JacobAtkins.com » Jacob Atkins

Count to 1023 with 2 hands

Jacob Atkins — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:21:00 +0000

First abandon the base 10 numbering system, and move to base 2 (binary). Then hold both hands out with your palms facing you. Now your right thumb is 1, right index is 2, right middle is 4, right ring is 8, right pinky is 16, left pinky is 32, left ring is 64, left middle is 128, left index is 256, left thumb is 512.

Examples:
19 = right thumb + right index + right pinky -> 11001

40 = right ring + left pinky -> 000101

378 = right index + right ring + right pinky + left pinky + left ring + left index -> 010111101

People I would give anything to meet and talk with

Jacob Atkins — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 08:08:39 +0000

This is a list of people in history and current time that I would give anything to meet and have a discussion with:

Nikola Tesla
Leonardo da Vinci
Grace Hopper
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Franklin
Carl Edward Sagan
Albert Einstein
Richard Dawkins
Seymour Roger Cray
Gaius Julius Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus
Alexander III of Macedon
Adolf Hitler
Sir Isaac Newton

This list is in no real order, and it is not finished these are only the ones I can think of for now. I will be adding to this list.

The year in review

Jacob Atkins — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:23:53 +0000

Well as it seems 2009 has been over to rotations, and 2009 wasn’t a bad year if I say so myself. I got a lot done and started a lot. Here is a list of top ten things that went down in 2009:

I got back onto the road of a proper higher education.
I started development of WiseLinux for use on clusters.
I received fairly decent grades for my first semester back.
Several new friendships were developed.
Several people got pissed, because I didn’t hold back.
LitterWare took several steps in the right direction.
I lost over 30 +/- pounds.
I finally got organized.
I started a small side business.
I started living my life the way that I wanted to and not the way I was told to.

These are just the top 10 things I can think of right now, so that must make them the best of 2009. If you can think of something that should be placed on my list post it in the comments. Also make a list of the top 10 things that happened to yourself in 2009, and post a link in the comments.

Getting ‘dd’ to take a dump

Jacob Atkins — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:44:04 +0000

I’ve been using dd a lot more these days. It seems like I’m blanking a hard drive or making a copy of one everyday now. If you have ever used dd, you know that it does not like to tell you how far along it is in the process of doing its thing. Well I have a solution to fix this!

Open up a new shell be it on the same machine with the old Ctrl + Alt + F# combo, a new ssh section, or a new terminal window. Once in the new shell enter:

watch -n 30 kill -USR1 1234

replacing 1234 with the process id of dd, and then then hit enter. Now every 30 seconds dd will take a dump and tell you whats going on.

To get the process id of your dd command run:

ps ax | grep dd

and there you have it. Now you can see where your dd process is at.

Videos of past projects

Jacob Atkins — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:52:09 +0000

I have been in the process of adding videos of my past projects to vimeo. I have finally gotten the three that are worth watching posted.

The video below is from my past work at NASA DEVELOP in Hampton, VA. You are looking at the flight path the test plane caring the ASCENDS testing instrument took. The colored blocks are making up the “Carbon Curtain” that shows how much CO₂ is in the path of the instrument

This video contains the same flight path and “Carbon Curtain” from the one above, but has wind trajectory added. The wind trajectories were generated using HYSPLIT going backwards for 72 hours. With the wind trajectories one can see where the CO₂ the interment has seen might have came from.

The last video is a news story from one of the local stations about Bring Ur Search Team Electronic Documents (BUSTED). This video has been posted before, the only difference is the quality is a lot better in this one.

New blag, kind of

Jacob Atkins — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 04:57:42 +0000

If your reading this blog post, you are seeing my new layout, on a new server, on a new blog platform. Over the weekend I started moving to a new server and during the process changed from Typo to WordPress. I hope you like the new layout, its a bit lighter than before, and the new server is a bit faster than the old one.

I hate XP more than ever

Jacob Atkins — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:19:52 +0000

I’ve been working on a computer for a co-worker for a while now, it’s taken a little longer due to the holidays. Today I came to the decision that it would just be best for the computer and myself to reinstall Windows. This computer had spyware and viruses that I had never even heard of. So to start off the day I inserted the wonderful Windows CD to start the install process. After the CD had finished loading its wonderful self, I discovered that it was missing the drivers for the SATA controller. I know this wasn’t uncommon for a while when SATA came out, and still now with newer chips and all. But this SATA card is about 3 to 4 years old, and plus the Windows CD had service pack 2 slipstreamed into it, so its not like I was I using a first gen CD.

After finding out the wonderful fact that the CD didn’t have the needed drivers, I did what anyone would do. I headed over to the manufactures website to get a copy of the driver to place on a floppy so that I could load the driver during the install. But after making the floppy, I made the wonderful discover that the computer didn’t have a floppy drive. So after this I decided to make a new XP disk with service pack 3 slipstreamed into it. After making that wonderful CD and booting it up, I discover that service pack 3 did not contain the proper driver either. It was time for round three, I redid the CD but this time I added the driver to the disc rather than hopping that a service pack would have it. I know that service packs do not always carry drivers, but I based the decision on the fact that after service pack 1 all my XP discs carried the proper drivers and most of my computers have the same SATA controller.

After I made the third disk and completed the install out got to the desktop of good old windows, at this point the wonderful activation window met me. At this point I had to find the licenses sticker that the manufacture had placed in the oddest place. After fighting with the computer to get read the sticker, I entered it to only find out that the license key was not for this version of XP. This brings me to the question how many versions of XP are there, and I don’t mean Home and Pro. Vista only has one all keys will work with all disks, this is not true with XP. I truly hate XP more than I ever had now.

Call For Obama With Andy Griffith And Henry Winkler

Jacob Atkins — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:05:07 +0000

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

Obama ‘08 – Vote For Hope

Jacob Atkins — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:48:11 +0000

Obama ‘08 – Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

McCain be Old

Jacob Atkins — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:02:47 +0000