A few random links that I've collected.
- liveplasma, graphically depicts links among musicians and movies. I don't actually listen to popular music much, but it's still fun to play with.
- Slashbuster. Eats trees for breakfast [WMV]. Other videos.
- Der Baggertransport 2001 aka Bagger 288. Eats medium-sized towns for breakfast.
- Mandarin Chinese lesson podcast. Perhaps someday^H^H^Hyear I may be able to use this.
- Warrington Cycling Campaign's Cycle Facility of the Month. It's hard to pick a favorite, they're all so great, but maybe it's July 2004.
- Floor ate hazardous Ohio eels.
- Jesper Holmberg's web log on localization. For example, you can find discussion of localizing keyboard shortcuts (a subject which was of passing interest some time ago).
- Public Radio Slave, answering the telephone at a public radio station.
- Waiterrant, the online journal of a waiter at what appears to be a rather fancy restaurant.
- Logos free books, online books (mostly children's stories) in various languages, often including audio. But the audio has annoying music in the background, alas.
- The Easter Bunny Hates You (WMV). Google video version.
- Dave Barry appeared on local radio station KUOW. The interview is quite funny.
- Dancing humans forming a variety of images when viewed from above. (via Metafilter.) I'm not sure which I like best; it's either the running man or the flapping bird.
- 1000 Arte ein Bier zu öffnen: Ohne Flaschenöffner im Grossstadtdschungel überleben = "1000 ways to open a beer: Surviving in the urban jungle without a bottle opener." (via BoingBoing.) My favorites: Electric toothbrush (for unexpectedness), notebook hard drive (for disproportionate expense), and excavator (for inconvenience).
- How to eat sushi.
- The Flogsta scream, a nightly tradition at the Flogsta dormitories at Uppsala University. (På svenska.)
- A brief and incomplete history of FAT32. They cut off my punch line, though. After reading the article, highlight this box with your mouse (or use Select All if you are keyboard-based) to see the original final sentence: At least they didn't call it "LardButt".
- Seeing the world in three dimension for the first time. Any story that involves Oliver Sacks is bound to be fascinating.
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The slashbuster videos were great. I especially liked the house demolition one that was squirreled away in the last slot on the second page of videos.
rofl @ lardbutt! :D
Yes, the Slashbuster videos are possibly the coolest thing I’ve seen all week. Not only will it let you take a top-down approach to mulching trees, it lets you take a bottom-up approach to mulching small houses. The coolest thing, though, it probably the video where it mulches a minivan!
Also, I’m sort of curious what date that was which you put on the FAT32 design notebook?
I remember back when Win95 was released a friend of mine who worked on it said that they were working on a 32-bit version of FAT for larger disks. Being an NT guy I just shuddered at what a horrible idea I thought that was. Now I am thankful that you guys went through with that, so flash memory card devices don’t fall off a cliff at 2GB and have to start partitioning large flash cards or having every digital camera/audio player have its own proprietary and incompatible filesystem.
That fat32 history article is almost unreadable because Microsoft have placed flashy adverts on each side to draw your eyes attention away from what you’re reading…
Wow, Flogsta-vrålet entering Raymond’s blog. Maybe I should decide to take part in it someday, after all.
(as I live in Uppsala)
From the FAT32 article
At some point you have to say, "Enough is enough." After considerable discussion, 32GB was decided upon as the arbitrary cutoff point. Windows 2000 and higher offer only NTFS when formatting larger drives. Note, however, that Windows 2000 and higher will use a FAT32 drive larger than 32GB; they simply won’t create one. (For a 32GB FAT32 drive, it takes 4 megabytes of disk I/O to compute the amount of free space.)
That seems a bit pessimistic. The FSInfo sector (http://www.x-ways.net/winhex/templates/FSINFO_Sector.txt) has a free cluster count, so if that’s set you can skip reading the FAT. If not, you need to read it once, but after that you can keep the count in ram, and write it back to FSInfo when you unmount. From my tests, reading both FATs on a 250GB SATA drive should take less than one second. Which is not too bad, given that you only need to do it once per mount.
And allocating clusters should be fast if you keep the "next free cluster" in Ram too, and the FSInfo sector has a slot for that when you mount/unmount. Sure FAT32 is a bit clunky, but it’s incredibly widely supported. There’s a demand for FAT32 support for volumes >32GB. I wrote a little freeware app to do it.
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm
I get 2-3 emails a day thanking me, and wondering why Windows won’t let you do it.
And I’ve used huge (300GB) FAT32 USB volumes with Windows, Norton Dos, MacOs and Linux, and none of them seem to have any performance issues. And most embedded stuff can only read and write FATxx.
Curse you for introducing me to Waiterrant. I’ve been reading it for hours now and cannot stop.
Thank you for understanding why Windows 95 users would create multiple logical drives on a physical external drive (i.e. it wasn’t a frivolous thing to do and wasn’t originally intended to become a bug hunt).
> this results in a theoretical maximum FAT32
> volume size of 2TB. […] Long before you hit
> the theoretical maximum volume size, you will
> reach the practical limits.
At the time FAT32 was developed, that was true. But you seem to be stating this as a current fact in a publication dated 2006. I think it was 2004 when I saw a report of Linux misbehaving on a partition of size greater than 8TB. If I wished to spend as much money today as I did for my first personally owned PC, I could probably make an 8TB partition myself too, using an external RAID controller that would present itself as a single SCSI interface.
> At some point you have to say, "Enough is
> enough."
Except in Windows 95B and 98, where the limit is still 2TB, except that the limit is really 32GB or 64GB for reasons other than those stated. For Windows 98 Microsoft announced and then retracted a patch that would survive past 64GB, but for 95 (all versions) the 32GB limit on total media size remains constraining.