I wanted to try out Tumblr to see how easy it was. Turns out it is pretty easy. Actually, I'm (surprisingly, perhaps) pleased with how seamless the whole thing was.

Even from the limited number of posts so far, the tumblr blog gets more feedback, which always gives an incentive to write more. I think that applies whether you are driven by vanity or not.

I'm not sure whether I'll keep the tumblr blog going or not, nor how I am going to split content between the two.

I usually blog in two distinct categories: general stuff which includes science, and unix and programming stuff. For the time being, I guess I will just post to which blog seems more suitable.

You can check out the tumblr blog here.

Here is a fascinating factoid about crumpled paper. Take a piece of paper and crumple it, then place it over another piece of paper. Some point of the crumpled piece is exactly over its corresponding point of the other piece.

No way, you say.

It is true. You can prove it intuitively. If you stand somewhere in your city and place a map of the city on the ground, one point on the map will be exactly over its corresponding physical point. It has to be, since the map is nothing but the city shrunk down. If you are at the corner of A Street and B Street and place the map on the ground, the map's A & B corner is right over the actual corner.

Similarly, the crumpled paper is, in a sense, the paper shrunk down. If you place the crumpled paper over another, there must a point on the crumpled paper that is over its corresponding point on the other piece of paper.

I have been going through James Malloy's tutorial on writing your own operating system¹ , which involves some assembly and quite a bit of bit twiddling with shifts and masks in C.

I haven't written any assembly or done any serious bit manipulation for years. I can do simple (i.e. 1 byte) hexadecimal addition in my head, but nothing more complex than that, so I needed a quick calculator that showed me the results from doing things like bit shifts, rotates, masking, and so on.

A bit of googling found one contributor to Stackoverflow recommending calcc by Luigi Auriemma. A quick download of a small zip file and there it was, GPL'ed source code and pre-built binaries for unix and MS Windows.

It is quick and simple to use and has the usual unary and binary     [continued...]

If you are wondering where Simon O'Donnell is in The Cricket Show, it turns out he will be the host for Nine's Sunday Footy Show. O'Donnell is leaving because he has commitments outside Channel Nine and would not be able to do both shows.

I like O'Donnell's presentation style. He had an easy conversational interview style and he had the knowledge that comes from being a former Test player. With his relaxed nature, he was able to get past the formulaic plastic face of PR spin and get his interviewees to really talk about themselves and their game. His tips and answers to young viewer questions about their technique was insightful.

All in all, it was an enjoyable way to spend the lunch break and get some of the background and culture of cricket.

Michael Slater is taking up the reigns from O'Donnell and, from his efforts so far, is doing a pretty good job.

ABC3 is the ABC TV's station for young viewers, mainly pre-teens. It closes around 9pm each night. Then they play some music and display a "We will be back tomorrow" image.

Over the last few months, I have occasionally miscued the remote and landed there. Surprisingly, or perhaps not given the time of night, the music is not kiddies' music. Sometimes it is really great.

Last night, for example, appeared to be Funk night, with some great tunes from the 80s and 90s and including some bands you have never heard of like The Soul Seven who were mainly a session band and who only put out two singles.

I don't know if they are using Rage's producers to draw up their play list, but whoever did certainly knows their music.

Last night I cancelled my TV viewing, cranked up the volume and listened to some good music courtesy of ABC3 Childrens' Channel.

As long as I can remember, Slackware has used Dillon's cron dcron as its cron daemon. Dcron is a lightweight cron with an emphasis on a solid secure codebase which, while missing a few esoteric features found in bigger cron daemons, is great for most users.

Since 13.1 and continuing with 13.37, Slackware has had an updated version of dcron that introduced some very handy features that make it especially suitable for laptops, or indeed any machine that spends much of its time in sleep mode. The features give dcron some of the characteristics of anacron.

Somehow I managed to miss the changes until now, almost two years later. (I must have been in a personal sleep mode.) Here I am going to explain the features and why they are great for laptops, and give a couple of examples.

Sleep

Over the years you have probably picked up several handy scripts that you run from a cron job. Some of them might run every day, some of them every week. For example, I have a weather script that grabs the local weather forecast from the Bureau of     [continued...]

Daniel Ricciardo, the young West Australian with Formula 1 ambitions, will go to team Torro Rosso for 2012. He and Jean Eric Vergne will replace Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari.

It is great news for Ricciardo. He was farmed out to HRT (Hispania Racing Team) for the second half of 2011 and acquited himself well, often beating his team mate there. Now he goes as a full time driver with factory backing and all that that entails for development.

What is suprising is that Alguersuari is being let go. Alguersuari did well in the second half of 2011, getting well up in the middle places. My tip is that he will go to Williams to replace Barrichello. As much as I like the old Brazillian, he did not perform on the track.

On the other hand, the word is that Barrichello, as a highly experienced winning F1 driver, is great for a developing team like Williams as he can talk to the engineers and communicate exactly what the car is doing.

Who knows. It is great news for Ricciardo and, as for the rest, it is the usual game of musical chairs until it settles down in the new year.

I have been a subscriber to How Stuff Works' email newsletter for years, almost since they started in the late '90s. Recently they were bought out by Discovery Channel and, as a result, I have ended up on Discovery Channel's email list.

Unsubscribe

I don't want that, so I went to the link they provide to change my subscription details. Here is what I saw:

    [continued...]

I wrote previously about blue moons when we last had one in December 2009, and two years later we are going to have another one on Saturday night.

Even though blue moons are fairly rare, this one will be even more exceptional because it will be a full lunar eclipse, starting late Saturday night for us in Western Australia.

Actually, this lunar eclipse is even rarer because it is the second one this year, the last being in June. You don't often get two eclipses in one year.

This is a full eclipse so it promises to be quite spectacular. I will be out there enjoying the view.

I have been a Neal Stephenson fan for a while now, as you can see from my list of books I have read. I read Anathem first in March 2011 and it completely blew me away. Since then, I have been looking for more Stephenson in the local libraries and bookshops.

The Age has reprinted an interview from The New York Times with Stephenson about his role in predicting the future of technology. Quite a good read if you don't know much about him, and it is interesting to read that he dislikes the role of forecaster that others have bestowed on him.