Wayne Graham's Blog - General

Rotten Luck

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:23:00 -0500

I'm currently at a conference at Lehigh University, and it's given me pause to really reconsider air travel. Every time I travel, seems something goes awry. Coming back from a conference in California about a month ago, the last leg of my flight was canceled because the plane needed a new tire, and all of Charlotte didn't have a tire for that particular aircraft. I could swallow that since the aircraft wasn't safe to fly, but the line to actually reschedule my flight took about 2 hours, and they couldn't get me back to Newport News (where my car was) until almost midnight the next day. Fortunately, my wife came to get me in Norfolk. I was significantly peeved to not choose US Airways for my next flight to Vegas that I was going on in the next couple of weeks. Coming back from Las Vegas (on United), the company had issued some "cost saving measures" that meant that the pilots couldn't have the engines on before we boarded on the flight from Dulles to Richmond. It was hot that day, so they turned the fans on for us, which drained the auxiliary power, which meant the engines couldn't be started. Well, they brought some field units on, but after the first three didn't work, we disembarked the aircraft to wait for maintenance to bring a fourth unit from another unit to get the aircraft started. In my latest trip (unfortunately back on US Airways), I got to Lehigh yesterday afternoon, but my bags only made it as far as Boston. I was first told my bags would be on the 4:00pm flight, but when I called at 6:30 to check, they told me they'd be arriving at 7:00pm. I called at 9:00 to check, and they told me my bag would be delivered by midnight last night. Since I wasn't woken up by my phone last night, I called again this morning. I was informed that the delivery service began at 8:00am, and they had a 4 - 6 hour window for delivery. I'm thinking that the next time I need to travel, Amtrak is looking a lot better...

IE 7 beta 3 in Standalone Mode

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 08:36:00 -0500

I've been running IE 7 beta 2 in standalone mode (so it wouldn't override my real IE installation) for a while. However, when beta 3 came there were some issues going to beta 3 because it needed to write some values to the registry and didn't assume your default settings. I ran across Tredosoft's entry on how to get beta 3 working. The really nice thing is that they packaged a nice installer to do everything for you! So, if you need to test your website in IE 7 (there are some funky things going on with style rendering), I definitely recommend checking this out!

Online Tests

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 11:42:00 -0500

With all the folks showing their badges of nerdiness today, I thought I add to this a bit. About a week ago I was reading a posting at Techfoot entitled I Passed College that outlined how a few Colleges and Universities are floating the idea of exit-exams with a badge for MySpace, Facebook, etc. that graduates "Passed College." Gene also mentions the Eighth Grade Test that Gardner talks about...so can you pass it?

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Morning Walk

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 08:56:00 -0500

Every morning as I walk from the dorm that I'm staying in for the XML class I'm attending to where the class is being held, I walk past a World War I memorial with the following quote:

Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he out to die.

This struck me as a really harsh saying and really stuck with me to the point that I had to find out where this came from. After a little Googling, I found that it is from Emerson's Quatrains–Sacrifice. However, it is part of a much longer poem, and the entire stanza reads

Though love repine and reason chafe,
  There came a voice without reply,
    "Tis man's perdition to be safe,
      When for the truth he ought to die."

How many punchcards...

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 20:33:00 -0500

OK, punchcards were long gone before I even started school, but my office mate is an old-timer who used to use punchcards, and he referred me to a post on how many punchcards a three minute MP3 could take. Answer... "Assuming a non-Hollerith encoding with eight bits per column, and an MP3 file encoded at 128kbps CBR, there would be 36,864 cards in that deck, and the card reader would need a throughput of 205 cards per second. It might be wise to include an 8-column sequence number, however, so that a misordered deck can be repaired by a card sorter; with 72 data columns per card, the total is precisely 40,960 cards (40k cards), requiring a 228 card/second throughput. The 21 boxes of cards needed would be 5 feet 9 inches tall..." I think I'll stick with an iPod... but it is amazing that I can now carry more than this (around 10,485,760 punchcards by my estimation) on the thumbdrive on my keychain!

GoogleEarth

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 13:52:00 -0500

Ok, I wasn't going to talk about GoogleEarth, but when I was trying to show my wife (a former geography teacher), I saw that Google removed it's installer from its beta site. However, my ever vigilant minion found another similar program. World Wind was released on May 26, 2005 (almost two months before Google Earth) and is comparable to the GoogleEarth beta. Maybe not quite as intuative to use, but almost more useful for my purposes of geocoding places since it provides latitude, longitude, heading, and terrain elevation in additional to satellite, ortho, topographical, and urban ortho projections. If that wasn't enough, there are a bunch of projection models that allow you to turn on-and-off layers of the map. There's also a Visualization studio with several visualizations of fires and how they spread. As far as a tool for learning and discovery, these types of tools are absolutely amazing. Allowing self-discovery and the visualization of events in time and space have been a long time coming. I won't go into my feelings about the importance of learning through self-discovery, but man flying through canyons is really cool. Anyway, if you missed the GoogleEarth download, NASA's World Wind is definately worth the download (but only if you have broadband, it's 180MB)!