Hugh's Worthless Blog

Well, we run several web sites on our departmental SunFire server, but the two most popular ones are the departmental web site for Earth & Planetary Sciences and our informational meteorite site that is linked by scientific sites all over the internet. Today I was looking at the browser stats for both sites (for the months of May and June 2009) and noticed quite a substantial difference between the two: Departmental Website Internet Explorer 49% Mozilla Firefox 40% Safari 8% Chrome 2% Others 1% Meteorites Website Internet Explorer 68% Mozilla Firefox 25% Safari 5% Chrome 1% Others 1% I know that the meteorites site actually receives more than twice as many hits as our departmental site and it gets a lot more hits from from "non edu" sites, so it most likely better represents the general browsing world as a whole. Our departmental site gets a lot more hits from within Washington University and also from other universities and from people interested in our academic progr...

Well, they have been saying today was the day, so when I came in today, I checked www.mozilla.com to see if they really were going to make their release by the "first half of 2009", and it looks like they are waiting a few more hours. Another site claimed it was going to be released around 5pm GMT which translates to noon here in St. Louis. I'll be curious to see how quickly it will download once it is released. It is only an 8MB file and is heavily mirrored so it should be able to be downloaded fairly quickly. I have been using the RC3 for the last week or so on my laptop and it already seems pretty stable. I am not sure why they are waiting until the last minute. I checked the FTP site at ftp.mozilla.org and they do not have it there waiting either. Update 10:30am St. Louis time: Okay, it is now available and it downloaded quite quickly. No big deal as expected! It seems the same as RC3 to me, which is fine! I even checked the log files on a couple web servers and i...

I've been reading a very educational book I just happened to come across while I was visiting the county library on Lindbergh. It is called "Dear Mr. Buffett" and it is written by an author named Janet Tavakoli . She was originally trained as a chemical engineer (which I, of course, consider a good thing), but she later received a business degree and worked primarily in financial analysis positions at commercial banks for the past 20 years or so. She spells out very precisely how mortgage backed securities, CDO's and credit derivatives work, and how banks have used them to make themselves rich earlier in this decade, and how they are now being rewarded for their earlier greed and reckless promotion of these over leveraged and over rated products by the generous bailout funds from the taxpayers. What a great country we live in when you can not only promote a bad product and profit from it, but if you have friends in the government you can even be rewarded for your mi...

It has been a while since I have mentioned any new Christian music , but since Everyday Sunday released their new album this Tuesday ( "Best Night of Our Lives" ), I think I am due! On Monday I even received a message from Aaron Shust's e-mail list telling me his new album "Take Over" is now available for pre-order at his website for only $9.98. Unfortunately they are charging a shipping charge of $3.99, but I paid it anyway and have it on pre-order. I get it autographed for what that is worth, but I will be happy just to get to listen to it all early in a "listening party". Another cool site I discovered (from my daughter who learned about it from someone else) is Grooveshark.com , which is similar to imeem or last.fm , but has a much easier interface for building playlists and finding songs. Once you start playing with it, the other free online streaming music sites seem archaic in comparison. When you find a song you like you just click on a ...

Hurray, our refinancing on our loan finally completed after the sale of our previous house in April. I remember I called our bank the day before the closing on the sale when I knew we would receive the large check and that was on April 8. So it has taken exactly eight weeks since I applied on the phone for the loan to be approved and funded. But is was worth it to lock into a low fixed rate (4.910%) on a loan that is less than 35% of the LTV of our house, giving us a tiny monthly payment less than a fifth of our monthly income. The closing company called yesterday to say the loan would be funded today, paying off the balance of our interest only loan we held since last year when we bought our current home. I checked our lender's site today and the rates are up to 5.5% now. One thing I noticed after receiving our last loan is we must have received 20 or 30 of these "official" looking letters telling us to buy life insurance policies to cover our mortgage for some low, l...