Ben's Bits

Today is the twentieth birthday of Square One Television, the 1980s and 90s television show produced by Children's Television Workshop (CTW, now Seseme Workshop). Many of us remember watching both Square One (for math) and 3-2-1 Contact (for science) as children. To some extent educational science programming continued after the discontinuation of 3-2-1 Contact, both Newton's Apple (for adults) and Bill Nye (for students) continued the trend of high quality educational science programming, though both of those programs have also ceased production. Yet there has never been another successful attempt at educational math programming that I'm aware of. The same fate was met by Ghostwriter (for reading/writing) and Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego (for geography/social studies) which were also popular educational PBS programs. Although these programs may sometimes have been of dubious educational value, they were certainly more educational than much of what is found on afterschool television today and they were enjoyed by a great many people.

Aside from a reprise in this creative and clever educaitonal television writing for school-aged students (most educational programming these days seems aimed at the pre-school to 2nd grade crowd) I would hope that the producers of these early pioneering shows would see fit to release DVDs. Much of this programming is still used in schools because nothing better has come along and the episodes would also be enjoyed by a wider populace which either remembers them or is looking for quality educational programming. Until the day these are available on commercial DVD I'll have to be satisfied by the tape collection which I have traded with other collectors and converted to DVD.

For more information on Square One Television visit the fantastic Square One Television fansite and forums. For more information on 3-2-1 Contact and early science programming read 80s Science TV at Inkling Magazine.

Being someone who believes that while municipal wifi is nice it is overhyped and should come after fiber to the premesis (where I do much more computing anyway) I'm excitied to see that the nearby city of St. Paul, Minnesota is exploring municipal fiber.

What the St. Paul Broadband Access Committee (BAC) may not be aware of, but something I suggested they read is Bob Cringley's article from last year about a new model for municipal connectivity. Instead fo relying on the municipality itself to provide Internet service, arguably with the potential to be a worse system administrator than the RBOCs and cable companies, his suggestion is a public/private partnership. Following his thinking, which comes from Bob Frankston (of VisiCalc fame) and others, the city would install and own the fiber infrastructure from central connectivity points to end users but would not actually provide any Internet (or voice or video service) leaving that up to private providers. In fact, the municipality would not be responsible for any of the electronic equipment either, just the raw pipes (or tubes if you prefer).

The beauty of this solution is that the city will own the infrastructure and allow multiple providers to compete to provide service. That competition, in addition to the fact that providers will not have the large up front cost of installing the fiber itself, should allow for service costs to remain quite low. In addition, with the use of technologies such as optical splitters and combiners it would be possible to get Internet from one provider, voice from a second and video from a third if you so chose. It'll be interesting to see if this can take off, one thing I know is that I'm not especially interested in having government control the Internet portion of my service, the potential for abuse such as censorship or snooping is simply too great, but I have no problem with them owning some of the last-mile infrastructure if it means I can select from a number of providers!

I recently saw two videos which poke fun at pop music. The first claims that many pop songs utilize only four chords. The point is illustrated by playing and transitioning through many songs over the course of the video. The second points out that many pop songs are based on the meledy in Pachelbel's Canon in D. It also does this by playing segments of the songs where the meledy appears.

Of course there are a few problems. First, the key of many of these songs is changed in these videos to make it more obvious so it's not really the same chords but the same chord progression. Secondly, it's important to remember that while these songs may incorporate the same chord progression or meledy these are only parts of the song and not the entire basis of the song. There's a long tradition in the arts of reusing others' work so I don't see this (especially the Pachelbel one) as a criticism of pop music so much as a fun and humorus exercise.

Not long ago I built a new storage and mail server to replace several aging servers. I knew that to provide space for all my files and a little room to grow I would need a little more than a terrabyte of storage space and that I wanted this to be in a redundant RAID array. I mentioned in a previous post how I created a software RAID + LVM setup for this. The one catch is that my motherboard had fewer SATA ports than I initially thought so I had to leave one drive off the srray while I got things up and running.

A few days ago the PCI Express SATA controller came in so I needed to add the fifth drive to the existing array, ideally without breaking anything. The first few site I checked stated this was not yet possible but after doing a bit more checking I found out that if you have a current kernel, mdadm and LVM2 tools it actually is. I based this on information from the Gentoo-wiki but I did make a few changes for my specific scenario.

Really the only additional information I needed was to copy the partition table from one of the other drives (sdd) to the new drive (sde). "sfdisk -d /dev/sdd | sfdisk /dev/sde"

I also use "lsof /home" to find which processes had open files on the volume before I unmounted it. I also set the stride flag on resize2fs to 16 based on my block and chunk sizes. Apparently getting this correct has a great bearing on speed and efficiency. For the record the stride size should be chunk size (from /proc/mdstat) divided by block size (from the file system). In my case my chunk size was 64k and block size 4k.

On a recent trip around the web I discovered two open source tools that allow you to create installer packages for Windows applications. The Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) has been around for quite a while, I even used it once upon a time to package up a few scripts of mine. A chief complaint at that time was that it didn't look or operate in the same way the Microsoft Installer (MSI) programs did which has the potential to confuse some users or make them feel that your software was of a lesser quality. In fact recent versions of Mozilla Firefox, Gaim, OpenOffice and many other popular applications use NSIS for the installer. An interesting thing about NSIS is that you can cross compile the Windows installer on POSIX OSs such as Linux.

An alternative to NSIS is Inno Setup which has been around since 1997 when the author grew frustrated with InstallShield Express (ahh the days of InstallShield). Since that time a community of support for this installer has developed leading to tools such as ISTool, a graphical intergface for creating the installer script. One of the interesting things about Inno Setup is the extensive support claimed for installing 64-bit applications, something bound to catch developer's eyes as more consumers move towards 64-bit computing.