Memory Mysteries Explored
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- Category: IBM Thinkpad T30
- Last Updated on Sunday, 16 June 2013 10:26
- Published on Sunday, 16 June 2013 10:25
- Written by LEW
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I am planning on measuring the memory usage of several different programs and configuration under Linux. As any who have delved into the world of Linux memory management will tell you, it is a strange and mystical place. Trying to determine actual memory usage is highly unlikely, if not impossible, for the casual user. While there are several programs that report out memory usage, what they report is generally not the whole story.
When you query Linux for memory usage, you get things like virtual memory, Resident memory, buffer memory, swap memory, etc, etc... A few words of explanation will help to clear things up and explain why the task of memory measurement is not so simple.
Space travel 101 - Sublight
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- Category: Posterum Tellus
- Last Updated on Tuesday, 11 June 2013 08:14
- Published on Tuesday, 11 June 2013 08:14
- Written by LEW
- Hits: 16
Since an integral assumption of Project Posterum Tellus is that space travel is possible, I should spend some time looking at the mechanics. When I say mechanics, I mean results, not how they are achieved. Rather than pontificate on some future modification of existing technology or a totally new technology, I choose to pontificate on the results.
As usual, a few basic assumptions for consistencies sake. I assume both Newton and Einstein are correct for normal travel. This way I can express my thoughts in a constant manner. I also assume future breakthroughs that push these structures to the limit. And finally a future breakthrough that allows surpassing these limits. Again, I am interested in results, not how it’s done.
Posterum Tellus - The Begining
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- Category: Posterum Tellus
- Last Updated on Thursday, 06 June 2013 15:46
- Published on Thursday, 06 June 2013 15:46
- Written by LEW
- Hits: 18
One has to start somewhere, so... In the Beginning… Well actually in the future. What will earth be like in the future? And what would human expansion to the stars look like? A couple of questions I am going to play around with. Play being the operative word here. This is not going to be definitive hard scientific work. Rather an intellectual exercise that will undoubtedly contain lots of personal bias and wishful thinking.
POVRay Star Map
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- Category: Digital Artist
- Last Updated on Thursday, 16 May 2013 17:58
- Published on Thursday, 16 May 2013 17:41
- Written by LEW
- Hits: 47
As part of my new project, Project Posterum Tellus, I wanted to create a graphical representation of the suns stellar neighborhood. I decided that POVRay was the perfect program to do this with.
There were two phases to this part of the project. The first was to determine positional information that is easily usable in POVRAY. This was easily done by querying the INTERNET.
The second part was to write the POVRAY script file to create the star map. This part exposed me to a number of POVRAY script commands that I have never used before.
Phase One
Did you know there were several coordinate systems in use today for star positioning? A short search turned up; Celestial Coordinate System, Equatorial Coordinate System, Horizon Coordinate System, Terrestrial Coordinate System, Elliptical Coordinate System, and Galactic Coordinate System. And if that is not enough, some systems can be expressed in both polar and rectangular coordinates. That is enough to make one’s head hurt.