soul 