"Engineering to exceed all expectations."

Aston Martin automobile

"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

We seem to have reached the age where Life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.

Too true...

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.

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...

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!"

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)

"Why the hell are we making meth?"

Walter White

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.

Wiki - Bid-Offer Spread

“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

Functional Fixation

Unsung Apollo 13 Heros

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.

 

Thomas Herbert Barton, 1992 Winner of the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award

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

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.

Statistics means never having to say you're certain.

787 Wing Stress Test

Buffon's Needle

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!

Clean.  Colorful.  Calming.

There is an aspect to this that feels comfortably invoking.

http://tinyurl.com/CS-Application

Optimal processing...  Brain Prediction

Amazing Paintings.. Umm Wait What? – I.D. 19 - slodive

Amazing Paintings.. Umm Wait What? – I.D. 19 - slodive

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

Albert Einstein 

Woodbury matrix identity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Woodbury matrix identity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

YouTube - Mini 2-Wheel Balancing Robot.mpg

YouTube - Mini 2-Wheel Balancing Robot.mpg

YouTube - Kalman Filter

YouTube - Kalman Filter

YouTube - Lec 16 | MIT 18.085 Computational Science and Engineering I

YouTube
- Lec 16 | MIT 18.085 Computational Science and Engineering I

YouTube - Lec 16 | MIT 18.085 Computational Science and Engineering I

YouTube
- Lec 16 | MIT 18.085 Computational Science and Engineering I

Recent Nvidia drivers causing catastrophic failures

Recent Nvidia drivers causing catastrophic failures

Test Post

This blog has moved

This blog is now located at __FTP_MIGRATION_NEW_URL__.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
__FTP_MIGRATION_FEED_URL__.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

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

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

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

"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

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.

"Instead of attempting to use direct numerical integration techniques, stochastic sampling techniques or Monte Carlo integration is an alternative. As mentioned, the key idea embedded in the MC approach is to represent the required distribution as a set of random samples rather than a specific analytic function (e.g., Gaussian). As the number of samples becomes large, they provide an equivalent (empirical) representation of the distribution enabling moments to be estimated directly (inference)."

Bayesian Signal Processing, James V. Candy, 2009

"Walk a little slower, daddy.", said a child so small. "I'm following in your footsteps and I don't want to fall."

"Sometimes your steps are very fast, sometimes they are hard to see; so walk a little slower, daddy, for you are leading me."

"Someday when I am all grown up, you're what I want to be; then I will have a little child who'll want to follow me."

"And I would want to lead just right and know that I was true; so, walk a little slower daddy, for I must follow you."

"But they that will be rich, fall into temptation, and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil."

I Timothy, 6

"There can be no joy in living without joy in work."

St. Thomas Aquinas

"The expanded chest, full-formed limbs, and grave countenance of this warrior, would denote that he had reached the vigour of his days, though no symptoms of decay appeard to have yet weakened his manhood."

"The frame of the white man, judging by such parts as were not concealed by his clothes, was like that of one who had known hardships and exertion from his earliest youth. His person, though muscular, was rather attenuated than full; but every nerve and muscle appeared strung and indurated, by unremitted exposure and toil."


The Last of the Mochicans - James Fenimore Cooper

Llama, Llama, Misses Mama!

Ahab turned.

"Starbuck!"

"Sir."

"Oh, Starbuck! It is a mild, mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty- forty - forty year ago! - ago! Forty year of continual whaling! forty year of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make was on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, wall-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! - when I think of all this; only half-suspected, no so keenly known to me before - and how for forty year I have fed upon dry salted fare - fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul! - when the porrest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts - away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving buy one dent in my marriage pillow - wife? wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey - more a demon than a man! - aye, aye! what a forty years' fool - fool - old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, bruch this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, starggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God! - crack my heart! - stave my brain! - mockery - mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into the sea or sky; bettern than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! - lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby-Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!"


...

'Cause you never can tell
What goes on down below!
This pool might be bigger
Than you or I know!


McElligot's Pool

So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life's
a Great Balancing Act.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 1/4 percent gauranteed.)

Kid, You'll Move Mountians!


Oh, the Places You'll Go!

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/26/1528223

"Then there is the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches."

W.I.E. Gates


"All models are wrong but some are useful."

G. E. P. Box, 1979, Page 201.

"One of the things you learn in engineering is to be rigorous. If you build a bridge that falls down on a windy day, there's going to be hell to pay. Financial markets are not like that; they are very noisey. It's hard to tell who's skillful and who's just lucky. And a lot of analyses are done in extremely haphazard, primitive ways, but the investing public doesn't know any better."

Dan diBartolomeo - Wired, March 2009

http://web.mit.edu/18.06/www/Video/video-fall-99-new.html

Command + Tilde - Switch between open windows in Firefox.
Command + Tab - Switch between tabs in a given window in Firefox.

When a young-man dies...

Rebuilding my Macbook...  It is truely freshing to rediscover software I've stashed away in the past.

Gnaural (http://gnaural.sourceforge.net/)

Holophonics - (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holophonics)

http://www.ambiophonics.org/

Binaural Beats - Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats#Brain_waves)

http://www.auditory.org/recorders.html

http://git.or.cz/

Ah... Statistics.