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!

October 14, 2008

Backposts Galore!

Like I said in ‘~traviscj/ lives!’, I was stupid and forgot the hard drives with my websites on them at home. But….. Google Cache came through and I just pulled all my posts from that. The big downside is that there’s now definitely going to be some weirdness with overlapping posts and soforth, which is a pain, but I’m not really sure how to get around it, other than just waiting until I can get the data off the disks again. So, if you came across my page from an old link, you probably won’t see what you’re expecting, at least until Google Cache re-pulls everything. I don’t think too many people have linked to me, which is actually a good thing this once, I guess. In any case, I have the dates, titles, and posts. Sorry I lost your comments, feel free to re-comment at will!

October 13, 2008

traviscj lives!

I finally got my blog running again. I don’t have the old data… oops. Forgot it at home. But in the mean time, at least I’m hosted again!

August 24, 2008

Mugged!

Friday started off a pretty decent day in Brazil. I finally got comfortable enough with my phrase book to start busting out phrases to the Taxi driver and it ended up making our taxi rides a fair bit more comfortable, quicker, and cheaper. So, there’s one place that Portuguese is coming in really handy, even if it is even just a tiny bit of it. It’s getting a lot more comfortable interacting with the native Brazilians here, probably for all of us, but it was pretty pronounced today, and I was feeling pretty good about it. I had intended to get some pictures at IMPA, so I happened to have my camera today.

August 22, 2008

More Updates from Rio

Sorry for not getting this updated a little bit sooner, but it has been an eventful week sortof. Apparently it’s been almost a week! Time flies, apparently.

Wednesday was pretty standard. More classes, more modeling, more cool climate stuff. IMPA has pretty good coffee for free on supply until 4pm, and all of us Seattlites are pretty much living on it, and on the verge of staging a coup when they try to shut it down. There are currently a bunch of very fun, very loud Irish guys outside the 9-bed dorm room, so everyone in our room is pretty sleep deprived. Hence the coffee addiction. We also finally formalized some ‘cab groups’, or a set of people we’re going to share taxis with for all the taxi rides we’re taking to and from IMPA and other places around Rio.

August 20, 2008

First Couple of Days in Rio

So Monday morning was really lazy. Some people went to get a volleyball, a bunch went down to the beach again, and I let my sunburn cool off. It was also really warm and sunny, which is a nice change from Seattle! We left for IMPA around 2, got on taxis to get over there, and eventually made it. The taxi drivers are apparently pretty vicious. We took 5 cabs, 3 got charged around 15, one around 20, and one 25. So they try to rip you off.

August 18, 2008

IN BRAZIL

I finally made it to Brazil. It was a very long and tiring flight, but I was seated next to a couple of very nice locals that fed me all sorts of useful information. I ended up pre-buying a ticket from the Taxi company, but apparently this is sortof a bad call, because they way overcharge if you don’t have them use the meter. Anyways, not too big of a deal. He took me right up to the hostel, and a bunch of familiar faces were there.

August 17, 2008

In Atlanta

Well, I made it at least as far as Atlanta. The Boeing 757 we flew in had touchscreens in each monitor that told me I’ve traveled 2326 miles so far. Landing was pretty smooth, and the flight was relatively easy. A bit longer than I’d expected, and a little bit more restless than I’d hoped.

I stopped to get some food immediately on arriving, somewhere called Krystal Hamburger. They have a Sausage Scramble Combo, a cup full of scrambled eggs, sausage, and grits! How awesome.

August 7, 2008

Whack it with an X squared!

David and I were working on our Math381 model, and I was getting frustrated because the data we collected and the results from the simulation were not lining up properly, which was quite frustrating. We were hoping to see something like this:

Number of Logins from Data

Instead, we were getting stuff distributed like this:

Simulated Number of Logins

I realized that we needed some function to force a bunch of this junk further left. Recalling an old adage from Mr. Cone’s AP Chemistry class, I decided it was the right time to whack it with an X squared. This is vaguely appropriate, because rand() has a range [0,1), so squaring it should put a whole bunch of stuff further right, but not everything(ie, the first half will end up in the first quarter, the first 3/4 will end up in the first 9/16, etc). Imagine my shock when I saw this: