Common Sense 4 Common People

Beware of Greeks bearing bonds

Sad but true... This article might read a bit cruel, but being a Greek I was astonished by how accurately it describes the sick situation in Greece, a situation which made me in 2009 try my luck some place else.

It is a lengthy article, but definitely worth the while reading throughout.

Dimitris Staikos

Holy Books and Holy iPods

Do I really need to say that dealing with irrationality is an exercise in futility? No, I don't think so, but of course no one talker will admit himself as being irrational or holding irrational beliefs. It's always the other one that is being irrational. And just in case you ask two irrational people to discuss with each other then you are in for lots and lots of fun.

I just heard on CNN a little while ago the news about this pastor who is about to burn a Holy Book in order to make a point to his adversaries around the world, and how the US General is Afghanistan is asking or almost begging him not to do so because the American operations there will be in danger.

First of all I am really so sorry for any General whose operations are so well planned and thought out that a pastor on the other side of the world can put them in danger...

But the whole issue of Holy Books begs for some questions...

It seems that although a book is basically a bunch of pages wrapped up together with a cover, IF the pages happen to have imprinted on them some magic combination of words, which some people consider Holy Words, then the book itself becomes Holy to this group of people, Holy enough to provoke threats of violence in case it's integrity is violated. That is, a material object gets raised to Holy status, which is an act of total irrationality, especially given that you can reproduce it almost infinitely.
Yes, I know that this is basically a symbolic act, of actually burning the holy words, but bear with me for a minute...

Well, what if my freshly received copy of a Holy Book has two typos and a missing page? Is it still a Holy Book? I mean, it definitely aimed to be a Holy Book, but since it is not exactly the same with THE Holy Book, then I am not sure if it has lost part or all of its Holiness or if it was never Holy at all...

Clearly, if it was Holy (in conception) and ended up losing part of all of its Holiness, then someone is to blame for this... And this someone has to pay for their crime, isn't that right? So maybe I should go first blow up the bookstore (for selling this abomination), then the printing facilities etc.

What did you say? One or two typos don't matter? What about 3 or 4, or 10 or 50? Where do you put the line? How many mistakes in the reproduction does it take to make the contents non-Holy?

Now, the book is a relatively easy case, but we are not living in the Middle Ages anymore... What about that audio book of a Holy Book that I have in my iPod? Does this make the iPod Holy or is it just a Holy File stored in it? I don't know about you, but both the ideas of a Holy iPod or a Holy File just sound so absurd to me... but they are just a natural consequence of the Holy Book concept. Holy words are contained in there, and destroying these Holy words is an offense it seems.
So what if I need to delete the Holy file to make some free space? Is this the same as burning a Holy Book? Why should it not be? And it makes it much easier to knock yourself out if you happen in be in the Holy Book burning business. Just copy the Holy File 1000 times then delete all 1000 files... wow... what a pleasure... and so convenient, just remember to use something like SDELETE so that the actual bits are REALLY wiped out; you don't want them lying around in your disk, do you?

Well, if deleting a Holy File is the same as deleting a Holy Book, then clearly the operating system providers should provide some means that will prevent us from deleting these Holy Files, maybe they should be providing them to us as part of the operating system, as protected files... How rational would that be now?

Of course there's a next step to this... what if someone memorizes the Holy Words contained in a Holy Book? Has he become a Holy Person too? Why not? What if he prints the Holy Words on the walls of his home, is this now a Holy Home that you cannot anymore bring down? What if he prints them overnight on the Statue of Liberty? Would the authorities be allowed to cleanup the mess the next day, or would that provoke Holy War? What if a guy in death row tatooes a Holy book all over his body? Should that permit him to escape the death penalty?

I think that by now my point should be clear. If you want to consider some words as Holy that's your own business to do so, but don't mix things up. You should consider the words and ideas as Holy, not the material objects that happen to contain them. And the world might just be a slightly better place...

Have Fun
Dimitrios Staikos

Are you learning Chinese? You probably need this site!

If you are learning Chinese as a foreign language then you must absolutely put this web site in your arsenal of tools:

It is much much more than an online dictionary. It does both simplified and traditional (which is what I study by virtue of being in Taiwan). It also integrates with Google translate but then breaks down the Chinese word list in a very clever manner so that it is much easier to understand the Chinese phrase. Did I mention it can even play you animations on how to properly write each character?  

Can't live without it!
Enjoy!
Dimitrios Staikos

Intel further delays USB 3.0

Here are some interesting news items:

• http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/is-intel-delaying-usb-30-to-give-light-peak-an-advantage/8493?tag=nl.e539
• http://www.techeye.net/hardware/usb-3-0-the-misery-continues

Intel pushed USB 3.0 chipset integration into 2012.

Why? As we say in Greek, "Who is crying 'miaou miaou' on the roof top?" (a cat of course)... LightPeak of course.

Intel knows too well that USB 3.0 is good enough for most users to delay LightPeak adoption for another several years, so they need to keep it in check.

Have fun!

Dimitrios Staikos

The problem with Greece

What is the problem with the Greek people? What is the 'curse' of the Greeks that got them into this situation? A lot of people ask me, because I live abroad and I happen to be Greek.

What do I think?

Greeks have historically been smart people, but there is no way to tell if today they are smarter than the people of other countries. The real problem is that about 90% of Greeks believe they are much smarter than the rest of the Greeks (and the rest of the world).

Believing that you are smarter has no value unless you can prove it, by doing something smarter than average. And the easiest way is to outsmart someone else or even better outsmart the "system"!

I will define "systemically unstable behavior" as something that if the majority performs within a system then the whole system gets screwed, including the actor. Trying to outsmart others or the system is systemically unstable behavior with regards to society.

In a nutshell, that's what happened to Greece. The 90% did 'smart' things and thought they would get away with it, that others would pay the so called negative externalities.

So many times I had heard the answer "But Everybody Does it, I would be stupid if I don't do it too" as an excuse for something inappropriate somebody did. This thinking is built into the Greek DNA.

Can this mentality change?

I don't think so, it might be temporarily put aside, but it is really the curse of the modern Greeks.

Cheers,
Dimitrios Staikos

If I had killed you...

I watched EX last "night" in the airplane... My goodness, this movie is so hilarious, I just hope my hysteric laughter was not a big annoyance to the other passengers.
Of all the lines in the movie, here is my absolutely favorite, from a scene where a middle aged Italian couple is fighting with great passion:

Husband: If I had killed you when I got the idea for the first time, I would be out of jail by now, a free man!!!
Wife: If *I* had killed you, then I wouldn't go to jail at all. The judge would find me insane for marrying you and let me free!!!

Totally Unpektable!!! (greeklish slang for the Greek "apekto" which means something like "amazingly amazing").

Have fun!

Disk space disappearing mysteriously in Windows?

Oh I feel so happy whenever I solve yet another mystery in the wonderful ways that Windows works :-) So happy that I desperately need to blog about it :-P

Last year I bought a ThinkPad laptop with Windows Vista. Lately I was running out of disk space. It just had an 150GB drive, so I was running low. I bought a new drive and with lots of failed attempts and some magic utility finally managed to restore the original disk with its mystery Lenovo partitions into the new disk and have the laptop actually boot! Then I had an extra partition which I decided (I now I am adventurous...) to mount as a folder on my C: drive. Just to see how that will work.

Then I moved lots and lots of stuff to this mounted-partition and got around 40GB free space in the main partition. Plus another 100GB or so on the mounted partition, I thought I was good.

However... the free disk space of the main partition continued to drop and drop and drop without any apparent explanation. When it reached down to 2GB, I moved some other stuff and got it back to 10GB. Then drop and drop again and today I had only 1.5GB free on the main partition. That was a challenge that simply begged to be tackled!

FireWire Reference Tutorial

The FireWire Reference Tutorial was officially announced a few days ago by the 1394 Trade Association. This is a free guide to help engineers understand FireWire and it teaches FireWire starting from scratch. It assumes no prior knowledge. The tutorial is about 80 pages, so it won't take that much of your time either! Sounds like a good investment to me :-P

Being the author of this tutorial, I am very glad that it has finally reached the public. I hope you enjoy it and that it proves useful to your efforts.

Have Fun!
Dimitrios Staikos

Hail to Redundancy

Today I was literally saved by the bell... or rather saved by my RAID10.

When I bought my latest workstation I decided it would pay off to spare no expense, while trying to stay out of the "Game Machine" zone. One of the things that I decided I should have was hard disk redundancy. Backups and source control are must of course, but if my workstation crashes my problem is not losing the data. My problem is making an identically optimized workstation. I need about a week to do that.

  Just think about it: Reinstall Windows with Service Packs and a gazillion updates, Office with its own updates, Visual Studios and service packs, SDKs, WDKs, .NET frameworks of several versions and SPs, tools, etc, the endless list makes me shiver only to think of it. I have better things to do than looking at progress bars that pretend to be progressing thanks to some nice visuals.

So when time came I did what I thought best. I got an Intel WX58P workstation motherboard with hardware RAID and installed 4 identical 1TB hard disks in RAID10 configuration. In fact I got some "Enterprise Class" hard disk from Western Digital, just to be on the safe side.  

Today was pay-back day. Just 8 months after purchase and one of the disks in the RAID crashed. Here is how it looks like from the Intel Matrix Storage Console (click for details):

It took my hardware provider BARTEK (hail to them too) about 6 hours to come to my office with a replacement disk but it was the horroriest time (if there is such a word) that I've had in months!!! What if the currently not mirrored disk also crashed??? Oh my... I lose everything...

I tried to do some reasoning but it wouldn't be of much help. What is the possibility of two enterprise class hard disks crashing withing a 7 hour window? And especially the right two disks! But the one had already crashed, so it's history! Now I had 3 disks... What was the possibility of one crashing, especially the right one crashing? Especially given that another one of the same class and lot had already crashed! It's history of course but it can be indicative of problems in the whole lot... Probabilities were always confusing me...

And poor me, I had strong reasons not to shutdown the machine for 7 hours... Now that I think of it, it was not that wise, I should have shutdown to reduce the probability of an additional crash, but now it's history too...

Anyway the disk was replaced in time, the RAID was restored and now I am a happy blogger telling you how great it feels to have RAID save your ass(ets).

Enjoy!

Dimitrios Staikos

The Law of Late Projects

Very recently a good friend of mine, Prof.Vasilis Vassalos, made a comment on Facebook about Parkinson's law by referring to this article.

Parkinson's law says that all work expands to fill all time available for its completion.

This has be proven statistically to be very true, so nobody can doubt it. However some of the consequences of this law often go unnoticed as the law's wording and meaning gets twisted and turned over to suit one's needs.