Youtube complains of a lack of local storage? Try this...

It seems youtube would really like you to (aka forces you to) enable enable flash storage for third parties and enable at least 10 kg storage for everybody by default. This is most certainly not a technical necessity, but to make advertizing work better. Otherwise you can't save your youtube 3d settings. But once you've saved your 3d settings, you can switch third party storage back off. ;)

Guess the Size of an Lrzip Archive of all Linux Kernel Sources Since 1.0

I've reported before about the efficiency of Lrzip. Now Con did a useful and fun thing: He created an lrzip archive of all the sources of all 2.6 linux kernels. And guess how much space it took? Update: Guess how big an archive of *all* Linux sources since 1.0 is.
A few hints:
- All sources in a tar are 10.3 GB.
- The 2.6.39.1 kernel is 73 MB as a tar.bz2 archive.
- Now it would be less, because the first kernel was smaller (just 32 MB).
- So taking the average (73+32=105/2=52.5) times 39 would be just 2GB (compressed!).

- 19,617,064,960 bytes linux-1.0-2.6.39.tar
- 11,067,473,920 bytes linux-2.6.0-2.6.39.tar

- ( 2,000,000,000 bytes linux-2.6.0-2.6.39.tar.bz) estimate
-   1,535,618,848 bytes linux-2.6.0-2.6.39.tar.xz 13.8%

With heavy, slow IO it took less than an hour to compress, and lrzip was more than twice as fast as xz.

Now that I gave you all these numbers let's see how much it really is... (make a guess an click the link)

Learn Flashcards Efficiently - Tips and How to get OpenCards Running in Linux - Slow Opening of Files in Openoffice and LibreOffice

OpenCards is a great, optimized memorizing software that ensures you need as little time as possible to learn your flashcards.
What you get

• As it's based on Openoffice, you can make full featured flash cards including diagrams, mind maps and everything else supported in Impress.
• Focus on learning. As it logs your progress and automatically schedules the next time to question you, you can learn without organizing what to learn when.
• The repetition schedule is based on modern psychological research. The Leitner system is "a widely used method to efficiently use flashcards that was proposed by the German science journalist Sebastian Leitner in the 1970s. It is a simple implementation of the principle of spaced repetition, where cards are reviewed at increasing interval." (Wikipedia)

Google Finds the Flu

Google just released a tool to track the spread of flus by statistical analysis of their search data. And it seems to work, too.

New Layout

I've changed a few things in the layout. Let me know if it works for you!

Preacher of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Here's a funny video about a FSM preacher.

Voting Machines Are Good - Homer Votes

Encyclopedia of Life

A website mapping (or trying to) all life on our cosy little planet Earth. Why go to other planets to find life if you need not go father than your backyard? Out now: eol.org.

Also check out this interview with the founder.

New Stuff

Pogue just wrote an article about basic things every computer users should know. Well, most of it I did know and won't write it here. But one thing I found interesting it the part about new hardware coming out:

iPods come out in September and digital cameras in February and October.

Google Ads Experiment Ended

I've ended the experiment with Google Ads and removed all ads. I've earned somewhere between 0 and 8 cents. Looks like my Blog (still) has way too few visitors. I don't even really know from looking at my ad control website. And then they did put some quite weird and non-fitting ads in here every once in a while...

But don't worry, I'm still spying on you with Google Analytics. ;)

The Great Sysctl Mystery

Most advanced Linux users with know the sysctl interface for fine-tuning the Linux kernel. But there is probably noone on earth who really understands all those parameters. Well no wonder, as they're usually not even documented.

So I just thought to myself:
It would be great to have a program which has all the values and explanations to them. It could then create configuration files and let sysctl parse them. "Linux Kernel Tuning" would be a cool name. If I had more time... ;-)

(Not) Giving Back to the Community

Open source software is not only a great chance for software projects to make better software. It is also a great Chance for the community and companies to quickly create new products or assemble them to new products.

Among the current examples of using free software are many big names

• Apple's OS X operating system
  
• the Safari browser
• Google's Servers (Linux-based)
  
• Google's new Chrome browser
• AnchorFree's Hotspotshield software.

The problem is, though, that many companies use code from other projects themselves, but fail to give back code to the community.

Apple only publishes the changes made to the Darwin operating system every once in a while, only that few people really care. Of course Apple doesn't want people to be able to run Mac OS X on normal PC hardware and thus does everthing to discourage too active community involvement here.

But you can only wonder how come the Safari browser, based on KDE's Konqueror KHTML engine, is still not available for Linux. Even worse, most of the enhancements made by Apple are never incorporated back into KDE. And Apple even managed to draw developers away from developing KHTML to working only on Safari. (I know, this is a big debate and flate-prown.)

Google claims to give back much more to the community than it would have to and proudly states that Chrome is made open source. But it's not like it really was their free choice. Chrome is based upon Firefox and KHTML and both are open source and at least HTML is GPL-licensed and may thus not be published as a closed source software. And most other Google software products are closed source: Google Desktop, Picasa, etc.

And one has to wonder about the big picture. If companies do not return code enhancements and help to the open source projects, the result will not only be a major frustration in the projects, but also a financial detriment for the global economy. Because only if the project members are encouraged to write free software and not only used, they will enjoy working in their free time. In their work they help to prevent a constant reinventing of the wheel in different areas of software development and fix many bugs.

In the end good open source collaboration can free up many resources and enable programmers everywhere to create new, better software much more quickly, dynamically and freely. This is something a company must consider when getting involved with open source projects and keep in mind to provide help back to the projects in terms of a significant part of the employee time, code and money they saved.

The Internet

I just wanted to try out something I found on the DVD of my computer magazine. I don't know why, but I just went to the website to download it. The problem is just that I'm in Australia and the download limit for this month is already exceeded and thus the bandwidth throttled to 6kb/s.

And after I had downloaded half of the file from the Internet it occured to me: Why not copy it from the DVD? And so I did. Crazy how you can get accustomized to downloading everything online...

The answer to life, the universe and everything

Google seems to have assimilated Douglas Adams' work, because it knows the answer to life, the universe and everything. Just google for

"answer to life, the universe and everything"

and you shall get it. More, as always, on Wikipedia.

How to Help with Linux Kernel Development

"Please do contribute to Linux, and a great way of doing that is to test latest mainline or linux-next or -mm and to report on any problems which you encounter. 

Nothing special is needed - just install it on as many machines as you dare and use them in your normal day-to-day activities.

If you do hit a bug (and you will) then please be persistent in getting us to fix it. Don't let us release a kernel with your bug in it! Shout at us if that's what it takes. Just don't let us break your machines. 

Our testers are our greatest resource - the whole kernel project would grind to a complete halt without them. I profusely thank them at every opportunity I get :)"

(Andrew Morton, from the LinuxWorld interview. )

I recommend using the release candidates(-rcX), you can get them at www.kernel.org and report bugs at bugzilla.kernel.org. The nice thing is that this way you can make sure the next kernel will work on your system before it's even out. And you're usually not the only person who would suffer from these bugs of course.

Let your plants tell you when to water them! :)

An explanation how to make your plants twitter you when they need water. That's having plants for real men! :)