Giant human skeletons - Divaina reporter misleads the public

"Sunday Divaina" reporter misleads the pubic in an article published in 2007-Sep-16 edition describing a discovery of giant human skeletons. These two photographs (The one showing the human skeleton appeared on the article) show how smarter the original image has been converted. The original photo is a skeleton of mastodon where you can see a tusk at the bottom right corner. Notice it is in the same position in the edited version and also the man at the bottom is in same action.

When you see something like this, anybody who has an Internet connection can brows and check whether the news is true or false. But if you don't have access to the Internet, you have been "Digitally Divided", huh! . But in this version of new digital divide, in addition to the lack of access to information you get cheated by others who have the access.

Both of the images has been in the Internet since some time and there are lot of discussions and blog posts on them. But the news reporter has not investigated enough to find out whether the news is true or not. Divayina is well ahead than the other newspapers in the country but they should pay more attention to this sort of things.

Theory and Practice

Whenever it comes to the implementation of best practices, it is very hard to convince people the advantage of following them. Recently I did a presentation on SCM Patterns where people found that most of the best practices I explained are the same as they already following. To a certain extend their thinking is correct, but what it implies is not that they are really following them but the fact that those priciples are quite apparent.

Sometimes I advocate people to adopt to 5S. But in that case the respond is much worst. Everybody thinks that they are already following 5S or it is very simple to follow them, but both beliefs are wrong. It is the simplicity and obviousness which prevent them from accepting its validity and usefulness.

This is where you do need a field visit. I have worked in manufacturing plants where 5S has been implemented very successfully. There is a huge gap between what one can imagine and what can be really implement if everybody is willing to contribute.

Sweet download accelerator for Linux

It is axel, http://wilmer.gaast.net/main.php/axel.html. You can specify the number of connections, multiple servers etc. Interesting thing is that you can limit the bandwidth it takes so that you can save some bandwidth for other programs to consume.

Here is a sample command for download ubuntu iso image from 3 servers with 50 connections.

axel -v -a -n 50 http://{mirrors.xmission.com/ubuntu-cd,us.releases.ubuntu.com,
mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com}/dapper/ubuntu-6.06.1-server-i386.iso

This page has some additional information on usage. http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/download-accelerator-for-linux-command-line-tools.html

Have fun.