Alkahest

Back when I was a postdoc, I was studying FFTs. Okay, actually, I’m not enough of a mathematician to study FFTs, I was studying the efficient implementation of FFTs on parallel computational clusters. One of the graduate students I was working with on the project penned the following:
If there’s a working FFT
That’s not in [...]

In 2005, congress mandated a change to daylight savings time, essentially, starting it three weeks earlier (March 11th, this year) and ending it three weeks later. Our local paper is requesting suggestions for what people will do with their 22 extra hours of daylight.  Here’s my suggestion:  spend the time fixing all of the [...]

so Saturday night around 11:30pm, the acid neutralizer I just installed, exploded. Okay, it didn’t really explode, but the top popped off again. Spoke to the customer support, looked around a bit more and it seems that the threads on the tank were stripped. I’ll call tomorrow and see about getting a [...]

Two web-related notes:

I’ve just migrated the Piedmont Wildlife Center’s website from a bunch of php webpages (the only reason for the php was to include the template) to the Drupal content management system. I’ve also added in the Coppermine photo gallery to keep our pictures. I would have used gallery2, but it kept [...]

I had a chance last week to read a few books, all of which I would recommend in some fashion or another:
National Geographic’s “The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography” This is a very good, basic field guide to photography. It covers a huge range of subjects and, not surprisingly, has some beautiful photographs. [...]

Let me get a prediction in here before the data come out tonight or tomorrow.  “Cyber Monday” will be a disappointment to retailers.  They will do more electronic business than they did last year, but not significantly more than they did last Friday or next Monday.  Any uptick is going to be small and due [...]

It’s taken me a bit to write about Admiral Poindexter’s visit and the small group talk we had with him. Let me start by reminding folks that here’s a guy who was convicted of lying to congress. The conviction was later overturned on a technicality. He’s also very politically savvy. I [...]

bah - the past few nights, my website/blog keeps getting screwed up because all of the disk space on the drive is consumed.  the first night, i freed up some space, but didn’t pay attention to how much was free. it happened last night and again i freed up space, noting that i had about [...]

Well, it seems that we finally know what happened with the North Korean nuclear test that fizzled.  They apparently mistranslated the Arabic documents the U.S. posted online.
Okay, so neither of those is really very funny.  On the one hand, the U.S. posted a whole host of Arabic documents from Iraq that had never been examined [...]

I recently had a small argument with a vendor selling biometric fingerprint scanners tied to your credit card number.  He said that they were the greatest and most secure thing ever; I said that there weren’t any standards and that the security of the devices was questionable.
I wish I had seen this earlier.