Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

darktable 2.0 released

darktable

For those people who think Gimp is the only image editor on Linux, here’s darktable 2.0.  I mentioned it briefly before, but never linked to it.  Linux Weekly News has reviewed the release candidate recently.  Have a look at the features page – it’s quite extensive.  If you are more of a visual person, there here are a few screenshots.

Amazon Makes It Almost Impossible To Calculate Their “Virtual CPU” Equivalent

So, it looks like I’m not the only one trying to figure out Amazon EC2 virtual CPU allocation.  Slashdot runs the story (and a heated debate, as usual) on the subject of Amazon’s non-definitive virtual CPUs:

ECU’s were not the simplest approach to describing a virtual CPU, but they at least had a definition attached to them. Operations managers and those responsible for calculating server pricing could use that measure for comparison shopping. But ECUs were dropped as a visible and useful definition without announcement two years ago in favor of a descriptor — virtual CPU — that means, mainly, whatever AWS wants it to mean within a given instance family.

A precise number of ECUs in an instance has become simply a “virtual CPU.”

You are your phone

Fig 1
Barcode of smartphone use over two weeks.Black areas indicate times where the phone was in use and Saturdays are indicated with a red dashed line. Weekday alarm clock times (and snoozing) are clearly evident.

Here are a couple of quotes from the “You are your phone” article:

Even obscure variables such as how frequently a user recharges the phone’s battery, how many incoming text messages they receive, how many miles they travel in a given day or how they enter contacts into their phone — the decision to add last name correlates with creditworthiness — can bear on a decision to extend credit.

and

The test subjects used their phones more than five hours a day, on average. Much of that usage went on unconsciously, the researchers found. When the subjects were asked to estimate how often they checked their phone during a day, the average answer was 37 times. The tracking data revealed, however, that the subjects actually used their phones 85 times a day on average, more than twice as often as they thought.

It’s an interesting read, though not too surprising.

Amazon EC2 t2.nano instances

If you thought t2.micro was a tiny machine, I have news for you – Amazon announced t2.nano instance type.  It features 512 MB of RAM, 1 vCPU, and up to two Elastic network interfaces.  Price for on-demand instance – $0.0065 per hour.

This instance type is perfect for small websites, developer and testing environments, and other tasks which don’t require a lot of resource.

GitHub redesign

github interface

About a month ago, GitHub revealed its redesigned interface.  It gets better and better with every iteration.  But this time also got a feeling of deja vu, whic took me a while to figure out.  And finally I did.  The navigation menu went from right side to the top.  And it’s not the first time it’s there.

Here is a link to the Refactoring GitHub’s Design blog post (I linked to it before), which explains some of the design decisions and the menu on the right.  Among other things, there’s a screenshot of how things used to be before.  Have a look.

old-github

It’s not identical, but it’s pretty close.