Technical

Okay, thanks to Jag, I’ve seen the coolest thing ever. The steampunk keyboard + monitor: Now all I need is a few dozen hours of free time to build my own.

As I’ve been working on the web front end for the PWC database, we ran into an interesting problem. Our patient records are implemented w/ a “tab style for the display of different parts of the record. Unfortunately, the folks using the database kept tabbing over to a different part of the record which wound up not saving any of the changes they made. My original quick fix for this was to have the tab buttons also save. But that made me nervous. I worried that if someone accidentally changed things or if I was giving a demo, a change to a new tab would save bad data. ...

I haven’t been so much with the blogging lately. For me, that is generally a sign that things are busy enough that I’m living life rather than blogging it [ed note: For all of you young readers, this is what is known as irony. When I have the most to say, I have the least time to say it in; conversely, when I write the most, I have the least to say]. ...

I can’t turn around anymore without hearing something new about how colleges and universities are public enemy number 1 with the copyright industry. In early February, the Recording Industry Association of America released a top 25 list of the schools to which they have sent notices of alleged copyright infringement. Right after that, they started announced that they would start suing students and that they were going to send “pre-subpoena and “settlement notices to campuses. ...

er, sorry just a minor Red Dawn reference – it’s not my fault, I grew up in the 80s. Now that I’ve got that out of my system, a note on a new toy. As I mentioned before, I’m going to go (mostly) digital on my trip to Yellowstone. I bought 8 GB of memory cards which is only 800 or so pictures in raw format. For the past several years, I’ve shot around 800 pictures in film. On the one hand, I suspect I’ll take more pictures in digital since the marginal cost is basically zero. On the other hand, I’ll have the ability to prune out any bad shots. Still, I suspect that I’ll wind up wanting more memory cards. ...

Back when I was a postdoc, I was studying FFTs. Okay, actually, I’m not enough of a mathematician to study FFTs, I was studying the efficient implementation of FFTs on parallel computational clusters. One of the graduate students I was working with on the project penned the following: If there’s a working FFT That’s not in FORTRAN but in C Alas it twice as slow will go And that (as always) goes to show If speed is your greatest asset, Then what you C is what you get. -V.V. (Mony) Iyers ...

In 2005, congress mandated a change to daylight savings time, essentially, starting it three weeks earlier (March 11th, this year) and ending it three weeks later. Our local paper is requesting suggestions for what people will do with their 22 extra hours of daylight. Here’s my suggestion: spend the time fixing all of the computer problems caused by the DST change. Essentially, a change to DST is very similar to a self-inflicted Y2K problem. If you want to get a sense of how time/date issues can affect computer systems that aren’t prepared, take a look at this article regarding the new F-22 Raptor and it’s problems with the International Date Line. I wasn’t worried about Y2K because we knew about the issue for years and most modern operating systems and software had already addressed it. With the DST changes, we haven’t had nearly enough notice or preparation. Now, I’m not stocking up on canned goods, but I’m pretty certain that March 11th is going to bring about extra work.

so Saturday night around 11:30pm, the acid neutralizer I just installed, exploded. Okay, it didn’t really explode, but the top popped off again. Spoke to the customer support, looked around a bit more and it seems that the threads on the tank were stripped. I’ll call tomorrow and see about getting a replacement tank Update: I just received a call from the folks that sold me the acid neutralizer (I didn’t even have to call them back). Two interesting things: 1) apparently, the tank head they sent is a down flow head and the system I’ve got is designed to be upflow. Not a big deal, except that I have to reverse the inlet and outlet plumb lines as compared to what’s labeled on the head. Normally they send a note along those lines – this time they didn’t. 2) Given that one of the threads is stripped, they’re going to send me a new tank and an RMA to return the old one. ...

Two web-related notes: I’ve just migrated the Piedmont Wildlife Center’s website from a bunch of php webpages (the only reason for the php was to include the template) to the Drupal content management system. I’ve also added in the Coppermine photo gallery to keep our pictures. I would have used gallery2, but it kept dying due to memory errors with the database. I’m guessing our ISP has the ulimit set to small. Overall, the updates went pretty well, the biggest headaches were taking us out of a table based layout into the (more) modern world of CSS. I kept the current look and feel, but the CMS should make it easier to change in the future. But for now, at least I can distribute the web updating responsibilities to others 🙂 Does anyone know how to get WordPress to do better detection/blocking of comment spam? It’s killing me. Fine, I’ll go google for it.

I had a chance last week to read a few books, all of which I would recommend in some fashion or another: National Geographic’s “The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography This is a very good, basic field guide to photography. It covers a huge range of subjects and, not surprisingly, has some beautiful photographs. The book covers both film and digital photography, editing, archiving, composition, and has a great inspirational chapter describing Robert Clark’s photographic travelogue using only the camera in a cell phone. My only complaint about the book is that it covers too many topics, but not much in depth. It’s a great book for a beginner, but there wasn’t too much I hadn’t seen already. ...