We recruited 2 new members today.
carldr
skugg
I am not sure who recruited them but its a good addition to the team. We have now got 17 processors active and we might be getting another one over the weekend.
Help folding@home by joining team plico and help fight disease
Team Plico
Will AKA plico has just joined team plico and overtook me straight away. Or was it Christian because he joined using plico as well. We have now got 4 members and our current team position is.
9130 of 32877
Harry Google result
242 out of 23,700,000 on Google for “Harry”.
Folding@home Rank Update
Individual Rank: 273523 of 369286
Team Rank: 10690 of 32865
Join Team plico
Protein Folding
I have been a member of SETI and distributed.net at one time or another but I found Folding@Home. Unlike SETI and distributed.net Folding@Home is a medical project which is the main reason why I decided to join and start a team. I like the idea of SETI and the other distributed projects but I would rather my cycles went towards curing cancer or some other disease than to finding prime numbers or looking for aliens.
Team details as follows:
Team Name: plico ( Latin: to fold )
Team Number: 39250
Why did I not join an already existing team?
Unlike some people who want to join one of the best teams and start at the top I prefer to start at the bottom and work at it. However, it would be nice to get other members. So, if you would like to join team plico then download the software and just follow the instructions. Its very simple.
I have also thrown together a Home page for the team
Web Standards CSS and HTML
Before I start I just need to say that I am an advocate of standards but I am not a religious bigot about them.
My problem has never been the technicalities of CSS or HTML, lets face it if you have figured out Perl to a reasonable degree and know your way around half a dozen programming languages then adding some markup etc to your toolbox is hardly going to kill you. Or at least you wouldn’t think so?
Unlike programming languages and their platform specific problems, browsers display your work as they see fit. The user at the other end may see a work of art or a bloody debauchery and judge you and your ability accordingly.
The browser doesn’t even have the common decency to open a window informing the user that it’s made some complete horlicks in rendering our page, nor should it! It’s our problem! if we want people to read the stuff the least we can do is make it as legible as possible for them, its not their fault the browser has a few quirks.
The internet, for all intents and purposes is a new method of communication and like all previous methods of communication it comes with its fair share of problems ie its new, its evolving, it hasn’t reached any form of maturity yet. As an analogy:
Have you ever phoned someone and had a “BAD LINE”. This prompts you into very articulated speech were all the words are formed “just so” and you might even talk a bit louder. Mean while, in the back of your mind you are cursing the weather or your blaming the old exchange down the road for the bad reception.
Without even realising it you will be compensating for the deficiencies of the system you are using with your loud speech and long drawn out words. You might not like it but its an accepted part of the system and out of your control so you just get on with it and do your best. Web Development (Development in general) is like this.
I am all up for standards but I am not one to take a pop at something because it has not been done “Just So”. Implementing standards is a process and there is no need get all religious about it.
Fun With the Gimp
I have been meaning to learn some sort of image manipulation tool for quite some time. I have used the Gimp in the past when I want to scale something or convert images from one format to another but I have never had the time or inclination to sit down and learn enough of it to be reasonably confident.
I have just had a long weekend so I decided to learn it because like it or lump it, its a very handy tool in any web developers arsenal. I mainly do backend work but there are occasions when I envy the versatility of other web developers when putting together sites. If you want to have a look at the sort of stuff I mean have a look at the The Zen Garden. Some of the pages on that site are just divine.
Pig Shit and Chips please
For just over two years we have always bought McCain’s oven chips. They are low in fat and as far as we were concerned very nice.
This all changed about 3 weeks ago when we cooked some chips and they came out smelling like pig manure, I kid you not, I have worked in a cattle market and I know what pigs smell like and this was exactly the whiff I was getting. The first thing we thought was that the freezer was playing up and that somehow the chips had defrosted and gone off or some such nonsense. We checked the rest of the stuff in the freezer and everything was fine, I know this because we always keep Vodka in the freezer and it was as syrupy as usual which indicated to me that the freezer was very cold.
Anyway, we bought another bag (previous bag from Tesco’s) from Asda’s several days later under the assumption that we had just got a dodgy bag, perhaps it had lay on the floor somewhere too long or defrosted and been refrozen once too often. Same bloody problem. You can imagine our consternation, we had been using this product religiously for two years. We then decided to clean the oven completely even thought it was fine.
Most people would just try and change brands at this point but we wanted to know exactly what was causing that pig shit smell so we went off to Iceland (the frozen food mecca of the UK) and got a bag out of their freezer. We came straight home and bunged a batch in the Oven. You’ll never guess what. PIG SHIT all over again. So there we have it.
McCains Oven Chips stink of pig manure, or at least the ones we have used recently do. We wrote a letter to them detailing our discovery a few days ago. We are awaiting a reply…………….. to be continued……………………..
A Mathematician’s Apology
I started reading
A Mathematician’s Apology
Author: G. H. Hardy (Foreward by C. P. Snow)
ISBN: 052142706
this one as soon as it arrived through the post. It is quite a small book and even smaller when you open the cover, at least in this edition it is since they have left over an inch of margin around the text.
I really enjoyed it. I have to say that I enjoyed the forward by Mr Snow as much as the content by Hardy. I think this was because he was writing about the Author of whom I would like to know more whereas Hardy was writing about his subject rather than himself. You can get a feel for Hardy’s character from the text, particularly near the end but I thought that it dealt mainly about his take on mathematics.
The book is definitely some sort of apology, I thinks its open for debate whether he needed to apologize for anything but he obviously felt the need to justify himself in some way.
Personally I don’t think Hardy had any more need to justify himself than Da Vinci, Matisse or Michelangelo, Hardy was an artist its just that his art was mathematics which like some forms of art is not appreciated by the masses. However, this does not mean that what he created wasn’t beautiful or worthwhile. In fact years later it was found that a lot of what Hardy had created was of immense use.
Sans Serif or not to Sans Serif
I am pretty damned sure that fonts are one of the most used yet least appreciated aspects of computing I have come across.
It would be fine to interject here and say NO, surely its “blah de blah”. I say no…… People in general don’t give a damn about how machines work / talk / do their stuff, however they are concerned with how stuff looks.
For instance, look at the fashion industry. Clothes are expensive but the workmanship is generally crap but who cares, its a “scurgly! made by whatsisname”, and it looks good.
Its the same with computers, look at the Mac, previously thought the underdog, now its almost a fashion statement to own one.
Anyway, back to fonts. I am not really that bothered about what fonts are on my machine as long as I can read the text without squinting to much, but just the other day it was noted that I was using “Sans Serif” fonts and I was lacking in “Serif” fonts.
Well… I just shit my pants, what the hell was I missing. Apparently I wasn’t missing anything. Sans Serif add an extra bit to your fonts and I was missing the option of not missing them on everything I read.
To cut a long story short I needed to get some Microsoft fonts installed on my Debian box and this is the process.
First thing I needed was the Microsoft truetype fonts. ON debian these are called
msttcorefonts
and can be installed via “aptitude” or apt whichever you prefer. I fetched these and this installed a whole pile of stuff in
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/
Next thing I needed to do is create a “fonts.scale” file as ROOT
]$ cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype ; ttmkfdir;
sorted. The directory should now have the correct file. The next thing to do is restart either, the font server, or X11. I just logged in and out and that was it. New fancy fonts that are almost identical to the ones I had previously or at least in first inspection they are.