About 2 years ago I had already reviewed some parallel (and not) compressing utilities, settling at that time on pbzip2 – it scales quasi-linearly with the number of CPUs/cores, stores compressed data in relatively small 900k blocks, is fast, and has good compression ratio. pbzip2 was (and still is) a very good choice.

Yesterday I got somewhat distracted, and thus found lbzip2 -

an independent, multi-threaded implementation of bzip2. It is commonly the fastest SMP (and uniprocessor) bzip2 compressor and decompressor

- as it says in the Debian package description. Is it really “commonly the fastest” one? How does it compare to pbzip2? Should I use lbzip2 instead of pbzip2?

This minor distraction had grown into a full-scale web-search and comparison, adding to the mix plzip (a parallel version of lzip), xz, and lrzip. After reading thousands of characters, all of these were put to a simple test: compressing an about 2 gigabyte FASTQ file with default options.

All the external links and benchmarks, as well as my own mini-benchmark results, are provided below.

The conclusion is that out of all the tested compressors lbzip2 is indeed the best one (for my practical use). It is only slightly better than the trusty pbzip2, which takes the second place. All the other compressors performed so poorly, that they do not get any place in my practical rating…

So, let us first ask internet wisdom/foolishness, if lbzip2 or pbzip2 is faster/better?
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I have recently realized that my planning habits are quite similar to what The Secret Weapon promotes. However, my planning is not as elaborate and detailed/structured as TSW, and I am using several tools:

• Google Keep, an awesome note-taking and to-do lists application with a really good web-interface, and free;
• Trello, convenient lists/projects/tasks management platform (especially for group work), and free;
• Google Calendar, the de facto calendar standard for Android phones, and free;
• my A5 format weekly paper planner, and… the only not free component.

It is easy to see that I am using too many tools.

In an effort to use less tools, and also to try some of the features of TSW, I’ve performed a brief search for GTD/TSW-compatible Android apps.

TSW website is built around the Evernote app. However, I am not sure if this would be a good solution for me, as I have been already using Evernote since several years for longer-term note-keeping, and thus already have a bunch of notepads, notes, and tags there. Moreover, Evernote’s website mentions something about “offline notes” in the Premium (non-free) tier for mobile apps; this hints at the requirement to have internet connectivity to be able to work with TSW+Evernote efficiently through the day.

Oh, before I forget: all the 4 tools that I am using have their purpose, with overlap between Keep and Trello.
My A5 format paper planner (weekview compact 2015) is not a simple weekly planner; it has a structure that stimulates goal-oriented planning.
More specifically, it provides means to plan:
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Note: this is a rant. Unless you are specifically interested in the subject (keywords: delivery, hermes, failure, amazon), you should not read this.

I buy a lot on amazon.de – this is easy and convenient. Most of the time it also works good, with items arriving as promised or (mostly) earlier. Sometimes there are minor problems, but nothing worth remembering or mentioning. However, my latest order, “delivered” by Hermes Paketversand, was such a spectacular failure, that it deserves a blog post.

My item was expected to arrive on Tuesday, the 5th of August. In the evening of that day we found an important message from Hermes in our mailbox, saying that We were unable to deliver your package, we come again tomorrow, on the 6th of August. Hmmm. That is strange. My wife was at home in the 1st half of the day, when Hermes, supposedly, was delivering my package (I learned about their delivery time later from delivery tracking page). This is what I would call a minor problem, not really an issue. Maybe, for some reason, the door bell wasn’t heard, and our delivery did not reach us. But it comes next day, right? Right?…

There was absolutely nothing – not even a note – delivered in the following 4 days. On Saturday I started worrying. I checked Amazon package delivery status (detailed), which said that we have missed 3 (!) delivery attempts between 9:00 and 13:00 on August 5-7. I could have believed one miss, but three in a row, with my wife at home… that is extremely strange, to say the least. Anyway, I was ready to forgive this, as long as I get the package.
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Did you know that the creator(s) of BitCoin is/are unknown?
Did you know that the account which generated the Genesis Block is estimated to have up to 0.6-1 million BitCoins?
Did you know that the creator(s) of BitCoin disappeared from any BitCoin-related discussion and development forums a long time ago?
Did you know that 3 journalist investigations aiming to identify BitCoin creator(s) all ended up with different results?

This information is not available in one piece, but there are some of the pieces at the following URLs:

A mistery hidden in the Genesis Block
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
Four years and $100 million later, Bitcoin’s mysterious creator remains anonymous
Ted Nelson Says That Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto Is Shinichi Mochizuki
Where in the World is Satoshi Nakamoto?
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin

Below is a huge graphical brief history of Bitcoin, including the continued growth of its exchange rates.
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If you try starting Outlook 2010 and get an error like this:
“Outlook 2010 cannot open your default e-mail folders. An unexpected error has occurred. MAPI was unable to load the information service gwmsp1.dll”

you can easily fix this problem by going to Control Panel, clicking on Mail, then Show Profiles button.
Remove everything that’s there. Now start outlook again.

Note: removing all the mail profiles will disable your Novell Groupwise client.
If you still want to use non-Outlook email profiles, then the better solution is to manually create a new mail profile for Outlook.

Source: CNET forums.

All sane people agree that spam is a blight of the internet, be it email spam or comments spam or forum spam or any other form of unsolicited, blatant, shameless, out-of-context advertising. Multiple spam-fighting and spam-stopping systems are being developed.

With automated spam, automated spam-fighting systems might be the only choice. Sending rightfully angry emails to ISPs to notify about their customers violating service agreements is probably a waste of effort (something tells me most of these complaints end up in the trash folder, or even in the… spam folder). However, I get a feeling that some spam is not automated – it appears to have been actually prepared and sent by a human. (Alternatively, spammers behind those spams simply have better software.) Anyway, some spams seem to contain valid contact data of the advertized entity – like an email.

The resulting idea is very simple and was probably already implemented somewhere by someone: simply publish online contact emails of the entities which, apparently, had chosen spam as the primary means of advertising. These emails will be sooner or later harvested by spammers, added to spam databases, and will start getting progressively more spam.

There are a few drawbacks to this approach:

• knowing spam-collection points enables “black PR”-like mass-mailings in the name of one’s competitor, double-hurting the innocents; I do not see a clear method of preventing this, other than by concealing spam collection methods;
• human intelligence is required to identify if the contained email truly belongs to the advertised entity; this is fairly time-consuming, especially when scaled up; a possible solution (with its own problems) would be to build an online gateway for submitting curated spam samples, thus distributing the workload to all the participating volunteers;
• the next logical step is actually harvesting and then publishing all the emails from the advertised website;
• the biggest drawback, however, is low efficiency of this approach; increasing spam percentage will only be a mild nuisance, which isn’t likely to propagate high enough to affect spam-deciders; also, indirectly spamming someone’s mailbox will result in the loss of time, which could have been otherwise used for facebook and other important activities

What do you think? Should such a method be used?

Below I provide a few sample records from real spam comments, which had true-looking emails. I’m including some extra meta-data. Ideally, this should be stored in some kind of a database.

Submitted on 2013/11/13 at 15:23 GMT
Author : Виктор (IP: 95.134.110.37 , 37-110-134-95.pool.ukrtel.net)
E-mail : aionind@yandex.ru
E-mail : sale@aion-industry.ru
E-mail : info@aion-industry.ru
Submitted on 2013/11/26 at 8:53 GMT
Author : Виктор (IP: 95.134.146.235 , 235-146-134-95.pool.ukrtel.net)
E-mail : kvazargr@yandex.ru
E-mail : info@kvazar-gr.ru
Submitted on 2013/11/28 at 7:24 GMT
Author : Виктор (IP: 95.134.117.155 , 155-117-134-95.pool.ukrtel.net)
E-mail : relevater@yandex.ru
E-mail : info@relevate.ru
E-mail : support@relevate.ru
E-mail : billing@relevate.ru

There’s definitely a need for a public database, API keys, and quorum algorithms…

Author : casinoworka (IP: 91.207.4.201 , 201.4.207.91.unknown.SteepHost.Net)
E-mail : pharmacywork7777777@gmail.com
E-mail : info@prowessmedical.com

This is just a “Go to” dialog of the really good Notepad++ editor.