physical graffiti

I just installed CentOS 6.2 on a Dell Poweredge 2970 with an attached MD3000. Everything worked out of the box! Thanks to CentOS for having built-in drivers for the Perc5 and Perc6 cards used in the Dell server.

Was trying to clean up/repair my girlfriends mac. She was running snow leopard and i was trying to boot from a snow leopard install disc to check the hard drive. Everytime i tried to boot from CD i got a kernel panic.

Turns out that if you computer shipped with OSX ver A then you cannot boot with a disc that has an older version! but instead of saying, "hey we don't have the drivers for this hardware" they just give you a kernel panic.

thanks apple.

For bizarre and mysterious reasons some journals accept eps but not pdf format for figures when you submit a manuscript.

For example frontiers accepts the following formats: eps, jpg, tiff.
Tiff and Jpeg are bitmapped so they do not scale well.
eps is a vector format so no matter what size you view it at it looks beautiful. In other words you could keep zooming in on a letter in an eps and you will never see the pixels because the eps format is a programming language

Unfortunately Preview on the mac will not convert from PDF to EPS.

However TexShop will!

you can open a pdf, select the part of the pdf you want to export and then go to
Preview->Save Selection to File…

Note the that margins are not quite accurate, so you need to leave extra space on the top and right edge of the selection box.

http://durak.org/sean/pubs/software/cvsbook/CVS-says-it-is-waiting-for-a-lock_003b-what-does-that-mean_003f.html

If you see a message like this:

     cvs update: [22:58:26] waiting for qsmith's lock in /usr/local/newrepos/myproj

You can just go in to the repository and delete the lock.

If you find that you don't have cvs anymore after upgrading to Lion, you probably still do

try this

cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -s /Developer/usr/bin/cvs

When exporting figures to a eps file, Matlab usually adds a background. To remove this, the eps file can be altered in a text editor. There are two possible solutions depending on the postscript level of the eps figure.
Postscript level 2
The file will have the following first line:
%!PS-Adobe-2.0 EPSF-1.2
Look for four numbers followed by the string PR. Comment that line using %.
Postscript level 3
The file will have as first line
%!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0
Look for four numbers followed by the string rf. Comment that line using %

Copied from http://track-d.net/help.shtml

It turns out when there are many names for the same thing it can lead to some confusion.

Medial Precentral Cortex, Agranular Cortex, Secondary Motor Cortex, Primary Whisker Cortex, Frontal Eye Field, vibrissal Motor Cortex, dorsal shoulder cortex, Frontal Orienting Field.

These turn out to be all the same part of the rat brain.

The funny thing is that for the past 30 years there have been two parallel fields that didn't know they were studying the same structure. Now the cat is out of the bag!!

You heard it hear first.

I've had my own domain for a long time. But i always just forwarded the mail to another account: either a university account, gmail or mobileme. But i finally set up google apps for that domain.

The question now is whether it is still worth $69 a year for mobileme. And i think the answer for me is still yes.

Why? Because I have 3 macs. 2 laptops and a mini. Let's look at it feature by feature.

1) Mail. Don't need it. Can use IMAP and google apps for my domain
2) Calendar. Don't need it. Use google calendar
3) Keychain syncing. i find this VERY useful. is there a 3rd party replacement?
4) Address Book/iPhone syncing and integration. Very useful. I don't think the contact management in gmail is up to par with this.
5) iDisk. I use it, but there are other things like dropbox. However, i do use the iDisk app on the iphone and it is a pretty good service.
6) findmyphone and back to my mac. i don't normally use these features... but they are nice to have.

So.... what it comes down to is that i think it is worth it to pay $69 a year for keychain and contacts syncing between my computers.

What are your thoughts?

I generally run matlab on a linux machine over X11 from my mac laptop. I just find the mac version of matlab really crap.

Also, the linux machines that i use to run matlab are far faster.

One weakness of running over X is the lack of persistence of the session. If i have to close my laptop I pretty much have to start again when i reconnect to a network.

VNC is an option for this but it's not super efficient. People have worked on getting a more efficient solution and that is freenx.

The only thing that was really bugging me was that the fonts looked like shit. Basically they looked like someone took a jpg of the text. It turns out, that's exactly what was happening. In the nx client there is an option to customize the display settings and it allows you to turn off jpg compression. There is also an option to customize jpeg quality, but for my money (especially since i'm on a LAN) i'll stick with no jpeg compression.

A typical Jeff story:

11pm Tuesday night. Checking out some music events in the city for thursday. Hunger kicks in. I have no food because i just moved into a new apt!
Head to the local store (open until midnight) with my re-useable grocery bags and fill 3 of them for a total of about $130. Head home and as I'm thinking about loading my stuff into the fridge, i decide that i want to switch the hinge on the door from the left to the right. How hard can it be? I have the manual for the fridge and there are clear instructions about how to switch the door hinge. And once i have things in the fridge it will be more of a pain in the ass. I knew where the manual was.

"You will need these items:...." i had them all.
"Read entire instructions before starting"... meh, that's for pussies.

So i turn off the fridge and begin.
Remove top hinge. check
Remove center hinge. check.
Remove bottom hinge........ 'Pull fridge 30" from the wall and lean back against the wall to access bottom fridge'. Shit. my microwave and toaster are on top of the fridge. Plus there are a few things inside.... ok ok.. moved everything. Tilt up fridge. check.
(Remember in the meanwhile my groceries, with a few frozen items are sitting there waiting....).
Move bottom hinge to other side. Check.
Replace fridge door. check.
Find center hinge designed for right side.... WHAT WHAT? moment of panic. do i have this piece? There is only one place it could be... and YES! thank you lord.
Install center hinge for right side. check
Install freezer door. check.
Ya!! it's all done and finally i put my groceries away. Then i find the chickpea tofu pesto salad that i bought just to eat specifically tonight. It's tasteless and smells kind of dodgy.

Anyway. That's so typical of me to start one thing in the middle of another thing without really thinking it all through and it all works out in the end anyway!