frogcake.net

Category: Geek

  • Sharkproof

    I may never go to the moon, but it’s nice to know that if I do my Speedmaster will still keep ticking.

    I like watches. I particularly like watches that have some history or character about them. Watches that are designed for a purpose, not just to look good.

    Omega have released a new version of their Seamaster PloProf. The standard Seamaster is a nice watch, good enough for James Bond, but the PloProf is like a Seamaster on steroids.

    The first PloProf (the name comes from plongeurs professionnels – French for “professional divers”) was first released in 1970 and it was rated to the man-crushing depth of 600M. It also looked like no other watch. The crown was on the other side and under a protective shield to allow freer wrist movement and to protect against any accidental changes at depth.

    At the 2 o’clock position is the orange bezel-release security pusher. You need to push this to move the bezel, again to prevent any accidental asphyxiation on the sea floor.

    The new PloProf has all these same features as the original but doubles the depth to a giant squid-dwelling 1200M. You can also get it with a “Sharkproof” bracelet.

    Nice to know that if you drop it in the bath, or get your arm bitten off by a shark it will still keep time.

  • You do not have permission

    Miguel found this screenshot in an old email from when we were working on permissions and preferences in OpenX:

    The subject of the email was “Permissions & Settings: Learn From The Masters”

  • Piping Wired

    Love how there is now a UK version of Wired?  Hate how it doesn’t have Scott Brown or Steven Levy?

    I do.

    I mean, Warren Ellis is great and all but I miss my favourite regular writers from US Wired.

    Well now I’ve finally found a use for Yahoo Pipes, that cool but strangely pointless thing Yahoo built a couple of years ago.

    Luckily Wired post all their magazine content online (an inferior format, unworthy of Wired’s awesome graphic design, but I’m not going to buy both editions of the magazine, especially as they share some of the feature articles) so I created a pipe to suck down the Wired RSS feed and filter it for articles by Scott Brown and Steven Levy.

    Now I have the best of both worlds.

    You can get an RSS version of the pipe here.

    Image: Uwe Hermann

  • Firefox 3 Easter Egg

    We all know about The Book of Mozilla but Firefox 3, which was released today, has a cute easter egg when you type about robots into the address bar with all sorts of robot references.

  • Conferences

    The 2008 conference season is in full swing and I’m a little sad I couldn’t make it to the MySQL conference this year as I had a great time in 2007 – but not that sad because the reason is I’m going to JavaOne in May and don’t think I could have got approval for two conferences in as many months. 🙂

    Still, I can live vicariously through all the people blogging the event. Artem Russakovskii’s notes on the Scaling MySQL – Up or Out? keynote have some interesting numbers:

    Question One: Number of MySQL servers
    Facebook 1,800 (900m/900s)

    Question Three: Number of Web Servers
    Facebook 10,000

    Question Four: Number of Memcached servers
    Facebook 805

    That is one hella memcached! This post from last year by a facebook engineer lists their number of servers at 200 giving a total of 3TB of cache. If we assume they are using the same kind of kit then they now must have a memcached size of about 12TB!

    Scaling is something I’ve been investigating at work recently and we will potentially be dealing with big numbers ourselves so it’s encouraging to know open source applications like MySQL and memcached can scale so massively.

  • Old Computers

    This site has some beautiful images of old computers including an amazing picture of a Cray CDC 6600 that seems to have huge glowing green eyes. This was the world’s fastest computer from 1964 to 1969 and looks like something from the set of Blake’s 7.

    They also have a picture of the Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer(!) from 1969. According to wikipedia:

    It sold for $10,000, weighs over 100 pounds, and is used for storing recipes (but reading or entering these recipes would have been very difficult for the average cook as the only “user interface” was the binary front panel lights and switches). It had a built in cutting board and had a few recipes built in.

    There is no evidence that any Honeywell Kitchen Computers were ever sold.

    No shit.

    Update: The images are from Mark Richards’s book Core Memory – A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers.

  • Zen ADSL

    I just found another good reason to like Zen ADSL. I logged into my customer portal and discovered that I can change the reverse mapping of my static IP address through a simple form on their website.

    I’ve been using Zen for years now and I can’t see myself changing in the near future. Certainly not to Virgin Media who, incidentally, phoned me a couple of days after I lodged my complaint with the CISAS and offered to refund the money they owed me straight away. Of course it could take up to twenty-one days to receive the cheque…

  • Unix humour

    This guy has a great name for a sysadmin:

    Daley’s view was backed by Tim Chown, systems administrator for the University of Southampton’s school of electronics and computer science and a member of the UK’s IPv6 taskforce.

  • That new mac smell

    You know how new cars always smell really nice? I don’t know why the fumes given off by all that new plastic and glue smell nice but they do. I imagine a new Ferrari with full leather interior would smell even better. The trouble is, no matter how clean you keep your car, that smell always quickly fades.

    I’ve had my MacBook for a little while now and it still faintly has the same smell that wafted up when I opened the box and cracked open its lid for the first time.

    Now, Kathryn thinks I’m weird because I also like the smell of books and magazines but I googled for “new mac smell” and it turns out I’m not the only one. Apparently it is:

    a little bit of plastic bag with a hint of lindenberry followed by a rush of Styrofoam

  • Mac Zealots

    Apple have just released minor updates to the MacBook range. I only bought my MacBook a month ago so I guess I’m a little annoyed that I just missed the update but the upgrade isn’t really that significant; a slightly faster CPU and a bigger hard drive, basically.

    This guy, on the other hand, is not taking it so well:

    Good work Apple. Idiots.

    As someone waiting to buy their first Mac I am FURIOUS with Apple and their continued raping of MB buyers.

    The MBs are the line of computers that will benefit most from SR and Apple do THIS? I actually cannot believe it. They are absolute bastards.

    Oookaay. Repeat after me: calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean…

    Macs are like that, though. Kind of like a Harley. People either love them or hate them. I guess I’m part of the Cult of Mac now, although I know it’s just a computer.