BurnPC.com

I thought I had a bad drive. I had tried installing Ubuntu several times on these drives as a RAID-0 array (4xWD360 10000 RPM SATA drives). It turns out that the dmraid package was somehow causing problems recognizing them. Removing the dmraid package allowed for recognition from the installer when launching it from the live desktop.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1393415

Have not posted in quite some time… but hey I’ve been busy!

The summer is definitely over. With Ciderfest approaching this weekend it’s probably one of the last outdoors events of the year before we start dealing with snow. We had snow this last weekend but at least it didn’t stick!

At 8:31 this morning Alexander was born, 7 lbs 2 oz, 21 3/4 inches. Mom is doing great!

The hardware arrived this week for my final model of the Mobile DRC Project. I’ve created a page outlining the hardware and reason for the choices here.

I’m experimenting with this software to see if it can help me focus better while working on the computer. http://gnaural.sourceforge.net/

Weird stuff, not so exciting for listening.

I’ve recently become very interested in Cloud Computing with things like Google AppEngine, Amazon EC2, and even Salesforce. I think there are some very compelling benefits to running your apps in The Cloud. All the hardware stuff that software developers should not need to worry about (although many of us do because we LIKE hardware), such as performance, scalability, redundancy, and the like, are addressed by letting someone else handle those pieces.

How is this different from say, hosting your servers at a data center with super bandwidth, monster generators, multiple OC192 hookups from different providers? [Read more →]

Earlier I posted how youtube changed how they handled mp4 files, which resulted in my video not being classified as High Quality. When Youtube classified the video differently, they made it have a horribly low framerate which was very noticable. After some tinkering around, I found that by simply re-encoding the video at the same resolution and framerate with ffmpeg youtube sees it as High Quality after I upload it. ffmpeg is doing something, but I have no idea what…

ffmpeg Instructions for Linux (I’m assuming you have installed ffmpeg already):

ffmpeg -r 30 -sameq -ar 44100 -ab 128 -i originalFile.mp4 -y outputFile.mp4

ffmpeg Instructions for Windows:

Sorry… no instructions at this time. I would like to provide them and may update this when I have a chance.

This is Part 1 of a 2 Part Series. Part 2 will focus on semantic web, faceted navigation, maybe some graph theory. I’m not there yet.

The purpose of this article is to discuss dealing with the practically infinite amount of information that is now available to us via the internet. Information is becoming increasingly distracting and I think can lead to serious impact especially on areas of research where true focus is needed.

Intro

If I can sit on a couch with my phone / PDA / laptop and find the answer to Jeopardy questions fast enough, what value is there in knowing an obscure date or fact? Absolutely none. Facts on their own are simply trivia. I think everyone has agreed with this for a long time. Rote-memory teaching techniques may be good if your goal is to know the names of all the bones in the human body. And granted, their are certain vocabularies which must be learned in order to understand fields of work. Bones of the body are part of the vocabulary of doctors / biologists and the like. But yet again, knowing an individual word’s definition may not have much value. So where does the value begin?

Concepts are Key

Our ability as humans to understand and create relationships between the pieces of information provides for an additional level of understanding. Communicating concepts and relationships via a complex language allows us to collaborate and grow those ideas, to build on the work of others.

So what happens now when in the age of google, flickr, twitter, wikipedia, email, calendars alerting you to do crap… an age where we are constantly bombarded with ‘trivia’… how do we work with such large volumes of data? [Read more →]