I’m not a big fan of registering my email address all over the place, but the latest flood of comment spam finally made me get a WordPress API key in order to be able to activate the Akismet plugin. I’m not a 100% sure how this thing is supposed to work, but it successfully identified spam on a re-scan already.
So, spam bot, if you are reading this – don’t you even try…
Yesterday I wanted to help pushing large chunks of log data (30G) through a ridiculously low-bandwidth channel. I remembered reading about Con Kolivas’ lrzip and wondered whether it would provide better compression than bzip2 in this case. So I ran a little benchmark on a 1G chunk of data and compressed it with bzip2, lrzip and p7zip.
| ratio | time | compr. | cost | |
| bzip2 | 7.14 | 05:45 | 100.00% | 100% |
| lrzip | 7.26 | 24:33 | 101.76% | 427% |
| p7zip | 8.42 | 28:13 | 118.01% | 490% |
OK, so I’ll stick with bzip2 for now. At least for that kind of data lrzip is not really an option – ~330% extra effort to get less than 2% improvement just doesn’t seem worth it. I have to say I am impressed what kind of compression p7zip (or better 7-Zip) can achieve but it is very expensive nevertheless. I like the fact that it seems to utilize all available CPUs automatically, though (in realtime it ran only ~19 minutes on a hyperthreading machine).
Finally I remembered to pack my real camera before jumping into my car yesterday morning. So here are the results of my latest experiment in tunnel photography. The first two are using the traditional technique, the third features a slight deviation to reveal more of the original image.
Additionally I took some non-tunnel images and ran them through the ‘convergence’ process. The last image is an original photo (no convergence here) – I merely applied some Selective Gaussian Blur to reduce the noise.
I assume these wallpapers should keep me going for a while. Maybe I’ll make some dual/wide screen edits sometime. As ‘usual’ Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 applies.