Another in-your-face example of a Windows bug...or maybe it's an attempt to sabotage the good reputation of the Samba team. When I connect to a Linux box, via Samba, from a Windows� machine, and view the Properties on one or more files/folders to find out the total file size[s], I get data like this:

Type: Multiple Types
Location: \servershare
Size: 234 KB (239,742 bytes)
Size on disk: 8.12 MB (8,519,680 bytes)

If you were a fool and believed those readings, you might be lead to believe that files take up a lot more disk space on a Linux box than on a Windows� machine.

I've come across some really 'challenged' users in my life. Even people you would expect to know better [like some managers I've had the misforture to work with] would be fooled by this.

In my never-ending search for 'puter mods, I come across these plans for a noise insulation case. I like the idea of this case, but the thought of putting you 'puter into yet another box [making it physically bigger] is a little off putting...but you have to weight that up against how you deal with the noise I guess. And I like the choice of external design as well...sort of.

Hopefully this will be the first and last time I post about Longhorn. Seems to be all the rage on the net now because of PDC, but as usual it's appears like all crappy hype dished out by the AllCrappyHype masters.

Anyways, here are some screenshots. Not that impressive IMHO. Bit of a OSX bite. Finally displaying some features that have been in X forever.

I wonder how much money it will take [this time] to cover up all the security flaws and make the product appealling to the masses.

There's a moth plague in Sydney at the moment. I went out on the balcony where I'm staying about an hour ago and there was one moth fluttering around. And just a few moments ago I ventured out again, but this time, there was hundreds on the balcony, and thousands all around the building.

Maybe I have time to vent a little frustration. Why do American's so love to hear anime in their own accent? And crappy hollywood actor's voices at that. IMHO you can't really appreciate a good Japanese anime unless you listen to it in Japanese and read the subtitles.

But then again, I guess they've got that whole culture problem, where they try and rewrite history so it looks like everything cool in the world was produced in America, by Americans. I can imagine years from now kids growing up thinking Nausicaa was an American product...or even manga/anime in general [especially with all the crappy, CRAPPY US anime ripoffs - yes...don't forget Kimba the White Lion].

What got me started?...this.

Not trying to make excuses for not posting lately, but...here's my excuse - In the last week all my time has been taken up by either work or catching up with friends. Lame? Maybe, but true. In any case there's a big catch up coming soon.

The Japanese international Rugby team was defeated by Scotland yesterday, but it was a great game and Japan put up a great fight. In defence Japan was all over Scotland. It was unfortunate that the size [mainly weight] of the Japanese wasn't a little greater as it was the only real advantage Scotland had and which they used to win the game.

The crown in Townsville was definitely warming to the Japanese. After the match the Japanese team got a standing ovation from the crowd and where clapped off the field by the Scotish. It was a good show of sportsmanship.

Meanwhile, Georgia got flogged by England, although I gotta say, the Georgians have got a lot of promise. They only ended up having about [had to be less than] 20% possesion time, but they never let up on defence. It was sheer experience that beat them.

Canada went down to Wales, by a slightly larger total than I expected.

Why am I still talking about Rugby...because there not much else happening at the moment.

No, it's not another version of SimCity, it's [currently] the fastest supercomputer in the world [According to the TOP500.org supercomputer list].

The Earth Simulator's site is a little corporate looking, so I'll go with the TOP500's description;

The Earth Simulator (ES) is a project of Japanese agencies NASDA, JAERI and JAMSTEC to develop a 40 TFLOPS system for climate modeling.

The ES site is a new location in an industrial area of Yokohama, an hour drive west of Tokyo. The facility became operational in late 2001, and claimed first spot in current Top 500 list. In spite of a public 5-year development period leading to that event, the US supercomputing community was caught by surprise.

Hardware: The ES is based on:

• 5,120 (640 8-way nodes) 500 MHz NEC CPUs
• 8 GFLOPS per CPU (41 TFLOPS total)
• 2 GB (4 512 MB FPLRAM modules) per CPU (10 TB total)
• shared memory inside the node
• 640 � 640 crossbar switch between the nodes
• 16 GB/s inter-node bandwidth
• 20 kVA power consumption per node

The vector CPU is made using 0.15 μm CMOS process, and is a descendant (same speed, smaller process) of the NEC SX-5 CPU. The machine runs a version of the Super-UX UNIX-based OS. OpenMP parallel directives are used within a node, and MPI-2 or HPF must be used across multiple nodes, necessitating a dual-level parallel implementation. In fact this can be considered a three-level parallel system, if single-CPU vectorization is taken into account; however, vectorization is largely automatic. Still, an optimized code will need to employ MPI-2 at the subdomain level, OpenMP at the loop level, and vectorization directives at the instruction level all at once.

Physical : The CPUs are housed in 320 cabinets, 2 8-CPU nodes per cabinet. The cabinets (blue) are organized in a ring around the interconnect, which is housed in another 65 cabinets (green). Another layer of the circle is formed by disk array cabinets (white). The whole thing occupies a building 65 m long and 50 m wide. Activity on the nodes is signalled by a bright green beacon at the top of the cabinet, and if a fault occurs, a similar red light turns on. Switch cabinets also have green and red signaling lights for various types of communication events.

The machine room sits at approximately 4th floor level. The 3rd floor level is taken by hundreds of kilometers of copper cabling, and the lower floors house the air conditioning and electrical equipment. The structure is enclosed in a cooling shell, with the air pumped from underneath through the cabinets, and collected to the two long sides of the building. The aeroshell gives the building its "pumped-up" appearance. The machine room is electromagnetically shielded to prevent interference from nearby expressway and rail. Even the halogen light sources are outside the shield, and the light is distributed by a grid of scattering pipes under the ceiling. The entire structure is mechanically isolated from the surroundings, suspended in order to make it less prone to earthquake damage. All attachments (power, cooling, access walkways) are flexible.

If that description means nothing too you, believe me...wow. Wonder if SAs game on it afterhours ;)

It's the end of my third day of three weeks in Australia and I have done much else but watch Rugby Union. There's no much else on TV. If I go out into the street I see crowds of punters wearing a range of jerseys. If I browse the local news sites I see the same thing, but this time real players in .jpeg compressed format.

Yesterday night Australia defeated Agentina in what was a fairly close match, although the scoreline may not reflect this.

Today I've seen Italy get beaten by New Zealand, Ireland coming out victors over Romania, and France get one up on Fiji. Now I'm watching South Africa pretty much walk over Uruguay. The matches today have been watchable, but there seems to be [and imho always has in international rugby] two groups of teams - the really good, and the ok - which seems mainly due to the popularity of the game in the different countries.

Australia, New Zealand, England, South Africa, Wales, Italy, France and Ireland tend to have a much larger pool of players to choose from, and hence have more talent. Romania, Fiji, Uruguay, Canada, Japan, Georgia, Namibia, Tonga and the USA have only small numbers of players in their respective local leagues, and it really shows. In the case of Uruguay, they have only 1000 Rugby Union players in the country to choose a international team from.

Nobody's fault, but it makes for some pretty boring, one-sided-high-scoring, games. We'll probably have to wait until the next round before any of the more interesting matches occur.

Having said all that, all the teams have their good points and shine at moments, but....you know what I'm saying.

NOTE: I have no idea why I'm writing about Rugby Union...no idea.

btw: Check out my friend's Rugby site - Heaven's Game. He's a footy head [so he knows what he's talking about], and also a software developer I worked with. Great guy.

Can't sleep.

My desire to get into astronomy is increasing. I bought a book the other day called "Teach Yourself Astronomy" by Patrick Moore [sorry...can't be bothered linking it to amazon]. One of the chapters is on telescopes, and thanks to that I now know alot more about telescopes [and astronomy in general] than I did two days ago.

Anyways...it's late and I can't sleep [from the flight...not really jet lag 'cause Sydney and Japan only have a 1 hour time difference, but I can't sleep on planes...the trip blew my sleeping cycle out of the water], so I'm doing a look around for some telescope related pages. Here's some of the stuff I've found;

How To Build A Telescope - G. Carboni, March 1996. A taste from the introduction - We describe below how to construct two telescopes. The first one is simpler to build, but is important for understanding the solutions adopted in the second one, which is perfected and optimized for astronomical observations.

Telescopes: How to Make Them and Use Them by Thorton Page.

Telescope Buying Guide by Jeff Kanipe via space.com.

Homemade Astronomy. This site is dedicated to the design and building of telescopes and eyepieces. It includes links to suppliers and other sources of information useful in the building of astronomical equipment by the amateur astronomer. My intention is to illustrate some innovative things I have built over the years, using both simple shop tools as well as advanced programmable NC equipment. I hope the information will be of interest to both the advanced machinist as well as the home shop enthusiast. The workshop of Alvan Clark is featured in this illustration--a respectful nod to telescope builders of the past.

And finally from the Alachua Astronomy Club - Buying Telescopes. Don't buy telescopes from most department stores � they are usually "trash." They typically have poor optics, very low quality eyepieces, and shaky mounts....Also, don't buy a telescope advertised by magnifying power � that is a good indication they are low quality instruments. (A 60mm diameter telescope usually has a maximum power of about 100-150x but are often sold as 450-675x!) Telescopes should be specified by aperture (and focal length or f/ratio) not magnifying power....

It's a start.

Yep...Back in Sydney. Left my damn Australian mobile in Japan, so catching up with friends is going to be tough [did I already blog that?]. Going to do a run of phone calls tonight and see what I come up with.

The Rugby Union World Cup starts tonight, so Sydney is going to be packed with drunk footy-heads having a 'good time' [ie: getting really, really, really drunk and singing/yelling in the streets...maybe get into a 'biff with an opposing team's supporter if their lucky].

Weird to be working in an office again. Lots of background noise ;) But, for someone like me that was basically raised in a corporate office environment, somehow it was strangely relaxing.

Damn this Narita connection is fast. My site is loading like a mf. At least I know that the slowness in Niseko is not due to my hosting service provider. Good to know.

Have arrived at Narita [New Tokyo International]. Busy as always. The flight from Chitose seemed a lot sorted this time. Now I've got a massive 5 hours to wait until my 9+ hour flight to Sydney. I'm gonna be musty by the time I arrive tomorrow morning [about 9am Sydney time]. And I left my Australian mobile in Niseko...doh! I'll only be there for a few weeks, but it has some contact numbers I'll need to catch up with friends. Still...there's always alternatives...I'll track them down somehow.

Apart from hanging with friends, I've got a fair amount of work to do in Sydney. Luckily I'll have an office to work in, which will help me concentrate on things at hand. I've also got to buy some large clothes [mainly TShirts]. Extra large in Japan in about a medium in Sydney.

All is good though. I promised myself I'd never bitch about travelling, and as much as I'm starting to really hate hanging in airports, it's still fun. Kindof ;)

Ok all you Star Wars fans [myself included, even though the last two films have been second rate], check out Duality, by the Crew Of Two.

From a /. post - "...The homemade video used only three props and apparently the quality was good enough that the makers were hired on by Lucas Films. The film was 90% made with Electric Image Universe, Adobe After Effects, FinalcutPro, and Commotion Pro. Of course the rest was the blood sweat and tears of the crew. I have to admit it is a very good example of what software can do today without million dollar render farms and special effects equipment."

And, of course, their first movie - Duel

This ever growing series of interviews, relating to the blogsphere, is worth a look/listen.

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Reading between the lines, you have to pay for the service if you want The Works [Region, City, Latitude & Longitude], but they give away a CVS file with IP Addresses mapped to countries [which is cool] and the APIs for their service are open source [which is cool].

Worth having a look at.

There's some snow on Yotei this morning. Last night the weather was rough. High winds, heavy rain and a low temperature. There's usually about a 9 degrees difference between the bottom and top of Yotei. In any case it was cold enough for the rain to turn into snow. As I look at it now, the peak is about 30% covered. In some places the snow creeps down about 300 meters from the top. It's just started raining, so the snow will probably be gone by lunchtime, but it'll start becoming more frequent now...snow season is just around the corner.