Yet Another Geek Girl

Buying a new house...

2011-12-08T23:37:00.001-08:00

That is an old house..Water heaters that have sat and not been turned on for a while, may have smelly water when you turn on the hot water. I always hear about softeners and purifiers but in this case it appears that these won't solve the problem and in fact could make it worse. I've never heard of this but there is a harmless (? I need to find verification of this) bacteria that reduces sulfur causing a horrible smell when you turn on the hot water. The key repair here appears to be flush the water with either hydrogen peroxide/bleach, run the water super hot, and then drain the tank (turning off the water while doing so). It's apparently not a permanent fix, but I'll be trying this out as soon as possible!

Reminiscing

2011-10-29T01:38:00.000-07:00

Midnight was a sweet dog, that we never trained. I didn't even realize that dog training was something you did with dogs that weren't show dogs! Somehow as I guess all dogs do, he learned from us and trained us to be dog-keepers. Midnight didn't get any special foods, and only ever got Milkbone treats. He ate the most simple basic dog food there was with much gusto, and his poop was foul probably because of this. I really hated picking up his poop. He was a very affectionate dog though. I could hug him, and pet him, and cuddle him for hours and he wouldn't complain. He was a very slobbery dog, and it was quite often that he'd gross me out with his doggie boogers. There was a lot of teasing between my siblings about getting slimed. He had a problem with pulling on his leash, and my brother Michael suffered a broken arm one summer due to not paying attention to his tugging. Yet no matter how much 7 kids put him through, he was the most loyal and faithful dog. Midnight went on many walks and runs with me all throughout his life. As I got older, and life got complicated, he was the one companion I felt connected to without the drama. My mom bought a new dog cocker spaniel Cinnamon who would constantly bark. As my senior year approached, I would go on runs with Cinnamon but it wasn't the same. Cinnamon would tug, and bark at anything, and it wasn't pleasant. He'd also snap and bark at Midnight and that upset me greatly. My senior year in high school, shortly after my father's death and before my great-grandfather's death, Midnight started having problems. He started growing these tumors in his ears, and every night he would lay his head in my lap and I'd clean his ears with this medication that was supposed to help. I could tell it hurt him because he cried, but he would just look at me with his big doggie eyes placing his trust in me. The internet is a great thing because at least I know now that it's a disorder that afflicts cocker spaniels and not something that we could have done differently. He got weaker and weaker, and he ended up having to be put to sleep.It's almost 20 years, but I still miss him.It's hard to write well but at least I have a framework to start writing down the memories. As time goes on I worry that I'll lose that last part of him that remains.

Head First Statistics - Review

2011-09-30T23:44:00.000-07:00

Along with taking Probability and Statistics at NDNU with my official stats book, I bought Head First Statistics from O'Reilly. My course was focused on calculus based statistics which is not covered by this book. It did give me a better comprehension of the terms and subject matter than the official book. The examples are very simple and easy to understand and build up as you move through the book. It was easy to match up with what I was reading for class, and helped me immensely when I was writing up my project report.

updating my personal laptop

2011-09-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

My work laptop has been my primary system for the last 3.5 years, mainly because I spend a lot of time working. I realized that I was just really tired of the slowness and problems I've seen with the disk, and it's been over a year now so I splurged and picked up an air (http://www.apple.com/macbookair/). It pre-arrives with Lion, which at this time in September looks from the updates to have been built after June but before July. perl 5.12, python-2.71 all ready to go. I have an iMac already upgraded to Lion so I have some experience with Lion. I upgraded the Xcode included after Lion rolled out and noticed warnings about issues, but as I had no problems with my iMac install so I figured the problem had been resolved. I went to install Mac ports, and discovered that I needed to install Xcode. I went to the Mac app store, and attempted to install. No luck, and it appeared to just hang. The process just said "Paused". Rebooting didn't help. Updating the OS with software updates hung. My solution (I do not advise using this), was to kill launchd (this caused the system to reboot), but cleared the stuck app install. Next I did a system update (did not choose the options that included the firmware updates). Then I re-tried the install of Xcode. So my advice to folks who are attempting to install Xcode is to go ahead and do a system update prior to installing Xcode! Xcode installed fine, followed with Mac ports, and then sudo port install bash-completion to get my bash command completion installed. So far I'm loving the new system although I've not completely fixed my working environment up yet. Looking forward to writing some helpful goodness about the Mac :) Until next time!

Yelp "Bling"

2011-03-20T00:20:00.001-07:00

Recent reviews by Jennifer D.

Reviewing gene synthesis from proteins Biology I

2010-10-24T21:40:00.000-07:00

In 1909, Archibald Garrod was the first to suggest that phenotypes, or the presentation of physical characteristics are dictated by genes through enzymes that catalyze specific chemical reactions in the cell. He called it the "inborn errors of metabolism" that led to disorders like alkaptonuria. He was the first scientist to be attributed with applying Mendel's principles of heredity to humans, and not just plants.

Later, Beadle and Tatum investigating the bread mold, Neurospora crassa hypothesized the "one gene-one enzyme". Their test involved looking at Xray bombarded mold that could not survive on a minimal medium and changing the nutrient levels to see at what point the mold could survive. Through detailed experimentation they were able to pin down the problems arising through the synthesis of arginine. Three mutant strands of Neurospora crassa had a different inability through the catalyst pathway of synthesizing arginine.

Through the combined efforts of Garrod, Beadle, and Tatum we have a better understanding of the relationship between genes and enzymes.

In the most simplistic terminology DNA transcribes mRNA, and mRNA is translated into an amino acid sequence forming polypeptide.

Replacing the PS3 hard drive

2010-06-26T10:44:00.001-07:00

There are a lot of step by step instructions you can read on this process. One walk through. There are others with pictures. It's pretty easy to get into the system to do this.

I bought a Seagate Momentus 2.5 Internal Drive 500GB 5400 RPM 8MB cache drive from Fry's for $79.99. (You can get smaller drives for cheaper. Put the new drive in, turn the PS3 on, within about 2 minutes it's back up and running. Literally, it formatted the drive, restarted and it's back up. It still has all my configuration information, but I don't think it has any game play data. So if you have a PS3 and you care about that information make sure you make regular backups.

ETA (July 22, 2010)

So the modification is a semi-success. I do not know if there are additional problems with the unit, or if this is a result of replacing the hard drive. I primarily use my PS3 to watch movies, either via Netflix or a DVD. Occasionally the PS3 is no longer recognizing the DVDs. Additionally, it sometimes stops mid-play and hangs in a frozen state (screen is completely black). I haven't worked too hard on figuring this out, so I may have a new update in the future with how to fix this problem (if it is fixable).

ETA (March 20, 2011)

Still a semi-success. I really don't have a large drive to fix this after getting cable. The system plays regular PS3 disks fine with no issue, it might just be the Netflix DVDs that have issues.ETA (Sep 28, 2011)

Still a semi-success. No problems playing games, but video is still iffy.

PS3 not booting

2010-06-25T21:53:00.000-07:00

I discovered today that a PS3 can get into a very funky state.

The system when turned on would do the little PS3 starting sound, and then show the logo for the PS3, and then a swirly wavy line across the screen in shades of blue and green.

This to me looked like something where the PS3 had something in memory but that the disk was in a bad state.

I started searching on the internet (and if you found this page via your own search hopefully I can provide some help, but please look around as it looks like there are multiple issues). I mostly use my PS3 to play movies, so I'm not too concerned about data loss. I'm trying not to think about the result here and just describe the issue to hopefully help others :).

So if you search around, you may find the recommendation to hold down the "Start" button on the console for a couple of seconds until you hear 2 beeps and then it will take you to a menu to choose some special options. This did not work for me. For my particular model (and may be the particular version of software on the system too that determines this), you hold the eject button and the start button at the same time. It didn't really sound like two beeps but a fast succession of a number of beeps. A menu didn't show up, it just informed me that my harddrive was corrupted and that it was formatting the drive. It stops at "24%" and then restarts the system.

I suspect that I have some potentially bad sectors, so I will do a bit more searching and potentially replace the harddrive.

Discrete Mathematics

2010-04-18T20:48:00.000-07:00

My latest foray in self-education is going back and reviewing my discrete math, and going through lecture notes provided for CS173 over at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign here http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/class/sp10/cs173/.

Reading through the lecture notes (morning and evening are pretty much the same but a different style), I'm actually enjoying the topic. My own dreaded class on discrete math, I started out with one professor who had a health ailment and went through a series of substitutes until the final one was decided. He would scrawl across the board with thick angry strikes of chalk against board the cloying powder in the small room irritating to my throat. I ended up with an A in the class but it was based on his declaration at the beginning of the quarter that the grade could be based on a number of formulas one which was solely based on the final grade. I ended up studying my heart out towards his testing style (after doing abysmally on quizzes and midterms). Now with the freedom of following my own desires in knowledge and not ascribing to meet some specific requirement that a professor has decided is the baseline for understanding a subject I'm enjoying the subject immensely.

I enjoy the CS173 lecture notes because they come in 2 different styles that actually complement each other. I have the fifth edition and not the sixth edition of Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications so there have been a few places I have needed to check against the current table of contents to find which sections to read.

I've only just begun to follow through the course, so hopefully the notes don't disappear before I've fully gone through them. I'm actually working through the homework assignments as well which is definitely a fun stretch of concepts which haven't been used in years!

I am especially grateful to universities and professors that put their notes up online and allow students (and other teachers potentially) to grow and learn. We live in privileged times and I hope that we continue to have the benefit of shared knowledge.

Statistics and R

2010-02-15T17:55:00.000-08:00

Just a marker for myself to remember to go back and review Adrian Cockcroft's R-ness.

http://perfcap.blogspot.com/search?q=chp - Calculating headroom using R. Brief scan looks pretty good.

Book lists

2010-01-18T13:05:00.000-08:00

After visiting the library yesterday, I thought about how I'd like to keep track of what I read from the library. I'm going to figure out some kind of formula to determine how much I'll donate towards the library with checking out versus buying books.

Thinking about how it would be nice to be able to just have an ongoing list of books that I've checked out from the library, I realize that they probably don't have that technology (or at least not to share it with their patrons). It would be really cool to have some kind of phone app that would let you see what you've read from the library and put items on hold so you could keep your book queue full.

I found this great site, ISBNdb.com that lets you look up information about books and they provide an API to that information. Queue brain cells firing up and combining new python knowledge with ISBN lookup. I found the site when I was looking to see whether there was some kind of resource that made ISBN<->book lookup freely available. It seems like ISBNdb.com is pretty easy to use (tested out the API using simple curl calls.)

ie.

curl 'http://isbndb.com/api/books.xml?access_key=GETYOUROWNACCESSKEY&index1=isbn&value1=0596002815'

Sadly I can't paste the output here but imagine you see a nicely formatted XML snippet here with the response.

If you want to try it out, you'll need to create your own account, and then access keys.

What I find really interesting is that they'll give you similar books as if you were browsing in a library. Nice job folks!

It looks like there is a perl package that makes it easy to use within perl, WebService-ISBNDB.

An ISBN is made up of
GROUP/COUNTRY ID - national/geographic grouping of publishers
Publisher ID
Title ID - particular title/edition of a title
Check digit (last digit validates the ISBN)

Santa Clara Library

2010-01-16T19:15:00.001-08:00

I had heard that the Santa Clara library was a great library. It truly is. It takes about 30 seconds to get a library card. You walk in and to the left there is a kiosk. You fill out your name, and address and note the number they give you. Go to the circulation desk with that number and 2 forms of ID and you have a library card.

There are a lot of well lit desks, comfortable chairs, and a view on to Central park. I could easily spend hours there and I plan to make it a place to visit more frequently.

They have terminals for computer access, and they also provide wireless connectivity. There are quiet rooms for group study.

Depending on my usage, I'm going to set aside money that I will save from buying books to donate towards this library. Although I'm a resident of Sunnyvale, the library in Sunnyvale is disappointing. In fact most libraries I've been in have not been inspiring. The Santa Clara library has a vibe to it with the park next to it that just _feels_ right.

Thanks Santa Clara and those that have supported the Santa Clara library in making it such a great experience.

Desire to learn

2010-01-14T21:35:00.000-08:00

So much fascinates me that I sometimes get lost in a myriad of competing desires to learn. I flipped back today to looking at improving my perl commandline fu which has me distracted from python.

Sometimes I feel like if I could just focus on one thing at a time I'd make much more headway to becoming really good at that one thing.

What is that one thing I'd like to focus on though?

Syncing the bodybugg armband to digital display unit

2010-01-10T13:39:00.000-08:00

If you are an early bodybugg user, and then you replaced your bodybugg you may run into the same problem I had with it not syncing to your digital display unit. I finally trawled through the faq and discovered the secret.

To sync up your armband to the display when it's not working, first put your bodybugg on your arm and make sure it's "on". Next press and hold all four buttons on the digital display. Press the button on the bodybugg, and finally press view and mode on the digital display. It will sync up and you will be able to see your activity on your bodybugg again.

ETA: March 20, 2011

Wow! This is now the number one linked item on yahoo search when searching for syncing the bodybugg armband. I'm glad folks have found this as a useful resource.

Python Resources

2010-01-08T21:29:00.000-08:00

This entry will be edited for more content, but I wanted to start a place to jump from with regards to learning python.

The python website has a lot of information and is a great place to further learning. There are links to beginner and more advanced books and documentation.

Python website

Doc Library

Python on a mac

IDLE is the IDE for python. It is called IDLE for Eric Idle, a writer and performer in the British comedy group Monty Python. First steps in using Python, you should understand how to use IDLE. Danny Yoo has a good intro on IDLE.

Writing python code has a recommended style Pep-0008, style guide and Pep-0257, Doc string conventions. import this is an "Easter egg" a poem by Tim Peters describing fundamentals to keep in mind when writing python code.

py2app
py2exe Tutorial

Python User Groups

SF Python user group - BayPiggies

Python Conferences

This one looks good.. held at Caltech - CACR SciPy
- Python for Science

Python Courses, Online Books

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

Interesting style of documentation - Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python 2.0

Physics computing course based on Python

Algorithms - Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python

Python Frameworks

Twisted - Recommended framework from Ver

Working with Python on a Mac

Mac specific packages

Python Package Index
Use help(PACKAGENAME) at the IDLE prompt additionally to get information about using the module.

os
>>> import os >>> os.uname() ('Linux', 'host.domain.com', '2.6.9-67.ELsmp', '#1 SMP Wed Nov 7 13:56:44 EST 2007', 'x86_64') OS tuple- (sysname, nodename, release, version, machine) >>> os.getloadavg() (0.9970703125, 0.68310546875, 0.60888671875) Return the number of processes in the system run queue averaged over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes or raises OSError if the load average was unobtainable. >>> os.urandom(5) b'\xbeo\xc3u ' Return a string of n random bytes suitable for cryptographic use.

time
>>> time.gmtime() time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=0, tm_min=0, tm_sec=10, tm_wday=6, tm_yday=10, tm_isdst=0) >>> time.localtime() time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=16, tm_min=0, tm_sec=56, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=9, tm_isdst=0) >>> time.gmtime(0) time.struct_time(tm_year=1970, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=0, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=1, tm_isdst=0) >>> time.strftime('%X %x %Z') '16:07:59 01/09/10 PST'

optparse - Need to figure out when optparse vs getopt is more useful to use.

platform - >>> platform.machine() 'x86_64' >>> platform.node() 'hostname.domain.com' >>> platform.platform() 'Linux-2.6.9-67.ELsmp-x86_64-with-redhat-4-Nahant_Update_6'

Palm Pre update 1.3.5 - Dec 28

2009-12-31T11:00:00.000-08:00

Interesting notes about this Palm Pre update for 1.3.5 (Official release notes here:
Palm's 1.3.5 release notes)

1) The emergency button function on "locked" version of the phone is no longer prominent causing mistaken calls to 911. Hopefully the smaller icon means I won't accidentally hit it in my pocket.

2) I didn't get a notice of availability of an update. I heard about the update from a friend whose brother has the phone and was talking about it. I checked and there it was. So you may need to do a manual check for an update.

3) This update was a little different from updates in the past (at least from what I remember). The phone had a black screen for the full time once it downloaded with a white wheel.

Hopefully this update fixes the frequent crashing that I'm experiencing. I don't see a mention of the crashing being fixed at all, but the last update brought frequent phone crashing and shutting off completely. Being on call for work and using my phone for pages means that it's made me quite paranoid about my phone being functional and frequent checks to ensure that it's really on and just sleeping versus crashing and turned off.

Additionally, I'm hoping this update fixes the problem where it says too many applications are open (that's not the term it uses, I believe it says cards) when I only have 2 windows open.

Languages are alive and changing

2009-12-31T10:45:00.000-08:00

Linguistics fascinates me. I've been reading The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language and while a dated read in terms of some of its anecdotes it is a good layperson's read of what linguists know about the basics of language.

Take for instance the word silly. Apparently it started out as a word meaning blessed or sanctified. Blessed implied innocence. So over time silly took on the meaning of innocence. These days silly doesn't imply either of those meanings.

What will our language look like in 10, 20, 100 years?

In essence because words change translations of older texts continually need to be updated because the choice of words chosen at a particular point of translation may no longer have the emphasis or meaning that was originally meant.

Taking that in to account, search needs to constantly evolve as language evolves for every language. It's mind-boggling.

Customer Service

2009-12-30T11:57:00.000-08:00

Why are online retailers so inconsistent with delivery?

I was very frustrated with Barnes and Noble in the past with book delivery, and the way they handled the Nook was atrocious. I'm happy with my Nook for the most part now (although I have a lot of ideas for improvement).

I was looking around at some books the other day online and I decided to order them. 2 of them I bought through Amazon, the third I bought from Barnes and Noble. Knowing my average response time from B&N I was expecting the book to be the last to arrive. Wrong. Free delivery option chosen and I still received the book bright and early this morning. Thank you Barnes and Noble! Looking at my Amazon order, they aren't going to even ship the books until January 4. I'm considering canceling the Amazon order and going with B&N but I'm curious as to how long it will actually take. (These are all books that I can't buy in any electronic form so it wasn't an option to buy for the Nook or I would have :)

So what to do in the future? Order from Amazon or Barnes and Noble? Are there other options that have better customer service? (I dread having to contact Barnes and Noble customer service as it always takes at least 24 hours and it's generally form responses)

ETA:

It's December 31 and one of my orders has just shipped out from Amazon. Expected arrival date is January 12. Free shipping from Amazon is supposedly 5-7 days. This probably means that they take the worst case possible of 7 days and then only work from business days.

I have seen in the past with Amazon shipping, that the worst case possible is when my item arrived.

Is it better for items to get here as late as possible but as expected, or to go with the option that will try to get it to you as fast as possible within reason of their costs?

ETA2:

Came home from the gym, and my Amazon package with the first set of books have arrived. Expected delivery is still showing up as shipping out January 4.

Nook 1.1.1 Update - Dec 21

2009-12-21T22:21:00.000-08:00

I wanted to document some of the changes I have noticed with the Nook update forced on all Nook users today.

By forced, I mean it literally downloads without any input from the owner of the device. This is pretty surprising to me as it should at least ensure that the owner has charged their device up enough before pushing an update! My nook was at 20% charge and after the update it gave a message about needing to be plugged in. So either the update changed it's perception of batterly life, or it ate up some power while it updated.

I've noticed some remarks about this being a 1.1.0 release. My software says it's at 1.1.1. Previusly it said 1.0.0.

So changes I've noticed.

1) The UI for the My Library/Documents when you are in a book has changed. If you go back twice it does not take you to the listing of your library but the main screen. This has added an extra click to go back to My Library/Documents if I'm in a book.

2) New option of "View Item details and Options" .. Previously you just clicked on o to do this. Not intuitive when you first use the device, so this must be why they added the option. Pointless when you realize that o does the opening to view the details. Would have been useful if since adding this view item details option that they made O actually go straight to opening the book you've chosen.

3) Battery life/time always show now. Page number has been moved to the bottom to be associated with the scroll bar of how far you have gotten through the book.

4) I still can't open my epubs from Oreilly. What has changed as the formatting for every doesn't lock up the screen at the bottom requiring a hard power cycle. Instead I can get the touch pad to respond and go back to the main menu and go back to my library. It will be nice to be able to open epubs at some point that weren't purchased direct from B&N!

Things that haven't changed

1) I don't notice any difference in speed.
2) epubs still stay stuck in formatting mode.

ETA - January 4

It also looks like you can't rate items from the Nook. I'm not sure why this feature was removed. I thought they could expand it so you could sort by rating at some point.

Other "features" I've noticed is the system occasionally locking up for no reason, although it does give me the option to "Wait" or "Force Quit". Previously I would only see lock ups when trying to open an epub that I put on the device. I'm also not sure about battery length. I charged the nook completely January 30, and it required a full charge again today.

New beginnings

2009-12-21T22:11:00.000-08:00

Lately, I have been very inspired to contribute back to the general internet community at large. I am a typical geek girl with a wide range of interests, and activities. As I interact with my surroundings, I notice "things", and I have opinions on them. In the past I would start to write and even post in my personal journal, but it was never meant as a geek outpouring of experience. I've thought about updating my own website, but I'm not really interested in managing yet another piece of software in order to express my experiences on my own server. So I'm checking out blogger and seeing if this forum will give me an adequate outlet.

A good friend mentioned the difficulty with workflows and adequate tools to contribute. I understood exactly what she meant! We have made such great strides in so many ways, and yet some very simple functionality is still missing.

Open APIs have helped forge a new future. I take advantage of the flickr -> twitter feed that allows me to quickly post pictures from my phone (with geotagging, thanks pre/sprint!) to my photo album and twitterfeed. There is so much progress to be made though.