March 16th, 2010
Last Saturday was the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, particularly in this case, my calling.
The day consisted of a workshops, some social gatherings, a formal ring ceremony and banquet.. It was an epically full day I’m sure to remember so long as my brain is in tact.
Suffice to say, I learned a lot more about the illusive Iron Ring and in respect to what is stands for, don’t really have much to say about it, other than it’s a great symbol, though I think the concept could and should be expanded in some regard to apply to any and all professions. Anyway, it was an epic time.
February 7th, 2010
Hey just a fast post here.. I’ve been using sshfs on Ubuntu (meh, linux in general) for awhile as a means of securely remotely accessing my files. I’ve taken some steps to add a line to my /etc/fstab file to make this run smoothly…
Though today I ran in to a really weird situation. I found that despite having a uid=xxxx line, the appropriate user wasn’t getting ownership of the mount. In fact, when that user would look at the permissions for the mount, it returned something like “d???? ? ? ?”. Whisky Tango Foxtrot.
Well, turned out the problem was a result of how I had my fstab arranged.
Continue reading Ubuntu 9.10 remote mounts via sshfs
January 29th, 2010
A Message to my fellow U of C Students….
'PL'-this BS-'O'
The other day I was sitting in class watching a prof write some notes on the chalkboard. As per usual, he navigated around a big section of the board that was boxed off with a note “PLO” (Please Leave On) written over it. The notes he wrote were compressed and distorted as he really needed a full board to express the idea.
It got me thinking…
Watching my prof thoughtfully navigate around the box got me thinking of how this ‘bull’ was affecting everyone in the room. There we all sat to learn something new. The person sharing their idea has so many limits on communication to navigate and this PLO box was one of them.
I recall seeing these kinds of ADVERTISEMENTS on chalkboards back in to high school. I’ve seen them thoughout my 8 years / 2 degrees at U of C… They’re nothing new and they compete for our attention. Yet I’m starting to wonder why my profs generally respect and avoid these intrusions?
Continue reading No More Chalkboard Spam
January 28th, 2010
iPad Promo Images
Yesterday Apple introduced their massively anticipated iPad tablet device. For those who haven’t yet heard about it, it’s basically a hudge iPhone (that doesn’t make phone calls). The iPad is meant to unlock a “new” market segment for small computing devices that is somehow not already met by the iPhone and netbooks.
What does it do, anything new?
The iPad doesn’t bring new functionality to the computing world, but it does consolidate and simplify use particularly of eBooks. There have long since been many very cool eBook readers out there built around providing simple means for people to read electronic books.
Amazon's Kindle eBook reader
With the release of iPad, iTunes will expand to include support for buying eBooks and of course that functionality will be easily available for regular computers and perhaps for the iPhone as well, unless Apple decides allowing that would result in you buying less stuff.
Beyond books, the iPad does all the stuff you expect from an iPhone. It runs the exact same applications (with rare exceptions), it will play back music and movies. Of course one major distinction is screen size. The iPhone’s screen is made up of 480×320 pixels where as the iPad provides 1024×768. So in the case of browsing documents, this will make a major difference. The iPad’s resolution however is like that of a standard TV – so all our new HD/widescreen content won’t fill the screen (unless you like cropping out much of the scene).
Like some of the better eBook readers, the high end iPad offers 3G connectivity. This enables those users to be connected to the internet via the cell phone network (like our smart phones). The sad part here is the extra ~$130USD for 3G is well on it’s way to paying for an Amazon Kindle or a Barnes & Noble Nook (both $260USD) which are optimized strictly for reading eBooks but both include 3G as well.
Continue reading iPad FTW?
