Posted in reading, science on December 12th, 2006 No Comments »
Local scientists, ancient reptiles, volcanic eruptions, and Antarctica! All in one story! Really, this article was written precisely and exactly for me.
In brief, a paleontologist from Berkeley (across the Bay from me) was involved in a spectacular find: an almost complete skeleton (cartilage and all) of a juvenile plesiosaur, buried in 70 million year old [...]
Posted in hardware, linux on December 12th, 2006 8 Comments »
If you’re using a fairly modern laptop with an Intel chipset, the chances are that it has an Intel ICH7 I/O controller hub:
$ lspci | grep -i ide
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 01)
This usually means that your internal hard disk and CD-ROM/DVD drive (if you have [...]
Posted in software on December 12th, 2006 No Comments »
During a lunchtime conversation the other day, a coworker mentioned that he was hacking in his spare time on an entry for the Netflix Prize. This got me to thinking about collaborative filtering: why had I never seen a good description of how to do it? I suspect that people who might ordinarily have a [...]
Posted in reading, science on December 6th, 2006 No Comments »
Some time ago, I read a Nature review (subscription required) of Doug Macdougall’s “Frozen Earth“. As is the way of such things, after I ordered my copy, the book suffered several months of neglect before I finally had a chance to pick it up. However, once I started reading it, I quickly became engrossed, and [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on December 4th, 2006 No Comments »
I was shocked to read this evening about a local family that became snowbound for days in the mountains of southern Oregon; three of the four family members were rescued this afternoon. (This has apparently been big news around here, but I’m afraid I don’t follow the local news much.) The husband, James Kim, left [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on December 1st, 2006 No Comments »
I’ve used blosxom for a few years to manage my blog, and while I appreciate its simplicity and “Unix nature”, it’s not actually very usable. It’s difficult to extend; the code is impenetrable; and it’s been orphaned by its author, who has gone on to better things. For example, as I couldn’t find a simple [...]