The member blog is fixed. We had taken it offline for several weeks for a security upgrade, but it’s back in time for admissions decisions. Cheers, folks, and good luck.
Updates from james RSS
The member blog is fixed. We had taken it offline for several weeks for a security upgrade, but it’s back in time for admissions decisions. Cheers, folks, and good luck.
Looks like University of Maryland, College Park admissions decisions started coming back in a big way this weekend.
From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/health/05docs.html?8dpc regarding the cause of death of F.D.R.:
“… for many years the president’s blood pressure was dangerously high. Available records show that it had risen to 230/126 in 1944, from 128/82 in 1930, which would have contributed to heart failure. A reading moments before he died was 300/190.”
Without any further knowledge of the case except the widely-accepted claim that FDR died from cerebral hemorrhage, I would assume that the 300/190 reading was a *consequence* of the hemorrhage (Cushing’s reflex). In such a situation, the cerebral pressure becomes so great that the brain becomes ischemic, triggering sympathetic release that causes hypertension. Knowledge of his pulse near time of death would be helpful.
Posting this from IE6.
Yale lost The Game again. Can Stanford salvage the day for me?
Testing out the new layout.
Just took a look at http://blog.notdot.net/2009/11/Damn-Cool-Algorithms-Spatial-indexing-with-Quadtrees-and-Hilbert-Curves . Their discussion of Hilbert gives a nice taste for why someone might care about Hilbert curves.
It reminded me of a recent paper published by Eric Lander and colleagues regarding the folding of the human genome. Long story short, it is a real-life Hilbert curve. The upside to this is that Hilbert curves untangle very easily, allowing for relatively easy access to deeply buried regions. ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/326/5950/289 ) Perhaps most importantly,it made for an attractive cover on Science Magazine.
Being in desperate need of a new laptop, I was lucky to get some funding to purchase a new Dell Studio 15 with an i7 720, 8GB RAM, and a 500GB Seagate HD. So far, the system has run like a dream, and I plan to post speed tests and some informal battery life tests for those of you wondering about Intel’s new i7. First, though, I need to figure out if my hard drive is faulty.
The feature of the hard drive that gives me pause is a soft clicking that comes from it approximately once every second (though not always). The click is not associated with the normal, hushed ‘grind’ of disk i/o. By not associated, I mean that it occurs both during and not during disk i/o. The click does stop on occasion, but I have not been able to identify what causes it to stop, or to start again. The clicking is kind of annoying, but it would be tolerable if I were sure that it didn’t portend hard drive failure in the near future.
I then ran two tools to try to ensure that the drive was intact. I ran smartctl and discovered that the disk had a very high seek_error_rate (1,353,126), but I have read (in the Google pdf about their experience with hard drive failures) that a certain manufacturer, presumably Seagate, always racks up a high count certain errors such as this, and they are not diagnostic. Importantly, reallocated_sector_ct is zero. Next, I ran SeaTools and performed both a short drive self test (DST) and a long DST. Both of these showed no errors.
Finally, I recorded a video with my my iPhone seated on the front left portion of my laptop, where the hard drive is located and where the sounds emanate from. Does anyone have experience with the kind of clicking that can be heard in this video?
I have. However, the laptop I had was far from new. Furthermore, after using it for a year (and after a year of being unable to detect the source), I simply bought a new laptop. If you have some warranty, I would suggest getting a replacement. You don’t want to end up with a crashed drive or a faulty laptop
Thanks for the suggestion. I got in touch with Dell and they’re shipping me a new HD.
Well, seeing that this issue may have been resolved… congrats on the new laptop. 
Thanks 
The old one was figuratively killing my ability to work on this site!
(Note that I said figuratively there on purpose, to combat the annoying trend of saying “literally” when in no uncertain way is said thing not at all literal.)
I will offer up one quick gripe: the touchpad keys are extremely small, and the touchpad extends all the way to the keys. Now that Dell has gestures, this means that if my thumb glances the edge of the keypad while clicking a button, a gesture happens.
Hello! I just purchased the same laptop two weeks ago and it’s making the same noise. Did the new hard drive solve your problem? Also, how does someone who knows nada about computers (me) install a new hard drive?
Hi! I did replace the HD, and it did solve the problem.
To do it, you need to have a small Phillips-head screwdriver (such as what you might use for glasses). You take off part of the bottom of the computer. Looking at the computer when it is turned on and the keyboard is in front of you, the hard drive is just beneath your left hand. So when you power it off, unplug it, and flip it, it will now be by your right wrist.
I removed the L-shaped plastic backing on the bottom of the computer, slid the old hard-drive out, unscrewed it from its housing, screwed the housing back into my new hard drive, and put everything all back together.
I didn’t feel that it was all that difficult, but I have installed my own hardware before so I do have some experience. If I had the high-quality warranty I would have had them do this for me, but I didn’t, and I didn’t want to send the whole thing back, so I did it myself. I have had no problems since then.
NYT Typos:
The acquisitions, the result of billions of dollars spent by large companies snapping up smaller ones, has created a new Internet core of “hyper giants,” a coin termed by the report.
For the rest of us, there are terms to coin. For the NYT, there are coins to term.
MMS over iPhone is now enabled! To get it working, do the following:
1) Attach your iPhone to your computer.
2) Open iTunes, navigate to your iPhone, and check for Updates.
3) Install the (tiny) update.
4) After your phone finishes syncing, turn it off then turn it back on.
Now go to your photo roll, click an image, and go to the menu in the bottom lefthand corner that you’d use to send the photo via email. You’ll see a new option – MMS. Click that, and choose a friend to send the photo to.
Of course, 3.1 still disables tethering so I’m still not happy with Apple/AT&T at the moment.
prologue 10:44 pm on November 19, 2009 Permalink |
Ah~ It looks so much nicer… ^-^
Good work~
James 11:06 pm on November 19, 2009 Permalink |
Thanks! We’re working on making the menus work more naturally, because I think it’s a downside of the new layout.