Super fast "du"

Have you ever tried to get a sense where is your disk space? I have.

First I'd run something like "df -h" and it'll tell me:
Useg: 490G, Available: 20M.

Then I'd run "du -ch --max-depth=1 | disk_use " to get a sense where are the bad guys. Then you do "cat disk_use | grep G" and proceed recursively.

This thing works, but it's really painful, because at the top level "du -ch" has to traverse the directory structure and compute the *exact total*. That takes too much time. I don't care about exact numbers. All I want is the estimate of where are the biggest data chunks are. *This estimate is really easy to get.*

We shall randomly select individual data pages(I mean inodes), find their respective top level directories and add +1 to each top level directory. If we do that for ~10K pages, we'll get a very good estimate as to which top level directories contain most data. If you want to get nubmers in KB, simply normalize them (make them sum to 1) and multiply by the total used space.

If you have some free time, please do it.

This insane world

Ok. Let's all buy organic and save the world. Doesn't work.

I got some tea from http://www.ineeka.com/.

It's all nice pictures, "cultivating consciousness", ..., nice stuff. The problem is that the tea comes in a metal box. Think about it.

One metal box for 20 tea bags?! How is that sustainable?

(the tea is good, though)

How to kill Google

I love Google. They create great software that I can use for free. The problem is they monopolized the market and significantly limited the competition. All of this is because their software is free. But is it? The software is not really free.

Google makes money by selling ads attached to our daily lives and that's the price we pay for using Google services. The problem is that Google bundles the services and the ads together. They have a monopoly on the service side due to their monopoly on the advertising side. And that is pretty bad.

So here's how to bring the monopoly down. We (ordinary people) should pay for the services we use. We will own all our data stored on the service, which is what we really want. As we own the data, we allow automatic sharing of it with some ads provider, who may then sell the ads space to the advertisers. Ads providers will vary by the cost of their ads, by how well they can match the ads to our intents and desires. This is precisely where Google is way ahead of the competition and should rightfully dominate that market (unless someone catches up). Of course, the ads provider will PAY US, not Google, for access to our lives and our personal information. It will then be our decision what ads we'd like to see and who serves better ads.


Bottom line: we should own our lives and pay for the services we use. The makers of the e-mail software get paid for the e-mail, advertising service providers get paid for the advertising. For some reason, it makes sense to me.