Here’s an interesting article on how Chinese computer users enter characters into their computers. I’m guessing that some of you may wonder how it’s done.
Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category
Entering Chinese Characters into a Computer
Thursday, February 23rd, 2006vnStat Network Traffic Monitor
Tuesday, February 21st, 2006I just discovered vnStat, a network traffic monitor for Linux. Here’s a blurb from the website:
vnStat is a network traffic monitor for Linux that keeps a log of daily network traffic for the selected interface(s). vnStat isn’t a packet sniffer. The traffic information is analyzed from the /proc -filesystem, so vnStat can be used without root permissions.
It will tell you how much inbound and outbound bandwidth that your Linux machine is using—hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. That’s handy.
By inspection, I’ve been able to tell that it runs like so: it installs itself as a cron job that runs every five minutes to update its internal database. Then you can type vnstat on the command line to give you the stats.
I’d post some sample output, but since I’ve just started running it, there’s nothing to show. I’m glad to have found it, though.
More Word Processor Bashing
Sunday, January 22nd, 2006As you may know, I really hate word processors and how they work. I much prefer document formatters or text processors. Anyway, on this forum thread, second post, I read something that made me nod and laugh. Thanks Gomer_X:
I get so frustrated with Word type wordprocessors (OO Writer included), that I resort to writing stuff in HTML. At least then I get what I want. Every time I have to deal with Word’s helpful attempts at doing bulleting/numbering for me, I want to slit my wrists. I mean it can’t be that hard. It’s certainly not intuitive.
As a bonus, following a link to the Ubuntu documentation project later in the thread, I came across these two excellent resources for technical authors:
Ubuntu + Python + BitTorrent trouble
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005I’m wondering if anyone else has experienced trouble with the Python that comes installed with Ubuntu when trying to use the official Python BitTorrent client. (Note that Ubuntu comes with a Python BitTorrent client, but it’s completely different than the official one. Seems like a rewrite. I don’t know its origin.) Anyway, the official btdownloadcurses.py eventually hits some error that screws up the screen drawing, and btlaunchmany.py eventually stops working and begins sucking up 100% of the CPU.
I’ve seen lots of discussion regarding different clients and different OSes with regard to the 100% CPU usage. But I don’t think this is related. Now my intuition told me that the fault lies with Ubuntu’s Python installation. The above problems occur under Hoary and Breezy, and I’m using Python 2.4.2 of the Ubuntu base installation and BitTorrent 4.0.4 downloaded from the BitTorrent website.
So in an experiment last night, I grabbed the sources from www.python.org and compiled my own Python 2.4.2 from source. So far, the official BitTorrent client hasn’t cracked or croaked when running under this Python. So there is something weird about Ubuntu’s Python installation. I wonder what’s different about it.
Update: Well, I spoke too soon. After two days of running soundly, the client gave up the ghost just like before. So, now what? I guess I’ll go back to FreeBSD.
Stealing bandwidth through inline linking
Thursday, November 3rd, 2005I found out today that another blogger out there is using a photo that I took:
http://blogantes.blogspot.com/2005/11/tic-tac-tic-tac-o-tempo-no-passa-as.html
This, in itself isn’t completely a big deal, but the way that the image is being used means that I’m paying for the bandwidth to show my image on her page. This is called inline linking or hotlinking and is considered bandwidth theft.
I’m not sure how I feel about it though. The good thing is that when a reader of her blog mouses over the image, they will see the hyperlink pointing back to my site. I’m not sure this was intentional or not. I’m not sure of the intentions of this blogger at all, because the site’s not in English.
Any thoughts about what I should do? I know there are ways to restrict the serving of links to only users coming from my main site. I’ve considered serving up a different image with a nasty message to readers of her blog. I mean, when she made the inline link, she gave me the power to substitute any image I want, right?
Google Image searching is partly to blame for this. I’ve been seeing a lot of visitors come to my site via a search for “clock”. So this might only get worse in the future. But for now, I’m just chillin’ about it.
Update: Following the discussion in the comments, I’ve marked the photo with a copyright notice and my name. So at least my name gets out there.
Update again: Yikes!!! I took a serious look at my webserver logs tonight and found out some pretty interesting things besides this one blogger using my clock image.
- In the past 8 days, I’ve served the image 1496 times for a total of 40 MB! (That’s 7.44% of the total hits on my site. In comparison, the header image of my blog has been served 1134 times, or 5.64% of the hits.)
- It’s being used in about 37 different blogs and message forums. And someone has even incorporated it as the background image of a weblog theme (!).
- It’s the last image on the first page of a Google Image search for “clock”.
This last item caused the previous two, especially since it’s the clearest-looking image of a whole analog clock presented on the results page. Check out this screenshot.
In other words, I got screwed big time. So, I’ve implemented the robots.txt filtering that Jim suggested. This won’t do anything until Google and others recrawl my site. So, to stop my leaking bandwidth, I’ve renamed the file so no one can find it. This will break all the webpages out there that inline-link to the image. This will also break my weblog entry about the clock. (I thought about fixing my code to point to the renamed file, but Google Images would show my page with the corrected image, so people could still grab it.) In about a month, after Google drops my image from its search results, I’ll fix my code and restore my page to normal. Hopefully, thereafter, the problem won’t return.
What surprised me most about all this is how prevalent this practice is: people on web forums and weblog hosting services use inline linking a lot to spice up their entries. This happens because they either have no hosting options, or it’s just too easy to copy and paste a link from Google Images. They probably have no idea that this behaviour makes them such bad neighbours on the Web.
A new FreeBSD logo has been announced
Tuesday, November 1st, 2005The new FreeBSD logo has been announced. Check it out:
![[New FreeBSD Logo]](http://madphilosopher.ca/darren105/new_freebsd_logo.png){kind=logo}
Acronyms Anonymous
Tuesday, November 1st, 2005I just finished editing a paper on the pre-launch and in-orbit calibrations of a sensor package on board a NASA Earth Observing System satellite. Space projects are known for their use of acronyms, and I’m impressed: this paper managed to employ the following 62 acronyms.
AIRS AMSR-E AMSU AOI ASTER AU AVHRR BB BBR BCS BRF CERES CZCS EOS ESE EV FEL FM1 FOV FPA HIRS HSB IAC IFOV L1B LSF LUT LWIR MISR MODIS MOPITT MTF NASA NFR NIR NIST NOAA NPOESS NPP OBC OOB PFM PV RSB RSR RVS SD SDS SDSM SIS SIS-100 SMIR SNR SpMA SRCA SV TDI TEB TOA TV VIIRS VIS
Many sentences read like this:
This paper primarily focuses on the radiometric calibration of MODIS SB by the SD/SDSM system and the TEB by the OBC BB.
Fun, no?
A quick synopsis of the last few days
Wednesday, October 19th, 2005Here’s a quick synopsis of the last few days of my life:
- In trying to create a page for a new project idea, I discovered that my WordPress installation was now broken. WordPress is the thing that runs this site.
- In creating a new WordPress installation for my Tchou Tchou’s new website, I found that it was broken too. Out of the box. No final solution yet.
- I successfully started a mailing list for my extended family. My first use of the list was to wish my Grandparents a happy 65th wedding anniversary today. (Wow!)
- I bought a new 250-GB hard drive to house my growing media collection.
- I managed to decimate my computer’s hard drive at work and I lost everything. And I mean everything. Fortunately there was no important data there. I keep it all online or at home, surprisingly enough. I don’t know if it was my fault, though. A 7+ hour transfer from a USB hard drive locked up my Ubuntu and left the ext3 partition in an unmountable state. Bye bye data.
- In lieu of a working hard drive at work, I’m using Damn Small Linux as a life-raft “Live” operating system. At 50 MB, it’s awesomely powerful.
- I absolutely fell in love with Jonathan Coulton’s music when I heard his song “Shop Vac”. (Go download it. You know you want to.) Some of my money will be flying his way very soon.
- I reconnected with my friend Juraj from Calgary. We haven’t seen each other or talked since about 1999 or 2000, I think. I’m glad he uses the same email address, anyway. I’m still waiting to hear back from another lost friend, Matt, though.
- This week (and the next two) I’m helping my Tchou Tchou work on her research project for a course she’s taking. She’ll be surveying art students at the college level to get their opinions on curriculum and teaching style.
So, all in all, I’m quite busy, and I’m having mixed high and low experiences with computer technology. But the lows are pretty low right now. I wish things would stop breaking. <sigh> Yet, life is going well.
Server Madness Madness
Sunday, September 25th, 2005In my last post, I ranted on about the hardware troubles that I was having with my server. After writing the entry, Bruce and I had a long keyboard chat about our situation and how we were going to proceed with the network and the machines we had available to us. It was a productive meeting. But here’s the kicker: right after we finished chatting, Bruce’s desktop kicked the proverbial bucket. Man is it a bad month for him and me, technologically speaking! He figures it’s the 1 GB RAM chip that went bad. Unfortuately, there’s no money to get a new one.
Bruce connected a keyboard and monitor to the server so he could use it as a life raft to contact me. As we chatted this second time, he tried to get the old server back together. Fortunately, he succeeded, despite having been unsuccessful with that hardware configuration a few days before. So the new server became Bruce’s new desktop and we brought the old server out of its two-week retirement. So server-wise, everything is back to the way it was before I began changing it all around.
Whew! It was a heck of a ride. But for now, my experiments are dead in the water and my hopes for some really cool applications for the Swing Beijing! website have been dashed. I await further inspiration while hoping to avoid any more meltdowns.
Server Madness
Thursday, September 22nd, 2005I am a FreeBSD god. I can administrate my way in and out and upside down a FreeBSD box like mad, and do good work, too. Computers used to frustrate me endlessly until one day in 2000 I installed FreeBSD 4.0 on an unwanted machine and all my problems magically disappeared. It just made sense. And it worked. And the documentation was so complete that I hardly ever had to search the web for how to do stuff. So the unwanted machine became my desktop, and eventually I set up another box as a server for my (then) website, and as a firewall/router for my friend Bruce. That server has been serving us faithfully for many years, a Pentium I, 100 MHz machine with RAM varying from 32 MB to 80 MB.
Over the last month, however, I started planning for some future projects and my experiments showed that “the little server that could” just “couldn’t” any more. I needed more raw CPU power. So I replaced the server with my Mom’s old Celeron 500 MHz machine, and that’s where my trouble began. Twice, the machine locked up for no reason when reading in from swap during my experiments. It was running the latest FreeBSD 5.4. So I wiped it clean and reinstalled FreeBSD 4.11, the latest stable version from the 4 branch, thinking that somehow the problem was with the 5 branch of FreeBSD. But this morning, doing a simple cp -Rp /oldroot /usr/, it locked up again.
Damn, this is annoying.
I’m starting to suspect the new hard drive, or its interaction with the hardware. And this is where my power as a FreeBSD god fails. I can’t do nothing about how well the system runs if it’s running on flaky hardware. And so I’m frustrated, so frustrated, yet again. I have a few ideas on how to proceed and resolve this whole mess, but for the moment, I’m just waiting on Bruce’s assessment of the situation. Blogging this is part of my therapy to step back and perhaps feel better about the situation. How’s it going so far?
I do admit to one fundamental mistake: running experiments on a production system, or more accurately, replacing a tried-and-true production system with an experimental system. I could have (and should have) run both systems at the same time, ensuring the stability of the new system before retiring the old one. But the one thing that stood in my way was the number of ports in Bruce’s hardware router. I should have just told him to go and buy a larger hub. Oh well, back to work…
