In 1986, the Cray 2 supercomputer was the first computer to calculate 1 billion floating point operations in a single second - 1 gigaflop.

In 1997, the Intel ASCI Red became the first computer to calculate 1 trillion operations - 1 teraflop.

Now, in 2008, the IBM Roadrunner became the first computer to calculate 1 quadrillion operations - 1 petaflop - in a single second.

I think it's difficult to wrap your head around how large a number that is. Take a million, already a very large number, one thousand millions is a billion, one thousand billions is a trillion, one thousand trillions is a quadrillion. That's a petaflop. 15 zeroes.

1,000,000,000,000,000

Increasing calculation speed by a factor of 1,000 has happened every 11 years. If that trend continues, we'll see the first exaflop-capable computer in 2019. Another 11 years later, in 2030, we'll see the first zettaflop - one million petaflops. 21 zeroes.

Supercomputer sets petaflop pace

The toilet on the International Space Station has been fixed, and Hillary Clinton is finally giving up.

I just ran a manual cleanup of non-English language packs from my Applications directory. Removing the additional language junk saved 2.62 gb (yes, gigabytes) of disk space. Update: I ran it on /Library, too (same steps as below, just modify step 2), freed up another 1.1 gb, bringing the total disk space to 3.72gb.

Size of "Applications" before: 6.41 gb (6,220,745,877)
Size of "Applications" after: 3.79 gb (3,879,507,421)

Note: the following tip will permanently delete non-English language support from everything in your Applications directory. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm just pointing that out. If, for some reason, you need to recover the addtional language support (maybe you're learning Hungarian?), you'll need to re-install the application(s).

Here's what to do:

1. Open Terminal window
2. Run this: cd /Applications
3. Run this: find . -name "*.lproj" ! -name "English.lproj" ! -name "en*.lproj" -exec rm -rf {} \;

I wrote about this before -- Removing language support from OS X applications (to free up disk space) -- but just re-ran it on my current computer so made another post with current data.

Got a question about vim pattern matching that I had to look up, probably worth sharing.

Say you have the following text, and you want to modify the quoted things, so you start with this:

blah blah blah "BLAH" blah blah "FOO" blah blah

And want to end up with this:

blah blah blah <"BLAH"> blah blah <"FOO"> blah blah

Run this:

:%s/\(".\{-}"\)/<\1>/g

I expected ".*?" to work (valid Perl regex syntax?), but ultimately found ".{-}" worked with Vim.

This keeps showing up in the news, today noticed a link to Te Papa, the museum in New Zealand where the squid is being inspected. Lots of photos and info there. Also found this link with more stuff: Colossal Squid.

I finally got Leopard to mount my home server. Never had any problems with Tiger across multiple machines, but Leopard didn't work. All I want to do is mount the volume...

I could connect directly, so I knew everything was accessible:

smbclient //1.2.3.4/public

Anyway, here's the magic that worked for me, from Terminal:

mkdir /Volumes/public
mount -t smbfs //1.2.3.4/public /Volumes/public
open /Volumes/public

The mount prompts for password, you can specify a different user if you need, too.

Can't stand the new Dock in Leopard, found this to remove the huge slab of white behind the icons:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

Then either logout, or quit Dock through Activity Monitor.

Does anyone make food using Red Bull as one of the ingredients? Like, chicken pasta with Red Bull sauce, or maybe snickerdoodle cookies with Red Bull. Surely someone has tried some stuff like that.

I think this is an untapped market, especially for the raver party crowd. You get hungry partying all night, right? But what can you eat? How about a nice piece of Red Bull cake to go with your Red Bull + vodka. Or maybe bar peanuts dipped in Red Bull.

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I've spent the past 4 weeks living+working in Fresno, California, and found myself repeatedly explaining to outsiders that Fresno is in fact nothing more than a big, huge ghetto. People just don't seem to get it, so I took this photo while driving on one of the freeways. Totally normal. All freeway signs in Fresno look just like this.

Wtf is up with so many dev tools using auto-complete, suggestions, tooltips, etc.? Seeing all of these "helper" add-ons really makes me depressed that developers are asking for (and using!) these "features". If you're working with SQL, shouldn't you know the syntax of an insert statement? If you don't, and rely on the tool to guide you through it, maybe you shouldn't be writing SQL at all. Perhaps I'm just a bit of an old school purist, but having all of this automatic bullshit is like constantly reminding a carpenter about basic stuff.

"This is a hammer, hold it like this, ok?"

"That's a mitre saw! Be careful!"

Tips such as these are only relevant if you're a shitty carpenter, and the same goes for dev tools.

If I'm going to be badgered, I want useful tips.

For instance, run static analysis to tell me I've got a potential deadlock scenario in my code.

Or make observations about layout and suggest a design pattern to improve organization.

Or highlight certain methods (or blocks of code) that are fully self-contained and amenable to writing unit tests, thereby encouraging me to do something useful and beneficial.

But instant activation of all possible keywords in a particular context? "Here are 20 things you might want to type now..."

Come on. That's not useful, and it's faster for me to just type out what I want, rather than scroll through a tiny little context menu looking for the answer. That's really my complaint. These "features" are intrusive, inefficient, and encourage people to blindly rely on them without learning (and using) the basic skills of the trade.

I wonder how detached developers will be in 20 years. I imagine they'll be using some insanely abstract high-level language where the author has no idea what the hell is going.

After 6+ months of dormancy, I've finally wrapped up the Sound Switcher widget. Functionally, I'm pleased with the results. Cosmetically, that's another story.

I would really like to get feedback from anyone who tries it out, likes it, has issues. The core functionality works great (and has since last June!) but the widgety part is questionable.

I had been using Dashcode which was helpful, but then it expired and I was forced to hobble along with klunky UI debugging tools, hence the huge lag between now and the start of this project. And yes, I know Dashcode is part of Leopard; no, I'm not on Leopard yet.

Check it out here

i just subscribed to make. It's a print + online magazine that's filled with all kinds of cool shit for geeks.

I thought we had seen the end of refrigerators with built-in Internet browsing, but Whirlpool just announced a new contribution to the otherwise dumb idea.

Instead of making a fridge with a built-in computer system (which they apparently agree consumers don't want), they're instead making a fridge with a platform for other vendors to make computer and iPod hookups. Somehow, this is better.

From A Chilling Idea at C.E.S.:

In a press release, Whirlpool said that 30 percent of laptop computer, digital photo frame and digital music player owners use their devices in the kitchen - making the centralpark(TM) connection a natural step in appliance evolution.

That's as dumb as finding out that people take laptops with them into the bathroom, so they should have a toilet with built-in web browser. Seriously, people don't browse photos, internet, etc. in the kitchen standing in front of the refrigerator. They're probably sitting down, or least leaning over the counter.

Why even be in the kitchen in the first place?
Because that's where people congregate.
But why there?
Because everyone eats, snacks, drinks, and the kitchen is the heart of that.

So I'm supposed to believe that you should now hang out in the kitchen, glued to the front door of the very thing which contains exactly that (food & drink) which attracts people there in the first place? Not a chance.

Whoever tries to surf the web on that stupid fridge is gonna get beaten up for being in everyone else's way.

I tried vi integration in Eclipse a long time ago, gave up because the integration was crappy. I don't remember what I used. Anyway, I just checked again and found Eclim which has great features. It doesn't hurt that it's free + open source, unlike viPlugin which costs 15 Euros.

Update: I finally managed to get Eclim sort of running on my Mac. After wasting time to discover that the Eclim installer didn't recognize Mac Vim, I downloaded Vim source for unix and ran configure + make + make install, then the Eclim installer let me proceed. So I started eclimd but the first test failed, I cannot run :PingEclim. The docs say I should go to the forums for help. You've got to be kidding! I've already wasted enough time to declare Eclim a lame, half-baked solution, and the install docs are to post on forums and wait for who-knows-how-long? ...Deleting Eclim right now...

This table shows the different quadrants associated with the Strengths Finder 2.0 personality test. They're mostly identical to the v1 quadrants, but a few themes were renamed.

Striving: Working Harder Achiever Activator Adaptability Belief Discipline Focus Restorative Self-Assurance Significance	Thinking: Working Smarter Analytical Arranger Connectedness Consistency Context Deliberative Futuristic Ideation Input Intellection Learner Strategic
Impacting: Influencing People Command Competition Developer Maximizer Positivity Woo	Relating: Assisting People Communication Empathy Harmony Includer Individualization Relator Responsibility

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I never watch any form of broadcast news, and I typically don't read mainstream news websites either. Once in a while though something pops up and I end up on a news website reading something I probably didn't know about. It's almost always something I could (should?) have skipped.

About 3 or 4 months ago there was that big bridge collapse, don't remember where exactly, maybe Minnesota? Clearly it didn't leave much of an impression, I don't even know the state let alone the city or any specific details. Anyway, I had no idea it had happened, literally knew nothing about it. That day I was at lunch with some co-workers and they were talking about it. Completely lost, I had to ask for clarification and their reaction of pure shock was quite amusing. The three of them were genuinely stunned that I knew nothing about the bridge collapse. How could this be? We have computers to keep us informed of every little thing! Who doesn't know about the bridge collapse?!, they seemed to say.

But if you think about it, aside from being on the news why else would I know or care about a bridge collapse?

I'm much more interested in reading about the continuing conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and how many tens of thousands of people have died fighting on both sides. Or maybe that the French President is all chummy with Qaddafi and doing multi-billion dollar business deal selling planes and other stuff to the Libyan goverment. If a bridge collapsed in Libya and CNN wasn't there to tell you about it, would you care?

After my wife sent me an article about the tiger that just ate a guy in San Francisco, I went to CNN.com and took this screenshot of the current front page. I added emphasis to show the general theme.

This guy did the most badass thing with the Wii Remote. Full video here: Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote. If you're impatient, skip to 2m 44s.

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I made this logo for a project I worked on at a previous job. It was a play on an existing logo submission but I included the communist tone as a fun jab (it was funny given the circumstances). I have no idea what logo they ended up using. Last I heard, the entire project - 8 months of work - had been scrapped so it could be rebuilt from the ground up in Python because Java was "a failed experiment".

I guess it's getting kinda cold at night.

I saw an Audi R8 on the drive home tonight. Wawaweeewa! So nice.