Fnord.

One would think that mechanical watches, being obsolete and all, would be mostly confined to Asian markets, high-end stuff for the rich and crazy, and a tiny slice of watch fans like me. After all, quartz works better, costs less and is easier to make.

Timex quit making mechanical watches back in the 70’s or so. Fossil has never made them as far as I know. Both are now selling them, for very reasonable prices. The Fossils are all under $100, and the Timexes look reasonable as well. Both have some nice touches - the Fossils have the winding rotor visible through the face, and some of the Timexes are equipped with power reserve meters.

Marvelous! A couple pictures:

I had previously disdained Fossils; they seemed to be fashion-oriented, cheaply made and often copied other designs. Guess I have to think again, because I quite like some of these and the price is excellent. And who would have guessed about Timex? This power reserve looks quite nice:

Saw this posted to a mailing list, and thought it interesting.

Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun

The article has been thoroughly debunked, but the graph shows the problem. Quite something, eh?

More good info at piggington.com.

With the loaner Sun T2000, we’re trying to build code that does serious math, using the C++ STL and the magnificent GNU GMP library. I finally got to the point of getting a clean build and link on Solaris, only to get this:

  ld.so.1: radical: fatal: /usr/local/lib/libstdc++.so.6: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32

Much googling led to the email thread. The fix?

  typeset LD_LIBRARY_PATH_64=/usr/local/lib/sparcv9:/usr/local/lib

Now we’ll see how fast this machine is compared to my G4 laptop. Lots of integer math, lots of data movement, should be well suited to the Niagara architecture:

Niagara signals the first volley in a new way of thinking about servers, or at least a class of servers. The whole idea of Disruptive Threads, as Marc Tremblay calls, it is quite real, and it will take a while for many people to understand, much less use. Threads, threads and more threads, that is what this chip lives for.

A superb article on ‘marine deck chronometers,’ with some stunning photography and (really, seriously) fascinating history.

Cool.

A couple of weeks ago, I started using Camino for web browsing. It’s a mac-native browser based on the Firefox engine.

I really like it. Faster than Firefox, much more mac-native as far as integration, look-n-feel, widgets, Keychain integration, etc.

Works well, renders more stuff than the KHTML-based browsers, free, highly recommended.

Say hello to the sapphire samurai. For a little while at least, mine is one of a kind. Full review and details to follow, but I had to post this picture to admire. Purty, eh?