Jim Carson One of these things is not like the other
Computers
GoogleSoftwareUp clearing CS_VALID and Mac Freezes
PSA: In case someone else encounters similar symptoms where your MacBook freezes and the only indication is an error GoogleSoftwareUp clearing CS_VALID, I hope to save you a wasted evening of trying things and reading forums… Symptom: My heretofore reliable MacBook started going into “beach ball” mode. The active application remained responsive to keyboard, mouse [...]
Dolphin Kick
When I first heard someone mention the term dolphin kick, I thought it was a reference to the 1980s Patrick Duffy show, Man from Atlantis. The BBC says the dolphin kick “replaces a standard underwater leg kick with a whipping motion that minimizes water resistance.”[1] It’s a little easier to make sense of this if [...]
Dates
I’ve been researching date/time formats for inclusion in a software product, and wanted to share some of the thought processes involved.Use case: an engineer or scientist wants to plot something over some time period. All time periods are possible, so we must provide years down to minutes. For example, a coastal engineer surveyed said he: [...]
Notes from SC10
King Neptune, outside Mardis Gras Land A few weeks ago, I spent a week in New Orleans at Supercomputing 2010. (Sometimes my job has perks.) I wrote a really long summary of this for internal use, but thought I’d share some of my notes: Jack Dongarra of Oak Ridge National Labs offered his perspective [...]
Why Not a Netbook
Late last fall, when I was first contemplating replacements for my four year-old Dell Inspiron laptop, Netbooks piqued my interest. I gave them serious consideration as a replacement machine, but there were three major problems: 1. Screen sizes suck, especially the vertical. The most common (at the time) were 1024×576, which was a huge step [...]
Mechanics
I have to agree with Elizabeth that the whole taking a phone call in the middle of a meeting is off-putting. Some of my coworkers are notorious about this, often jumping to address a quadrant 4 domestic issue. I do try to ignore any calls until after the meeting’s over. One exception is if my spouse’s [...]
Presentus Interuptus
For most of October, I was on the east coast attending conferences. I saw a toxic number of PowerPoint presentations. I was astounded how many times the presenter was interrupted by operating system over-zealousness. One guess as to which one. “Balloon tips,” sometimes also known as “What?! I don’t care. Let… me… aaaarrrrrrgggggghh. Just fucking [...]
PHP-vil
All I wanted to do was migrate my work-related forum to a new host. Here’s how it should have worked: Copy stuff over Edit configuration files Populate database rock on Here’s how it actually worked: Copy stuff over Edit configuration files Populate database Software was unable to connect to a database because php5′s developers do [...]
Volunteering
Today was my monthly volunteer stint at a local grade school. To recap my previous three sessions: Episode One, writing station: The exercise was to learn the parts of speech by practicing Mad Libs, then create one’s own Mad Lib. A Mad Lib is a story where one provides the nouns, verbs and adjectives, often [...]