I’m trying different things nowadays to see if I can’t be informative *and* fun! Well, at least informative. And maybe blog more regularly, too.
We’ll start it off with something that had been bugging me for a couple of years, for which I just found the explanation.
Computer work engenders some bizarre practices and tenets, but typically one could always rely upon the math. Since computer science departments grew out of math departments at universities, there usually isn’t a lot of wiggle room when it comes to the numbers — except for when hard drive manufacturers let their marketing departments call a 645GB hard drive a ‘750GB hard drive’. But other than the boil-brained, you could pretty much count on the fact that there are 8 bits in a byte, and that a 1 gigabit network connection would (theoretically) let you pass 1024 / 8 = 128 megabytes per second. The numbers were never perfect metric matches (like 1 meter = 100 centimeters), but they were consistent.
So it surprised me to find everyone who talked about fiber channel connection speeds saying that a 4 gigabit fiber channel connection can push 400 megabytes of data, a 2 gigabit connection 200 megabytes of data, and so on. “They must be taking a shortcut,” I thought, and didn’t give it much thought beyond some wondering as to why 4 gigabit fiber channel doesn’t pass the same amount of data that, say, theoretical 4 gigabit ethernet would.
It turns out I was partially dread-bolted clack-dish wrong, though, and discovered recently that there’s a good reason why fiber channel went metric. It’s still not as exact as I’d like, but the approximations were a bit more accurate than I’d thought.
Fiber channel uses an electrical encoding called 8b/10b encoding to carry data on the fiber (and copper, when used). It maps 8-bit symbols to 10-bit symbols in such a way that there won’t be too many 1s or too many 0s sent down the wire — they’ll roughly balance out. And much to my surprise, it’s not just because the designer had OCD and needed to make things come out even — depending on how the signal is carried, if there are too many 1s in a row, capacitors in the circuit that might be used for filtering and such can get charged up to a point that they’d interfere with the signal. So 8b/10b encoding means that for most of the 8-bit values (think ASCII table), there are two ways to encode each character. So, for example, when you send an ‘A’ down the wire, you can choose an encoding with more 1s or more 0s to make the bits balance out.
8b/10b encoding also provides for some extra slots for control codes like the arbitrated-loop loop initialization code and such, so that you don’t have to worry about escaping real data in case your control sequence shows up in a live data transfer.
What this means is that for every 8-bit byte you send down the fiber, it gets converted into a 10-bit byte, and 10 bits get sent for every 8 bits of real data you mean to send:
So when you do the math, instead of 1 gigabit fiber channel being 1024 / 8, it’s actually 1024 / 10 = 102 megabytes/sec, roughly. The line rates aren’t quite exactly on the gigabit mark, but the math is close enough to estimate. Remember that the gigabit/sec unit refers to the line rate — how many bits can go across the fiber in one second — and megabytes/sec refers to the amount of real data (8-bit data coming from or going to a disk) that can be passed in one second. So:
1 gigabit fiber = 1088 megabits/sec on the line = 108.8 megabytes/sec of real data (not 128 MB/sec)
2 gigabit fiber = 2176 megabits/sec on the line = 217.6 megabytes/sec of real data (not 256 MB/sec)
4 gigabit fiber = 4352 megabits/sec on the line = 435.2 megabytes/sec of real data (not 512 MB/sec)
8 gigabit fiber = 8704 megabits/sec on the line = 870.4 megabytes/sec of real data (not 1024 MB/sec)
(Per a reminder from MC: these are the theoretical top-end speeds you’ll see, and not what you’ll see in the real world. At least with ethernet, if you get 80% of the theoretical limit, you’re having a good day. Thanks!)
I hope this was at least a little useful, and perhaps even thought provoking. Okay, maybe not. But it’s a nugget of possibly useful information that I discovered recently, and thought I’d try to pass along.
Some more links and a bit of opinion now. Watch out!
Some business-ey things. Is your organization designed for humans? can spur off an interesting thought experiment about how businesses should be structured. The traditional model chooses people and puts them in slots. Person A designs the widget, person B makes the widget, person C markets the widget, and person D sells the widget. I think that companies where all people from A to D can interact and share duties — Person A and B can talk to person C about how to market, and person D can relay customer information and suggestions back to persons A and B. Companies where people are too siloed have problems — designers design products and never really find out about how their customers really use their products, or what problems they have. There are a bunch of companies I’m familiar with that are blurring the lines between divisions, and letting engineers and designers *gasp* talk to customers. I think this is a good thing. (Link via Kottke.org)
Five questions every mentor must ask. I think it applies (as the author states) equally well to anyone (especially internal folks!) who are looking at a business or a process within an organization, as well. At the very least it gives you a framework to start from when trying to “think outside the box”. (Egh. I need to work on my synonyms.) Via the New Shelton Wet/Dry.
This is something I’ve run into in the past. How does a technical person effectively convey to HR or a recruiter what they’re looking for when relying on them to screen resumes? Not sure if this comic will help.
In an interesting experiment, a UCLA psychologist showed that talking about bad feelings helps lessen their impact. So talking to one’s priest, therapist, psychologist, even your S.O. really does help one cope with overwhelming emotion. Possibly found via The New Shelton Wet/Dry.
And last, to make myself happy, I’ve been listening to The Birdsong Radio web site at work. Lovely recordings of just birds singing their tiny hearts out.
I think I did one of these before. I’ve gotten the flu now twice in less than six months — certainly not a happy thing. I appear to be past the I-need-a-body-transplant-this-one-is-broken stage and into the messy-remnants-don’t-cough-now-but-your-nose-is-running stage. Here’s hoping for a full coherent day tomorrow.
So in the last throes of fever-induced delerium, here are some links i’ve been saving up. Like the last one, unfortunately, I didn’t record where I got them from — so they’re probably from the usual suspects — Reddit, Digg, Neatorama, among others.
Not to seem like an amputation fetishist, but I think these two people have the right idea — if you have to have a replacement limb, design it to be sleeker and better than the one it replaces. This prosthetic arm by Hans Alexander Huseklepp, and this prosthetic leg by Jordan Diatlo (possibly both via NOTCOT). A prosthetic certainly shouldn’t look pedestrian. (oh my. I’m probably going to hell for that one.)
I knew that Naugahyde existed, but I had no idea that it came from real naugas. I think this one came from Kottke.
Here’s a scary idea that’s almost Hugo Drax or Max Zorin in its scale: Herman Sörgel, a German architect, wanted to build a dam across the Gibraltar Strait and drain the Mediterranean Sea. Called Atlantropa, ignoring the environmental impact, it was purported to provide space to relieve overpopulation, and large amounts of farmland (including irrigating the Sahara Desert). It’s almost British Empire in its audacity. The poor guy couldn’t get anyone — the pre-WWII Nazis or the post-WWII European countries — to support the plan, even though he shopped it around for 30 years. You can’t say Sörgel didn’t think big.
I should also plug CodeTwit.com — it’s a site where some colleagues and I are starting to post tips and tricks we find when doing general computer work. My first post was one on how to diagnose fiber optic problems without going blind using a cellphone camera. I still want to put some useful computery things here, but with luck that site will become a good repository for random hints.
Been lagging in the posting thing lately. Here are some links I’ve saved up for a while; unfortunately I’ve forgotten where I found most of them. A good majority come from Digg or Reddit, but others come from other web sites.
Danger Seekers, a fun sort-of-cyberpunky rage against the establishment animated music video with a catchy tune.
Appropriate to the apprehension that comes with a down economy, an article about how fear can impair proper decision making — so do your best to recognize and minimize the fear, where possible.
More soon. But for tonight’s video: as you can see from the next few posts, we’ve recently discovered Bill Bailey — extraordinary musician, comedian, and overall smart guy (who attracts nutters). We recently got Bill Bailey’s standup DVDs and relished them; he’s great at standup, did a hilarious TV show for the BBC (that he posted on YouTube), and did a great collaboration with an Indian band for an encore. He’s also a regular on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and QI.
Anyway — enough gushing. Once they start in you’ll recognize the tune, done in a spectacularly different way.
Shortish linkdump tonight, mainly because I wanted to post the video at the end.
We have:
Six ways to get ahead this year — new years’ resolutions that makes sense for anyone working at a company. I try to do a few of these already, but more don’t hurt. And they’re not as smarmy as the “Is this good for the company?” banner in Office Space. Via The Consumerist.
Last, we’ve got the ever-equipmented Vincent Laforet, who’s currently using a mix of Canon and Red equipment (sometimes both) to shoot a surfing short. See some behind the scenes footage for more creative photo gear combinations.
OK — here’s the video. I’m a fan of Eddie Izzard and Dara O’Briain for smart stand-up comedy; tonight on Videosift, I find that they’ve been posting stand-up clips from Bill Bailey, who up till now I’ve only seen in clips from QI. (Go sign their petition to release the DVD in the US — want intelligent funnythings on TV please!). Play. Laugh. Enjoy.
Bill Bailey on “Acts of God” rental insurance clauses:
Consumerist had a *great* start to 2009; they were purchased from Gawker Media (who wasn’t giving them any love due to no company wanting to advertise on the site) by Consumers Union, the publishers of Consumer Reports. It makes sense, is absolutely great, and means more posts like this cheat sheet to strange food expiration date codes.
For the how-things-work people, here’s a video outlining how the Hibernia Atlantic repairs undersea fiber optic cables. I’d heard about fusion splicers before (they start at $20k and go up from there) which bond broken ends of fiber optic cables; I had no idea they were as automated as the one in this video! Via Reddit.
Most Mad Scientists may have tired of the scientific method. Via many places.
This movie of one of Jupiter’s moons disappearing behind the planet is starting to look as good as CGI. Hooray for Carl Sagan’s starting all this by insisting a camera be included on the Viking space probe all those years ago.
From the Life magazine archives on Google, this picture shows something interesting and possibly weird going on at a bowling alley. I can see Derek Flint participating in a sport like that.
And now, a video made possible with inexpensive editing and compositing software, and a man or few with lots of time on their hands, that reminds me of reading USEnet TV-show crossover humor fiction stories fifteen years ago(!?): Star Trek meets Doctor Who: The Christmas Special. Thank you, Reddit and Mind Grapes.
This year, Soma FM is doing a lounge Christmas channel (warning, auto-opens a pls file and starts playing). So far it’s been spectacular fun, and certainly not your average crappy Christmas music. Also, they play good music during the rest of the year, and run on donations like your local public radio station.
And now, straight off of youtube, someone took the Quantum of Solace opening credits and pasted in Joe Cornish’s proposed theme song. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I understand it’s much better this way.
Today, I marveled at how well Network Appliance’s cluster failover feature worked. One head of a pair lost communication with its disks, the other head took over, and nobody noticed.
From the BBC Tech-Ops history site, devoted to lore and information about TV through the history of the BBC from the perspective of the studio techs, a post with information and a recreation of the very first pre-television moving picture broadcast, on the Baird Televisor. The rest of the site is just as interesting.
At some point, people will simply stop listening to ideological bluster, and talk about the real reasons for problems with the auto industry, as opposed to what the GOP wishes were the problems. Illustrated with a graph. Via Reddit. (Update: Via Salon.com, part ‘Two:’ of this conservative blog post is what I want to see more of. Analysis and educated decision making, not bloviating.)
Here’s a really good idea for natural lighting, though sealing the cap might be problematic. Video in Portugese, but the concept is understandable. Recycling old water bottles as floodlights. Via Reddit.
First they found one in Russia, now one from England. Seems schoolchildren have been doodling while bored in class for centuries. Scary to think that some random note or notebook sketch may turn up as an amusement in the year 3000. Via Reddit.
Tonight, via Reddit, Peter Sellers beats out William Shatner by about 40 years. A Hard Day’s Night in the style of Sir Laurence Olivier’s Richard the III.
I’d go for this bailout — give everyone a sum they have to use to buy things instead of paying down debt or investing with. Like the “stimulus checks” but guaranteed to be shoveled back into the economy. Via Reddit.
This is rather moving; the surviving Tuskegee Airmen to be invited to Obama’s inauguration. And it’s Sen. Feinstein of California of all people who sent the invite — not someone I agree with a lot of the time, but she did an impressively good thing this time. Via Reddit.
Not normally a fan of Reader’s Digest, but every now and then they do an impressive article. Here are eighteen memos to President Obama from various political and cultural leaders. A few (esp. Grover Norquist’s) surprised me. Via Reddit.
For the aspiring MacGyvers out there, or at least someone who always wants to be prepared, Parachute-cord bracelets. So you’ll always be ready to rappel down the side of a (two-story) building. Via NOTCOT.
Here’s a fun metafilter thread to read (especially in lean times!) — what pieces of everyday life can be upgraded, usually for not a lot of money, for something durable and well-made and even pleasurable to use. It drives me nuts when people will buy a poorly-made knockoff or off-brand item because it’ll save them a few bucks, then being unhappy with the result, when a few extra bucks would have gotten something decent. If the difference is only a little bit, save a little longer and buy the better made product that lasts longer. No matter what you’re spending, even if it’s $5 for a can opener, you can’t afford to throw away money on something that’ll break in a few months. A few of the answers can get ridiculous (Aeron chairs? I wish!) but many of them are very interesting to read.
Easyweb is a French company that uses (bright) laser projectors to project spectacular 3D graphics and imagery on buildings, using building features in the presentations. Their six minute portfolio video is absolutely amazing; just sit back and enjoy it. Via Reddit.
Here’s a lovely concept — a cuckoo speaker (which is probably not a clock). Via gizmodo.
Adobe and University of Washington put together an interesting tool called Zoetrope — sort of like a visual WayBack Machine. MIT Technology Review put up a video about it, and Gizmodo did a quick writeup.
Sony’s released specs on their Cell-CPU-based server called Zego. Could be an interesting change from x86, especially for visual processing — and might give Cray a run for its money.
Tonight’s video: Real life Mario Kart! (via everywhere)
Going to try and make a pie crust with cream cheese instead of butter or shortening tomorrow. Maybe also brown sugar instead of normal sugar. And if that turns out well enough, form it into little tartlet shells with yuzu curd in the middle. Wish me luck.
Beyond that, mostly photo fun today:
Impressive set of animal pictures, but the text’s all in Russian, so I’ve no idea what it says. Beware the squirrel porn in the middle. Via Reddit.
Tonight’s video — violinist Paul Dateh and a DJ Inka One from LA making really impressive violin-and-hip-hop (ish) music. It’s really, really impressively good, especially when they get further into the medley. I only dabble in hip-hop listening, but I’d buy their music.
Not much tonight. I had to get up unpleasantly early today, so a quick post, dinner, and bed for me.
Here are things I found:
This is, as the page says, absolutely huge, esp. given how I have a relative who works on things like this. Astrophysicists at Lawrence Livermore National Labs have taken visual (ok, infrared) pictures of three extra-solar planets. More at space.com. Previously all planetary detections have been by inferring the planets’ existence from gravity wobble and things like that. Via Reddit.
These folks staged a bunch of scenes for Google’s Street View camera car; you can see the scenes via their page and via Google Maps. Via Neatorama.
Okay, I got sick, and slacked on posting. I think I’m better now. Even the lingering cough is mostly gone.
Meanwhile, we have a new president-elect (yay!) and weather that’s starting to look more wintry.
Here are a few links I’ve stored up:
Someone watched the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the ark is stored in a giant warehouse with millions of other crates. This person then decided to imagine what might be in those other crates. Explore Warehouse 23.
Information on Obama’s administration at change.gov.
Some information from reporters who spent time with the campaigns, with promises that what they saw wouldn’t be released until after the election. There’s some scary stuff about Sarah Palin.
If you take a picture of stars, upload it to Flickr, and add it to the Astrometry group, a program will take your photo and try to identify the constellations in it. It will then labelall of the identified objects in the photo. (Via Kottke)
And finally, a song in Polish. Not sure what it means, or why. But it’s catchy.
Okay, so I’ve been keeping up on the coverage of the economic disaster we’ve been having by reading The Consumerist and listening to This American Life, and trying to catch up on NPR’s Planet Money. And I’ve got a question, but I’m not sure where to ask it.
The problem as I see it is that we have a bunch of banks that are exposed to unknown risk by having sold credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities. Nobody is able to say how much each bank or other organization is worth because while you have the list of assets that do have a value on them (standard stocks, buildings, equipment, whatever), you then have these other lists of assets that nobody can assign a value to because:
for the credit default swaps, nobody knows who’s going to go under next so nobody knows if a credit-default swap that was sold for $10 million might require a payout tomorrow of $1 billion or more, and
for the mortgage-backed securities, nobody really knows which mortgages are low-risk and which aren’t.
The way I see to resolve these items, while probably not easy or attractive for anyone involved, is for each bank and investment firm to drop their drawers and expose everything. Every credit-default-swap exposure, every investment, every mortgage they offered, every little piece of land and equipment they own needs to get published. Giant text file, giant spreadsheet, whatever. This will expose trade secrets and probably other things that each organization would probably rather remain unscrutinized, but at this point it’s either do this or the organization may not survive to exploit those trade secrets.
I can’t find the reference now [update: here's one, about the Reconstruction Finance Corporation], but I seem to remember reading that in the 1930s after the bank runs of the late 20s, the US government set up a commission to do a full audit of every bank, where every bank was laid bare to this commission and either certified solvent or not. That sounds like a good start.
If not done by the government, then maybe it can be coordinated by the Treasury and someone can set up a huge Amazon Mechanical Turk job or something. Imagine that — “Save the economy! Read two pages of this bank’s financial statement, add up the numbers, get paid ten cents, and help certify these banks!” The best reference I can find is from the New York Observer, in 2002, after the Enron scandal, calling for a Board of Audit. Yeah, it goes against the grain of every self-respecting capitalist who worships at the altars of Reagan and Thatcher, but I ask you, where is your god now? Oh right, he’s prolonging the crisis by randomly dumping wheelbarrows of money at your doorstep.
At the very least, someone needs to be going through all the mortgages that make up these mortage-backed securities and doing the due-diligence that should have been done in the first place. Pull all the paperwork, call everyone up and ask for paystubs and tax returns, run the credit checks, and assign each mortgage a real risk value. Then, at least, you’ll know how many loans were worthless, and how many were real loans to people with the means to pay them back.
So if these are the ways out of the mess, why isn’t anyone doing it? Maybe things aren’t quite bad enough; but if you have roaches or flour moths in the pantry, the only way to get rid of them is by pulling everything out, cleaning the pantry, closely examining everything you’ve got, putting the bad items out with the trash, and putting the clean items back in the pantry. Only then will you get rid of the pests, and there’s no other way to do it.
I realize it’s not my industry and I don’t have any real connection to the financial world other than hoping I (along with everyone else) don’t get screwed by what goes on with it, but it seems like most folks are just sitting with their heads in their hands and hoping that the badness will somehow blow over and get better. I don’t think that’s the answer, and while right now it seems like this might help, I’d love to know how I’m wrong.
Yugh. So this week I’ve been slowly succumbing to an actual being sick — the flu or something.
Today it got to the point where I just had to sleep it off, and I do feel better for it.
Some links I’ve been collecting slowly over the week:
This has been all over for a bit, but Keith Loutit posted a bunch of tilt-shift videos that are really interesting looking; the videos mess with your sense of perspective to make it seem like you’re watching a dollhouse come to life.
See, here’s what you need to do if you have insane amounts of money. Set up the ultimate personal library. Not buy crappy crystal-blinged laptops and cellphones. Via Digg.
Here are a bunch of movie and videogame themes played on various instruments… the one-handed Pirates of the Caribbean theme, and the Pulp Fiction theme (Misrilou) played on the Ud (a middle-eastern guitar) are my favorites. Via Miss Cellania.
Wordle is a web toy by former They Might Be Giants drummer Jonathan Feinberg that takes any text or URL (with an RSS feed) and builds a word cloud out of it. Via Ben Fry.
Accomplished & 
Geeky
Rushed & 
Working
puts up an explanation of old and new terms found in various parlance. Via I don’t remember where.
Silly & 
Sick
Giggly & 
Tired
and relished them; he’s great at standup, did a 
Mellow & 
Amused & 
Relaxed
Awake & 
Exanimate & 
Sore & 
Exhausted & 
Recumbent & 
Thirsty & 
Curious
