Sunday, February 17, 2002

hmm ... running the command line Seti@Home on my G4 PowerBook has started up the fan and it shows no signs of stopping! The CPU idle is 0% and seti takes all the CPU I'm not using (~85%). 3:24:38 PM    comment

Saturday, February 16, 2002

A Saturn Occultation on February 20th favors North Americans The Moon is a bit past first quarter, 55 percent illuminated, when it overtakes the ringed planet. By then the two will have already set in Europe on the morning of the 21st, except for portions of Portugal, Spain, and northwest Africa. But for the eastern United States and the northern Caribbean, Saturn disappears behind the Moon's dark limb when well up in the south after sunset. It reappears on the bright limb roughly 60 to 75 minutes later. 9:32:03 AM    comment

Monday, February 11, 2002

Reminder to self: When something breaks and I don't think I changed anything, either I'm wrong (and the cat walked over the keyboard), or I'm right (and the auto-templater reverted the version of java on the test server from java 1.3.1 back to java 1.2). In either case, it takes all day to locate the trouble ... grrr 5:19:00 PM    comment

Saturday, February 9, 2002

The Joel Test The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. You don't have to figure out lines-of-code-per-day or average-bugs-per-inflection-point. Give your team 1 point for each "yes" answer. A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time. 10:09:15 PM    comment Common Signs That Your Child May Have Joined the Taliban When teens start to "experiment" with the Taliban, there are usually warning signs. Unfortunately, many parents write off these signals as normal adolescent rebellion. Often, parents will stay in this state of denial until their son (or, increasingly, daughter) is arrested by U.S. Special Forces and put on trial. By then, it's too late. Just ask John Walker Lindh's parents. 12:19:01 AM    comment

Friday, February 8, 2002

InfoWorld Technology of the Year (2001) THERE WAS NOWHERE to hide from the impact of Web services in 2001. In a year of otherwise recessionary technological ebb, Web services built to tsunami strength, defining the next wave of distributed enterprise computing and offering a means of toppling the Tower of Babel built from years of isolated, enterprise stovepipe solutions, without requiring companies to rebuild and reboot to interoperate. 4:00:08 PM    comment

Thursday, February 7, 2002

Apple/Genentech BLAST Apple today announced a breakthrough implementation of BLAST software that accelerates protein and DNA searches used in biomedical research and drug discovery. Apple/Genentech BLAST is up to five times faster than the standard BLAST implementation, the popular bioinformatics tool from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Apple/Genentech BLAST provides improved accuracy and speed over the standard NCBI BLAST, depending on search parameters such as the nucleotide match-length. For certain common searches this version enables a dual 1-GHz Power Mac G4 computer to deliver more than five times the performance of a comparable 2-GHz Pentium 4-based system running the standard NCBI BLAST. 10:09:46 PM    comment When PC Still Means 'Punch Card'. Usually thought of as cultural relics, punch cards are still consumed by the millions in everything from payroll systems to betting slips and, of course, voting machines. [The New York Times: Technology] 2:01:14 PM    comment

Friday, February 1, 2002

Where will it end ? Toshiba announced 10 Gig and 20 Gig hard drives with 100 Mbps transfer rates in a 1.8 inch format weighing 60 grams. 5:37:06 PM    comment

© Copyright 2002 Gavin Eadie. Last update: 2/6/02; 5:06:25 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.