Daily Archives: March 14, 2009

Rant of a Geek

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So I destroyed the forum at Jer’s Software Hut. By pure blind luck—the purest and blindest variety of this luck: Extra Virgin Pure Blind Luck, I made a backup two minutes before destroying the forums. I have yet to restore the forums from the backup for reasons I’m not sure of, but the data is there, and I know I will be able to pull it off eventually.

So I have this file that should restore the database to its previous condition. Groovy. Only problem is, it doesn’t work. I’ll figure it out. But that’s not my beef here. My beef is about units. The maximum size for an uploaded restore file is 102 kKiB.

How big again?

There’s been a movement afoot to try to separate the binary “thousand” from the decimal thousand. Thus a thousand meters is a kilometer (km), and a 1026 bytes is no longer a kilobyte (kB), but a kibibyte (KiB). I’m down with that. It’s a distinction I already made in my head, and now it’s codified.

But then there’s 102 kKiB. No. No, no, no. You’re at three decimal point precision here, there’s really not any reason whatsoever to be mixing your numbering systems. (I’m cc’ing this message to the people at myPhPAdmin.) Why not just say 99 MiB? Every mainstream operating system reports file size in MiB (though they call it MB), so suddenly there’s no deciphering involved.

Maybe it’s just the residual physics geek in me, but units, properly used, make things simpler. I got out of a second semester of class by unit-analyzing my way through a test. I had no idea what the question was asking, but I knew what I had and I knew what units the answer had to be in, and most of the time that and a little calculus is enough.

But that has nothing to do with my current rant. My rant is this: 102 kKiB is really effing retarded.

I feel better now.

Edited to add: Apparently, the “MB” numbers on hard drives are the absolutely retarded 1000 x 1024 Bytes, or 1000 KiB, or 1 kKiB. Even though it’s stupid, I will swallow and not be annoyed when the unit is used in direct reference to a hard drive, for truth in advertising. In the case of a file upload, there is still no excuse.

Thanks!

Balaton

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The cheapest (large) beer at Little Café Near Home is now well over a buck fifty. My preferred beer is nudging up against two dollars for half a liter. Therefore I’m spending more time at the Budvar bar next door. Tonight, however, I stopped by LCNH to snag a bottle of wine. Tea, bless her heart, a fine and happy soul who understands that life is but a joke, redirected my eye from the 95-crown wine selection to the hungarian outlier. Twenty crowns. Today, about ninety-five cents.

It’s sitting on the table in front of me as I write this. I’m a little bit afraid. I will open the bottle tonight. I will drink at least some of the contents. It’s just my imagination I know, but I already feel the hangover coming on. But for science, it must be done. Wish me luck.

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Thanks!