Moore's Law as an excuse to slack?

An interesting article was brought to my attention. A paper entitled The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations proposes that it may be more efficient to wait until faster computers can tackle the problem.

The author proposes, that if you have a significantly large computation to do, it may be better to wait some amount of time before the hardware is purchased. Then the computation will take less time (and you may be able to do more work with the hardware than initially anticipated) and still meet a deadline. This may be beneficial to departments and projects where money may be an issue.

However, your boss may not like this arguement.

Success!

Yesterday, I mentioned that I could not compile gaim-blogger on my Gentoo system. The quick and dirty hack I came up with was to create a symbolic link called /usr/include/cairo.h to /usr/include/cairo/cairo.h.

Argh!

gaim-blogger doesn't compile on my Gentoo system. It would be cool to update my blog directly from gaim. It appears that there is some missing C header file somewhere, because I see this message fly by:

/usr/include/gtk-2.0/gdk/gdkcolor.h:30:19: cairo.h: No such file or directory

Which obivously causes the build process to puke because there are undefined structures and functions.

Maybe I'll have to do some searching tonight and this weekend, and I won't have to bust out too much C.

Secure those wireless networks!

I heard about a program last night called EtherPEG. It is a program for MacOS X that sniffs traffic and displays images that go by. Personally, this should scare you if you have an unencrypted wireless network, since all traffic can easily be sniffed.

Back from vacation, folks

Sorry I haven't blogged much the last few weeks, but between the holidays and vaction...

Just a few tech observations from my trip...

• For you laptop carriers, Royal Carribean's Soverign of the Seas offers wifi access in may places around the ship as well as many public terminals, but getting out to the Internet carries a $0.50/min charge which is probably the most expensive I've ever seen.
  
• At a Hampton Inn, I saw public terminals running Linux (Linspire). Only caveat - these terminals were logged in as "root".
  
• The restored Saturn V rocket at Cape Canaveral is pretty impressive!