mmc | 2 years ago | on: Dear Linux Kernel CNA, what have you done?
mmc's comments
mmc | 2 years ago | on: Making Hard Things Easy
https://github.com/mikemccracken/hs
your snippets are stored in a git repo that you can sync around how you like.
mmc | 4 years ago | on: Remembrance Agent (1996)
If I recall correctly, I never had enough time to make it very useful, and it wasn't clear how best to get its input sources - Mail.app stored email it could read, but other things like calendar and chats were inaccessible to it.
I did it as part of a generic project for making use of input managers: https://sourceforge.net/p/leverage/code/HEAD/tree/
(NOTE: the RA code isn't there, I think it was never even useful enough for me to share it)
My favorite use of that was the "ISIM", or emacs-style incremental search in text views. That was nice. But of course, loading arbitrary external code wasn't sustainable, and that mechanism went away, along with my ISIM.
I no longer track OS X development, so I'm not sure if there's a new equivalent way to do this stuff. It'd be neat to hear.
mmc | 4 years ago | on: BibTeX Tidy
mmc | 4 years ago | on: Hypertext Tools from the 80s
KMS was a a multiuser networked read/write hypertext system, a commercial spinoff of a CMU project from the 70's called ZOG.
mmc | 8 years ago | on: Coda, a “next-generation spreadsheet” – from rows and columns to custom apps
mmc | 10 years ago | on: A Chronology of Microprocessors
mmc | 11 years ago | on: Colorado communities secure the right to build their own broadband
It's about fixing a short in a power transmission line. Sounds simple, right? It involves liquid nitrogen and hundreds of people with possibility of explosions or huge oil spills. That's right, the line is suspended in pressurized oil! It goes on…
I tried to find a good pull quote, and it's basically all mind-blowing pull quotes. But here:
"Every vault also has a nipple which allows sampling of the pipe oil. They said you withdraw the oil through a thick membrane with a syringe (?). This happens monthly on all feeders in the LA area. The samples are analyzed downtown by a staff of chemists who can relate the presence of things like acetylene, butane, and benzene in the oil to arcing, coronas, and so forth. Apparently the oil chemistry is a very good indicator of the health of the segments."
mmc | 11 years ago | on: Charlie Munger Donates $65M for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara
If we're talking about new faculty, who probably want to buy a house and may want to live near campus, I'd agree that UCSD's location is problematic financially. They seem to be able to attract solid faculty at least in engineering (the people I know), so they must be figuring this out somehow. Certainly some professors are living in small condos who would be living in big houses in the midwest…
However, most grad students while I was there managed well enough. If you don't have kids, and are OK with roommates, you can find places near campus or a short drive away (e.g. Pacific Beach) that are plenty affordable.
I don't really believe that any grad students avoid UCSD because of the cost of living - in a place where you'll only spend a few years and then probably leave.
mmc | 11 years ago | on: How to Read a Research Paper [pdf]
I started it back in ~2002 or so, and it's been kept running by a small group of contributors ever since.
Not a multi-user or web-based solution, but it has accumulated quite a few features (including searching many databases) that can make keeping a personal BibTeX file up to date much less of a pain.
mmc | 11 years ago | on: Inbox — The next-generation email platform
mmc | 11 years ago | on: Seattle, the New Center of a Tech Boom
http://weatherspark.com/history/29735/2014/Seattle-Washingto...
Unfortunately they don't have a great way to compare cities, aside from just loading multiple pages and eyeballing.
mmc | 12 years ago | on: ARM server pioneer Calxeda plans restructuring after running out of cash
mmc | 13 years ago | on: The Toronto Raptors, SportVU cameras, and the NBA's analytical revolution
"Three cameras on each side of the court..."
This reminds me of a talk I heard a long time ago from Takeo Kanade at CMU, who was working on reconstructing 3D scenes from multiple cameras shooting different angles of the same action. One example was basketball, and he had a demo showing a play reconstructed as if the camera was on the ball. Pretty cool stuff. It needed lots of cameras, though, and I remember asking him if they had explored how well you could do with a minimum # of cameras. I remember his reply being essentially that they were less interested in bad results with few cameras :)
Here's a link to some surprisingly old press about his work being used for Super Bowl 35 in 2001: http://www.ri.cmu.edu/events/sb35/tksuperbowl.html They used 30 cameras.
mmc | 13 years ago | on: The Toronto Raptors, SportVU cameras, and the NBA's analytical revolution
I can imagine facilities like hockey rinks buying the cameras and selling the service to the teams that play there, but not at that price. My impression of hockey rinks is that they're not terribly profitable. Most of the ones I've played in seem like borderline charities.
mmc | 13 years ago | on: The Toronto Raptors, SportVU cameras, and the NBA's analytical revolution
mmc | 13 years ago | on: Microryza (YC W13) Is A “Kickstarter” For Scientific Research
mmc | 13 years ago | on: Computer Science PhD trends
So 23.9% are in other parts of academic computer science, mostly Postdocs. another 3.6% go to positions (unspecified) in other academic departments.
His 47% is "North American, Non-Academic, Industry". It doesn't break down research vs. development jobs, which is probably smart.
Another interesting thing is that it's broken down (Table D4) by specialty - so for instance, two PhDs in HCI left the US from the 2010-2011 class, and the specialties with the highest percentage leaving the country after graduating were "Information Systems" and "Networks".
mmc | 14 years ago | on: Light Table - a new IDE concept
What other sticking points are there?
mmc | 14 years ago | on: Death to MS Word
> 1. Disable unused components with defconf or make menuconfig.
+1 for avoiding vulnerabilities, but were you saying this lessens the CVE evaluation workload? I'd love to hear about automation for evaluating CVEs based on a kernel config. I've done a fair amount of that manually and I'm not aware of any metadata in the CVE records (or in the CVE json in gregkh's new vulns repo) that includes config metadata.