Weber–Fechner Law

Αυτό θα είναι ένα ακόμα μη ολοκληρωμένο ποστ. Έχει πέσει πολλή δουλειά και τα καλά τα ποστ θέλουν φροντίδα και καιρό τώρα δεν το κάνω αυτό. Αλλά είναι καλύτερα να ρίξεις κάτι μισό στον αέρα, παρά να το ξεχάσεις στο ντουλάπι. Κάποιος μπορεί και να ενοχληθεί και να σε αναγκάσει να γράψεις παραπάνω.

Βλέποντας λοιπόν το τέλος της ομιλίας του Δημήτρη Αχλιόπτα που έκανε ένα γύρο στο web, χάρη στο διάγραμμα του θυμήθηκα τον Weber-Fechner Law. Να δεις που τον είχα ξανακούσει, α εδώ.

Διάβασα αρκετά σχόλια για αυτά που λέει. Τα περισσότερα ήταν out of context κατά την γνώμη μου. Ένας από τους λόγους είναι πως πλασαρίστηκε ως ομιλία, ενώ είναι φανερό πως είναι τα τελευταία 15 λεπτά ενός μαθήματος και πως ο Αχλιόπτας τα έχει “πάρει”. Οι όποιες διαφωνίες μου με αυτά που λέει είναι μικρές (π.χ. δεν κάνουν όλοι εφτάωρες συνεντεύξεις και δεν κάνουν πάντα). Θα σταθώ όμως στο γράφημα που παρουσίασε. Διάβασα πως πολλοί λένε πως δεν είναι επιστήμη αυτό που έκανε και πως βγήκε και από τα χωράφια του. Και λοιπόν; Χρησιμοποίησε μια γραφική παράσταση για να δείξει αυτό που πιστεύει. Ναι είπε απόδειξη, αλλά συγνώμη δεν εξηγούσε αν το P=NP κιόλας. Αλλά στο κάτω-κάτω δεν απέχει αυτό που είπε από το γράφημα του Weber-Fechner Law (που είναι επίσης εμπειρικές παρατηρήσεις).

Fechner's Law
Fechner’s Law

Σήμα είναι ο πόνος, σήμα και η ευτυχία.

[image source]

How legacy systems die

The news server that a friend was maintaining had stopped responding for a while. Leafnode complained with:

warning: HOSTNAME: cannot resolve host name: Name or service not known

So I emailed my friend and asked. It seems that the hardware of HOSTNAME had failed, and that after a month or so I was the only person who wondered about its fate. No plans to put it back online exist.

And with that I realized that the USENET is now dead for me.

Παράσιτα

Μια και ο Θεοδωράκης και ο Βαρουφάκης πιστεύουν πως το πρόβλημα της Χώρας είναι τα παράσιτα, θυμήθηκα την αρχή από ένα κείμενο του Schneier:

“My big idea is a big question. Every cooperative system contains parasites. How do we ensure that society’s parasites don’t destroy society’s systems?

It’s all about trust, really. Not the intimate trust we have in our close friends and relatives, but the more impersonal trust we have in the various people and systems we interact with in society. I trust airline pilots, hotel clerks, ATMs, restaurant kitchens, and the company that built the computer I’m writing this short essay on. I trust that they have acted and will act in the ways I expect them to. This type of trust is more a matter of consistency or predictability than of intimacy.”

Παραδόξως με τους ορισμούς του Βαρουφάκη για τους παρασιτισμούς συμφωνώ. Από τότε που τυχαία στο Google Books έπεσα πάνω στον ορισμό του transactional leadership.

“Γεννήθηκε έξω από το παλιό σύστημα εξουσίας και προσπαθεί να δομήσει μια νέα πρόταση, για μια νέα χώρα.”

Και όσο μεγαλώνει θα αλλάζει. Αναγκαστικά. Και αναπόφευκτα ο Iron Law of Bureaucracy θα το κάνει μία από τα ίδια. Ή θα πρέπει να αυτοδιαλυθεί για να γλιτώσει.

[ * Random mode on; είναι αργά και δεν μπορώ να κοιμηθώ ]

When you have an idea you won’t work on, share it

Someone else will pick it up and do better work than you ever planned to.

The story goes like this: I was always fascinated by surveys like the ones Netcraft did. Over the years, more organizations added their own surveys, redoing what Netcraft did, or complementing what already existed with new research and data. I was always interested in redoing some of this stuff at the national scale, namely observing how the global surveys compare with similar ones about “greek” IP addresses or .GR domains.

Alas, two were the problems. .GR data is not easy to get access to and of course time there is not.

However a few months ago I bumped into this DNS census list which contains .GR data one can work on. And stuff that I wanted to do came back to haunt me. Knowing that I would not be able to find the time to do so, I hinted to my friends at Project Zero what would be something nice to work on. A few weeks later they came back with their preliminary results.

I am eagerly waiting for the next parts of their analysis.

Εστία

To Σάββατο 30 Μαρτίου 2013 ήταν η τελευταία ημέρα λειτουργίας του ιστορικού βιβλιοπωλείου της Εστίας στην οδό Σόλωνος 60 στο κέντρο της Αθήνας. Τις επόμενες μέρες κάποιοι άνθρωποι εξέφρασαν τα συναισθήματα τους αφήνοντας σημειώματα πάνω στην πόρτα.

Εστία, η πόρτα
Εστία, η πόρτα

Σε λιγότερο από μήνα, τα μηνύματα αυτά είχαν αφαιρεθεί:

Continue reading “Εστία” →

This is not free Internet access

I just had the chance to browse through the proposal PDF (local copy) about implementing free WiFi access throughout Greece, a promise made by the Prime Minister of Greece on 2013/11/5. It basically boils down to this:

Free WiFi Internet access is 30 minutes to surf the web. Then you disconnect and reconnect.

This is not free WiFi. This is not free Internet access and this is definitely not a growth enabler. Simply put:

This is how the environment embarrasses the Prime Minister (and the country if implemented verbatim).

Where is POP3? IMAP? SMTP? Hell! Where is ssh? This is the Free Big Firewall of Greece.

You people are supposed to know that the Internet is the network and the World Wide Web is a network application. You still have time to change the slides.

Error: {cannot_discover_cluster,”The nodes provided are either offline or not running”}

When you have hosts with multiple interfaces that you want them to be parts of a RabbitMQ cluster, you may get this error:

Error: {cannot_discover_cluster,"The nodes provided are either offline or not running"}

This may happen when you want all communication to go through a specific interface for each host. In such cases after setting up the DNS and/or /etc/hosts correctly, it may help you to explicitly set RABBITMQ_NODE_IP_ADDRESS and RABBITMQ_NODENAME in /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-env.conf.

Then you may proceed with the rest of the instructions.

The Elements of Computing Style

I bought The Elements of Computing Style on an impulse, mainly because it is written by dds and I do not own any of his other books. So I did not even pay attention to the subtitle:

190+ Tips for Busy Knowledge Workers

So what I expected was a book with advise on writing code, or on choosing certain algorithms for solutions of certain (small compared to Big Data) sizes. But this is a productivity book of another kind. It offers advise from when to read email in order to make the most of your available worktime to whether your chair should have arms or not and why. It is written in a clear flowing style and if you’ve ever heard dds speak, you almost listen his voice while reading it. It is not heavy stuff and this makes it an excellent companion for the bus.

Given my aversion to certain word processors I particularly enjoyed advise on how to handle documents with them and picked up a few helpful tips along the way. Travelling advise was fun even though it does not affect me and I find chapter 2 (Work Habits) the most important one since it offers ways to deal with interruptions of the flow:

It can take us more than 15 minutes to enter into such a state of focused attention, and only a trivial interruption to exit from it.

Best advise from the book: LOG YOUR CHANGES

The book is available from Lean Publications which makes it an interesting experiment as it has both a minimum and a suggested price and as you decide how much you’re going to pay for it, you are immediately informed how much of your money goes directly to the author.