Gone until 2009

I am serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Belgium and the Netherlands until August 2009. See you then!

Clearwire

My friend told me today about an Internet service called Clearwire that his company is using. It’s very intriguing.

Clearwire works by providing wireless Internet to users through structures similar to cell phone towers. Once the user sets up a special router, he can connect his computer or network to it in various ways:

• Connect directly to the router
• Connect a conventional wired or wireless router to the Clearwire router
• Use ClearPlugs, which uses existing electrical outlets to send the signals

That last one is a bit baffling to me. Ethernet over electrical wiring? I haven’t been able to find much information on it, although this blogger says it isn’t very reliable. Hmm.

Speeds on the service are as high as 1.5 or 2 Mbps–certainly much faster than dial-up.

One advantage (or, some say, disadvantage) is Clearwire’s use of the licensed radio frequencies at 2.5 GHz. This makes it more secure than typical Wi-Fi, which uses unlicensed (and therefore more open but also more vulnerable) frequencies of 2.4 GHz. (Read the FAQ on their website, under About Clearwire.)

Law of language elegance

I read this excellent post on Derek Young’s blog today. In it he discusses the seeming paradox that elegant languages, such as Ruby and Haskell, are not as popular or widely used as the less elegant or plain ugly ones, like PHP and Perl. I found Paul’s comment particularly insightful. And rb’s comment was quite amusing–a good idea though probably impractical at present. At any rate, the post and discussion were very interesting to read.

As a side note, xmonad was written in Haskell. So I’ve got a Haskell compiler now. Maybe I should start learning it…

Binary addition still fascinates: Wooden adding machine

I took the Introduction to Computer Systems class at BYU earlier this year and learned quite a lot about how computers work on the hardware and low-level software levels. One of the topics, of course, is binary arithmetic. I had a friend who loved to do binary addition on his hands. It always amazed me how quickly and accurately he did it.

Today I ran across this post today which had a link to a video of a wooden binary addition machine created by Matthias Wandel. I think it’s fascinating, so here’s the video:

News archive search on Google?

This is just too funny. I was doing a Google search to find out if it’s possible to use Vim to display one file in two panes (so I can view one part of the file while editing the other). This is what I found at the bottom of the search page:

None of those articles had anything to do with Vim, of course. Is something wrong with Google news archive search?

UPDATE: It turns out it’s a piece of cake to open the same file in two panes–it’s the same as for any other file. :sp filename