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Tag Archives: computers

Filesystem Organization for Physicists Part 1: The Problem

27 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by bwkeller in research

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

ast, astronomy, computers, programming, science, technology

I’ve been warned that I sometimes veer too far in the direction of toolmaker away from the standard path followed by most scientists.  Try as I might, I cannot seem to avoid finding the process of doing science nearly as interesting as the goal of getting that science done. And so, my mind has been orbiting around a problem I suspect is endemic amongst all physicists, if not all scientists.  That problem, captured so nicely by this PhD comic is that of filesystem cruft.  Science, being at it’s core an experimental art, produces for every successful idea a whole panoply of failed experiments, mistakes, and generally messed-up crap.  Being paranoid creatures consumed by our own fears, along with the awareness that serendipity has been a cornerstone of great work, we are loathe to sweep these ill-fated children of the mind into the trash where they (mostly) belong. And so those of us who rely on computers for most of our day-to-day work end up with home directories filled to the brim with old scripts, corrupted data files, a dozen different versions of the same list of values, and other digital detritus.  And this situation makes for errors, confusion, thousand yard stare, anal leakage, and other evils too foul to discuss in polite company.  Just looking at my /home directory on my workstation at the University, I have more than 100,000 files sitting around, waiting for me to stare at them for a quarter hour trying to remember what they were for.

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Backup Your Google Life: gback

27 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in computer science, programming, projects

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

backup, cloud, coding, computers, gback, google

You should all be watching Steins;Gate There was a rant that bounced up and down the tubes of the internet this week, talking about how one poor fellow migrated all of his important data into google services, only to have google pull the digital rug out from under him by deleting his account after it was algorithmically flagged.  This sucks, but one thing I have always been pestered about is the importance of regular backups.  Just because google is “the cloud” doesn’t mean your data is in a deadly limbo state of potential destruction if you don’t back it up.  The problem is, backing up a machine you control is damn easy, while backing up your cloudified data is not. Continue reading →

What The Hell Is Wrong With My Computer?

26 Tuesday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in computer science

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

bug, computers

So, after my machine ran out of battery power while suspended, I booted it up to be greeted with the most strange bug I’ve ever seen on a linux machine:  All my text was screwed up.  In every application, including GDM.  It disappeared after I ran an apt-get upgrade and rebooted.  Has anyone else ever seen this bug?  I’m running Ubuntu 10.04, for the record.  Screenshot after the jump.

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Papa LCD’s Contrast Ratio was TOOOOOOO high…

18 Sunday Jan 2009

Posted by nfitzgerald in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

computers, technology

My new Acer Aspire One forms the perfect addition to my workspace family. Aww – isn’t it cute!

Papa LCD, Mama LCD and Baby LCD

Papa LCD, Mama LCD and Baby LCD

From Paper-Weight to Media Server

12 Friday Sep 2008

Posted by nfitzgerald in networking

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

computers, networking, servers

This is something I’ve always wanted to try, and now have the opportunity! My parents had an old relic of the Pentium 3 epoch, which I was able to appropriate in the name of Science. The Dell Dimension 4100 really is an old battle axe, and I’ve given the old bird a new lease on life by turning it into a Media Server. My plan is to use it for a webserver eventually as well.

Our house has not one but two high-speed cable connections, which we divide between the upstairs and downstairs people. The various routers and modems are displayed in a pleasing techno-shrine to the electro-gods in our living room:

The problem is that the shrine is downstairs, while our convenient nook-come-server-room is upstairs. Continue reading →

Warai 0.2: Now with video!

07 Thursday Aug 2008

Posted by bwkeller in programming, projects

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

computers, gits

Just a quick post, wanted to announce that warai now has support for video. It’s slow as hell, and it chews disk space like no tomorrow, but it works (so far).  I’m pretty pleased with it, I think it really does capture the same look as the Laughing Man’s hacks.

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Ben’s Tweets

  • RT @OJ_Astro: A blog post by physicist Syksy Räsänen (@SyksyRasanen), who has published with us twice, about why overlay journals are an an… 1 day ago
  • RT @JokesAstro: If the Islands of Hawaii were very massive stars, Kauai would be going supernova soon. https://t.co/NEboP6FRWd 2 days ago
  • RT @AnicaSeelie: @gauravmunjal Imagine if there was a duck but it had human ears 2 days ago
  • RT @jfmclaughlin92: Friendly reminder that if you're at a public university, your institutional email can be searched basically whenever. B… 2 days ago
  • @rcrain_astro Academia has a lot of problems. Precarious employment, massive overworking of junior researchers, poo… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 days ago

Nicholas’ Tweet’s

  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! Retrieval-augmented models are expensive. Make them faster by partially pre-computing passage representations. W… 5 days ago
  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! We propose FiDO, an improved version of Fusion-in-Decoder with faster inference and better performance. Work don… 1 month ago
  • @_julianmichael_ @LukeZettlemoyer @emilymbender @nlpnoah @ssshanest Congrats! 5 months ago
  • RT @michielsdj: Now accepted to @iclr_conf! 🎆 1 year ago
  • @mjskay Yeah, I feel a major point people were missing is that an endless spiral into the drain is actually the perfect visual metaphor. 1 year ago

Top Posts

  • Basic Data Plotting with Matplotlib Part 3: Histograms

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Blogs We Read

  • Bad Astronomy
  • Boing Boing
  • Rationally Speaking
  • Terry Project (UBC)

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