Hugh's Worthless Blog

Well, it should be a wild Final Four here this weekend with Illinois, UNC, Louisville and Michigan State. I was hoping WVU would pull out the upset over Louisville, but it was not to be. Those were four great games last weekend, though. I think the Final Four this year is too close to call. Yes, even Michigan State could do it. You heard it here first! On the world of Linux distributions, I will first have to say that something has gone amiss with the new wuarchive so my home directory there is not working. I have grabbed a new name for my own mirror site though from dyndns.org with the lovely name of mymirrors.homelinux.org , which contains both my Linux mirrors and my freeware mirrors . My most recent updates there include the latest patched Mozilla 1.0.2, the just released Puppy 1.0.0 versions and the Ubuntu hoary release candidate .

With the CeBIT starting up in Germany, Klaus and the KNOPPIX folks have released a new version 3.8 for the convention. It is available via BitTorrent at stacktrace.org , or via FTP/HTTP at WUARCHIVE.WUSTL.EDU , of course! I have dumped it on the mirror but have yet to try it out myself yet. I have also put the beta version of SAM (sam-2005-2beta.iso) on my own Linux mirror site . Like KNOPPIX 3.8 it also uses the 2.6.11 kernel with its goal being a system for "average users".

Well, they made it unbeaten until the very last game, but even the mighty Vashon Wolverines could not put away Poplar Bluff and their star center Tyler Hansbrough. I guess they will no longer be ranked #1 in the country. At least it was good to see them play in Class 5 where they belong. If they were still in Class 4 like last year it would been easy for them to have swept through the season, but it would not mean as much. In the big NCAA world though, Illinois came back from their lone loss last Sunday against Ohio State to sweep through the Big Ten tournament, ending with another convincing win over a strong Wisconsin team. They are going to be a hard team to beat.

I have written two little free utilities that I have posted on my website (although the actual executables reside on artsci.wustl.edu to save my bandwidth.) The first is missing.exe , a standalone version of my What's Missing calculator that also lets you write a full amortization of the loan. By doing so that replicates the functionality in the Generic Loan Calculator , so it pretty much combines the two programs into one standalone application. It is a 310KB Win32 executable that was written with Rapid-Q that should run on just about anything, but it does not have the ability to print or save results. You have to copy and paste the fields to do that for now. My other new application is another ~300KB Rapid-Q program called mathsolv.exe that solves quadratic equations, the pythagorean theorem, distances between x,y points, and solves for characteristics of circles. Just a little app I thought might be useful for middle schoolers like my daughter!

As you expect, nothing can stay perfect. So the Illini finally lost yesterday in the come from behind win for Ohio State. Some folks thought they needed to learn how to lose one and now they did. Now we will have to see how they react in the conference tournament. As for Vashon, they won two more and are again headed for the Missouri Final Four. Now they face two really tough teams from outside the metro area, first Springfield Kickapoo and then either Poplar Bluff or KC Rockhurst. It should make for some interesting games next weekend.