One poster had written:

Real programmers type cat | cc and get it right the first time.

The other replied:

Some of us don’t have to cling to safety blankets like that. We prefer the simplicity of cat > a.out

The start of SiOnyx has prompted a rash of articles on “Black Silicon”. The Tree Hugger article was very “Rah Rah!” while the After Gutenberg article was much more grounded. The idea is that some R+D folks came up with a way to enhance the surface of a silicon wave to improve it’s ability to absorbe photons. Conspicously missing from this was a write-up on whether any electrons were kicked out by this absorbtion. After all, if that absorbtion doesn’t create electrons, it’s creating heat. I can make anything create heat by painting it black.

This was the most facinating graph I’ve seen in a while. Would you believe that the amount of money in money market accounts varies inversely with the stock market? It does have large implications for market timing. Not so much right now, but in the future.

My wife and I got these cool Motorola phones a while back, the W490. We put some 2 GB memory cards in them and record videos of our kid with them. It mounts like a USB drive and we copy the videos off. Great fun for the whole family. Unfortunately, the phone saves it as a .3gp (WTF?). Being a Linux fiend, it just took a little Googling to get the video converted to a mpeg-2.

Step 1: Convert to MPEG 2

ffmpeg -y -i file.3gp -sameq -f mpegvideo -ar 32000 -ac 1 file.mpg

Optional Step 2: Flip video if you put the cell phone on it’s side

mencoder -vf rotate=2 -ovc lavc -oac copy file.mpg file_flip.mpg

Linux ROCKS!

A long time ago, I didn’t trust that the current web-mail provider du jour would always and forever be my link to the outside world. And I don’t expect Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google to implement e-mail address portability. So, I got my own domain name and forward the e-mail to whatever service I’m currently using for web e-mail access. Right now that’s Google. But, when I follow the iPod Touch (henceforth referred to as the iTouch) directions for connecting it to my GMail account, I have to use the blarg@gmail.com e-mail address. But, no longer.

To work around it, Add an account (From inside the Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendar) and choose other. Enter your regular e-mail address and name, but pull the IMAP and SMTP server information from GMail’s iPhone help. Of course, to get SMTP to work, you need GMail to acknowledge that you’re using that e-mail address. That’s a story for another time.

I had moved on from D2Audio almost 2 months ago now, but I’m still ecstatic for them that the acquisition went through.

Intersil Corporation, a world leader in the design and manufacture of high-performance analog solutions, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire D2Audio Corporation, a privately-held innovation leader in the design of digital audio power amplifiers for consumer, commercial, automotive and professional audio applications.

D2Audio was founded in 2002 as a privately-held company in Austin, Texas. D2Audio is the developer of the world’s only intelligent digital amplifiers, the Digital Audio Engine(TM) (DAE) family of ICs, which deliver superior sound quality. The patented D2Audio technology monitors, perfects, and enhances audio quality with real-time digital feedback.

Here’s a few good articles on the collective guesswork for when the Fed will change interest rates. In case you need help sleeping

• The Tech Farm
• Future Source contract prices and a handy calculator

The futures seem to be betting that it will stay unchanged until at least November.

This guy has my type of sense of humor

Several weeks ago now, I picked up one of the tiny linux-based HP Media Vaults (mv2120). The advantage of this one over those Windows based media jobbies was that it supported NFS to make my Linux universe happy. Or at least supposedly it does. To speed things along, I mounted the device using CIFS. All the files are copied over now, so I can power-down our slowly-getting-flaky-Celeron-300-Mandrake-older-than-time file server. It feels good to have 500 GB laying around waiting for abuse.

Update: I had some CIFS file permissions problems – stuff was getting set non-writable and causing headaches. This fixed it:

use the ‘noperm’ options, thus:
//serverIP/public /media/nas cifs
credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8,noperm 0 0Bingo! But what an awful solution, eh?! As it happens, I’m the only
person logging on to this machine, so maybe it doesn’t matter. But how
do folk on shared systems deal with this? (There seem to be a lot of
cheesed off cifs users around, from what I’ve seen!)

The next time there are mass-presentations, I’m e-mailing this around to my coworkers