Something Similar

It's Time

Making the move over to a new address. SomethingSimilar.com is live and has all of the old posts. It's not all that pretty (yet) but I'm working on it. Thanks for the bandwidth and the storage space, PyCS. I'll get out of your hair now.

Peek-a-boo!

Not quite ready to come out of the oven, but I might as well let you folks take look see with the light on.

Convergence Kills: What Apple is Planning For

Excellent article describing what Apple seems to be trying to with their iPod/iTunes products and how that ties into convergence, cellphones, movies-on-demand and the MPAA (semi-spoiler: DRM). Far more interesting than this summary gives.

I waited to post this but once I saw the followup, I knew I had to post it. For what its worth, this also really made me decide that anyone just sitting around waiting to see the cellphone market either implode or stabilize at a much slower rate is really going to be getting the best deal long term. It has to do one or the other. The cellphone market is moving to complete oversaturation (if it hasn't reached that point yet) and something has to give. Either quite a few companees give up on it and it slows to a sustainable rate (Ha! And lose out on those short term profits? Never!) or it reaches critical mass. Just my 2 cents.

omg Classes

I'm beginning to go into serious withdrawal. I really just need to slip into a nice cryofreeze pod for the next 2 weeks. I'm in desperate need of the company of friends and the vast majority of them are still out in the Great Unknown (Ohio). To those of you whom I'm speaking of, prepare yourselves. You will not only be getting Jeff-bear-hugs but Jeff-bear-hugs-with-swing. If you're pregnant, have a heart condition or have a weak stomach, please infrom me prior to.

Sigh.. 2 more weeks until I get to play with my "Mathematical Methods in Physics" class.

NVIDIA kernel module and XFree86 or XOrg

Note to the non-technical reader: Ignore this post unless you really want to read something that will teach you nothing.

I've now seen at least 2 other people besides myself run into this error. The latest was a rather nice fellow who posted it on the Lunar Linux mailing list. While using NVIDIA's linux drivers, and running XOrg, his X server refused to start and displayed this (edited):

Symbol noPanoramiXExtension from module /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/nvidia_drv.o is unresolved!

This same thing can happen with the regular XFree86 X server as well. Now, because he was unable to find it using Google, and I had seen a few others with this problem, I decided I should share the super-secret solution to this. I hope this helps a few people. Google, you better be caching this.

drumroll

horns blaring

Recompile your X server with the Xinerama extensions enabled.

Now if that makes no sense to you, consult your friendly neighborhood distro support. Alternatively, you could email me (you can do so by clicking here: ). Good luck.

Wrist Sleeve For Cellphones

While I would never use it for carrying its intended payload, I'm damn sure I could figure out something much neater to do with it. Hmm.. from Boing Boing

Speaking of CP

What timing. New measurements of charge-parity (CP) violation using a stronger methodology. Essentially, its been shown that matter and anti-matter are not perfectly "symmetrical", that their values are not just the "reverse" of the other, by examining how often B mesons and anti-B mesons (matter, and anti-matter particles, respectively) break down into K⁺pi^- pairs (a pair of 2 more subatomic particles). Theory says that the decay of B and anti-B mesons should have the same probability of generating K⁺pi^- pairs but according to this experiment there's a rather large discrepancy (910 pairs to 696 pairs).

God, I love this stuff. If you folks want a better explanation of CP violation, leave a comment, and I'll get cracking on it.

Journal Publishers Pissed, Poor Science Students Get Way Too Excited

Congress is moving to force a shift to "open access," a form of free-to-consumer publishing, for scientific papers. The move angers commercial publishers, who see their livelihoods threatened and it scares scientific societies, who are afraid they will face losses or costs they cannot afford. Even librarians, who pushed for the move, are cautious, because they are concerned for the health of the scientific societies.

Peer-reviewed journals are the life's blood of scientific research. Through such quality-control vehicles, researchers can tap into what one another is doing. Journals often allow doctors to find out about new discoveries to help their patients, for example.

Unh, double unh, unh.

Please do it, congresscritters. I needs my peer review fix. I jones so bad when I'm not hanging out in the library stacks. If this happens, I'm going to be all for opening a bottle of hampagne over a nice Open Acess CP violation paper. Or maybe a neat neuroscience paper. Oh, oh! What about one on gene expression patterns in embryogenesis of.. er.. some species!

Sigh, until that time I guess I can satisfy myself with arXiv.

Hewlett-Packard Launches Line of Linux Laptop

This news is slightly dated (a whole 2 days old) but thats only because I hadn't gotten around to looking at the laptops themselves. Now I have. And I want. You can get SUSE Linux 9.1 already installed on it. And if you choose SUSE 9.1 as your operating system, you subtract $50 from the total price! Yummy! It's also in their "lightweight" line of notebooks! Sweet! I'll be damned if I isn't out of my (and most college students) price range. Car first, laptop second (ugh). So, all of my college peers cheer yourself up with a free iPod by clicking here.

Bush Ratings vs. Terror Alerts

There are few things that are quite evident from the chart:

- Whenever his ratings dip, there's a new terror alert.

- Every terror alert is followed by a slight uptick of Bush approval ratings.

- As we approach the 2004 elections, the number and frequency of terror alerts keeps growing, to the point that they collapse in the graphic. At the same time, Bush ratings are lower than ever.

Interesting. One could argue that the frequency of terror alerts is going up is due to terrorists wishing to disrupt the democratic process and increasing their planning as the presidential election nears. However,the correlation of terror alerts with Bush's dips in ratings and the timing of certain events such as the Democratic National convention cannot be ignored. To be honest, these vague "alerts" which lately are using old information (i.e. the latest one that was based on data that mentioned buildings being cased before 9/11), leave me unable to believe that this is simply "terrorist chatter" increasing.

Forgive any grammar problems. I'm dropping off but wanted to mention this.

Broken Libraries

Does anyone know of a tool that flits about your filesystem and checks for shared libraries with broken links or am I going to have to write the damn thing? I know it could be done semi-trivially but I hate wasting all of that time that I could be using on my ~3 projects at the moment. Heh, thanks.

Oooo.. Free Ipod

This is strange. According to Paul and Colin over at Planet Ars Linux, this is for real. The title link describes how to do this and I've followed through on it (using the eBay option, just waiting for it to get "counted"). Get your own iPod mini and help me get one of my own would you? Click here and signup. Even if you don't go through all the way, you count as one of the 5 referrals I need to get the iPod Mini . Thanks!

Update: Ok, I was wrong. Referrers have to "complete an offer". Bah, ah well.

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) --- results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate -- the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google (or Technorati) for all blogs that participate in this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).

REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/ (through http://planet.gnome.org)

(2) I found it via "Newsreader Software" or "Browsing the Web" or "Searching the Web" or "An E-Mail Message": "Browsing the Web"

(3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://jmhodges.pycs.net

(4) I posted this on date (day, month, year): 04/08/04

(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 16:23:00

(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Bowling Green, OH, United States of America

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(7) My blog is hosted by: PyCS.net

(8) My age is: 20

(9) My gender is: Male

(10) My occupation is: Student

(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software:

(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: PyDS

(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 20/10/2003

(14) My web browser is: Firebird

(15) My operating system is: Linux

The Hundred Thousand Gallon Restaurant

Genius! Found over at CollinGrady.com (through Planet Ars Linux)

Dispatches from Fallujah

Very, very well-written. Be sure to read Thursday and Friday. Excellent objective viewpoint of the soldiers in deep.