So here i am after a pretty long hiatus. I somehow forgot i had a blog to maintain - no it was not due to amnesia or any form of dementia. A sudden onset of acute procrastination was the diagnosis; a disruptive trait for which i am still strictly following the prescribed treatments. For obvious reasons, i decline to state what they are as they are highly addictive for the curious minded. Sheesh! I should have been a doc.
Hmmm, a while back, helping do bug triaging for the KDE app Dolphin, i came across a feature request for an option to change the unit of measurement for the various folder & file sizes per the user’s preferences. Whereas most are familiar with the good old kilo, mega, giga SI decimal prefixes; binary prefixes for digital data: kibi, mebi, gibi etc, are totally off-radar. Wikipedia does an excellent job explaining what they are here. Although, this is really simple to implement –monkeying around with Dolphin’s source to produce a solution is fairly straightforward- KDE’s maintainers were just not going to make changes to the trunk to satisfy those of us weaned on the SI Units. A 6 year long thread on this subject follows the arguments for/against including it.
Despite their best intentions, until my granny can use a Linux distro without me on hand to explain what’s going on or the ‘apocalyptic’ event of Microsoft doing an Enron/Lehman…i pretty much have my shirt on folks not knowing what a kibibyte is. Say what?