Category Archives: Software

Joke, Philosophy, Software

Bad news are good news

e! Science News reports a new study in EPJ Data Science by Marcel Salathé showing that anti-vaccination sentiments spread more easily than pro-vaccination sentiments.

We find that the effects of neighborhood size and exposure intensity are qualitatively very different depending on the type of sentiment. Generally, we find that larger numbers of opinionated neighbors inhibit the expression of sentiments. We also find that exposure to negative sentiment is contagious

Read the full paper for the tricky design – at least the results fully underpin daily life experience. It’s certainly much easier to do Twitter than Facebook studies on the other hand these rather short messages are certainly not the main channel of many great “opinionated” people.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 19.09.2026
Software

Add geolocation barcodes to travel guides, conference leaflets, etc please

There are so cute little files while I am constantly looking up addresses in travel guides, madly identifying them at google earth before transferring location bookmarks to my mobile devices.

Why can’t publishers produce just some small geo.kml or geo.rdf files, deposit them somewhere on their web server and link them with barcodes that are printed each time a geolocation is referred too (example link Groebenzell)?

The iPhone needs a slightly different form (without kml) as well as an app like i-nigma that is pointed by this barcode

QRCode

to maps://?geocode=&q=gr%C3%B6benzell&ie=UTF8&client=safari&oe=UTF-8&hnear=Gr%C3%B6benzell,+Oberbayern,+Bayern&gl=de&t=m&z=14">Groebenzell.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 19.09.2026
Genetics, Philosophy, Software

A broken contract

Erika Check Hayden ( who asked me by email before she wrote that piece ) has a new article about “A broken contract – as researchers find more uses for data, informed consent has become a source of confusion. Something has to change“. While I largely agree with her analysis of the current situation, her points for change are somewhat weakly described ( BTW that paper already generated a heated discussion at The Mermaid’s Tale: “Informed consent — who’s it supposed to protect, anyway?” ). Continue reading A broken contract →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 19.09.2026
Software

A Word file that crashes the Macbook hard disk

Believe it or not, I was editing this week a document that I received by email. After 3 minutes Word Mac 2011, Version 14 crashed, leaving only a temporary file back on my OSX 10.7.4 desktop.

As restarting Word did not work, I used disk utility, that recommended to be started from another disk.

When doing so, it recommended to reformat my hard disk (which I did). Continue reading A Word file that crashes the Macbook hard disk →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 19.09.2026
Software

Sync Lion desktop via iCloud

While all that sync’ing works quite well, I still have different desktops on my MacBooks.
Here is a solution that is based on some undocumented feature of the iCloud that I have found at macstories.net. It basically needs to activate the iCloud settings also for files which will give you in Lion access to a magic 5 GB ~/Library/Mobile Document folder very much alike to Dropbox.
I am rsyncing here now my Desktop folder by an automator action as described at banana.com. Can be done in less than 5 minutes…

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 19.09.2026
Philosophy, Software

Infinite stupidity?

This is a new Edge conversation with Mark D Pagel.

A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. Continue reading Infinite stupidity? →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 19.09.2026
Software, Video

Computers are like bicycles for our mind (Steve Jobs)

or in his won words

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 19.09.2026
Joke, Software

Less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries

I have seen recently a TV documentation about the Dabbawalas in Mumbai who deliver freshly cooked food to the workplaces and return the empty boxes back to the customer’s home. According to Wikiedia.

In 2002, Forbes Magazine found its reliability to be that of a six sigma standard. More than 175,000 or 200,000 lunch boxes get moved every day by an estimated 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality Continue reading Less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 19.09.2026
Software

A Mac OSX journalling error can inhibit the boot disk to be mounted

The screenshot below shows my desperate search why my Macbook wouldn’t boot again (following a cold reset writing a large Photoshop CS5 file for more than 15 minutes).

The verbose boot mode (APPLE+S) showed some error with the journalling system, basically an error as described at the currently non functioning Apple Support Board

jnl: replay_journal: bad block list header @ 0x4bra50 (checksum 0xega0fee1 != 0x927a5993)
jnl: journal_open: Error replaying the journal!
hfs: early jnl init: failed to open/create the journal (retval 0).

Unfortunately nothing helped. Booting from an external disk just showed a normal, error-free HD in disk utility. Continue reading A Mac OSX journalling error can inhibit the boot disk to be mounted →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 19.09.2026
Software

Optimized SSD under OSX

Having now a SSD in use for more than one year, here are my accumulated tweaks. The first one is Smart Sleep which greatly enhances sleeping/wakening time. Disabling the motion sensor (“sudo pmset -a sms 0”) doesn’t hurt but is isn’t really necessary. Mounting the SSD noatime , however, gives a measurable performance gain. And at the end, I dropped that RAM thingy as it breaks with every system update.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 19.09.2026