fedora core 2

seems to work for me. it's nice and slick.

amd64 slow

linux and freebsd testing.

counting primes naively by testing against all odd numbers from 3 to sqrt of candidate. i386 1.3ghz (pentium m) and 1.4ghz (athlon) runs to 2^30 around 30 seconds.

linux box at work runs to 2^24 in a minute.

amd64 1.6 ghz runs to 2^24 in a minute (native compile with 4-byte int)
and 90 seconds in 8-byte ints

so the compilers suck.

1and1 free account

1and1 free account sucks. i can't download all the stuff i was hosting on there. they've blocked out my ip only after slurping a few files.

Fedora Core 2 DVD

It's annoying. I've been trying to burn the i386 Fedora Core 2 DVD on a Sony 8x DVD+-R/RW burner and it just isn't working. The RWs come out fine, but the +R -R isn't passing the media self check.

Time to go back to CDs.

Why not to do careful projections

Big companies and governments do careful projections. This causes them to move slowly and cautiously. Small companies don't have the resources to do careful projections. Consequently, they are more agile, adapt quicker, take more risks, and tailor more to the customer--perhaps at higher prices.

comcast mail crappy

slows down sending attachments. faster to email from yahoo. i tested with gmail receiving.

cheap hosting with root access

jvds and goldvision

Screw Scanners

Grabbing a lot of scans in a short period of time requires a digital camera!

1GB Email

Slashdot did a 1GB email piece mentioning spymac and rediffmail.

Rediffmail is chocking on a 5mb picture attachment.

Spymac is screwing up on my fascist cookie settings.

Google mail is doing fine.

Comcast didn't even seem to get the message.

House Buying

I'm now in the muck of house buying. After looking slowly for two years, tons of financing for a down payment is coming through. It's time to be motivated and finish.

There's lots of other things I want to do around now. MCAT scores came in across the spectrum from 50 to 99 percentile--90 percentile overall.

House Buying

I'm now in the muck of house buying. After looking slowly for two years, tons of financing for a down payment is coming through. It's time to be motivated and finish.

There's lots of other things I want to do around now. MCAT scores came in across the spectrum from 50 to 99 percentile--90 percentile overall.

I'm going to become a left-handed mouser

The Kinesis Ergo keyboard has the page down/up and up/down keys on the right hand. This is not compatible with mousing and scrolling during web browsing. I guess I'll mouse with the left hand then. I think I used to switch hands on regular keyboards so that my left hand would rest on arrow and page up/down keys, allowing my right hand to go to the mouse.

Keyboard Setups

I'm working with the Twiddler and a GyroMouse. It is slow for me.

I also use the Kinesis Ergo and the Cirque GlidePoint EasyCat TouchPad. Both these combos allow the keyboard and mouse to stay close to each other.

The last keyboard which is currently at work is the TouchStream which allows both hands to stay put on the keyboard and mouse.

Kinesis

After feeling some twinges of RSI, I ordered the Kinesis keyboard. It's quite comfortable and is easy enough to learn. It should avoid the static problems with the TouchStream. I also would have liked an integrated pointing device, but the EasyCat is just too small and the larger ones don't look like they would fit in the center space of the Kinesis.

One thing that both the Kinesis and the Touchstream lack is a dedicated numeric keypad. While this is alright for most typing, it doesn't cut it when I have a stream of numbers to enter.

What to do with oodles of computer stuff

I could record everything. This could be done with tons of web cams. I could place sound recorders. I could also do temperature monitors. I could wear web cams almost all day. I could record or capture screens from tv. This data might be useful if someone spent time to analyze it. I could use the computers to search for life within computer networks or systems. I could capture all my web traffic and then display it or summarize it on a web site. I could also scour the web for interesting data and summarize it on something useful.

Probably the easiest and least legal thing to do is caputer screens for tv. It would eat up the most storage and computing power. The other thing is what to do with these large hard drives I have at home but can't be used to serve data since it would kill my broadband connection's upload capability. I guess I'll have to do more analysis on the data. Perhaps some poorly tuned long running jobs. Also, what to do with the large amounts of memory in the system which is not being used since the long running jobs will probably be optimized to run like old-fashioned tape-drive computers with a few passes and temporary tape.

Speaking about power, it runs up a pretty big bill, all these computer things. If your computer uses 1KW, leaving it on all year racks up a 900 power bill at California's residential 10 cents per KW*hr. Time to get those solar panels and run the site and capture data only during daylight.