andyvanee

Backups and Archives are two different things. Ideally you should have a good archiving system, and your backup would be a redundant copy of that. In photography, a robust archiving system has between two and four copies of any file. These copies are: ...

I’ve been blogging a fair bit lately about metadata, archiving and dealing with the masses of information that we produce and consume today. It all comes from an idea that has been alternatively percolating and distilling in my mind. It’s the idea of stability. ...

One interesting part of the weekend photographic seminar I just got back from was the emphasis on metadata. It's important to take great photos, but it's just as important to know how you got those results. In the days of film, A photographer would keep a shooting log, recording aperature, speed, lens, etc. A decent digital camera will record all that information for you as long as you know where to look for it. ...

Just finishing up the weekend photographic seminar at the lake. Got some good shots and some good practice at composition, lighting and rhythm. ...

Data is chaotic. Our attempts to tame it are largely attempts at dehumanizing ourselves. Here’s a transcript of a piece of cardboard on my Grandfathers wall: ------------------------- | | | WALLET LIST | | ------ | | EARS | | CANE | | WATCH | | | | SWIM | | | |_________________________| Even by typing it here, I am imposing a fair bit more order than the original had. The original was written with a Sharpie and, although it was very legible, the intent and structure was difficult to parse. “List” may or may not have been the title or one of the items to remember. “Ears”, I assume, meant his hearing aid. All the items seemed like a general checklist for leaving the house until “Swim”, which makes the list seem very specific to a certain day, or day of the week. He has had this list posted by the door for quite some time. ...

Software Engineers assume that your data can be ordered logically. This assumption is built in to the file system. They assume that it's an easy task, but that it's best left to the user. Better than imposing an order that doesn't make sense for some users. ...

After reading "The Art Of UNIX Programming" again, it's got me thinking about the nature of the technological explosion that has happened since the quaint days of mainframes and text-based consoles. ...

I’m away from my Linux box and want to do some assembly programming. Mac installs GCC with the developer tools, but there are enough differences that I haven’t bothered to work through them until now. Here’s a decent tutorial, although it focuses on PPC assembly and I’m using an Intel Mac. The thing that frightened me about the Mac assembler was the default output of gcc -S. There is some strange optimizations and flags in the resulting assembly code. The key, as the tutorial points out, is in the compiler options. Here’s what I used on the ubiquitous “Hello World” program: ...

disclaimer: I copied this from my old blog. Not sure if it actually works:) My calculator code was quite easily polished up. Here’s the revised code which stacks operands properly and supports the main arithmetic operators +, -, * , /. If you flush the stack completely, you get a “nan” warning, which seems reasonable. Here’s the code: (gas, x86) ...