Wednesday, December 29, 2010

"Each time we face a fear, we gain strength, courage, and confidence in the doing." - Unknown

Sunday, July 25, 2010



The Kalman Filter, Nonlinear Filtering - Mark W. Watson / James H. Stock - NBER Summber Institute Mini-course, What's New in Econometrics: Time Series, Lecture 5, July 15th, 2008.

Saturday, June 12, 2010



"Engineering to exceed all expectations."

Aston Martin automobile



Sunday, June 06, 2010

"The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information."


Edgar Allan Poe

Thursday, May 13, 2010

10 Big Jumps
Mac OS X v10.4 and later: How to prevent .DS_Store file creation over network connections
Last Modified: October 16, 2009
Article: HT1629
Old Article: 301711

Summary
This is an advanced article that contains information about preventing .DS_Store file creation over network connections.

Products Affected
Mac OS X Server 10.4, Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS X Server 10.5, Mac OS X 10.5
To configure a Mac OS X user account so that .DS_Store files are not created when interacting with a remote file server using the Finder, follow the steps below:

Note: This will affect the user's interactions with SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, and WebDAV servers.

Open Terminal.
Execute this command:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
Either restart the computer or log out and back in to the user account.
If you want to prevent .DS_Store file creation for other users on the same computer, log in to each user account and perform the steps above—or distribute a copy of the newly modified com.apple.desktopservices.plist file to the ~/Library/Preferences folder of other user accounts.

Additional Information
These steps do not prevent the Finder from creating .DS_Store files on the local volume, and these steps do not prevent previously existing .DS_Store files from being copied to the remote file server.

Disabling the creation of .DS_Store files on remote file servers can cause unexpected behavior in the Finder (click here for one example).
How to Restore the Grub Menu after a Re-Ghosting:

1. Boot from a Live CD, like Ubuntu Live, Knoppix, Mepis, or similar.

2. Open a Terminal. Go SuperUser (that is, type "su"). Enter root passwords as necessary.

3. Type "grub" which makes a GRUB prompt appear.

4. Type "find /boot/grub/stage1". You'll get a response like "(hd0)" or in my case "(hd0,3)". Use whatever your computer spits out for the following lines.

5. Type "root (hd0,3)".

6. Type "setup (hd0,3)". This is key. Other instructions say to use "(hd0)", and that's fine if you want to write GRUB to the MBR. If you want to write it to your linux root partition, then you want the number after the comma, such as "(hd0,3)".

7. Type "quit".

8. Restart the system. Remove the bootable CD.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010


Castle Stalker

K2 Seismometer
So far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain.  And so far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Albert Einstein - Geometry and Experience
"Fuzzification" is a kind of scientific permissiveness.  It tends to result in socially appealing slogans unaccompanied by the discipline of hard scientific work and patient observation.

Professor Rudolf Kalman, University of Florida at Gainesville
Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life, it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism.

Bertrand Russell - Skeptical Essays
There is great difference between theory and practice.

Giacomo Antonelli (1806 - 1876)
The principal uses of linear filtering theory are for solving nonlinear problems.

Harold W. Sorenson - In a private conversation.
That is how grossly modified the water was...

Sunday, May 02, 2010


A nice day.
He is packing it in and packing it up
And sneaking away and buggering up
And chickening out and pissing off home,
Yes, bravely he is throwing in the sponge.
Brave Sir Robin ran away,
Bravely ran away, away.
When danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled.

Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly, he chickened out. Bravely taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat,
Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin.
Bravely bold Sir Robin rode forth from Camelot.
He was not afraid to die, O brave Sir Robin.
He was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways,
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin!

 He was not in the least bit scared to be mashed into a pulp,
Or to have his eyes gouged out and his elbows broken,
To have his kneecaps split and his body burned away
And his limbs all hacked and mangled, brave Sir Robin!

 His head smashed in and his heart cut out
And his liver removed and his bowels unplugged
And his nostrils raped and his bottom burned off
And his pen--
"Now stand aside worthy adversary..."

"Tis' but a scratch"

"A scratch?!  Your arm's off!"

"No, it isn't!"

"Well, what's that then?"

"I've had worse."

"You liar!"

"Come'on, you pansy!"

Tuesday, April 27, 2010


When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

The Learn'd Astronomer - Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)

Monday, April 26, 2010

Saturday, April 24, 2010




The bid-offer spread (bid-ask;  buy-sell) for securities (such as stock, futures contracts, options, or currency pairs) is the difference between the price quoted by a market maker for an immediate sale (bid) and an immediate purchase (offer).

The size of the bid-offer spread in a given commodity is a liquidity measure of the market and size of the transaction cost.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010



“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought –
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two!  One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day!  Callooh!  Callay!
He chortled in his joy.

“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.


Jabberwocky
Lewis Carroll

Saturday, April 10, 2010

In Canada, there are no laws regulating SIM locking or unlocking. No Canadian wireless service provider sells unlocked phones, and none unlock after service contracts expire. Though you can buy unlock codes from Bell mobility for a cost now. Changes to the Copyright Act proposed by the Canadian government would make any circumvention of digital locks, such as carrier locks on cell phones, illegal. In 2008, then-Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced Bill C-61 to update the Copyright Act and implement World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaty provisions. However, the bill expired with the dissolution of parliament for the 2008 federal election. The government still maintains interest in these reforms, as witnessed by the public consultations held during summer 2009 and by its current participation in Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement(ACTA) negotiations.
Jailbreaking for iPhone OS  Interesting.  However, I don't think I'd do it.

Thursday, April 08, 2010

 


Dr. Barton taught power electronics during my Electrical Engineering undergraduate program.  I had no idea of his contribution until I saw this segment of a video on Nikola Tesla I watched tonight, "The Genius Who Lit The World".

Brilliance.



This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,--
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,--
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Mill, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched m his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:--

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!


The Chambered Nautilus
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

I don't know, I just lack clarity.  In the past, one door closes and another door opens.  Now, it's like I'm caught in a vestibule of indecision.

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Friday, March 26, 2010

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.
No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with exactly the same kisses.

Reproduced from the poem "Nothing Twice" by Wislawa Szymborska
Every element in the Universe exists in a state of constant change and becoming.

Unknown
You cannot step twice into the same river.

Heraclitus of Ephesus
Inverted pendulum... Very cool!

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Albert Einstein 

Saturday, February 06, 2010

The sound of hoof beats 'cross the glade
Good folk, lock up your son and daughter
Beware the deadly flashing blade
Unless you want to end up shorter
Black Adder, Black Adder, he rides a pitch black steed
Black Adder, Black Adder, he's very bad indeed
Black: his gloves of finest mole
Black: his codpiece made of metal
His horse is blacker than a hole
His pot is blacker than his kettle
Black Adder, Black Adder, with many an cunning plan
Black Adder, Black Adder, you horrid little man.


The Black Adder Lyrics
Twitter Development Profile - http://vimeo.com/9225227

Friday, February 05, 2010

The reader will understand the text better if these ideas are well-structured, and will see and feel this structure much better if the typographical form reflects the logical and semantical structure of the content.

Tobias Oetiker, Hubert Partl, Irene Hyna and Elisabeth Schlegl

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Its cold outside,
There's no kind of atmosphere,
I'm all alone,
More or less.
Let me fly,
Far away from here,
Fun, fun, fun,
In the sun, sun, sun.

I want to lie,
Shipwrecked and comatose,
Drinking fresh,
Mango juice,
Goldfish shoals,
Nibbling at my toes,
Fun, fun, fun,
In the sun, sun, sun,
Fun, fun, fun,
In the sun, sun, sun.


Red Dwarf Lyrics

Thursday, January 21, 2010

"Of course, we have every reason, in daily life as well as in politics, to try to learn as much as we can from history in order to make better decisions for the future!"

Finite Markov Chains and Algorithmic Applications - Olle Häggström, 2002

Sunday, January 10, 2010

The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that if deviations from expected behaviour are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future. For example, if a fair coin is tossed repeatedly and tails comes up a larger number of times than is expected, a gambler may incorrectly believe that this means that heads is more likely in future tosses.[1] Such an expectation could be mistakenly referred to as being due. This is an informal fallacy. It is also known colloquially as the law of averages.
The gambler's fallacy implicitly involves an assertion of negative correlation between trials of the random process and therefore involves a denial of the exchangeability of outcomes of the random process.
The inverse gambler's fallacy is the belief that an unlikely outcome of a random process (such as rolling double sixes on a pair of dice) implies that the process is likely to have occurred many times before reaching that outcome.
The reversal is also a fallacy, the reverse gambler's fallacy, in which a gambler may instead decide that tails are more likely out of some mystical preconception that fate has thus far allowed for consistent results of the tail; the false conclusion being, why change if odds favor tails? Again, the fallacy is the belief that the "universe" somehow carries a memory of past results which tend to favor or disfavor future outcomes.

  “An expert is someone who, over many years, manages to remain confident enough to keep trying and humble enough to keep learning.”