This is another great quote by Pablo Picasso. And another one that is not easy to understand. This is just one possible explanation:
Picasso hardly meant that great artists steal popular designs whose original source is known to everyone. What Picasso did mean was that great artists rummage through the great junk heap of lost, bypassed, and forgotten ideas to find the rare jewels, and then incorporate such languishing gems into their own personal artistic legacy.
(via Joel On Software forum)
Ed shares this story with us, via a friend of Pablo Picasso.
I was staying with Picasso in his studio. Every day, dealers would come by to authenticate paintings they were trying to sell… they would ask the painter if the painting was real or a fake.
A dealer came by one day, Picasso glanced at it and without hesitating said, “fake.” Later that day, two more were identified as fakes.
The second day, a different dealer came by. Picasso hardly looked up. “Fake!” he bellowed.
After the dealer left, I couldn’t help myself. “Picasso, why did you say that painting was a fake? I was here, in this studio, last year when I saw you paint it.”
Picasso didn’t hesitate. He turned to me and said, “I often paint fakes.”
(via Seth)
One possible explanation (via Rabbi David Gaffney):
The notion that a person is creating fakes when they fail to live up to their capacity has far-ranging artistic implications. The contention that the second-rate is second-rate, even when it is executed by first-rate people, is particularly worth proclaiming in an age when geniuses are discovered and proclaimed weekly. There is always room for the near-miss and for the clearly second-rate. But the standard for outstanding accomplishments must inevitably be lowered if no one bothers to distinguish the good from the not quite good enough.
TylkoZyczenia.pl – my new Rails website is now live. It’s Polish language only and it will probably stay this way. Basically, it’s a site with collections of wishes for various occasions, like Christmas, New Year, birthdays and so on. At the moment it’s not very different from other, similar websites (and there are lots of them in Poland) apart from the fact that my design, in my humble opinion, is leaner and much more clearer/simple than the others (aka simplicity all the way). I have some ideas to make this site different (read: better) from the others, though. Stay tuned.
It took me about 2 months of intensive, after-hours work. It’s the first version, which is usable to be online (meaning that basic stuff, like registering and adding new wishes work. The TODO list is quite big…). Enjoy!
32. Polish Film Festival. 5 days of screenings. 18 movies seen. I had the chance to experience some of the best Polish cinema ever. I’m a big movie fan and as I’m from Poland I try to watch every possible Polish movie I can (and no, I’m not that patriotic, I was thinking about emigration many times…). Each year it’s different. There were better years, there were worse years. But this year the festival has surpassed my expectations by a very large margin. Most movies were outstanding. This was one of the best if not the best Polish Film Festival ever. Every Polish movie I have seen was either very good or great. There was only one bad movie in the whole main competition, namely Braciszek, so there is no usual Top 5 of the worst festival movies. Here are the best ones:
I miss those festival days so much…
During the festival I was also a photographer (or rather a photo reporter). Here are the links to my work:
And since I could not decide which pictures to put up here, I’m presenting you the best three of the many I took:
The three pictures above are Copyright © 2007 Onet.pl
[mp3]/files/djohn-skips.mp3[/mp3]
D-Jon by way of KLB – It Skips But It’s Awesome
(via project.ioni.st)
It’s been over a week since the 7th Era New Horizons Film Festival has ended. Same as last year, I’ve spent 11 days in the cinema. As always, the time has passed quicker that I could imagine. And as always, it was worth every second of it! Although I must say that the movies selection was not as good as that in 2006.
I’ve watched 51 movies. It was as much as one could watch as there were 10 regular festival days with 5 screenings a day plus the opening day with only one screening. I’ve spent about 1150 zł (circa 420$) on the whole festival (accreditation, accommodation, meals, etc.).
See you next year? Oh, and say no to French cinema! ;)
All my career, I’ve been fascinated by the fact that the universe looks not just beautiful but in some sense deeply ingenious. It looks like it’s been put together in a way that makes it work exceptionally well. I suppose the most striking example is that the laws of physics and the various parameters that go into those laws seem to be just right for life. If they were even slightly different, it’s quite likely there would be no life, no observers, and no people like you and me having this conversation.
Excellent read.
During the recent move of my development machine to the basement I’ve conducted a test telling me what is the actual power consumption of my new Core 2 Duo powered server. Basically, it is a normal PC: Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz, 2 x 512MB DDR2, 2 x 250GB SATA 7200rpm (RAID 1), old PCI graphic card and a 350W power supply. All running latest Ubuntu (currently 7.04 Feisty Fawn, server edition). Since it is a development machine, it’s idle most of the time (98% or even more). And this is the state I was making my measurements in. So what are the results? Well, I was quite surprised how low my power consumption actually is. I took three tests, which indicated basically the same: about 77 Watts. Even taking into the account temporary power usage spikes (when I’m actually using the machine…) it shouldn’t cost me more than 4$ per month to keep it running 24/7. Isn’t that sweet? ;)
Actually it was more like I was losing my mind, not my Ubuntu…
But let’s start from the beginning… I have two identical 250GB hard disks so I’ve decided to create a RAID array out of them. Not a system (bootable) one as I had too much trouble setting it up (I’ve set it up but dist-upgrade broke it all too nicely; kernel panic, etc.). I’ve set up a separate 5GB system partition on the first drive, leaving the rest for RAID. This left me with 5GB of free space to spare on the second drive. Smart as I was, I decided to clone the system partition from first drive to the second one, using dd, so I’d still be able to boot if either of the drives crashed. I called it semi-RAID built-by-hand and, well, I was quite proud of it. All seemed fine as months passed (and remember, that this was a server and as such almost did not require any reboots). But time passed and suddenly there was the new Ubuntu out, the Feisty one, so I decided it was time to upgrade. As I had some minor troubles during the upgrade (obsolete packages, invalid config files that I ordered to keep, etc.), I was rebooting every few minutes. And this is where fun comes in…
After a successful upgrade to 7.04 the screen greeted me with a 6.04 prompt. Hmm… strange. Let’s see what’s going on. Okey, so this upgrade actually did go so well. No problem, let’s do it again. This time I did not reboot, but kept making other changes. At some point I had to reboot, though. Now I was scratching my head really hard. Some packages, I knew I had uninstalled previously, kept coming back. I was making changes to various config files only to see those changes not being written to the disk after rebooting. Like, WTF? Now I was rebooting like crazy… losing my mind more with every reboot. I was making directories like THIS-IS-FIRST-HARD-DISK-FOR-SURE only to see them disappear and reappear a couple of reboots later. I was almost crying with despair. I’ve came up with the idea to compare /dev/sda1 with /dev/sdb1. Funny thing, they turned out to be the same. Who knew, maybe my RAID-by-hand automatically turned into a real one?
I had dark thoughts. I was thinking about giving up on having two identical hard disks inside one PC and maybe about downgrading to Edgy, not even knowing whether that was possible. I was even thinking about giving up on those two 250GB disks. I was really desperate. I knew, I needed a break.
10 minutes and one glass of cold water later I was on the mission to find out what is exactly wrong with my Ubuntu. Or my PC. Or my hard disks. Or the world around me.
It wasn’t easy. The df command reported my system being on /dev/sda1. Mounting /dev/sdb1 did not help as it has been showing me the same partition. But then came the bright idea to try and mount /dev/sda1, despite it being already mounted. To my surprise it turned out to be a completely another partition! The lost one! The one I missed so much. I was in heaven, so I started googling, because by that time I just knew it had something to do with those weird UUIDs. And I’d found out that I was not alone. I was so happy…
Now I know that my mistake was to make the exact clone of the system partition and have those two partitions (with the same UUIDs, yeah, unique ids my ass) available at the same time. No wonder my Ubuntu felt schizophrenic, but it still does not justify all of this weird behavior I was greeted with. Some error, some syslog entry, anything would be helpful… is that too much to ask?
What I was left with after I’ve figured it all out was this nice free disk space report (notice the double /dev/sda1 entry):
$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Monuted on
/dev/sda1 5162796 1650512 3250028 34% /
(..)
/dev/sda1 5162796 1558632 3341908 33% /mnt/disk-aThe root of the problem is that I base most of my core linux knowledge on the RedHat from the 90s when /dev/hda1 was saint and meant exactly what it represented, namely the first partition of the first hard disk (presumably connected using the first cable and set as master). With UUIDs all this has changed. Apparently for the better, but leaving some folks like me scratching their heads with disbelief.
Yes, Ubuntu is Linux for human beings. Apparently not for all…
PS: For future reference, remember to set the UUID after doing any partition duplication using dd. You do it like this:
tune2fs -U random /dev/sdb1