Short Term Memory?

for i in xrange(START_OF_SEMESTER, END_OF_SEMESTER, WEEK):
    study_and_have_fun_in_jerusalem()

    go_back_home()

    suffer()

    go_to_jerusalem()

Does XKCD Involves Conspiracy?

First of all, for those of you who are not familiar with XKCD - check it out.

It's a preety famous geek web comic, that got headlines in the past week because it changed a google search string results from two to a few thousands (Slashdot story here).

Anyhow, in the couple of months we're living in the apartment here in Jerusalem, we've noticed this webcomic is getting closer and closer to our reality here (and leave the Guitar Hero strips alone! :)).

So there are two options:

1. Someone is spying on us.
2. Our life is duplicated somewhere else in the other end of the planet.

Hmm...

Windows XP Performance Tweaks

In the last few weeks, I've been playing with my memory management settings in Windows to enhance performance. After all, nobody wants to wait for his computer to finish doing something.

It has all begun when I purchased another 1GB of RAM for my computer. After installing it, I happily thought I would be able to get rid of the page file (I've heard about some people doing it). The reasons are quite obvious - having a data transfer rate of ~1GB/sec (RAM) instead of ~50MB/sec (HDD) when paging memory.

After removing the page file I was quite happy, or shall I say Windows was happy, until I started running memory consuming applications like Guitar Pro 5, which loads all of its RSE (Real Sound Engine) samples to the RAM. Windows then became pretty sick and told me he is increasing the page file size (of course he can't do that, because I disabled the page file).

So I gave up and set-up a page file of 2GB, but still felt some tasks are too slow for an AMD dual-core 3800+ with that amount of RAM.

Then I started looking for windows performance tips, most of them I knew from my past occupation as a sysadmin, like setting the classic windows theme, disabling visual effects, shutting down the indexing service and more.

Some tips, however, were not known to me and even surprised me a bit.

For example, dealing with file last access timestamp. When Windows accesses a file for read or write it changes a value in the file system known as the file last access time. This means that your HD is busy writing data to itself, even if it only reads files!

All of this is pretty known and trivial, but the less trivial thing is that you can disable this useless option (no application that I know of uses this field anyway) by entering the command prompt and using fsutil:

fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1

After setting this flag I've noticed that explorer runs much faster, especially when loading a new directory listing and displaying it.

Few more tips can be found here (check out tips 4,5,6): http://kadaitcha.cx/performance.html

And also here:
http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/sgp-tweaks.ars

Suggestion for a new Facebook API function

After I got a message from a 16 years old girl (does she knows how to write?), I thought about a new function that facebook applications should use:

def is_legit(filrting_girl_age):
    if self.age / 2 + 7 > flirting_girl_age:
        print "What the hell were you thinking!"
        return wtf
    else:
        print "All is good, you can go now!"
        return true

A Degree of Inner Turbulence

(Outro of) Lady Macbeth / Serotonin Blues

"Things have changed, people changed.
Feels like there's so much a weight on every word.
Conversations are heavy, too heavy.
We're trying so hard, for so long and it just exhausts me. Terrified.
There's a line that keeps repeating in my head over and over again:
why does this doesn't change?"

The past two weeks made me think about things I never delved into. The reasons nor the triggers cannot be explained, but I think it's some kind of the depression involved with the weather, strike in the university and just a lot of different stuff that happened to me or to friends of mine that shaken me so much.

A lot of questions have been raised - not all of them were resolved. Not all of them CAN be resolved, in the current reasonable time frame at least.

The only thing I can say is that it's so strange how things are so much entwined one with another; sometimes so entwined it makes me wonder if there's an entity that arranges all this things to happen together - maybe for us to learn more about ourselves, maybe for its own sick humour.

But the thing that I've noticed the most, is that everything is balanced - you can't win it all and you can't lose it all. So we all need to see one's cup as half full and help friends when they see their cup as half empty. That's the true meaning of life.