FIlm: 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days Directed by Cristian Mungiu

A really bleak moralistic film set in 1980s Romania where abortion and contraception are not legalised.

A pregnant woman has arranged an abortion to be performed, but the man performing has a high price both financially and morally.

A thought provoking film, nothing heart warming here though - but well shot and minimalist sets throughout.

Facebook Economics II

So after my initial post IPO analysis the shares are still taking a battering on the market.

There are 2.13809 billion shares issued.

Currently trading at $23.09 per share, $49.36 billion market cap

That's a loss of $31.96 billion...

Microsoft Decline

Interesting article describing Microsoft slow decline and internal strife:

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer

Focusing too much on competing with themselves, rather than turning out good products. Rushing things to market to make a deadline. Microsoft had some significant firsts, ereaders, tablets but they just could not make them a success. This is astonishing despite their huge budget for such work.

If the anti-trust investigation had broken them up, would that have really being doing them a favour?

Casio CFX-9850G

A late 1990s graphical calculator, I bought this when I wanted to see how things had moved on from the original Casio graphical calculator. It is more powerful, a full 32KB of memory, and has a lot more functions. It even had a PC connect mode, but despite all that it feels a little underpowered even for back then.

It does have nice keys, display and I can remember my sister preferring to use it because you could see the calculation you were doing. More interestingly it ran on triple A batteries so no expensive replacements.

Found at:

www.caffnib.co.uk/calculators/calculators.html

Tour de France 2012

I am not a big cycling fan, but with history in the making I decide to watch the final state 20 that ends up in Paris. So Cavendish won, with Bradley Wiggins setting up his final sprint. It is clearly a really technical precisely timed event, the break away which had 20 seconds at one stage was reeled in in the final 5km.

A nice piece of history a British 1-2, whereas we've only finished at best 4th. Cycling seems to be resurgent and it was an interesting thing to watch unfold.

Casio FX-992

This was a calculator I bought after my degree and used for a few years. My first solar power/battery powered one. It had a supposedly more intuitive input system, where you could enter the function key before the number you wanted to apply. It took a while to get used to from the previous models.

Found at:

http://www.calculator.org/Pages/calculator.aspx?model=fx-992s&make=Casio

The Flashing Blade

For some reason I thought back to my summer holidays when I was growing up. For a couple of years there seemed to be re-runs of a French imported series called The Flashing Blade. It was an epic series on horseback it seemed, so I looked it up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flashing_Blade

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-ZEDNkZ2L4

Casio FX 7000GA

For my A levels, in the first year I bought a graphic calculator. The college I was attending was getting a bulk order and I bought through that, I seem to remember it was about £30 but I might be wrong. So this is where graphic calculators began, it was a pretty neat machine, with a simple programming language too. Any exam would first involve writing a quadratic solver for use in problems! Programmables were allowed in the exam, as long as they had been "reset" before the exam started. I remember my A-level this procedure was done, but they did not press the reset button properly.

Found at:

http://www.voidware.com/calcs/fx7000g.htm

Casio FX 100C

For my secondary school exams I got a new calculator and used the FX 570 as a spare. I don't remember it being more capable than that, and it was back to a more chunky design. I seem to remember at the time that it would better to go back to a simple AA battery.

Found at:

http://www.calculator.org/Pages/calculator.aspx?model=fx-100C&make=Casio

Casio FX-570

My second scientific calculator, lasted my from about third to fifth year at school. It fell apart as I remember, but it was a neat calculator including fractions, constants, and base conversions

Found at:

http://www.voidware.com/calcs/fx570.htm

Casio FX-82

Nostalgia time, this was my first scientific calculator and Casio FX-82. It only had an 8 digit display, a sliding on/off switch. I used it in my first couple of years at senior school. It was actually quite bulky for a calculator.

Found at:

http://www.voidware.com/calcs/fx82.htm

Film: Dodgeball directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber

I re-watched this comedy from 2004, a formulaic but funny film about a run down gym that faces closure because of a mega corp gym next door having bought up their mortgage debt.

There only way out is to enter a Dogdeball competition to try and win the money to cover the loan. Amazingly they go onto win and save the day. Really this film still feels like a Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn comic vehicle.

There are some good cameos, Lance Armstrong to give the motivational speech to Vaughn when he is thinking of quitting before the final, Chuck Norris to give the casting vote when the team look like getting diqualified.

An unimportant piece of film history...

Olympic Torch

I saw the Olympic torch come through my home town today. In truth it is one of those ocassions to look back on and say "I was there", the occasion itself was a little fleeting.

Still the torch came through, the town was packed. Preceding it were the various sponsors Coca Cola, Samsung mobile, and Lloyds Bank.

Some coverage in the local papers:

Linux Multi Partition Install

I had to do a multi version linux install on an old PC, and it struck me that the distros do not make this as easy as perhaps it could be. These are the problems I had with the process (applying to CentOS 5/6 installs):

1. The boot loader configuration for Linux is pretty involved. The distro you are installing will get it right for the version you are just installing, but preserving other Linux installs on other partitions is not well catered for as you are given a "chainloader" windows like default for them that does not work.

2. The /etc/fstab setup now used UUID for the partition by default. This is fine in itself but when combined with insisting on making mount points for other partitions that you will re-create with later installs renders the earlier install non bootabe.

3. The same applies to the boot command from grub, it looks for a UUID by default although that is not such a problem.

4. When booting from a DVD to the install an image from a partition, it would be really nice if the installer would let you start any iso image not just the specific version you have booted the install disk from (then you could have a "universal boot USB drive/DVD".

5. It would also be really nice to have the ability to select the image you want to install from a disk partition, of across NFS. It must be possible to provide this functionality that would make things easier...

Running Records

With the Olympics just around the corner I found it interesting to look at the running records, also very interesting that the longer distances are still covering the ground fast:

Distance metres	Record Time seconds	Speed metres/sec
60m	6.39	9.3
100m	9.58	10.43
200m	19.19	10.42
400m	43.18	9.26
800m	101.01	7.92
1500m	206	7.28
3000m	448	6.69
5000m	757.35	6.60
10000m	1577.53	3.16

Banking Adverts

I've never seen a paper today to full of apologies:

- A "sorry" from Barclays, and a statement that the customer is top priority.

- A "we're working hard to put things right" from Natwest

- A "join us we're not as corrupt as those other banks" from Nationwide.

I do feel a little sorry for Natwest, an upgrade went wrong and suddenly everything collapsed. Probably should not cut back on IT so much maybe...

Barclays, little sympathy, even though it is the investment arm that has being exposed as corrupt.

Nationwide, hope they do not get too big - even though it appears a lot of deposits are heading their way. This is the only real way for the consumer to vote, if you do not like a bank's ethics - don't bank with them.

Itanium HP v Oracle

The very sad yet predictable end of Itanium. With products just left with HP, they try to convince Oracle that the need to keep producing their database on the platform...



You can hardly blame Oracle on this one, there must be no profitability in releasing this product on their platform.

At the time of creation you could not have forseen the multi core and 64 bit potential of the x86 line, and this has largely caused Itanium to be a flop. Had that not being the case then there may have been more customers willing to take the pain of an architecture changeover. AMD of course came up with x86-64 - had they not I would not be so sure the Intel would have been keen to extend the life of the processor in the server space given their second product.