Fred Cirera

Unlike almost all other developed countries, the US does not protect personal privacy, and vendors who mangle and lose your personal or business data pay no penalty. The ACLU wants to change that and has released a new report, ENFORCING PRIVACY

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Privacy laws are of limited value if institutions for enforcing such laws do not exist. The United States, unlike nearly every other advanced-industrial nation, does not have an independent data protection official or privacy commissioner to fill that role. We recommend that Congress take several steps to bridge this gap:

1. Activate the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and expand its scope and powers to turn it into a full-fledged privacy body with oversight of all government agencies.
2. Supplement the strengthened PCLOB with multiple overlapping layers of privacy protection, by creating a statutorily mandated Privacy Advisor within the White House’s OMB, and bolstering and expanding federal agency privacy offices.
3. Create an independent federal privacy commission to serve as a full- fledged private-sector privacy regulator.

Lists

def eratos(upperBound):
        primes = []
        seq = range(2, upperBound + 1)
        while True:
                try:
                        p = seq[0]
                except IndexError:
                        break
                seq = filter(p.__rmod__, seq)
                primes.append(p)
        return primes

Iterators

from itertools import count, ifilter
def i_eratos():
    seq = count(2)
    while True:
        p = seq.next()
        seq = ifilter(p.__rmod__, seq)
        yield p

anykey() {
    stty cbreak -echo
    KEY=`dd bs=1 count=1 2>/dev/null`
    stty -cbreak echo
    echo $KEY
}

Usage:

echo -n "Press any key: " && anykey

The most annoying thing with X11 on Mac is the shortcut CMD-W, especially when you are an Emacs user. On Emacs, CMD-W or META-W is the shortcut to put your selection into the cut buffer. But on Mac this is also the shortcut to close the window. This means that every time you type META-W on Emacs your Emacs window closes and you loose everything you are doing.

This recipe will explain how to remove the annoying CMD-W shortcut on X11.

At work, I manage a cluster of several hundred nodes. All those nodes are equipped with a little LCD display, like to one showed in the picture on the right. Until now, these displays were only displaying the name of the cluster vendor at boot, and the node name when the machine was up an running. To put these neat little displays to better use, I wrote a Python program named lcd.py, which prints more useful information.

When started, lcd.py burns into the MVRAM of the display the name of the company I am working for and the name of the node, which is in fact the position of the node in the rack. This helps me find which node is which when I take several of them out of the rack for maintenance. I just power the machine for a few seconds to read its name and position on the racks on the LCD display .

Then, the daemon goes into an infinite loop to probe the disk temperature using the S.M.A.R.T information provided by the disk. This information is then displayed on the second line of the LCD display. A quick look at the display and I know if something is wrong with the disk or the machine. Of course this is not the only monitoring system used to watch the system but every little detail helps. And it is fun to use these little displays.

The program also pings the “master node” to see if there are any network problems. If the “master node” cannot be reached, the program turns off the LCD display backlight. A quick glance at the entire rack and you know which node is in trouble.

For more information on these LCD display you can download the manual.

Download the entire source code

Insidehw ran a bechmark test between an Intel Core 2 Quad and an Intel Core i7. This test shows that the Core i7 is slightly faster than the Core 2 Quad, but not enough to justify the price difference between the two.

If you are planing to upgrade your machine from a Core 2 to a Core i7, you also have to add the price of a new motherboard and new memory. Which makes the upgrade way too expensive for a not that noticeable performance gain.

Read the full benchmark results