01.25.05
Mac Mini
Article on the Mac Mini’s many uses. Interesting uses: PVR and low-end server.
01.18.05
ADSL at 23,000 feet
Just got off the phone with a SBC technician. Nice guy at their call center in Saint Louis. Very knowledgable. He said he works from 1pm to 10pm at night. I was pretty suprised to get a call at 9pm for my dsl. I was getting about 250kb up and 260kb down. Technically I should be getting 384down, and 128up. really weird. I realized this a couple weeks ago when I was uploading some images and was getting better upstream than down stream. So in anycase, the dropped the upstream bandwidth, and now i got 311down, 108up. The important thing though, is that the latency is more consistent. Anywhere from 60-100ms. This sure beats the intermittent 3000ms i was getting before.
I’ve had adsl as long as they have offered it in my area. The funny thing is that i’m at 23,000 ft from the CO. The technical limit of adsl is supposed to be 21,000 ft. I think they refuse customers now if they are on that limit. I was complaining one time, and the rep actually said something along the lines of if i didnt like the service, they’ll cancel it (b/c im on the fringe)…
way to go cool guy from St. louis. keep kicking people off the phone!
Paying for the name….
I found this article on slate about Who Needs Harvard?. Basically talks about how the percentage of Ivy League graduates are declining in US corporations. They attribute this to both the improvement of other schools and also the necessity of the rich to work.
My 2c is that the these days there is a extreme level of diversity among different fields. A small private university cannot offer a premier education for the great diversity in careers. On the other hand, larger public universities not only have the critical mass to offer specialized education in many diverse fields, but also can pool the resources necessary for each field.
A professor at school told me that university is derivied from the two roots: “uni” means everything, and “versity” meaning knowledge. What he was trying to tell me is that in a university, you have to learn a little bit of everything. I can see how this applies in a specialized sense. For example, learning computer science is ok, but if you have the opportunity to learn CS and business, or CS and something else, it gives you a better level of understanding how one topic of knowledge can relate to others.
Console Tips
Sometimes after cat-ing a binary file, my terminal goes a-wall and all i see are a bunch of liner characters. I found http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO.html that provides alot of useful info. The solution to my specific problem is:
% cat
^O
^D
Using ctrl-N instead of ctrl-O switches to line mode. Spsedly ESC-C is a general term reset. I havent been in a situation where this has worked for me.
01.11.05
Debian Linux on a Dell Dimension 3000
I just installed Debian using the Debian Installer (to be included in Debian 3.1). Installation was as smooth as one could hope. The only real problem arose when trying to configure XFree86 against the i810 drivers and the dell 15″ lcd.
This guy’s experience was pretty helpful. Running Linux on my Dell Dimension 3000. I had some trouble with the video card. Unfortunately, I didnt read the guy’s page closely enough. So i had quite a bit of problems detecting 1280×1024 at 75hz or 1024×768 at 75 using 24bit color. It wasn’t until I found http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-5862.html that I figured it out.
“XFree86 -configure” provided a pretty good configuration file. I added the “DefaultDepth 24″ and specified “Modes 1280×1024 1024×768″. Still had to link the mouse correctly and also setup wheel support.
Dell’s are a bit too cheap at times. This computer has a loud case fan. Really annoying
01.10.05
women have bigger hearts
Aricle on the bbc about Heart Key to Woman’s Longetivity. Basically they say that from 18-70, men loose a quarter of their heart’s pumping activity. Women on the other hand, dont. So they think this is why women live 5 years longer.
Luckily, they also say exercise will have preventative effects.
01.08.05
Free as in harder to use
Interesting article about free software titled Your software rights or the best tools: often a sad choice
Giving up function or convenience in trade for other more important benefits is a reasonable sacrifice, but what of the user’s rights? Should we give up everything for freedom?
Robot outsourcing
I found this semi-humorous article at the Motley Fool about Rise of the Machines at Toyota.
So, now we have machines that are pretty much capable of taking over the business of making other machines. It seems that all we have to do now is get them each an American Express (NYSE: AXP) card and teach them how to max it out, and we can take humans completely out of the loop. It shouldn’t be too hard. In fact, I’ll bet the cards are already in the mail — preapproved.