I’m curious about i.am FIRST: Science is Rock and Roll. It will air this Sunday night at 7pm on ABC. I was mostly speechless during the segment of Science Friday that featured Dean Kamen and will.i.am. I have to confess that I actually teared-up out of joy. This week there was also news of a COSMOS sequel that will be airing on FOX. So glad a chance is being taken and the effort is being made to inspire and educate such a broad audience.
Continue reading

I didn’t expect learning of variations in Core 2 Duo processors and sockets while fixing my mom’s laptop to lead to interest in building a new PC, but that’s what happened. Shopping for parts takes too much time but I powered through, eventually narrowed it down, and made some purchases. Wanted something quiet and efficient (80 Plus Gold power supply, fanless graphics card, Core i5 2400, 8G RAM). Kristen mentioned Bioshock as a game I might like which gave me a performance-related goal.
Continue reading

I finally finished fixing up my mom’s laptop. Several mis-diagnoses later, and it’s back with the original fan, new processor, new thermal compound, fast maxed-out RAM, new battery, and new install of Windows 7. Whew. One CAN buy laptop processors on Ebay if one pays attention. The past few months have also taught me that some Amazon sellers will sneak a knock-off product to your doorstep. I attribute this to malice, and not a listing mis-match.
Continue reading

Recently I became aware that while teaching I sometimes go on and on for far too long. It usually happens when I realize a student isn’t “getting it” after a period of time, after the rest of the group has moved on. I address them personally, repeat the nugget on information, and then I may go into the “why” portion of what I’m talking about, after which I may go into variations that might be helpful to think about, and then I may go back to the original point and re-iterate.
Continue reading

Couldn’t pass up Tina Fey’s new book, Bossypants. I’ll start by saying that 30 Rock is the best comedy show on network television. And I’d be right. The Office faded fast. Family Guy got old after the 1st season. The Simpsons was probably good 10 years ago (though I was never a huge fan). But I don’t want to write about TV. So yes, Tina Fey… Heard her interview on Fresh Air and I had to buy her book.
Continue reading

Lately, the thing I’ve wanted to yell most at people is “pay attention!” It should probably be prefixed by “slow down!” People don’t read. They don’t listen to what others say. They don’t pay attention to the details. They apparently think they’re effective at multi-tasking at light-speed.
Continue reading

I continue to like Merlin Mann’s podcasts. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon Back to Work. Being familiar with You Look Nice Today I figured it had to be good, so I jumped in without a clue what it was about. Turns out to be centered on: fear happiness no-fluff life hacks creative work In episode 14, some things that really struck a chord with me were related to job unhappiness.
Continue reading

Been powering through Embedded Linux Primer. A few high-level things I’ve learned: initrd is old, initramfs is new initramfs uses a CPIO image (a type of archive that was new to me) to hold the initial filesystem contents Using TFTP to boot from a remote kernel and ramdisk sounds like fun, not to mention provides great flexibility for debugging. It’s not so hard to add extra items to the kernel config menu Learned some ins and outs of Das U-boot, and that support for using RAM has to be initialized by the bootloader otherwise you can only use stack memory.
Continue reading

My first motivation for investigating redis was due to an optimization challenge at work. Our network of websites covers track and field and cross-country. We have a database of 13 million performance records, and naturally our site provides visitors with the ability to view up-to-date rankings. Currently we use Sphinx for this, but Sphinx is geared for full-text search, and was quite slow (we’ve since optimized sphinx further, which I hope to write about later).
Continue reading

The supression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge. There is no place for it in the endeavor of science. – Carl Sagan (Cosmos Episode 4)
Continue reading