Singularity on the Plane

Don't know what a BOAB is? Read the last entry on this entry (hint, hint).

The numbering of free software projects - 6/9/2006 10:56:57 PM

I always thought version numbers as a decimal number. For example, 5.1 is less than 5.11 which is less than 5.2. So, if those 3 numbers are software versions, the idea that sprang on my mind is "5.1 is released first, then 5.11, then 5.2".

Of course I was shocked to know that free software projects (GNOME, Linux kernel, etc) don't think it that way. They reasoned that 1 is less than 2 whin is less than 11, so 5.1 comes before 5.2 which comes before 5.11.

Now, after getting used to the free software universe, I have come to like it more than my previous preference. You just need to change your point of view. Think of a book and think of the number before the dot as the chapter number while the number after the dot as a section number. For example:

"5.1" is analogous to "chapter 5 section 1"
"5.2" is analogous to "chapter 5 section 2"
"5.11" is analogous to "chapter 5 section 11"

Thinking that way, the sorting will make sense. When multiple dots are present (as in x.y.z.w), think about subsections and subsubsections.

You won't feel nervous again thinking that GNOME 2.12 is newer than GNOME 2.2.

My next computer stats - 6/9/2006 10:32:03 PM

RAM: At least 1GB (currently 512 MB). My current RAM is very insufficient, since on a normal session I open some IDEs (Visual Studio 2005 Express, SharpDevelop 1.1), some SDK documentations (.NET SDK Documentation, Monodoc), a media player, Firefox (browsers can be a crazy memory hog), dictionaries (English, Japanese), and still other programs (Go client, Go database, file explorer, image editor, etc). At this very moment, task manager indicates that 693 MB of memory is used. 512 MB isn't enough, Q.E.D.

Processor: AMD dual-core processor (currently AMD single-core). Programs are starting to get multithreaded, and it's thrilling to experience the speedup on a hardware that can actually run 2 threads at the same time. I'm especially watchful to the development of the multithreaded Go program Moyo Go Studio. Why AMD? Well, why Intel?

Hard disk: RAID 0 configuration (currently no RAID). Who likes to be bottlenecked by that sluggish piece of hardware? Oh, and the capacity should be at least 200 GB (2 x 100 GB).

Video Card: NVIDIA (currently NVIDIA). ATI is notorious for its bad driver support on Linux.

Monitor: LCD which supports 1280×1024 and at least 17 inch (currently CRT, 1024×768, probably 14 inch). My eye is tortured by looking at the monitor n hours a day. Switching from CRT to LCD should ease the pain. A larger resolutin support is needed because complex programs like IDE and Go database client has panels everywhere. A small resolution leaves an uncomfortably small space for the main panel. 17 inch is needed so that things at a large resolution won't look tiny (should be irrelevant on a vector graphic era).

Fan: A silent but powerful fan (currently noisy). The sound pollution emitted from my fan is unbearable. A computer is not a Harley. Noisy is not cool (pun intended).

Writer: DVD writer (currently CD Writer). DVD-Rs (the media) are insanely cheap right now. IIRC, with Rp. 4k you can get 4 GB storage. The perfect solution to backup trashes.

A powerful editor lacking 1 feature - 6/9/2006 10:23:24 PM

ConTEXT (why the crazy capitalization?) is my text editor of choice on Windows. It supports tabs, syntax highlighting, and most importantly user-defined actions. User-defined actions means that we can bind some keys (for example F9) to a shell command (for example to compile the file). This makes ConTEXT effectively a bare IDE for any task you can imagine.However, ConTEXT doesn't support Unicode. Yes, typing "watashi" on the IME yields ‚킽‚µ (hiragana) or Ž„ (kanji) on ConTEXT. That is pretty dumb, considering that it's now on 2006 and the idea of i18n (internationalization: i-(18 middle characters)-n) isn't anything new. I'll file a bug report on it.

BOAB: a neology - 6/9/2006 10:18:57 PM

BOAB stands for "blog on a blog", and this entry is an example of a BOAB. The idea is to blog anything interesting directly at home, and then uploading all offline blogs on 1 online blog entry. Since an offline blog entries will be a part of 1 online blog entry, it is a blog on a blog or BOAB.

The acronym BOAB doesn't come out of thin air. See FOAF.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 10th, 2006 at 11:20 am by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under Hardware & Software, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.