From the Freakonomics
Blog:
…and received roughly 200 resumes. Many of them are impressive. From an anthropological standpoint, nearly every single one is interesting, just to see the kind of skills and traits that people use as employment signals.
This is what I love about the Internet - every now and again, you run into someone who thinks so differently about such mundane things as dot points on a resume. My resume’s just a laundry list of skills and accomplishments to be matched against a job - purely technical. There’s a human side to hiring, sure - but that comes out in the interview. I’d never thought of it in terms of signals sent between animals; the way a zoologist thinks about, say, lekking behaviour.
Freakonomics is an awesome book, by the way.
In a word: don’t. Yeah, I know the default cases have the bowling shoe nature - especially the red ones - but when Nokia say they aren’t replaceable, they mean it.
Since some of you are going to plough on regardless, here are some of the Things I Found:
- Easy does it; the case is soft plastic, and easily marked; and you do not want to break anything.
- It’s real easy to mistake the buttons on the side for the clips holding the case on. I’m missing a “Play” button as a result. Pay careful attention to the layout of the replacement case; try to figure out on the phone by feel which is button and which is clip.
- The microphone is small, rubber, and wedged in to the front faceplate really well. Unless your replacement cover comes with a mike, you’ll need to dislodge it and transplant it. I suggest taking careful note of the orientation of the two little springs on the back, and gently lever it out with, say, a razor.
- Clean the replacement screen before you put it together.
There’s some other people’s experiences, here.
So, I’ve been looking at LinuxMCE - as I mentioned earlier - and have started getting the hardware together. I was planning on buying another Antec Sonata II - one of which I use in my games PC, and have been very impressed with - but I caved and bought an Antec 900, hoping the extra ventilation would keep the RAID cool.
My thoughts:
- It’s more expensive than a Sonata II, and doesn’t include a power supply. Having actually installed the motherboard, CPU, PSU etc. it’s not clear to me where the cost difference comes from.
- The Sonata II has drive rails, rubber standoffs (to acoustically isolate noisy hard drives, amongst other things), but the 900 has none. The 900 does have a couple of drive caddies, but these are nothing special. Seriously, the layout of the Sonata II is much better when it comes to installing hardware - exposed 5.25 inch drives pull straight out on rails, internal 3.5 inch drives are mounted sideways, so you can easily get to their connectors - and again they’re on rails. If you’ve worked on a decent server case you’ll know what I mean.
- Buy a power supply with extra-long cables. The 900 puts the PSU at the bottom of the tower; the motherboard I’m using puts the 4-pin bonus power connector at the top. It makes for a long cable run. There’s a 12cm fan next to the CPU to pull air from it – two if you install one in the mount on the side – but that’ll generate extra noise, over and above the existing PSU.
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The 20cm fan on top of the case is quiet, and pulls a lot of air, but the other fans still make a fair bit of noise - and if you disable them, you’ll need to block the gaps in the case. All four default fans in the case have three-setting speed controls.
It might make a good gaming case, if you’ve got some sort of over-clocked SLI’d fire-breathing neon monster - but you’d have to put up with a fair bit of noise from the airflow, and there’s no filter (unlike the Sonata II) to stop it inhaling dust, carpet etc.
…by deed poll, but - damnit! - it’s already been taken.
I though this paragraph in a BBC article on Japan’s Aging Population was interesting:
Utako Ohoe, 82, still lives in her own flat. She says she does not want to become a burden on anyone else.
“I want to continue living here by myself,” she explained. “I don’t want to become dependent on my daughter. I want to stay independent.”
A clever device helps her let her family know she is still OK. When Mrs Ohoe uses her electronic kettle it sends a text message to her daughter’s mobile phone.
Twice a day it sends a summary of how many times it has been used. Any change to what is a pretty regular pattern would warn her that there might be a problem.
I wonder if there’s another way of doing that? I’ve been looking at LinuxMCE lately - I think it’s about time I built a media server - and looking at the ways it made aware of people’s location. Could it be set up to watch the front door via a reed switch? The bathroom door? Could it keep track of phone calls answered versus phone calls that go through to the answering machine via its built-in Asterisk PABX? Outgoing calls made? TV shows watched? Music listened to?
You wouldn’t want it to spy on the person, but maybe an hourly cron job that emails you if activity drops below expected levels over, say, the last three hours. You could argue for less-frequent monitoring, but I think if one of my parents had a fall they couldn’t get up from, I’d like to know within a couple of hours at the outside.
From GigaOM:
In the volatile 23 minutes of turmoil between the minute the disinformation hit the stock market at 8:55 PST and Apple’s announcement that the initial email “is fake and did not come from Apple,” nearly 15 million shares changed hands. That’s 60% of Apple’s normal volume in well under a half hour. That’s also an awful lot money lost for some investors - and gained for others - all of it because of a lie.
In short, a fake Apple email was sent to Apple employees; they promptly forwarded it to the press, trouble ensued. I’m amazed that the market would jump so much at the news that an unreleased product might be delayed - aren’t Apple profitable without the iPhone? Is their stock price buoyed up by the fact they might release a product?
Years ago the Yippies threatened to put LSD in Chicago’s water supply; the mayor rolled out the National Guard to protect it. On being told by the Yippies that LSD wasn’t water soluble, and posed no threat to the good people of Chicago, the mayor admitted that he knew this, but had to roll out the National Guard to make people feel safe. A fake threat had been countered by real force.
Information’s (even wrong information) a funny old thing, isn’t it?
Yeah, I know it sounds simple, but there’s nothing in the online help.
Firstly, you need to figure out which device your USB drive is. Devices in Unix are represented as files in the /dev directory; this includes disk drives. On my system I have an IDE hard drive (/dev/hda), a SATA drive and a USB flash drive, both of which are represented as SCSI drives (/dev/sd*). The quick answer is that the SATA drive was installed first, and is /dev/sda; the flash drive is /dev/sdb. If you want to double-check, you can start the “Hardware” application (AKA “Device Manager”), which is in the /System/Administration Gnome menu. If you plug in the USB drive while Device Manager’s open, you’ll see a flurry of activity under one of your USB controllers. A series of entries will appear, one of the lowest level ones will say “USB2FlashStorage”. If you click on that, and click on the “Advanced” tab on the right hand side, you should see an entry marked “block.device”; in my case it’s set to /dev/sdb.
The only way I could find to format the disk was through the command line - there’s no fancy right-click functionality. The command I used was:
mkfs -V /dev/sdb
…which means “Make a file system, be verbose when you do so (show me every status message), and do so on /dev/sdb, my flash drive”. You’ll notice I haven’t specified a filesystem - in this case I wanted to use EXT2, which is the default. If I wanted to use EXT3, I’d type:
mkfs -V -t ext3 /dev/sdb
…where the “t” is the option for “type”. There are options for Microsoft formats as well; but I’d suggest formatting on a Windows box to avoid any incompatibilities.
Just wrong, I tell you.
Must you crap on my adolescence? Can’t you invent something new?