November 8, 2008

Fame and FORTRAN

I must be getting more popular on some search engines somewhere. I just got six random comment-spam messages. Awesome. I guess that’s why the more important bloggers have come to rely on Bayesian filters and soforth for taming the wild flow of spam. Hopefully that trend doesn’t continue.

Also, it seems as though I am now learning FORTRAN. I’m sortof starting working with Eric Shea-Brown on some Neuroscience research, working with HPC on NSF’s Teragrid. It’s pretty exciting stuff, and I’m really excited about getting moving on it. Anyways, back to FORTRANizing, I suppose.

October 31, 2008

Boom De Yada

I think I’ve already told most of my friends about this… but it’s just way too awesome to not have documented somewhere. Doubly-pronged awesomeness, actually: - The Discovery Channel’s Boom De Yada video. - XKCD’s Boom De Yada comic strip always makes my day that much better.

October 28, 2008

Happy Birthday to Me, Pt. 2

As always, a picture’s worth a thousand words:

upgrade to 4gb

October 26, 2008

Getting an AMATH Minor at the University of Washington

One of the secret gems at the University of Washington is the minor in applied math option. At least I think it’s somewhat secret. Most of the people I tell about it haven’t really heard of it. But yeah, here’s the deal: You only need to get through calculus and four more classes to get this minor! And a lot of programs require calculus anyways. I’ve taken most of the undergrad AMATH courses, so I figured I’d write something up about which ones I recommend the most.

October 26, 2008

Happy Birthday To Me

I should have written this up sooner, but I guess it worked out well because the last of it didn’t happen until just recently.

My friends did a fantastic job of throwing me one hell of a birthday this year. Beals made it up a little bit early to begin the celebrations with food and manly stuff. Then Katie and I had a joint birthday dinner at Boca de Beppos. Tuesday Sharvil and I made it out for a while. Wednesday we had a nice dinner at Shultzy’s, though they’re kindof in the doghouse for the service that night. Thursday Jackie took me out to Sonrisa, which was absolutely delicious. And finally, Friday night Jackie gathered up a bunch of the Brazil crowd into Finn MacCools, and it was absolutely wonderful to see them all.

October 26, 2008

Smart People Shows

Sharvil and I started watching Numb3rs today, from the pilot episode. We both basically decided that it’s really nice to watch shows that are sortof motivational in a way. Admittedly, they’re mostly designed to motivate you to watch more shows… but I think Numb3rs has been an important show for me, if for no reason other than motivating me to keep working on stuff when I’d rather not or when I’m nearly too frustrated to keep going. (I have been watching it for a couple years now, if that wasn’t obvious). Anyways, it’s usually worth the Numbers Painfully Awkward Lines and just general cheesiness and admittedly odd scenes. (Look up Numb3rs on TheRecapist and prepare to giggle a bit.) And it turns out a fair bit of the math is pretty legit, even if usually the equations he’s writing on the boards are sortof generic and not necesarily what he’s talking about.

October 22, 2008

A few more exotic uses for older hardware

There are tons of posts on the internet about what to do with older computers. In general, they say some of the same things: Linux/Firewall, Media Server, and ‘BitTorrent Box’. (Incidentally, the lattermost somewhat confuses me. I guess people want to download files on a separate machine in case it has viruses or whatever… but if you’re using bit torrent so much that it’s worth having a separate box for, you’re probably still gonna be upset if a virus takes it out. Or you could just use antivirus or an alternative OS. But I digress.) Anyways, for the uses I’ll outline here I’m going to assume that you (at least roughly) fit into the prototype of ‘I have a pretty decent computer sitting around that never really gets used.’ In my case, I tend to upgrade and want to keep the old one around because it’s still a pretty decent computer, but want to use the newer one for bigger and better things. Like reading xkcd and refreshing google news over and over again. Heh.

October 20, 2008

Ubuntu Hacks -- Flash, Java, e17

This must be about the 1 millionth time someone’s written a blog post about this, because I waded through a ton of them to get ones that worked. Which means someday, someone will be wading through 10 million websites trying to get their Flash, Java, and e17 working.

For the browser issues, I found this thread on the Ubuntu forums. In short, you download the first file listed(the Browser Install Script), untar it, and run it. It will download and install the 32-bit libraries, 32-bit browser, and plugins from the set of {Flash, Java, VLC}. The only trick then is rewriting your scripts to use firefox32 instead of just firefox.

October 19, 2008

Minor OS X Shell Shortcomings

In spite of the fact that a lot of people seem to loathe the colorized ls functionality, I sortof grew up on it(so to speak). OS X, by default, does not have this functionality(well, at least, GNU’s –color option never works). I figured the quick and easy way to solve this was to install coreutils, but I found another option. It appears OSX included a version of ls that works with ls -G. The coreutils one is (by it’s virtue as a GNU tool) probably more feature-driven, but realiasing it as

October 15, 2008

Themes!

In all of my time with wordpress, I’ve pretty much stuck to the default themes, figuring that what I had to say was a bit more important than what I was doing with it. But then I came across one with some fluid dynamics going on… and I couldn’t pass it up. Maybe someday I’ll get around to throwing some of my own graphics up there, hehe. Enjoy!