An ExpressCard SSD In A MacbookPro

 Computing  No Responses »
Apr 012010
 

Apologies to those arriving here looking for information relating to U***tu and the use of this ExpressCard SSD. There is nothing relating to it here – Google has taken you on a wrong turn.

So after a false start with the wrong product I end up with a Wintec Filemate SolidGo 48GB ExpressCard 34 Ultra SSD (which is specifically a PCI-based ExpressCard rather than a USB-based one which tend to be a lot slower). The specs on this thing claim 115MB/s read and 65MB/s write which compares to my hard disk with tested scores of 80MB/s read and 78MB/s write – so a lot quicker for reads and marginally slower for writes.

How does this translate into how quickly the Macbook operates ?

Well after quickly duplicating my “OSXBOOT” partition onto the new “disk” using carbon copy cloner onto the new disk (“SSDBOOT”) I can run a few benchmarks :-

Test Result for SSD Result for Spinning Metal
Menu -> Login 31s 27s
Word startup 5s 16s
du of MacPorts 34s 109s

Well apart from the slightly surprising result of the time taken to get from the Refit menu until the login screen being actually quicker for the spinning metal disk, the SSD is approximately 3.2 times quicker! Certainly a worthwhile performance boost … and presumably a suitably chosen SATA SSD would be quicker again.

Prevent – Unfairly Targetting Muslims?

 Politics  1 Response »
Mar 302010
 

The UK government’s Prevent scheme has been accused of unfairly targeting the UK’s Muslim community. Except for the “unfair” bit, it is fair to say it does exactly that – and that is what it was setup to do. Specifically to counteract those on the fringes of the Muslim community who target young Muslims and attempt to “radicalise” them in the hopes that they can be recruited into terrorism.

Young people tend to be passionate about what they care about, and that includes politics. They often want to see change at a faster rate than is realistic, which makes them vulnerable to extremists who want to use violence to achieve their ends. Imagine if an initiative such as Prevent were underway at the beginnings of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland  in the 1960s – would the terrorism have lasted as long as it did ? Well we obviously don’t know, but it is a shame that it wasn’t tried.

The fact is that young Muslims are more likely to end up as terrorists than any other particular group of young people. Radical Christians might end up bellowing out that we all sinners, but that is just irritating and bad manners. Young hedonists may end up making a mess on the pavement at peculiar times of the night; whilst we might disapprove, it hardly compares to a suicide load of explosives.

Now of course most young Muslims are not going to wind up blowing themselves and lots of innocent people up; they are not even going to take a trip to the kind of summer camp where you learn how an AK47 works. But some are at risk of becoming radicalised and becoming terrorists.

If we can target those who are at greater risk of becoming radicalised and somehow persuade them that it is a bad idea, we can both protect ourselves and those young people. Those who say this is unfairly targeting the Muslim community are ignoring the fact that this benefits the Muslim community as much as it benefits the rest of us.

Perhaps they should ask the parents of those young people who have been killed whether persuading their sons and daughters to take another path is unfair.

UK Election: Let’s Get This Farce Over With!

 Politics  No Responses »
Mar 282010
 

One of the tedious things about the UK election system is that we do not know when the election is coming, so before the date of the election is known we have a kind of “phoney election” where the politicians all go head to head being even more critical with each other than they usually are. And of course generating even more hot air than usual.

And then the election gets announced and all the tediousness goes into overdrive.

What for ?

Because of the election system in the UK, there are only a handful of seats (the “marginals”) where the result makes a bit of difference. If like most people you live in a parliamentary seat which is to a greater or lesser degree “safe”, your vote is effectively pointless and all the politicians making noise in your face about how bad the other politicians are, are just wasting of your time.

It seems that there are just 60 seats that are marginal enough to make a difference – 60 out of 646, roughly 9%. So only 9% of the population have a vote that counts! At least if we all vote more or less the way we usually do. Basically the political establishment counts on the majority of us acting like sheep.

The funny thing is that if politicians were honest and actually admitted that the voters in “safe” seats didn’t count, the normally safe seats would be up for grabs. So our electoral system accidentally rewards dishonesty! Kind of puts the expenses scandals into a new light doesn’t it ?

Of course even if you are one of the lucky few living in one of the 60 marginals, the election process takes far too long – who needs many weeks in order to make up their minds ? Most of us already know who we would vote for in the next election, so delaying it just allows the politicians to puff up their feathers.

Just remember we can always ignore the “big three” (Labour, Conservative, ad Liberal) and go for the independents and we might have a chance of getting some proper electoral reform rather than just a bit of tinkering around the edges.

iPhone: What’s Missing (5) – Multitasking

 Linux  No Responses »
Mar 232010
 

I am in two minds about the need for multitasking on the iPhone. I can see that it would be useful for applications such as music streamers such as the one for LastFM or Spotify (personally I prefer LastFM), but having multiple GUI programs running on a machine as small (in terms of hardware resources) as the iPhone could be problematic.

It could also make the iPhone less stable.

But there is a demand for running lightweight background tasks in a way with a only a small risk of interfering with the currently running GUI application.

It would be easy to allow too – just allow the iPhone application to fork a helper daemon with some means of controlling it. After all under that pretty skin, the iPhone is just an computer running OSX as anyone who has jailbroken it has probably found out.

Freebie Holidays for MPs ?

 Politics  No Responses »
Mar 222010
 

The BBC have tonight announced that numerous MPs have been accepting free trips for “research” (funny how the trips are always to fun sunny places though) and not declaring their interest. The MPs will undoubtedly claim that they need to make foreign trips to further their knowledge of far flung corners of the world.

Perhaps.

As someone who works in the public sector, if I were to get a free trip to say Barcelona on a jolly to look at some sort of IT trade fair paid for by an IT supplier, I would be very rightly likely to get sacked when discovered. Why should it be different for MPs ?

Being fair (although I’m not inclined to be fair to MPs at the moment), these MPs may well be genuine in accepting trips to learn more about places such as the Maldives, Cyprus, Gibraltar, and many other places. But it looks bad.

And not declaring the trip, and not declaring an interest when tabling a question has all the smell of rampant corruption.

Given the current climate of distrust in MPs, they should stop accepting these free trips.

Perhaps parliament should establish a yearly budget for research trips and allow MPs to fund trips out of this budget and when it is gone, no more trips to the sun. That at least will be much less likely to smell of corruption.

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