more vids…
old, yet still accurate… listen to the lyrics…
The Band: The The Album: Mind Bomb
Note, this band had Johnny Marr of the Smiths in the band at the time.
Archive for October, 2006
YouTube music videos
YouTube has some great old music videos. Steve sent me some links to some of his favorite old vids, so I looked for some of mine. I haven’t heard some of this music in a long long time. The music might be found on eBay or from a re-seller on Amazon, but the videos are basically lost. If iTunes doesn’t carry it, does it exist?
Anyways, here is a great old ( 1994 - so old! 
) video of a band that existed in Cambridge/Boston MA. The music was pretty ahead of its time and the video was well done. You’ve never heard of them and you probably won’t like it.
Access to all information is becoming a reality. It is so refreshing to remember something on a whim, search for it, and then actually see/hear it in mere seconds.
64 bits is necessary… for me at least
For quite a while, I thought that 32 bits was more than enough for most people. I had this belief in 1999 and I had it up to yesterday.
Today, I read something that made me change my mind. For some reason, I had some pretty big blinders on to the whole Linux memory system. Linux’s kernel has a performance hit when addressing more than 1 gig of physical memory. This is pretty serious. It turns out that a lot of the 32 bit OSs don’t have a great answer for this (Windows uses a 2gig user and 2 gig kernel split, so basically a 2 gig physical system for windows).
Also, I have had the need to work with some large in memory data sets that easily consume 2+ gigs at a time. Linux barely handles this with its 3/1 - user/kernel split. I’ve run ‘Out of Memory’ enough times to consider just moving to a 64 bit arch.
So, originally I thought the vast majority of users would be OK, but I was ignorant to the 1 gig physical design choice. I thought that a machine that had 4 gigs was 4x as good as a machine with 1 gig. That was wrong.
From now on, all of the big data machines that I have will be 64 bit systems. My next desktop OS will be 64 bit as well. The time has come.
Associating .rb files with Ruby in Windows
Today I had to write a DOS batch file to automate something on my Windows laptop. Unfortunately (fortunately?) I’ve forgotten the DOS batch language years ago. After giving it the old college try for 15 minutes, I thought I would give ruby a go since it was already on my system in the form of InstantRails.
The first issue was that none of the .rb files that I made would get noticed by ruby. After typing “start script.rb”, I found that I could associate the file with the ruby.exe in the \InstantRails\ directory. Then the next problem occurred. For some unknown reason, the arguments to the script were not making it into ARGV in the ruby script.
After a bunch of searching, I found a wikibook that had the answer at the bottom.
$ assoc .rb=RubyScript
.rb=RubyScript
$ ftype RubyScript=”c:\IntantRails\ruby\bin\ruby.exe” “%1″ %* RubyScript=”c:\IntantRails\ruby\bin\ruby.exe” “%1″ %*
For more info, go to the wiki book. I’m sure this is useful for other scripting languages as well.
