My reflections on 9/11
Hello, reader.
I felt the need to share my experience of 9/11, my thoughts and my observations. Tenth anniversary of attack seemed like good moment to go back in memories and write them down.
First off, let me tell you about myself, who am I, where do I come from, and what is my perspective. … continue reading.
DIY Installation kit for Motorola Canopy Backhaul
Hello, all,
if you have had the need to install many Motorola’s Canopy Subscriber Modules or any of the point-to-point links (backhaul links, as they call them) you have probably needed an easy way to check your installation. You, in fact, need to check your aim. Moreover, you needed to make sure that you have the best RSSI and lowest Jitter.
In order to carry out installations quickly and efficiently, Motorola offers an Installation Kit – headphones that offer you audio clues into your signal strength and on the jitter of the installed link. Such installation kits sell at pricemark of 30$ per piece – if you can find them and if you can afford to wait for the shipped kit to arrive. There is another option, obscure yet very useful – make your own audio installation kit. You will need:
MySQL ERROR 157 (HY000)
If you are getting an error, while trying to set up MySQL cluster, and error says:
ERROR 157 (HY000): Could not connect to storage engine
than – there is a connectivity problem and issue. First thing first – check if your selinux is active or not (cat /etc/selinux/config) – if it’s active, either allow MySQL daemons to connect, or shut it off.
Thanks to the people over at http://linuxadminzone.com/ for sharing cluster setup tutorial; it is much clearer than it is from the MySQL documentation. Took me two hours to finish the whole thing.
Howto: Editing sqlite database to set default channel for Mumble
In order to set the default channel for your mumble server, from linux command line interface, we would use a tool called “sqlite3“. If you don’t have it installed, simply use “apt-get install sqlite3” or “yum install sqlite3“.
Once you got it, you want to edit your mumble server database. In order to open specific database, we type “sqlite3 database_name.sqlite”. Thus, we use line “sqlite3 mumble-server.sqlite” command to read in our server’s db. It is typically located in your home folder in the sub-folder named .mumble-server or whatever you named it during the installation process. Once we started sqlite3 interface to the database, we check if we selected the right database; by applying command “.databases“. note the dot in front of the command. you can call .help to read help, or .tables to list tables in the database as well.
Successfully Blocking Ads (at OS level)
To share back with community. If you never knew how to properly block advertisements stuffed into your face, there is very efficient way to block most of ads served online. It is not really blocking, more of a circumvention: by using DNS and built-in features of our own operating system, we can re-direct ad requests to the – null. How do we do this? (If you do not understand technical lingo, skip to the end of the article please).
Watson Wins Jeopardy
This Valentine’s Day shall be remembered by much more than for exchange of few kisses and heart-shaped bonbons. On February 14th 2011, a three-day contest between man and a man-made machine begun. Match of Jeopardy was fought for a prize of One Million Dollars, and for everlasting fame and glory. Complete Touring Machine won the tournament.
Watson is the networked machine consisting of 10 racks, 6880 processors and 15TB of RAM. Watson was taught by IBM engineers, at the facility of T.J. Watson on the East US Coast. Watson was trained for four years, learning to do parallel processing of waste amounts of data, and to extract a sensible conclusion from it. IBM challenged Gary Kasparov 15 years ago, when Deep Blue has proven that machine can play chess better than humans. Today, we are getting into a new Era – machine has won Jeopardy quiz over two Kasparovs of Jeopardy: Ken and Brad, both multiple winners of Jeopardy show – Ken has won 74 games in a row, and Brad won the biggest amount of US dollars ever (or vice-versa, whatever). Even though Watson got some questions very wrong, it proofs much more than machine’s ability to parse information quickly; it shows us the Complete Turing Machine in a functional state, not just something theoretical. So what, if it takes tons of processors to do the job; in 10-30 years such machine will probably fit in your pocket.
This brings us much further than plain admiration for technology advancements, we are coming to a new age where computers can and will start improving our lives at much faster pace. Tomorrow, our schools will not have teachers per se; people present at classes will be taking care of the logistics rather than educating students. Students will be taught through interfaces personalized and most suitable for themselves, would it be through visual, audio or other ways of stimulation. They will be allowed to learn different sciences at their own pace, allowing them to work longer on things that they aren’t that good or whatever. Today, we are already using WebMD that assists doctors in their diagnosis – you input list of symptoms, and artificial collective intelligence suggests possible diseases and causes for such problems.
Tomorrow comes today. We are here, enjoy it, make plans how to better YOUR own life with computers.
