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Links April 2014

Yves Rossy is the Jetman, he flys with a wing and four jet engines strapped to his body, he gave an interesting TED talk about flying along with some exciting videos [1].

Larry Brilliant gave an informative and inspiring TED talk about stopping pandemics [2]. I thought that Smallpox was the last disease to be […]

Autism and the Treatment of Women Again

Background

I’ve previously written about the claim that people use Autism as an excuse for bad behavior [1]. In summary it doesn’t and such claims instead lead to people not being assessed for Autism.

I’ve also previously written about empathy and Autism in the context of discussions about conference sexual harassment [2]. The main point […]

Swap Breaking SSD

I’ve seen many comments about swap space and SSD claiming that swap will inherently destroy SSD through using too many writes. The latest was in the comments of my post about swap space and SSD performance [1]. Note that I’m not criticising the person who commented on my blog, everyone has heard lots of reports […]

BTRFS Status April 2014

Since my blog post about BTRFS in March [1] not much has changed for me. Until yesterday I was using 3.13 kernels on all my systems and dealing with the occasional kmail index file corruption problem.

Yesterday my main workstation ran out of disk space and went read-only. I started a BTRFS balance which didn’t […]

Sociological Images 2014

White Trash

The above poster was on a bridge pylon in Flinders St in 2012. It’s interesting to see what the Fringe Festival people consider to be associated with “white trash”. They claim homophobia is a “white trash” thing however lower class people have little political power and the fact that we still don’t […]

Sociological Images 2012

In 2011 I wrote a post that was inspired by the Sociological Images blog [1]. After some delay here I’ve written another one. I plan to continue documenting such things.

Playground

In 2011 I photographed a plaque at Flagstaff Gardens in Melbourne. It shows a picture of the playground in 1918 with segregated boys […]

Swap Space and SSD

In 2007 I wrote a blog post about swap space [1]. The main point of that article was to debunk the claim that Linux needs a swap space twice as large as main memory (in summary such advice is based on BSD Unix systems and has never applied to Linux and that most storage devices […]

Phone Based Lectures

Early this month at a LUV meeting I gave a talk with only my mobile phone to store notes. I used Google Keep to write the notes as it’s one of the easiest ways of writing a note on a PC and quickly transferring it to a phone – if I keep doing this I […]

Replacement Credit Cards and Bank Failings

I just read an interesting article by Brian Krebs about the difficulty in replacing credit cards [1].

The main reason that credit cards need to be replaced is that they have a single set of numbers that is used for all transactions. If credit cards were designed properly for modern use (IE since 2000 or […]

Finding Corrupt Files that cause a Kernel Error

There is a BTRFS bug in kernel 3.13 which is triggered by Kmail and causes Kmail index files to become seriously corrupt. Another bug in BTRFS causes a kernel GPF when an application tries to read such a file, that results in a SEGV being sent to the application. After that the kernel ceases to […]