Subtle Hints

~ rbonini

BBC blogger Bill Thompson has just blasted electronic voting machines due to the inability of manufacturers to put adequate security on them. He titled his post “The Ghost in the Voting Machine”.

IF you remember correctly this is a paraphrasing of an expression used by Dr. Lanning in iRobot. He said that the Ghost in The Machine was/were random fragments of code that would allow machines to develop consciousness. Now how’s that thought: A voting machine with a conscience, or is that a contradiction in terms?

Subtle hint, or what?

Windows Home Server Updates

~ rbonini ~ 1 Comment

Well, here’s another update.

The extra  1GB RAM is in and is working its magic on server performance (2Gb in total) .

Next, I’ve got to choose a TV tuner card (details here). And then there is SageTv to install and configure.

I also hear that Diskeeper 2007 has a WHS edition.

Diskeeper automatically keeps all of the hard disks (both internal and external) on your home server defragmented to optimise the speed and performance of the server. Unlike the standard Disk Defragmenter application included in Windows Home Server (and other Windows SKUs), Diskeeper runs as a service in WHS, and continually works on defragmenting your disks whilst the server is idle. Access the server, Diskeeper stops. Server idle? Diskeeper gets back to work so there’s no noticable performance hit whilst it’s running. They call it Invisitaksing.

Sweet. I checked the disks yesterday and most had more than 30% file fragmentation.

 I wrote a quick Vb console app to defrag all the drives automatically (using defrag.exe and the task scheduler), but I’m still testing it and I’ll post the code when I’m done. (its a stop gap, I know 🙂 ). So I’m desperate for Diskeeper 2007 to be RTM’d ( that’s Released To Manufacturing).

The homeserver.com domains are being registered. I just checked and swapped my domain over ( thanks to this reminder ).

And we have estimate retail pricing for WHS. Its a rumor that has yet to be confirmed.

I’m not sure weather to belive the £150 price tag. On the one had its rather cheap given the fact that Vista Home Premium is going for £135 from amazon.co.uk ( Home Basic: £79). On the other hand, it makes perfect sense since this is a product targeted at home users and should be in the same price range. On second thoughts, it also makes sense since people who buy WHS off the shelf most likely have spend money already building their server and won’t baulk at the price tag.

Update to the Update: Philip Churchill of the Ms Home Server blog suggests that it’ll go for £88.74 here in the UK.

Cheeky question time: if you’ve built a home server either for yourself or someone else, does that make you eligible for OEM prices? 🙂

Twist and Turn

~ rbonini

I think I’ll point you to a BBC op-ed piece that talks about the new technology of spintronics (lo-and-behold, there is a Wikipedia article. Honestly, is there anything that is not in that wiki? But I digress).

Quote:

“If you think about the spin of a particle, such as an electron, it can point up or down or at any superposition of the two; partially up or partially down,” said Professor Awschalom.

Each of these different “superpositions” can represent an almost infinite number of combinations of ones and zeros.

“You can store an almost infinite number of bits of information in one particle space,” he added.

This almost limitless number of possibilities would also pave the way for advanced computer processing, such as is needed in quantum computing.

“The spin of a particle is a very natural particle for quantum information processing,” said Professor Awschalom.

 

I’m used to reading about major conflicts between classical and Quantum physics, but can anyone give me more info about the “superpositions” part of this theory – I’m having trouble getting my head around it?

This is the explanation from Wikipedia:

Spintronics is the ability to change or influence the rotation of an electron.

Electrons have the basic properties of spin, charge, and mass. That the electron has superposition (being everywhere) at the same time, where theory states you can only know certain values but not simultaneously, one pair is momentum and position, and the other is energy and time. Electrons have 2 spin states +spin up and -spin down which are usually found in paired electrons. No two electrons can occupy the same quantum state. Spin up and spin down states of fermions have different energies depending on whether or not the spin states are aligned with the magnetic field or not. Electrons absorb photons quantum energy to change valence orbits, and they lose spin coherence by colliding with mutually resonant photons frequencies causing the electron to spin flip by energy transfer through mutual spin-orbit coupling and photon emission.

 

I’m still having trouble getting this (the superposition article in Wikipedia isn’t much help either).

Using Silverlight

~ rbonini

Not that I’ve used Expression Blend 2 to create anything fancy. I’ve done a two page test Slideshow in a quick feasibility study with regard to one of my pet projects.

Then I had to deal with the hosting. I’m using Sliverlight Streaming to deliver the applications to my webpages (via an Iframe, I belive).

It took a while to figure out how to upload the pages so that the service could understand what was supposed to happen with the application. then it took a wee bit longer to understand how to integrate the provided code on to my ASP.net page.

But I got it working, in the end 🙂 .

Now that I know it works, I have a few ideas.

And now I have to go and actually build the thing….

PS. If you get Error 2252 while running your application make sure that the path from your xaml file to the dll is correct. Took me a while to figure that one out. I find that its usually the simplest things that stump you 🙂 .