Hugh's Worthless Blog

I noticed yesterday on Distrowatch that a new KNOPPIX (Release 6.0) came out yesterday so I thought I would take a look at it. I hadn't really used KNOPPIX much for a few years since it has lost its novelty of being the premiere Linux LiveCD back in 2004 or 2005. Since that time, just about everything comes out as a LiveCD or has a LiveCD version, and KNOPPIX truly has not done much to keep itself ahead of the pack. The new version uses LXDE as its window manager and incorporates ADRIANE to help the visually impaired and novice users. I was not so interested in ADRIANE, but I thought I would see what they did with LXDE and how that would run on an old 866MHZ PIII (Dell Dimension 4100) I just happened to have in my office. It seems to boot up fairly well and LXDE does respond pretty well on the old PIII system, but I was wondering why I couldn't just run LXDE on Ubuntu. I poked about on Google and found PUD which is an Ubuntu based distro running LXDE made to run small and fa...

Hey, I just noticed that last week Ubuntu released a new 8.04.2 LTS release which is a second bug release of 8.04 which came out last April. Now there seems to be three different versions of straight Ubuntu you can use (I won't even mention the bazillion Ubuntu variants out there). There is the current stable version 8.10 which came out last October but which they will support for 18 months until April 2010. Now the newer 8.04.2 release just came out which will be supported until April 2011 for the desktop edition and April 2013 for the server edition. And soon in April the new 9.04 release will come out which should be supported until October 2010. Too many choices!! Well, believe it or not we ran out of CAT6 patch cables for our lovely building here at the university, so it was time to buy some more. When we moved into the building 5 years ago they gave us boxes and boxes of cables, but they have finally run out! I checked our regular places where we buy stuff, including CDWG , ...

My co-worker here at Washington University, Seth Davis, has put together another blog telling how he is going to lose weight using his new "20 rubber bands" method. Okay, it probably makes as much sense as anything else out there. He may become the next Jared of Subway fame.

Today I was talking to one of our faculty members about websites and e-mail lists when he mentioned a really cool approximation of pi he had run into. You take 1234 and transpose the digits to get the prime number 2143, then you divide that by 22, and then take the 4th root of that value: (2143/22)^(1/4) and you come up with a number incredibly close to pi. This was actually figured out many years ago by Srinivasa Ramanujan , but it is still pretty amazing, and much closer to pi than 22/7 by quite a margin. In fact is is accurate out to 8 digits. Ramanujan actually came up with a whole bunch of approximations of pi you can find here at this Wolfram site (the makers of Mathematica). Neat stuff, isn't it?

I love free stuff and I like cheap stuff, so I will talk about two that I am currently using. The latest freebie I tried out is adrive.com which is another free web based storage site like xdrive, but they offer a whopping 50GB of storage for free. My current favorite had been inbox.com , whose interface I still prefer (and who has a nice integration with their free mail service). However, it is hard to pass up the 50GB size since most other places only offer up to 5GB free. I tested their speed both from the university's ultra-fast connection and from my not so fast AT&T DSL connection from home, and it seems comparable to inbox, which had always been pretty quick too. So I will use both now since they are both free! My other favorite service to use is Virgin Mobile for cell phone service. Over the years we have jumped from cell phone provider to provider like other folks, and we just cannot justify the $25+/month most places charge since we are not incessant cell phone user...

Okay, first time homeowners, now is your chance! We will be putting our lovely three+ bedroom, two and a half bath house on the market in the next few weeks and it could be yours! It will be priced around $200K which should be fine for a first time buyer with a 10-20% down payment and a $50-$70K household income with the current low interest rates around 5% for a 30 year FRM. See how much home you could afford with my handy dandy "how much" calculator . Two or three years ago our home would have been priced closer to $250K, but we are going to price it realistically for today's market. So where does the free cash come from? Congress rather secretly passed a nice law this past year that gives a $7,500 tax credit to any first time home buyer (or one who hasn't owned a home in 3 years) as long as their AGI is under $75K for a single taxpayer, or $150K for a married couple. Originally, the $7500 was an interest free loan that was paid off in 15 years ($500/year) but now ...

So I was trying to clone the hard drive of someone's laptop so I thought I would use a copy of Ghost 2003 I had used in the past. It installed just fine, but when it was going to reboot to start imaging the drive it just went to the gray and blue screen and froze. I could not even get the laptop to boot into the XP installed on the drive after powering down. I had to boot from an Ubuntu CD and use the command line fdisk to change the bootable partition back to the main NTFS file system (Ghost creates its own tiny boot partition for its utilities). It seems our Ghost 2003 is not very compatible with the SATA drive in the laptop. So I just gave up on Ghost and tried the latest Clonezilla LiveCD. With the CD and my cheap $10 USB to IDE/SATA adapter from Geeks.com I had the drive copied over in less than an hour. Why didn't I start with Clonezilla to begin with? Also, I would just like to mention a new yoga blog written by the wife of a co-worker, just because I can. He came up ...

Let us all hope that 2009 is a better year for the economy, world politics and society as a whole. I would have to say that 2008 was not the best year, and so far 2009 does not look much better. But it is only 6 days old! Today was the first day back to school for the kids and my first day back into work. We were awoken by a telephone call however, informing us that our daughter had one more day off due to an "ice day" to extent her winter break. My son, however, was not so lucky since they currently go to different districts and he had to go to school! Since we have two homes right now, we have one that is within a few blocks of three districts ( Pattonville , Ladue and Parkway ) and the second is within a few blocks of three districts as well (Ladue, Clayton and Brentwood ). Four of the five of these were open today, but since my daughter did not switch districts to our new house (so she could graduate with her class at Pattonville), she was awarded with the day off today...