john

I decided to build a new computer recently, and I thought I'd throw down some notes on the little tricks to getting Debian Etch running on it.


The Motherboard is an Intel DP965LTCK. I had initially intended to pick up a SATA DVD drive, but when I ordered, I forgot about it. By some reversal of luck, the SATA controller was recognized by default and the IDE chipset was not, so I couldn't get enough of the install started from the boot iso.

The Fix:

Set the SATA controller to AHCI in the bios, and boot the install kernel with generic.all_generic_ide=1. If you don't set AHCI, the disk drives get picked up by this as well and they don't run so well. Windows XP will not boot with AHCI set, but after getting gnu/linux (take that Richard Stallman, I lower-cased your recursive acronym) installed, you can toggle it off and everything will be honky dory.

Apparently getting a really new video card means that I get to use the beta nvidia drivers and have to wait a little while for the GPGPU support to happen.

This sucker should last me 6 years, just like the last one.

Apparently Richard Stallman is giving a talk in my building at 10am next wednesday. Wacky.

I asked some of my relatives what they might want for christmas and they indicated that a donation to charity would be nice.

I just realized that the EFF meets the charity requirement, and it is something that I care about.

Thought I'd point that out to anyone else looking for charities you can donate to.

Man, I was digging around for blackbox themes on freshmeat today and sooo many of them involve naked women. I want pretty worksafe themes. It is a shame that using a geeky window manager means that other geeky people use it and therefore very few people resembling decent graphic artists are making themes.

In other news: null pointer dereferences in kernel makes baby john cry -- more specifically it reboots the machine. Time to use the magic number dance to get it initialized properly (p2m[((*store_mfn << 20) >> PAGE_SHIFT) - 1] where p2m is a map from PFN to MFN, store_mfn is a pointer to a known address, and PAGE_SHIFT is architecture dependent). Yumm.

At lunch today we were discussing the assignment of a ranking (1-10) to objects and we were trying to come up with a different system that might take into account more than a simple one dimensional scale. What we are wondering is whether, given the results of a number of queries to an individual of whether Object A is better than Object B for all of the objects, we can construct an n-dimensional space in which there is a partial order in each dimension even though we might have a non-transitive set within the queries (a > b, b > c, c > a). The difficulty being that we have no idea what the dimensions are and that the comparison operator is subjective. The main goal is to see what these dimensions might be and what we might be able to attribute to each of them.

This doesn't necessarily require dimensions, but sets with a partial-ordering.

Is this doable? Are we full of crap? Did I do a horrible job explaining?

Apologies if I butchered the math terminology.

Because you can't get on the southbound 805 down here....



hehe.

If you remove the @blahblah stuff it does something more reasonable.

I got this by searching for San Remo Dr, Corona, CA 92882
then using "To Here" from 92122.

Viola.

A Scanner Darkly was disappointing.

"You will have fortune as you desire" -- Panda Express * Panda Inn.

I love you.

"Years of treasured recollections dating all the way back to your childhood will be lost forever when a four-story fall exposes your photographic memory to daylight."

"You have an accurate and professional mind." -- Panda Express * Panda Inn

"Wise man is slow in choosing friends and slower in changing" -- Panda Express * Panda Inn

"
Do not hide your feelings
let others know
where they stand
"
-Panda Express o Panda Inn

The original Chipotle is 2 miles from my house.

The Piled Higher and Deeper comic author is coming to mudd on 5/3...craaazy.


http://www.phdcomics.com/speaking.htm

Something else on lj triggered the question of what defines maturity in people.

It is often said that girls tend to be more mature than guys growing up. Many of them seem to act like grown up women, although I have, many times, seen behavior that indicates underlying immaturity. I do know lots of guys who act fairly immature, but then I have trouble identifying what is meant in the general sense by being mature vs being immature. Mostly because I see the things that I see in younger people as immature in adults all the time.

What does it mean to be mature? What are the perceived differences between boys and girls that make the girls more mature?

Why is all the housing that seems appealing around UCSD female preferred?

Boo.

1. UCSD


2. GA Tech --> UCSC


3. CU


4. UBC


5. UNM


6. Northwestern???

(Northwestern hasn't told me anything.)

I am mostly settled on UCSD right now. I've set my ultimateum to Monday or Tomorrow, depending on how Tomorrow feels.

I am almost done getting myself down to 6 units. Woo.

hehe. Not that they are easy units, but woo none the less.

Short term planning is great:

• Eat Breakfast


• Read UCSD Graduate Research Brochure


• Read Fun Book


• Eat Lunch


• Do Work


• Go to Meetings

Woot.

Question for those who know: What is it like to live in Cupertino/Silicon Valley? I've heard it called sterile, but I have little to know idea. How hard is it to get out and visit people?

and a very merry un-birthday to me.

I turned 22.8 today.

That was a lot of fun. Thanks guys! I really enjoyed that.