My geek thread
10-02-11, 12:34 PM
#776
Not actually Tmonk
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Well theyre the right color so I'm in the ballpark.
I'll determine their exact size and polydispersity tomorrow.
I'll determine their exact size and polydispersity tomorrow.
__________________
"Your beauty is an aeroplane;
so high, my heart cannot bear the strain." -A.C. Jobim, Triste
"Your beauty is an aeroplane;
so high, my heart cannot bear the strain." -A.C. Jobim, Triste
10-05-11, 08:00 AM
#777
Making a kilometer blurry
ffs: radio path loss has a LOT of fluctuation indoors. It's worse in our building because we have SCIFs all over the place with grounded wire-mesh impregnated walls.
Here I was planning on all these lovely intersections of distance rings on my maps, and come to find out the predicted distance from a wifi access point is often much larger than the damned building.
Here I was planning on all these lovely intersections of distance rings on my maps, and come to find out the predicted distance from a wifi access point is often much larger than the damned building.
10-05-11, 11:01 AM
#778
Elite Fred
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I have been living with a cell phone with a cracked screen for a while and I'm thinking about taking the smartphone plunge. I have no plans to do any media streaming over the network, so is there any real reason to go 4G?
10-05-11, 11:32 AM
#779
Making a kilometer blurry
Just compare the coverage maps with where you spend time. I'm really happy on 3G right now. I'm sure I'll move up when renewal time hits next summer, but 3G Verizon has been great. My wife hated AT&T 3G though...
10-05-11, 11:38 AM
#780
Elite Fred
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My town is covered with 4G. I just worry that 4G will be a battery hog and do me no good. I have used my wife's Verizon 3G phone and it seems fine to me.
10-05-11, 11:48 AM
#782
My idea of fun
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We're not really covered in 4g. Some companies claim we are, but we're not. Regardless, 3g is probably fine. AT&T is a bit oversubscribed, and so in-between classes there's a crap ton of dropped calls while all the kids check their fb status, but they're going to be rolling out individual cell repeaters all around campus beginning in November to help fix that.
10-05-11, 11:58 AM
#783
Making a kilometer blurry
Yeah, for that reason, the HTC Incredible 2 seems like an under-appreciated phone. My original Incredible is still doing great, and performs well with the apps I use. Dual core would hog more battery as well. It depends on what you're doing, I guess. I'm not looking to calculate PI out to a million digits or anything.
10-05-11, 01:28 PM
#784
Elite Fred
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Yeah, for that reason, the HTC Incredible 2 seems like an under-appreciated phone. My original Incredible is still doing great, and performs well with the apps I use. Dual core would hog more battery as well. It depends on what you're doing, I guess. I'm not looking to calculate PI out to a million digits or anything.
10-05-11, 01:32 PM
#785
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10-05-11, 03:00 PM
#786
Elite Fred
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Now back to the (unintended but 'de facto' ) theme of this thread which has morphed into programming:
Believe it or not I have never had to deal with the minutia of extracting information from xml files before. I have understood the "theory" of it for a long time, but now the "rubber" has hit the "road". And now that I have to do now it is in the context of Python and the existing tools for doing it in Python are not "python-centric", that is they don't behave in the way you think that they would behave in a Python "world" and behave differently.
Coding this cr@p in Python is like living in a world where you are driving on the right side of the road and then suddenly driving on the left side, and then the right side, and so forth, over and over again.
It took me about 15 minutes to figure all of this out, but in those 15 minutes I built a HUGE number of brain synapse connections, so I guess that it is "all good".
Believe it or not I have never had to deal with the minutia of extracting information from xml files before. I have understood the "theory" of it for a long time, but now the "rubber" has hit the "road". And now that I have to do now it is in the context of Python and the existing tools for doing it in Python are not "python-centric", that is they don't behave in the way you think that they would behave in a Python "world" and behave differently.
Coding this cr@p in Python is like living in a world where you are driving on the right side of the road and then suddenly driving on the left side, and then the right side, and so forth, over and over again.
It took me about 15 minutes to figure all of this out, but in those 15 minutes I built a HUGE number of brain synapse connections, so I guess that it is "all good".
10-05-11, 03:18 PM
#787
Elite Fred
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We're not really covered in 4g. Some companies claim we are, but we're not. Regardless, 3g is probably fine. AT&T is a bit oversubscribed, and so in-between classes there's a crap ton of dropped calls while all the kids check their fb status, but they're going to be rolling out individual cell repeaters all around campus beginning in November to help fix that.
If I happened to be walking on campus between classes I used to keep track mentally of the percentage of students that were either talking or texting on their phones. For the male population it wasn't that large, but for the female population it was well over 50%. This makes me think that T-Mobile needs to replace their "easy on the eyes" female "spokesperson" with a hunky guy if they are really interested in marketing their product.
Last edited by mollusk; 10-05-11 at 05:35 PM. Reason: fixed a split inifinite. Maybe RTC will drop by and give me $h1t again.
10-05-11, 03:18 PM
#788
Making a kilometer blurry
My freaking radio power problem has now turned into a me writing a small game physics engine. It's been a while, but is fun.
10-05-11, 06:15 PM
#789
Elite Fred
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Back in the early-to-mid-1990's I coded up a server-side application that would test the response time between computers on the Internet via a "ping" response time and based on that it would make decisions on which version of a web page to serve. It worked like this: on an HTML request for a page to the server it would first "ping" the asking party and then wait for the response time. For "slow" responses it would serve up the less image intensive version of the page, but for fast responses it would get the "full monty". Back in the day of 56K modem (or 28.8) versus T-1 this was a big issue. I'll tell you how "back in the day" this was: My 286/Windows 3.1 computer on my desktop was the only HTML server in my department and it was serving out the department's webpages. (Windows 3.1 knew NOTHING about TCP/IP and network sockets, so this was a bit of a trick.) With most folks using dial-up back then WWW meant World Wide Wait and we didn't want those folks to get irritated with us because of incredibly slow load times, but at the same time we didn't want those with fast connections to think that we were passe.
Seeing that I was a State of Florida employee at the time and that all intellectual property rights were vested in them, I didn't think for one second of trying to "cash in" on an idea that at the time was worthwhile, but would shortly become meaningless. I let it slide.
However I did think about quitting my job at UF and going to NYC to do web "stuff" at that time. There was ungodly sums of money available to anyone that knew anything back then.
10-05-11, 08:30 PM
#790
Making a kilometer blurry
Good history there -- nice. The non-scaling web sites were why I always ran Lynx back then.
10-05-11, 09:36 PM
#791
Killing Rabbits
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Women prefer to look at other women. Just check out any women's magazine for proof. Pictures of men only sells stuff to metrosexuals and bodybuilders.
10-06-11, 05:50 AM
#793
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Ahh yes, our claim to fame. Forget Gatorade, Tebow, multiple national championships in multiple sports, but remember us for some idiot trying to cause a ruckus at a John Kerry speech.
10-06-11, 07:23 AM
#794
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10-12-11, 02:20 PM
#795
Elite Fred
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Took the plunge into the smartphone world. HTC Incredible 2 is arriving later today. 3G is good enough for me.
I had to use Pk2commander to download everything that I wanted off of my old phone due to idiotic Verizon practices, but I got everything.
How long before I root it? Not tonight (although I am tempted). Being a gsm and cdma capable phone there may be some issues and I'm not on top of all of that stuff. Still reading up on it.
I had to use Pk2commander to download everything that I wanted off of my old phone due to idiotic Verizon practices, but I got everything.
How long before I root it? Not tonight (although I am tempted). Being a gsm and cdma capable phone there may be some issues and I'm not on top of all of that stuff. Still reading up on it.
10-12-11, 02:25 PM
#796
Draught
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I rooted my Nook Color with Cyanogenmod. I've left my phone alone (HTC Aria) but I do like the mod, although I mainly still use the Nook as a reader.
10-14-11, 02:24 PM
#798
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I made my first GUI in Matlab. Didn't really need to, but I wanted to make an executable for the undergrad I am working with who doesn't have Matlab. This way she can use the program I wrote to calculate pack cementation parameters on her own computer.
Took about an hour to write, just because I haven't used Matlab in a while, but the data I collected to make the program useful took quite a while to get.
Took about an hour to write, just because I haven't used Matlab in a while, but the data I collected to make the program useful took quite a while to get.
Last edited by SalsaPodio; 10-14-11 at 02:27 PM.
10-16-11, 02:55 PM
#800
Elite Fred
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I got a HUGE piece of my consulting job coding working today. 
The rest is cosmetics.
The "thing" is a Python class that represents a particular type of chemical reactor where what comes out one end depends on what went in the other end some time in the past and this class needs to play nice with another code not written by me. The algorithm I used was designed from the beginning to minimize computational resources because computational models for reactors like this are notorious computational hogs and my client want to model reactor networks with quite a few of them in it. (True fact: I woke up one morning with the whole algorithm in my head. It is very elegant.) A central requirement of the algorithm is that it needs to create and destroy other types of objects in the other code dynamically (to keep resources in check) and Python is not the best language for this.
I sure did learn a lot about "dictionaries" and what really goes on with the "vars" function in Python. It can do a heck of a lot more than locals().
I needed to use some "double underscored" methods in the application that I was writing for to do everything required. I hate doing that.
The rest is cosmetics.The "thing" is a Python class that represents a particular type of chemical reactor where what comes out one end depends on what went in the other end some time in the past and this class needs to play nice with another code not written by me. The algorithm I used was designed from the beginning to minimize computational resources because computational models for reactors like this are notorious computational hogs and my client want to model reactor networks with quite a few of them in it. (True fact: I woke up one morning with the whole algorithm in my head. It is very elegant.) A central requirement of the algorithm is that it needs to create and destroy other types of objects in the other code dynamically (to keep resources in check) and Python is not the best language for this.
I sure did learn a lot about "dictionaries" and what really goes on with the "vars" function in Python. It can do a heck of a lot more than locals().
I needed to use some "double underscored" methods in the application that I was writing for to do everything required. I hate doing that.