Somewhere out there!

It’s not often you see some that could make a difference in peoples understanding of the world.  Statistics and lies are often used together, but this is true of all knowledge. Without the tools to ask questions we can not hope to understand ourselves.

From slashdot, see also the Gap Minder homepage and have a play with the tool at google labs. Will be interesting to see if

[tags ] statistics [/tags]

From Guy Kawasaki: a link to this interesting article and book.

The article postulates that people have two kinds of mindsets: growth or fixed. People with the growth mindset view life as a series of challenges and opportunities for improving. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are “set” as either good or bad. The issue is that the good ones believe they don’t have to work hard, and the bad ones believe that working hard won’t change anything.

The Principals of Beautiful Design looks like a interesting book to read. The author’s website for the book is cleverly put together. This from  Stylegala:

I was immediately attracted to the many qualities of this website. From its chilled blue colour scheme to the big friendly two column layout, it oozes quality. Even the unusual hand-drawn typeface works without detriment to the design.However the real “wow” factor becomes evident when you move your mouse over the navigation links, or click them. The unique visual prompts have been thoughtfully designed and portray a friendly, hands-on approach which I imagine fits the aura of the book like a tailor-made glove. Personally I would have removed the hover effect and left it to click only, but that’s something and nothing.

Technorati Tags: web design, book

Found a sliver of time and installed a couple plugins today. WordPress makes this a very easy process, which is one of the reasons I stick with this platform rather than finding some Rails based system. WordPress Video Plugin and View Counter. Unless the view counter is getting it wrong I seemed to be getting more views than I was expecting, maybe I’ll install Stat Traq and get Google Analytics going again to get a better idea of what are reading.

From the RSS blog.

SanDisk Releases 32 GB Solid State 2.5-Inch Hard Drive

A couple of months ago SanDisk introduced a 1.8-inch flash based hard drive for notebook computers. It has now announced a more mainstream 2.5-inch 32 GB capacity Solid State Drive (SSD) that could be dropped into any UMPC or micro-notebook and work right out of the gate.The 2.5-inch SanDisk SSD is only going to be available directly to PC manufacturers initially, and it will be offered as a drop in replacement for replacing existing hard drives.

The cost to PC manufacturers will be about $350 per drive when purchased in bulk.

At $350 per 32Gb 2.5″ drive or $11/GB, Solid State is going to be hitting the mainstream very soon.

Technorati Tags: ssd, hardware

KVM was announced a few months ago, it’s already in the Linux kernel and now has live migration:

Techworld.com – OS and Servers Insight – Linux-kernel virtualisation — finally on the fast track:

On the other hand, KVM appears to be on the fast path. This project first surfaced in October 2006; it found its way into the 2.6.20 kernel a few months later. On 25 February, KVM 15 was announced. This release has an interesting new feature: live migration. The speed with which the KVM developers have been able to add relatively advanced features is impressive; equally impressive is just how simple the code that implements live migration is.

Technorati Tags:   kvm, linux, virtualisation

Finally some sense shown about public transport. After being rejected by local government, central government has agreed to reopen the Onehunga train line.

Delight at Government’s decision to reopen Onehunga line:

Finance Minister Michael Cullen announced yesterday that the 3.5km branch line between Penrose and Onehunga – opened in 1873 but abandoned by regular passenger trains 34 years ago – would be reinstated for around $10 million.The Auckland Regional Transport Authority expects that a new station at a site yet to be determined, and extra trains for more than 500,000 passengers a year, will cost it another $3 million to $5 million.

Trains leaving Onehunga every half an hour from 2009 should give passengers a run of little more than 20 minutes into central Auckland, compared with bus trips sometimes three times longer.

Given reopening the train line is only 10 million and some of the roading projects are several billion dollars it struck me as incredibly short-sighted to ignore this project. Especially with 500,000 potential trips per years and Onehunga designated as a growth node.

Technorati Tags: onehunga, train

The NTFS-3G driver is an open source, freely available read/write NTFS driver for Linux and other operating systems. It provides safe and fast handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 and Windows Vista file systems. Most POSIX file system operations are supported, with the exception of full file ownership and access right support.

It seems to be quite stable, and is based on FUSE. Interestingly this does not seem to impact performance at all: NTFS-3G Read/Write Driver Performance.

This graphic is very interesting.

‘Virtualization’ Is Pumping Up Servers
There was a surprising slowdown in unit sales of x86 servers in the fourth quarter, according to two prominent research firms, Gartner Inc. and IDC. For example, IDC found that sales grew just 1.1% to 1.85 million units, compared with 8.8% growth in the third quarter. That is the worst performance for the market segment since the dot-com bust, and IDC analyst Matt Eastwood lays the blame largely on virtualization.

Technorati Tags: xen, virtualisation, hardware