Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Count to 1023 with 2 hands
Posted by: Jacob Atkins in General on February 23rd, 2010
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
Posted by: Jacob Atkins in General on January 24th, 2010
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
Posted by: Jacob Atkins in General on January 2nd, 2010
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.
Videos of past projects
Posted by: Jacob Atkins in General on July 7th, 2009
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
Posted by: Jacob Atkins in General on February 2nd, 2009
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.
Obama ‘08 – Vote For Hope
Posted by: Jacob Atkins in General on October 27th, 2008
Obama ‘08 – Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.
Best Movie I have seen in a while!
Posted by: Jacob Atkins in General on April 24th, 2008
I have to say that Sweeny Todd is the best movie I have seen in a long time. As far as I’m concerned you can’t put Johnny Depp in a movie directed by Tim Burton and not get a wonderful movie. Enjoy the trailer that is posted below to get a peak at this wonderful film, the trailer does not do the film justice. You must go pick this one up!!
Good bye triple displays, hello HD TV.
Posted by: Jacob Atkins in General on March 23rd, 2008
Not long ago I made the purchase of two 19" LCD monitors for the my rig. With the addition of two new monitors to the family that meant that there would be one extra. After a while I deiced to use it as a third display to increase my desktop space and what not. But after installing the video card I purchased to run the third display I found out that X11 and Nvidia don’t play nice together with more than two displays, that is unless you have two video cards with the same series GPU (I have a 6600 and the new one was a 5200). So After about two weeks of trying to come up with a way to fix this so that all three displays would place nice together, I have given up. I found several little posts on the internet about patching X11 so that it will work with three monitors, that being two of them playing with nvidia and one X does. But I have come to the decision that I will just make a MythBox and use the third display as a new HD tv like setup.
At the time I also have a nice server setting in my room that only shares files, runs MySQL, subversion, and is my test bed for my work in rails. So why not toss a capture card and my 5200 into it and use it as a TV? the capture card really doesn’t have to be much simply because I have a TiVO so it only needs to have a way to get the signal. So I’m planing on this nice little upgrade to cost me anywhere from $20 to $200 depending on whether or not I decide to get a nice big old HDD to put in it as well.