Ceaseless Student

I was just browsing Simple Spark and I came across a lot of neat software that I’d already used, some ok stuff, some interesting stuff and only (so far) one app that really stood out as uniquely awesome.

FooPlot is an exceedingly simple webapp that does it’s job fantastically. It graphs. That’s it.

It does what you’d expect from a TI-83 or such-like. It graphs functions, finds roots and intersections and not much else. IT also has some 3d stuff that makes you think 89. If you want to see all the functions it can handle look at the help tab.

The coolest thing is that you can tell it what to graph via URL. Check it out:

fooplot.com/3x+5
fooplot.com/e^x
fooplot.com/tanh(x)/((sin(x))^2)
fooplot.com/floor(2*sin(x))

Fabulous.

So. I haven’t written for a while. Partly because I’m on chillaxing at home and basking in profound depths of unproductivity an partly because my computer had some issues. Or, rather, I gave it some issues.

I was running some neat software I’d found that did diagnostics on all sorts of things and for part of it I needed to go into safe mode. No big deal. There’s two main (read: safe) ways to get into safe mode. One is to hit F8 during the boot sequence. But, at the time, I couldn’t remember which function key I had to hit. So I used the other method. Go to run and type in msconfig. Then check the /SAFEBOOT option in the boot.ini tab. No big deal.

I’ll not that when I did this a warning came up that told me I didn’t have priveleges to do that change. But then it let me do it anyways. This should’ve made me stop and think, but hey…

So I reboot and… realize that safe mode can’t use my network log-in. Damn. No big deal. I’d just reboot and hit F8 (I looked it up) and select normal boot. Oh yeah. The boot.ini file defines what a normal boot is and I’d set that to be safe mode. Damn. Oh well. No big deal. I figure I can just log in locally and change it back and I’ll be good to go. Well I couldn’t figure out how to log into my local machine. Eventually I called IT and it was easy enough - I just had to use that password that they’d given us during orientation… yeah… OK. Now that I had that I just had to change it back and that’d be that. No big deal.

Sadly, I didn’t have the privileges to use msconfig. No big deal, I could go and do it by hand (I just had to edit a text file). But I didn’t have the privileges to edit that file. No big deal. I’d just change the permissions. Except I didn’t have the privileges to do that either. Big deal. Well this sucks.

Then I came up with a solution. I could just use my linux partition to get at the text file and fix it. No big deal. Except that Fedora core 4 can’t mount ntfs. No big deal - I could get the right package with yum. Except that I couldn’t access yum off-campus w/o an ssh account. No big deal - I just sent an e-mail to helpdesk… and found out that Olin didn’t have a yum repository for fc4 anyymore. No big deal - I could just change which repos were enabled and used the fedora-extras one to get me some ntfs support. Except they didn’t have 3g-ntfs for fc4. Sad. Thankfully, a kind soul at IT suggested a Knoppix LiveCD with built-in ntfs support. Now it was definitely no big deal. Right? I mounted my windows partition. I found the text file. I opened it up. I changed the offending portion. And I found out that Knoppix only has read support for ntfs. Damn.

Then I found Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK). This aptly-named Linux distro booted from a LiveCD with built-in ntfs read and write support. Hooray!!

Now, Lappy feels much better and I’m back online and fully functional. And I even found a hot new program to blabber on about. You’ll get that shortly I’m sure.

Someone recently asked me how to visualize what files are taking up the most space on their hard drive. I decided this was a neat enough thing to do that I’d like to let y’all in on it too. My short answer: Use SequoiaView and/or TreeSize Free.

Sequoia:

Sequoia gives you a nice visual representation of what’s going on in your hard drive. The best part is easily the coloring you can set up. Below I have my .jpg files in green, my .mp3 files in red, my .avi files in yellow and my .sys files in blue. Each file is represented by a block and you’ll notice that blocks are grouped. For example, there’s currently a yellow outline around the My Documents folder. If you hover over a block, you’ll get its full path location - great for finding that massive uncompressed .avi you forgot about… Nice.
TreeSize:

If Sequoia is the way to look at the kinds of files eating up your hard drive, then TreeSize is the way to get stats about how much the locations on your hard drive are eating. The killer feature here is the explorer type interface that lets you delve deeper into the file tree. It gets you stats for every sublevel you need - sweet. The blue bars are also pretty neat. They represent the proportion of the hard drive that each folder takes up. Most folders have no apparent bar, but you can see that My Documents has abut 48% of my stuff. Nice.
So what’s the verdict? They’re both free. Get them both and try not to get lost playing with them (they are dangerously fun).

I saw a sweet, sweet, specialty browser today. The kind of thing that makes you want to actually need it just so you could use it. It’s a browser named strata by a company called Kirix. I’ve never heard of either of those two names before, but it seems awesome.

Strata is a database browser. If you mess with large tables of numbers that you have to parse through (often by retyping them all). Strata can use tables on the web as the basis for a table that can be fully manipulated. I’m much impressed. I can’t really write it nearly as well as their video shows it. And it can also make tables out of rss feeds. That was the neatest part of the screencast.

Hot. If someone ends up using this, give me a heads up so I can hear if its actually worthwhile. Thanks!

So I read about this neat site called Semapedia. The general idea is that Semapedia wants to make it possible to create physical links to wikimedia foundation pages (eg wikipedia).

The gig is that you can put in a wikimedia foundation page’s address on their site and they will give you a pdf to print out. This pdf has labels that can be read using a program for cell phones that they link you to. End result? You scan a hyperlink irl (’in real life’ for those who live more of their lives irl) and it points your browser at the appropriate page.

Honestly, their learn more page is pretty and easy to understand so you should hit that up if your interested. Anyhow, Check out this sample label:

Pretty cool huh?

So here’s where I ask you for a favor. If you have a data or web plan, could you check if your phone has an install available for it? Just go to http://reader.kaywa.com on your phone and they’ll let you know if it’s supported or not. Thanks a bunch!

If you do get something going, leave a comment. And if I’m anywhere near you, give me a call - this makes me all excited… can you imagine if these were ubiquitous? I wonder how that camera’s rated? *ping* I wonder what the political atmosphere was like at the time that this sculpture was made? *ping* Shiny, shiny, shiny!

You have pics. you know you want everyone to see them. You know you want them to show up on PlanetOlin… it’s a bit pathetic that 2 years has gotten us 613 photos. And by us I mostly mean Tostie14 who has 422 of those pics. All the other members combined don’t match him. So let’s fix this:

To start putting pics in a nice shareable public place you need a few things:

-Get a flickr account
-Add me (bdieseldorff) as a contact
-Upload some pics (I suggest using flock for this)
(Here you might have to wait for me to invite you to the group)
-Go to the ‘Organize’ tab
-Drag all the photos you want to give to the pool into the workspace
-Click the send to group button
-Click the Olin group

Yay!

If you’ve got Q’s comment or e-mail me for some A’s.

The website for Sitemeter is slow. Wow. It is seriously slow. Well. I have the code installed, but I have a stupid picture I want gone. Soooo slow. I’ll continue writing this when the stupid page can be made to load stuff…

OK. I’m actually giving up for today. I should drill my speedreading.

One thing I did notice: Google analytics reports stuff the day after it happens. This is boring Google! I like to be able to randomly refresh and be like “w00t! two more!” Huge props to StatCounter for having this covered. FeedBurner seems to do things in batches, but I haven’t really figured out what’s going on there. This is somewhat of a tangent but in FeedBurner’s rss metrics, they have this thing called reach that’s really hot. It accounts for aggregators and stuff instead of just counting them as one subscriber - my numbers look much shinier with planet Olin added in.

Peace out.

I’ve heard that Google analytics is the best thing out there. Then again, I had trouble installing it and I’ve heard reports that it misses test visitors and stuff…

I’ve been using Statcounter. Sadly, this reputedly solid tracker gives me substantially different results from the Feedburner’s reputedly solid tracking. What’s up with that?

So I’ve decided to load my site up with stuff and see what they all say. This might hurt the load speed a bit - I apologize in advance. What do you use? Put in a little blurb in the comments and I’ll add it the arsenal aimed at my traffic.

I’ll start by reviewing the installation process for the three I’m using as of this moment:

Statcounter - Fantastic. Personalized instructions depending on what you’re using. In blogger they just have you add one html element to your layout. So easy.

FeedBurner - Solid. It tells you where you have to go and what you have to do there.

Google Analytics - says something along the lines of “add it to your template above the tag. I’m fairly sure that this isn’t where you want it; that just goes at the bottom of the blog instead of each post. I followed the instructions for FeedBurner’s placement in the template instead and Google says Analytics is properly installed on my site. This is ridiculous. Google owns Blogger. I can’t believe they enjoy shooting themselves in the foot so much.

Update: Actually, the FeedBurner instructions don’t really work. Google’s instructions do end up working but I’m still giving them badness points for being big losers. They install just like stat counter - an html element in the template.

Please pass on any tools you use for traffic analysis to make this a broader test!

Matlab

you are quite effective
I feed you raw data
you return what I ask
you question nothing

you are a worthy adversary
matrix operations
make you run so much faster
linear programming is for losers

you are a workhorse without equal
when the going gets tough
the tough crunch the living hell
out of relevant numbers

So remember how I said I’d gotten 208 unique visitors to date on Tuesday? It’s more than 275 now. Blue is the unique visitor count. Check it out for the entirety of this blog’s existence:

I use StatCounter. It’s free, easy to use (add an html element to your blog) and has decent visuals. How accurate is it? I don’t know. I recently started using FeedBurner (when Google bought FB and it became easy to use with blogger) which can do some site statistics too. Hopefully comparing them will be interesting.
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Last night at around 01:00 I was doing some reading drills and had a monstrous headache. I thought “Maybe I should do an extra nap tomorrow…” At the end of the day though, I think it was a blood sugar thing. I ate some pie and felt much better and much more awake.
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Evidently the Stop & Shop on 9 is open 24 hours. I’m also told it’s closed Sunday. But seriously. 24 hours? Around here? Hooray places that are open after 20:00!
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As part of a NASA project, I’m using a PIC as a prototype circuit. I got to be all nostalgic and literally run through a good portion of the labs we did for POE. Awesome. For my money, the hardest thing to do with a PIC is get your computer to believe it’s actually plugged in.