Andrew Viterbi, who donated $52 million to the USC School of Engineering, joined a communications research group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) upon graduating from MIT in 1957. It was “the most intriguing job he was offered”. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1962, invented the Viterbi algorithm in 1966, and founded Qualcomm in 1985. I never knew that JPL had played such a crucial role in his success. What an amazing story. The Quiet Genius (PDF).
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I’ll be operating at maximum stress level in hopes of accomplishing more that way. On the other hand, I’m naturally not stressed out enough, and I sit back yawning and just staring at the world around me. So it’s time to buckle down. This summer, I’m doing two major things, each of which could easily be full-time. I’m doing a summer internship at JPL and I’m doing a summer of code project with OSAF. Sometimes I think I should have chosen one, but even today I don’t know which I would choose. Each has its merits, and it’s technically feasible to do both. So what’s coming up for what’s left of summer? This week, I have: Read the rest of this entry »
Watch this Google video from yesterday on Microsoft’s new voice recognition software. One of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while. “Dear aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all.” It’s drawing a lot of comparisons with All your base are belong to us, which is also what I thought it sounded like. It’s a totally different situation, but funny still.
The 50th anniversary of hard-disk storage is coming up in a little over a month. On Sept. 13, 1956, IBM shipped the first hard disk drive. It was the size of two refrigerators, weighed a ton, stored 5 megabytes on 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks– and cost $250,000 a year in today’s dollars to lease. Newsweek
In 1990, we had some brand new HP disks the size of a washing machine. Capacity 650MB.
Some software was written to move the head assembly from end to end. This would cause so much vibration the the whole machine would “walk” around.
Some new Apple Mac laptops and IBM Thinkpads have sudden motion sensors inside, which park the hard drive heads in the event of a fall which protects your data from being damaged. It’s being used for all sorts of things, including a way to turn your Mac into a Jedi weapon. It’s surprising how many fun uses for the sensors there are. Why not have an actual input device designed for this sort of thing? The acceleratometers (gyroscopes) can’t be too expensive now that Apple and IBM are including them in nearly all laptops. I guess that’s what Gyration has tried to do, but those are used just as mouse pointers. You need fun apps like these before it’ll take off. This is a good idea from a Slashdot comment. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve resolved to write at least once a day about my summer of code project. It’s the least I could do, considering all they’ve done for me. I have a presentation coming up on August 10. I need to talk to bcm about it. I don’t have anything to show yet 
I really need to do something. But what? Read the rest of this entry »
The “Contact Us” form in vBulletin is highly susceptible to spamming. I’ve received 100% spam from it– no legitimate emails. 32 spam emails so far.. the forum is inactive anyway, so I’m shutting it down.
It’s great when things go according to plan. A few months back, I messed up my computer when playing with the partitions with PartitionMagic (never use it!) Now I have a different open source package that works much better. Anyway, my computer was messed up, so I reinstalled Windows on a second hard drive. From then on, I boot from my D: drive. Now, I want to move everything from my old drives to the new one, and format the old drive so it’s fresh and clean, no paritioning errors or anything. But to make sure my computer doesn’t have any dependencies, I want to disable the drive first to make sure I don’t need it and that I have all the data want. It’s my Master drive, though, and my BIOS will only boot from C:. Windows and other software also assumes C: drive bootup, even if not directly. Your boot manager can be on C: while you actually boot from D: or some other drive.
Ah, Slashdot.
I’ve seen it. It’s rubbish! by megaditto (#15797025)
