Archive for March, 2005

More on the (E)Links Browser

Saturday, March 12th, 2005

What a coincidence. I was over in the server room today messing both with the (currently down) file server and the head node for another, older cluster. While I was waiting for the file system check to complete on the older cluster, I logged onto the head node of the ...

Export PowerPoint to PDF

Thursday, March 10th, 2005

My adviser writes the notes for each lecture he gives in Microsoft's PowerPoint. He then exports the PowerPoint presentation to PDF using some Adobe product (Distiller?) and posts both versions to the course webpage. He was having a difficult time converting the final eight lectures of this term to PDF ...

Dinner and Linux News

Wednesday, March 9th, 2005

I must admit I am quite proud of myself, because I managed to make dinner for Ariele and I all by myself. (And without the use of a grill!) She is preparing for her candidacy exam, so I offered to make dinner so she could continue working, and (granted, she ...

Text Web Browser Roundup

Tuesday, March 8th, 2005

I found a roundup of text-based web browsers today, and I thought the timing was pretty funny, given that Kristjan and I just had a conversation about such browsers the other day in lab. In fact, I think it came up because Kristjan found embedded in some comment thread on ...

NAG and GNU Fortran Compilers

Monday, March 7th, 2005

The two Fortran compilers I have used while at Caltech are the NAG and GNU g95 compilers. At some point last summer, I tried to compile my research code with g95 (I had previously only used the NAG compiler), and I noticed that the code ran about four times slower ...

The Workings of a Defibrillator

Sunday, March 6th, 2005

A defibrillator is a medical device used to electrically stimulate a faltering heart. Defibrillators can be used externally or implanted. I have read a little bit about the two main purposes of a defibrillator: to speed up a lagging heart rate or to force a "restart" of a heart that ...