It was interesting to note that my personal experience over the years turns out to be true. If you just need to compress something with no fuss, and without needing to save every last bit of space, gzip is champ. It’s just one of the most efficient compressors out there. (It’s no wonder why Apache uses it to compress web pages prior to sending.)

Unsurprisingly, a proprietary alternative provided the best overall compression. However, once again in keeping with my personal observations, bzip2 and 7zip were both better choices than gzip for saving every last bit of space. But due to the efficiency differences between them I still stick with gzip.

One interesting thing to note here is that 7zip has support for multi-threaded compression. So if you have a multi-core or multi-CPU system, it can provide some pretty good results at a good speed. Unfortunately I can’t throw out any numbers to show how it performs when using the multi-threading setup as I tend to always just default to gzip anyway.

In the next shop entrance over was a woman, obviously living on the street much like the man I had just passed. But you see, she was literally living on the street, while the man was sleeping in a shop entrance. Where the man had a dirty sleeping bag and a cardboard box, the woman had a nicely furnished little living room/bedroom/garage combo. She had all of her belongings nicely arranged in the living area, her shopping cart was parked in the “garage” with a few old candles to mark the entrance to the living room and a collection of fresh orange peels on a makeshift end table made of stacked books.

Did I just say orange peels? The orange peels took me by surprise at first, but then I realized that this woman, living on a street with nothing but what she could fit into a shopping cart, had managed to outfit her residence with an air freshener. A feat which has thus far proven itself to be beyond the meager abilities of two bachelors living in a posh high-rise apartment. She has managed to turn this most inhospitable of sleeping areas into a home. And while I don’t imagine she’ll be having dinner guests over anytime soon, I must say that she’s living much better than most bums. I might even go so far as to say that her residence is more tastfully furnished than the residences of most bachelors.

For those who are wondering what the heck I’m talking about:

demonbane@Thief:~$ dig warez.debian.net
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 21790
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; ANSWER SECTION:
warez.debian.net.       2938    IN      A       127.0.0.1

And, for those who are reading this and aren't geeks, find out about localhost.

P.S. Congratulations on making DD Nico!

I spent some time browsing through their catalog earlier, streaming various albums to sample them before I came across The Dreamer’s Paradox by JT Bruce. I won’t even attempt to describe it other than to say that it’s Just Plain Cool©®™. Besides, you can just click the link and listen to it yourself because it’s not DRM encumbered, and the RIAA won’t come trying to break your door down. Or maybe they will. Maybe listening to free music will cause their downfall just like file-sharing hasn’t (yet).

C’mon RIAA, just try and have one of your marketing monkeys use “Just Plain Cool” ©®™. I dare you!