James Baker III is getting his mitts dirty again on behalf of Boy Blunder. They're talking (out loud, this time) about partitioning Iraq -- an idea which I've discussed before to highlight just how bad it is. But don't listen to me. Here's the analysis by Middle East expert Juan Cole:

This is a very bad idea for so many reasons it would take me ( Read more... )

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Cream of tartar with vinegar works better than borax for getting rid of ants. Two days later, there's only one lonely ant where there used to be dozens... I think they decided to leave rather than dying out, though -- there aren't any dead ant bodies lying around. They even removed the ones I squished. Thoughtful of them...

In honor of Talk ( Read more... )

After I finished a you-better-fix-this-'cause-it's-very-inconvenient phone call about the spare battery in my laptop dying (again! -- Never, EVER buy from a place called BatteryValues.com!) I ran across a set of notes for a Unix talk given by Dennis Ritchie in 1972.
UNIX is running on at least five PDP-11, no two with the same complement of ( Read more... )

I really wanted to take Neural Networks. Artificial Intelligence is a topic I've always had a more-than-casual interest in, to the point of actually going to meet Marvin Minsky at one point under the guise of investigating a graduate degree at MIT, and falling back on a (less-intimidating) course or two at Boston University ( Read more... )

Act I ( Read more... )

Arrived in Amsterdam yesterday. Not the happiest trip of all time:

• I was unable to check in online, I suspect because I was travelling through Heathrow.
• The 1 1/4-hour trip from NH to Logan took double that due to rush-hour traffic, ending in a nail-biting arrival time of five minutes before check-in for the flight would have closed.
• Ittiest, ( Read more... )

In the Addonics stack I'm playing with now, there's an odd quirk: the order in which the drives are detected (and thus the /dev/sdx names they are given) is indeterminate when the thing is connected and then powered up. My guess is this gets determined by the order in which the drives report they are spun up to speed. Connecting the thing after ( Read more... )

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Got my Addonics storage tower and it has been working out quite well (see the entry Drowning in Drives? for background ( Read more... )