Monday, July 14, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
monkeytronic
I came across this photo while doing research for my latest endeavour, my crossword puzzle. It is a picture of Japanese (snow) macaques chilling at an onsen in Japan. I like monkeys. Read more about them on Wikipedia.
my very first crossword
Last night/this morning, I wasted time on crosswords, again. This time, I made a crossword. It is my very first, and it is probably either way too hard, way too easy, or, even better, way too hard in some parts and way too easy in others. If you try it, let me know what you think! Click here to get a printable page or here to get a puzzle playable with Across Lite on Windows/Mac, xword on Linux (here's the deb file). Solution here.
Monday, June 30, 2008
tragedy of tragedies?
A couple weeks ago, I saw that the cacti outside of the Wells Fargo near my home had sprouted some crazy large white flowers. This was on a Friday. On Monday, I came back to take a picture of these flowers, cuz they were so crazy. Alas, they had already withered and closed! I thought maybe it was because it was the morning and they had not opened yet, so I came back again at one-ish, and still they were wizened (that is my new word from this morning's NYT xword). Tragedy of tragedies! Here is a sad picture of the closed flowers:
In order to find a photo of the plant in full bloom, I've been trying to identify the cactus type today. I think it looks a lot like the Echinopsis Pachanoi, aka the San Pedro cactus. Here are some photos:
Anyways, looks to be a match, right? Well, here is interesting fact number 1. It is a night bloomer! So, I will go back tonight and see if it is now in bloom! Only problem is it has been a few weeks, so perhaps I am in for disappointment. But, there is hope! Fact number 2: It can grow to up to 40 feet tall. That is tall! Here is a picture of a tall one:
Fact number 3 is that the plant contains mescaline. Wikipedia says:
PS Please don't eat the pretty pretty cacti! I was only trying to be cool!
In order to find a photo of the plant in full bloom, I've been trying to identify the cactus type today. I think it looks a lot like the Echinopsis Pachanoi, aka the San Pedro cactus. Here are some photos:
Anyways, looks to be a match, right? Well, here is interesting fact number 1. It is a night bloomer! So, I will go back tonight and see if it is now in bloom! Only problem is it has been a few weeks, so perhaps I am in for disappointment. But, there is hope! Fact number 2: It can grow to up to 40 feet tall. That is tall! Here is a picture of a tall one:
Fact number 3 is that the plant contains mescaline. Wikipedia says:
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the highest concentrations of active substances are found in the layer of green photosynthetic tissue just beneath the skin.So, if you're (a) resourceful and (b) looking to score some unguarded mescaline, here's the place:
PS Please don't eat the pretty pretty cacti! I was only trying to be cool!
Thursday, June 26, 2008
what's that song they play when a goal is scored?
I'm sure you've been wondering, "What is that awesome awesome song played when someone scores a goal in the Euro Cup 2008?" Well, here it is. I have no other information.
notes on resuscitating my desktop 06/2008
I have a dual-boot Windows XP/Ubuntu desktop at home. Earlier this week, it started randomly rebooting itself at increasingly shortening intervals. Luckily, my brother was visiting and could try to fix everything. We decided to get a new motherboard, CPU, and memory.
New hardware:
Motherboard: GeForce 7050M-M
CPU: AMD X2 5600+
Memory: A DATA DDR2 800 Dual Kit (4 GB)
TR2-R1 CPU fan
You can replace the motherboard, CPU, and memory, then boot up into Ubuntu, and it should work. It did not work immediately on my Ubuntu installation, as I was still running Feisty and did not have all the drivers necessary for my new motherboard and could not start x. So, we logged in without x (Ctrl+Alt+F4), then upgraded the OS. This required the following commands:
sudo aptitude install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade
We did this two times; first upgrading from Feisty to Gutsy, then Gutsy to Hardy. Then, Ubuntu seemed to work.
Next, we tried to repair Windows. We could not boot Windows (it blue screened). Apparently, we should have removed any drivers specific to the old motherboard before replacing it. Of course, we could not boot windows when the original motherboard was going bad, so ... These pages: ars-technica article and ars technica forum give some instructions on how to repair Windows. Supposedly, if we had done things properly, we may have been able to put in the Windows XP disk, hit install, then repair, then let Windows do its magic.
This did not seem to work for us, so we reinstalled Windows, but did not reformat the partition. Thus, we could still see all of our files once installation was complete, but we lost all installed programs. After installing Windows and all the drivers for the new motherboard, Windows seemed to be working okay.
Of course, installing Windows wiped out the Grub menu list, so we could no longer boot into Ubuntu. There were a number of solutions to this problem presented on the Ubuntu forum here, none of which seemed to work. We first tried the Auto Super Grub Disk option. With this, we downloaded an exe which added an extra option to the boot menu, "unetbootin-supergrubdisk". We rebooted, selected this new option, and let it run. It ended up hanging at the
running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 ( hd0)"...
step. We had no idea why. So, we tried many of the other options offered at the Ubuntu forum, with no luck. We burned a Hardy live cd, booted from that, and tried to install grub. After this, we could not even boot Windows.
The first problem seemed to be that in Hardy the hard drive was called sda instead of hda. We got an old Feisty live cd and booted from that. My brother tried many things, but was unable to restore Grub. The final solution seemed to be to set the bootable flag for the Linux partition in the partition table. Previously, only the Windows partition was listed as bootable. The change the bootable flag, my brother used:
fdisk /dev/hd
then followed the menu to change the labels. After this, he rebooted from the Feisty CD, installed Grub again following the first set of instructions under "Quick Start" here. Everything seemed to work!!
To download Windows software from Caltech, I also set up the Caltech VPN, detailed here. So far, programs we have installed are:
Firefox
Flash
Avast
WinSCP
NX Client for Windows
Office 2007
Acrobat
Here are photos of the process:
It is a mess in here. There are computer innards strewn all over the place.
We could not read the blue screen that flashed for a split second when Windows tried to boot, so we took a photo. Turns out, it wasn't saying anything particularly useful.
I did not go crazy during this process.
New hardware:
Motherboard: GeForce 7050M-M
CPU: AMD X2 5600+
Memory: A DATA DDR2 800 Dual Kit (4 GB)
TR2-R1 CPU fan
You can replace the motherboard, CPU, and memory, then boot up into Ubuntu, and it should work. It did not work immediately on my Ubuntu installation, as I was still running Feisty and did not have all the drivers necessary for my new motherboard and could not start x. So, we logged in without x (Ctrl+Alt+F4), then upgraded the OS. This required the following commands:
sudo aptitude install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade
We did this two times; first upgrading from Feisty to Gutsy, then Gutsy to Hardy. Then, Ubuntu seemed to work.
Next, we tried to repair Windows. We could not boot Windows (it blue screened). Apparently, we should have removed any drivers specific to the old motherboard before replacing it. Of course, we could not boot windows when the original motherboard was going bad, so ... These pages: ars-technica article and ars technica forum give some instructions on how to repair Windows. Supposedly, if we had done things properly, we may have been able to put in the Windows XP disk, hit install, then repair, then let Windows do its magic.
This did not seem to work for us, so we reinstalled Windows, but did not reformat the partition. Thus, we could still see all of our files once installation was complete, but we lost all installed programs. After installing Windows and all the drivers for the new motherboard, Windows seemed to be working okay.
Of course, installing Windows wiped out the Grub menu list, so we could no longer boot into Ubuntu. There were a number of solutions to this problem presented on the Ubuntu forum here, none of which seemed to work. We first tried the Auto Super Grub Disk option. With this, we downloaded an exe which added an extra option to the boot menu, "unetbootin-supergrubdisk". We rebooted, selected this new option, and let it run. It ended up hanging at the
running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 ( hd0)"...
step. We had no idea why. So, we tried many of the other options offered at the Ubuntu forum, with no luck. We burned a Hardy live cd, booted from that, and tried to install grub. After this, we could not even boot Windows.
The first problem seemed to be that in Hardy the hard drive was called sda instead of hda. We got an old Feisty live cd and booted from that. My brother tried many things, but was unable to restore Grub. The final solution seemed to be to set the bootable flag for the Linux partition in the partition table. Previously, only the Windows partition was listed as bootable. The change the bootable flag, my brother used:
fdisk /dev/hd
then followed the menu to change the labels. After this, he rebooted from the Feisty CD, installed Grub again following the first set of instructions under "Quick Start" here. Everything seemed to work!!
To download Windows software from Caltech, I also set up the Caltech VPN, detailed here. So far, programs we have installed are:
Firefox
Flash
Avast
WinSCP
NX Client for Windows
Office 2007
Acrobat
Here are photos of the process:
It is a mess in here. There are computer innards strewn all over the place.
We could not read the blue screen that flashed for a split second when Windows tried to boot, so we took a photo. Turns out, it wasn't saying anything particularly useful.
I did not go crazy during this process.
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