November 26, 2009

TED Talks

I’ve been downloading a lot from iTunes recently, both in the form of TED talks and iTunes U videos. I’ll post about iTunes U later.

TED talks, for the uninitiated, are 5-20 minute lectures on something that someone(usually a researcher or philanthropist) has been working on to make the world a better or cooler place. I’ve been watching them the last few days, and they’re really great for hearing an opinion you might not, otherwise. A few of my favorites, in no particular order:

August 24, 2009

What could you possibly do with mathematics?

Recently, at a family gathering, I was confronted by the question many a college graduate is faced after telling someone I had majored in mathematics for my now-finished college degree: “But how are you going to make any money at that?”

Now, certainly it’s true: Graduate students don’t make that much. The average stipend for a grad student is roughly on par with (but still less than) unemployment checks. But that’s okay–in general, mathematicians know that they could make money other places, but they chose it anyways because of their love for the subject. Not that mathematicians make too bad of money anyway: The average in the US is about 50K, with associate professors making more than that. The particularly salary-inclined could pick up other credentials to become actuaries or work in hedge funds.

July 24, 2009

Goodbye, Walter Cronkite

I am in no way qualified to write a proper goodbye to the late Mr. Cronkite–him having retired a half-decade before I was born–but I have the greatest respect for the man, and wish in a lot of ways that I could have been around for it. On the other hand, reviewing videos of his newscasts, what strikes me is the massive impact and bleakness of many of these newscasts and how that contrasts with the emptiness of many more recent newscasts that I can recall. So most of my wistfulness revolves around our shared interest in spaceflight, his reporting obsession and a large source of my own scientific curiosity. I couldn’t say it better than Couric’s memorial commentary, which posited ‘It’s a measure of the man that he preferred the triumph of the space program to the despair in so much of the news,’ and that is certainly the way it was.

July 21, 2009

Blog Segregation

I’m slowly feeling more and more that I want some more compartments in my blogging. I’ve been thinking about stuff I want to blog, and stuff I don’t want to blog, and invariably they tend to get filed in both places. For example, I’d like to move toward a more professional blog that I could talk about my research, papers I’ve been reading, web sites I’ve found interesting, course projects, professional meetings, etc.

July 21, 2009

Wiki Problems

I really like the idea of having a wiki website. It’s great to be able to share documents really easily, be able to edit stuff without logging in, track changes you’ve made, and so on.

I have also tried quite a few wiki setups, including MediaWiki(mostly at a job a while back and a spectacular success), MoinMoin, and PmWiki. However, each of them fell flat in a certain annoying way.

May 30, 2009

MySQLdb module in Python on Ubuntu

To install the mysqldb module in python on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb

May 27, 2009

A Quick MySQL Reference

I got frustrated with not being able to write MySQL because I don’t do it often enough to be seeing it in my nightmares like MATLAB. But recently my datasets got annoyingly huge and it seemed like SQL might be a boon to me. So I set out to write a quick little program, and ended up writing this little reference along the way.

Also, Sharvil Shah contributed some comments to it, so thanks to him for that!

May 27, 2009

Netlib

Wow. Just wow.

April 19, 2009

Northwestern University

I finally committed to graduate school a few weeks ago. I’ll be headed to Northwestern University in Evanston, IL for the [Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics]](http://esam.northwestern.edu) department.

I really enjoyed both the visit at University of North Carolina and Northwestern the week before last. But I think I could like Chicagoland quite a lot, so I guess that’s where I’m headed!

April 1, 2009

Found - Wordpress Spam Virus in Theme files

Almost a month ago, I was helping my good buddy Beals get his Wordpress website set up. On looking close, I noticed something a little weird in a theme he had found(NOT Wordpress proper, to be clear):

D-69-91-134-36:black-abstract-20 tjohnson$ ls -alh *
-rw-r--r--  1 tjohnson staff  528 2008-07-24 08:35 404.php
-rw-r--r--  1 tjohnson staff 3.9K 2008-07-24 08:35 comments.php
-rw-r--r--  1 tjohnson staff 8.0K 2008-10-22 20:44 footer.php
-rw-r--r--  1 tjohnson staff  871 2008-10-22 10:10 functions.php
[more removed here]

As you can see, the footer and functions files are both modified much more recently than every other file, which seemed strange to me. So I took a look at the file: