X-Geek

Extreme geekiness

There are 699 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 36 of 70).

Datacenters in North Carolina


Earlier this month much hoopla was made by the Governor’s office when Gov. Bev Perdue visited Facebook’s datacenter in Forest City in Rutherford County. Facebook announced it was adding another building to the site, doubling its capacity.

In a press release, Perdue touted the jobs it would bring:

“Creating jobs is my top priority. Facebook’s additional expansion into North Carolina means more high-tech jobs and investment in Rutherford County,” said Gov. Perdue. “Facebook continues to be a ‘friend’ to North Carolina.”

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Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011

Dennis Ritchie, legendary creator of the C programming language and co-inventor of the best operating system ever (UNIX), died earlier this week. He was 70.

Ritchie was every bit as influential as Steve Jobs in shaping our computing world. Perhaps even more influential than Jobs.

Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and co-creator of the Unix operating system, has died aged 70.

While the introduction of Intel’s 4004 microprocessor in 1971 is widely regarded as a key moment in modern computing, the contemporaneous birth of the C programming language is less well known. Yet the creation of C has as much claim, if not more, to be the true seminal moment of IT as we know it; it sits at the heart of programming — and in the hearts of programmers — as the quintessential expression of coding elegance, power, simplicity and portability.

Its inventor, Dennis Ritchie, whose death after a long illness was reported on Wednesday and confirmed on Thursday by Bell Labs, similarly embodied a unique yet admirable approach to systems design: a man with a lifelong focus on making software that satisfied the intellect while freeing programmers to create their dreams.

via Dennis Ritchie, father of Unix and C, dies

Neuse Radio almost here

I’ve been perfecting my Neuse Radio streaming station lately and I’ve almost gotten it to the point where I can let the world listen.

It’s running on the open-source Rivendell radio automation suite, patched through the open-source JACK audio server, encoded with the open-source DarkIce encoder, streamed with the open-source Icecast2 server, and hosted on my CentOS-based VPS in Ashburn, Virginia.

It’s so automated that I don’t have to do anything to keep the music flowing. If I want I can add some chatter (called voice-tracking in the industry parlance) between songs to give it a live sound, but I tend to let the music run without interruption.
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iRP Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs


Unless you were under a rock somewhere, you learned the news that first shot through the wired world about 12 hours ago: Steve Jobs, the iconic Apple CEO, died yesterday. Jobs was quite an individual. Not only did he shape the company that’s synonymous with his name but he put his mark on all of Silicon Valley as well. It’s hard to imagine a Silicon Valley without Steve Jobs, actually.

I played this clip for the kids of Jobs comparing a computer to a “bicycle for our minds” and I couldn’t help staring at Jobs as he spoke. In his 20s at the time, Jobs is every bit like a big, excited kid. Those eyes burn fiercely with a childlike curiosity, like he’s hopped aboard a rocket that will soon be blasting off to points unknown.
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Neutrino particle traveling faster than light?

Every now and then, a scientific discovery delivers to us smug mortals a healthy kick in the head: reminding us that for all our bravado we still don’t know squat about how the universe really works!

Neutrino particle traveling faster than light? Two ways it could rewrite physics.

European scientists are shocked by an experiment that showed neutrino particles moving faster than light. The result, if confirmed, could challenge Einstein’s signature theory on relativity or point to a universe of more than four dimensions.

via Neutrino particle traveling faster than light? Two ways it could rewrite physics. – CSMonitor.com.

Smartphone speed-detecting apps

I was walking the kids to school the other morning when I saw a few cars driving faster than they should’ve been driving through the school zone. It made me wonder if anyone has written a smartphone app that can calculate the speed at which a car is traveling via the smartphone’s video camera.

Another app I thought would be useful (or not) is an app which uses the internal gyros, accelerometers, and/or GPS to detect when the phone is in a moving vehicle. It could then either activate “car mode” or, to become more restrictive: locking the keypad so that texting could not be done while driving.

The latter app would’ve been useful had it been on the phone of a driver in front of me on Wade Avenue this morning!

Smartphones and the world around them

Smart phones should not be new to me. Though I haven’t owned one until a few weeks ago when we bought LG Optimus V phones, I have of course been around them since the first iPhone came out. I would’ve thought that I would be well-familiar with them now but one insight into smartphones really surprised me.

Up until the smartphone, computers were by and large completely ignorant of their surroundings. For instance, old-school computers would not have noticed any effects at all during our recent 5.9-magnitude Virginia earthquake, but a smartphone could’ve! Smartphones can detect movement and motion and direction and position and orientation: a myriad of physical-space properties which were completely alien to most computers not very long ago. Some ambitious geek could write herself an app which aggregates the accelerometer readings of thousands of smartphones and uses that data to detect and pinpoint earthquakes, for instance. This is what fascinates me about my new smartphone: the potential it offers for physical-space interaction.
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San Diego blackout

Hassayampa switchyard

One of my enduring memories of visiting Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines twenty years ago was passing by the base’s power plant. There was row after row of semi-truck-size 250kw diesel generators, all roaring away and belching unfiltered black smoke into the thick tropical air. The civilian power source frequently suffered brownouts so the base had to generate its own electricity.

I never thought that Naval Base San Diego would suffer the same conditions, but yesterday millions of San Diego residents lost power when a problem at a switching station in Arizona sent the San Diego County’s electrical grid crashing down within minutes. Being an electricity geek with a fascination for electrical malfunctions, I had to find out more about this situation.

According to the Arizona Public Service press release:
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Raleigh incubator, part deux

In my job quest, I began checking into Adzerk since I’ve got connections there. On Adzerk’s blog, Andy Schrader bemoans the (perceived) lack of pizazz that Raleigh offers startups:

Problem is that we’re barely considering a move to Raleigh because of its perceived lack of culture (we’re not a law firm or a government office).

Raleigh has made great strives to rejuvenate Fayetteville street and bring businesses back downtown but why no attention to startups?

Here’s your proof that Raleigh’s “stodgy” reputation is driving away promising startup companies.
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DVD download kiosk

Movie Booth DVD download kiosk

On our way through the Seattle-Tacoma (SEATAC) airport, I spied this intriguing kiosk on Concourse B. It purports to offer DVD downloads directly to one’s laptop for $3 and up per movie. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to test this machine and now I wish I had, because I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

I’ve poked around today and can’t seem to definitively identify this kiosk. There’s a kiosk outfit called Movie Booth that has DVD vending machines all around the UK and Ireland. This box is different, though, as there is apparently no physical media dispensed: just a CAT5 Ethernet cable where one would presumably download the movie.

So does anyone have any hints about this machine? Is it some kind of joke, or a legitimate service? I got nothing.