Weblog Archive

Go Terps

(DiamondbackOnline.com) Terps headed to Gator Bowl. Let's Goooo Maryland!

Comcast upgrade

Comcast upgraded by service withough my knowledge. Until I got a flyer from them that they were rolling the upgrade into certain neighborhoods. I'm getting some crazy throughput now. Check out my results from broadbandreports.com:

According to the report, I'm above the level of "insane!" I wonder how long this will last -- I mean I wonder how long Comcast's network can sustain this bandwidth before the infrastructure starts degrading. Or maybe it's a ploy, to get us hooked on the speed and all of a sudden they come back with "Oh sorry, you can't have this anymore unless you pay up the wazoo." Oh well, I'll enjoy it while I can, not that I really need that much power.

Pybliographer

SourceForge.net: pybliographer-general. I just added a little feature in pybliographer.

My apologies!

My server went down for whatever reason. I had to reboot -- disappointing since it had an uptime of something like 230 days! And for whatever reason (I'm trying to track the culprit down now) it hiccuped at boot and started spewing out old email on queue to those of you who've commented on this site and a number of other sites hosted on the server. I apologize! I'm not purposefully trying to spam you, there must be a reason to this and I'll try to get to the bottom of this. In the meantime, feel free to flog me.

Dirt don't hurt?

Parents Look for Good Dirt on Child Health (washingtonpost.com). Here's the question of the day: would you let your child eat a cracker if it fell on the floor and was immediately picked up off the floor? I know this Wash Post article is old, but I was searching through Google about allergies and came across it. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with the one parent's reasoning that a child's immune system needs to be challenged to remain healthy. I wish we all knew the answer.

What a laptop

SAM'S CLUB | samsclub.com. Now that I've bought and used an Averatec (Sotec) brand laptop, and am quite happy with it, I've been keeping an eye on newer models. This one has great specs, for example, a DVD-RW! I have to say, having a DVD-ROM drive is a very nice feature on a laptop. You can store 4.7GB of data on a DVD-R -- just think of the possibilities. I'm sure someone out there has remastered Knoppix to include lots more goodies to fit on a bootable DVD-R. Come to think of it, I'll do a google search to try to find it.

Pybliographer 1.2.1 is out

Pybliographer - What is Pybliographer?. This is a great program to use in *nix systems for bibliography management -- if you can get it to work properly in you *nix box. If you have Debian installed, you can just do an "apt-get install pybliographer" and that should do it for you.

Gnome genome project

Book genomes. Table of Contents. Here I've been messing with Linux too much. Went to the NLM bookshelf and thought the book "Genomes 2" said "Gnomes 2." Funny eh? Nevermind.

Can you say"buh-bye"?

More Than 500 Infected in Hepatitis A Outbreak (washingtonpost.com). Chi-Chi's will have a heck of time getting out of this one unscathed in court. I can't tell you the last time I remembered eating there. It must have been decades ago, really. It used to big down here in MD, but there is no more to be found around the DC metro area, at least to my knowledge. I feel bad for the 3 people who died. I don't want to joke at another persons expense, especially after they died, but imagine if your last good meal was at Chi-chi's?

Phew! Got through that hurdle.

Computer Geeks - Sotec 3120X Averatec 3120X Cel 1.2GHz 256MB 20GB DVD/CDRW 12.1. My blog was put on the wayside for quite a while. I've been busy with getting together with my thesis committee to talk about my progress. It's one of those things that is absolutely terrifying to schedule and go through, but it shouldn't be. Grad students should reach the level whereby, after doing all their work and studying, they can look to their committee members as peers, rather than as individuals dangling their lives in front of them. That's the ideal situation sure, but I don't know about you, I still fear my committee. It's all part of the process, I guess. But after going through the meeting, I wonder to myself, "why didn't I do this earlier?"

The Lawnmower Man over again (Matrix spoiler)

Las Vegas Mercury: Film: One for all
Without spoiling things for readers already in possession of their rubber suits and hideous sunglasses (Carrie-Anne Moss' Trinity looks more than ever like a malevolent insect), a brief plot outline: Neo's body lies in Zion while his mind inhabits a limbo between the Matrix and the "real" world of the Machines.

Disappointing, disappointing indeed. Here I was hoping the third and final installment of The Matrix would bring something new and interesting to the storyline, but alas, falling back on visual foreplay without the meat of a good story becomes the norm yet again for these big money-making movies. I haven't gone out to see it, but now that I got this little spoiler, I'll just wait until next week (until after my thesis committee meeting at least). Anyone remember The Lawnmower Man? It's a great Stephen King flick. The reason I bring this up is that the idea of the mind being trapped (and decoupled from the body) in a "virtual world" is nothing new. Maybe the article is wrong, maybe the plot will be good, I hope so; otherwise, that's $8 wasted.

G wifi cards in linux

Linuxant - DriverLoader for Wireless LAN devices - Introduction. Getting my 802.11g card installed in linux has been a hassle. Hopefully, this will make things easier.