penny February 1st, 2012
Being a “beginner” in Excel again. I’ve had to google a lot for help in creating charts. Here is a useful link I found when I needed to create a column chart that consisted of stacks clustered together:
Go nuts! (If this link ever dies, contact us here and I’ll attempt to recreate the instructions written there.)
penny July 2nd, 2008
I sported a very bad headache this afternoon. I had meant to meet with an academic today, but by some fate issue (don’t ask me what I mean, I know I’m cryptic, I’ve been told many times) we ended up in two different suburbs. So anyway, the headache. It literally felt like my head was a tree trunk with two axe blades wedged on it. I spent some time walking in Parramatta streets to get some air. I ended up spending a lot of time in a shop called JB Hifi.
It’s mostly an electronics shop with all the merch I can look and handle all day. Today I hovered over PSP games, DVDs, CDs, earphones, headphones, desktops and laptops.
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penny April 24th, 2008
You’ve been warned. Es ist yet another Vista rant.
I just had another episode of frustrating network problems with Vista today.
(1) The network was insisting it was Unidentified.
(2) There were multiple networks found.
(3) “Local Only” it says, and the internet just won’t connect.
I’ve tried every trick I know, and looked some up online.
(1) Disabled wireless so it knows I only want the Ethernet to be found.
(2) Windows firewall settings.
(3) Disable IPv6.
(4) Toggle between DHCP and Static IP. This takes a while to set-up depending on where I am.
(5) Restart.
I did a couple of restarts before the configurations I wanted actually applied to the system. What else can I say but… ARRRRRRGH!!!!
I’ve been finishing up a couple of projects for the longest time, and I don’t think it a good idea to be reformatting my work machine should I need something vital that I forget about, and accidentally chuck out!! I’ve configured the system to work “normally” for me. By that I mean that things work to some extent, albeit crashing once or twice a week. What I really dislike is how the RAM gets eaten up by some invisible process(es) that I have no control over. I’ve stripped everything to a bare minimum at one point, and realised it had improved but a little.
Yeah yeah, downgrade to XP, I know, I know. I’ve also been set on setting up Ubuntu 08.04. I’m afraid that if I can’t make things work as they should (they work now, just not efficiently as I want it to), then I really won’t get anything done. The ******* problem is there was no Vista CD provided if you wanted to reinstall it should you be in a situation like mine, or something similar. I have a product key, which should be sufficient right? I don’t even know the answer to that question. Does anyone?
And there are those days like today when I can’t set-up my network (coz I moved from workplace1 to home to workplace2, I need to reset routers, configure IPs etc etc), can’t get decent running speeds for Mathematica or get bogged down by compiling TeX documents. It’s hard to get real work done when 70% of my time gets polluted with troubleshooting and tweaking. What about my time for procrastination browsing the internet for crying out loud!?
Here are some tweaks I do with Vista:
(1) ReadyBoost. This works by attaching a USB flash disk or SD/MMC and telling Vista that you want to use it for “speeding up your system”. I’m not sure how it works, but it seems to use the space allocated as a page file. At first I thought plugging the 2GB memory was helping speed my system up. But I don’t notice the difference anymore.
(2) Disable sidebar. It’s fun to have the Windows sidebar, as it has widgets like the OSX. But I don’t really use it all the time, so I shut it off whenever doing something needing memory.
(3) Use the most basic theme (disable Glass/Aero) with the least effects possible. Too bad. When Microsoft really endeavored to make Vista pretty with all these flashy visuals.
(4) Uninstall Office. It’s this big chunk of nothing that I hardly use. Replacements are a-plently. To me, what I used in Microsoft before were Word, Powerpoint, Outlook and Excel. Now just OpenOffice for Word, LaTeX Beamer for Powerpoint, GoogleDocs for Excel (sheets online, stats in R-cran) and Mozilla Thunderbird for Outlook.
penny March 8th, 2008
While bored to my wits, I went into yet another google frenzy and found this site. I found it so funny I just had to share it. It would probably be of interest to some UP graduates, especially those from Computer Science (CS).
It is a little website made by some sad computer science student in UP (he’s probably somewhere writing code to save the world now). In the website, the author (Alec, from what I gather in his pages) outlines his experiences in each of his academic courses in bullets. He documented what he learned (if any) from the course, his professor/teacher and what he/she was like, and other things he experienced in his classes. At one point he says in one CS subject “walang lab, pero ewan ko kung bakit natuto akong mag-program dito”.
Math teachers he mentions are Dr Pizana, Dr Roque, Dr Alejandro (now Kazanidis), Prof Adorio, Cherry Ramos and Ajay Jorge =)
penny November 23rd, 2007
[edited on 24 November 2007, factual errors found. Typos still exist but I'm too lazy to change them =P I know Riemman should be Reimann!!]
I stalked my academic roots in the Math Genealogy Project, remembering a remark my supervisor (Tanaka) made when we were in Christchurch that it is possible to trace supervisors from him up to Euler and Gauss. The conversation came up when I met a few people (like M Palmer) from the Feldman Lab in Stanford in the Evolution conference.
I browsed the site and searched for my MS adviser (del Rosario) from UPD, and found the same was true for him! They coalesce [most recent common ancestor] at David Hilbert.
Continue Reading »
penny September 9th, 2007
* I’ve braved the Palm Desktop Software BETA for Vista. It seems to work… for now. Only, I can’t seem to link Outlook properly to the handheld Calendar. This kink can be annoying when I’m on the notebook and want to sync with my handheld. But the other direction is good.
*Still on Palm, Adobe refuses to work on Vista. Then I checked online, and apparently, Adobe says “NO” to Vista updates. Geeeesh. All those eBooks!!
*I’ve tried 2 different MikTeX releases.. off to my third, 2.6. I’m not sure what is going on yet. Seeing I need LaTeX running on this machine soon, I’ve got TeXMaker 1.6lined up to install next. If all fails, I might resort to using notepad and compiling remotely from Uni. But then again, will XMing work in Vista?
* putty seems to work.
* Nero 6 is incomaptible. For now, the system file CD writer is enough. I will need Nero soon for creating media discs.
* I cannot install R at all.
* Nor can I GCC.
* Have yet to try Perl and Python…
penny April 11th, 2007
Scientists have found evidence that prior to being a predominantly green planet, Earth was purple!
Somewhat loose discussion:
This has something to do with how membranes of organisms absorb and reflect wavelengths of light from the sun’s rays. We all learned about chlorophyll in photosynthesis in grade school. Scientists are proposing the idea now that at one time, the Earth was riddled with organisms that absorbed green light and then reflected red+violet = purple light. But there existed some purple-absorbers who could not compete with the abundance of green-absorbers. To survive, the evolved with an ability to absorb purple, and reflect green. They somehow maintained survival, and eventually emerged victorious in dominating the environment.
So how useful is this information, aside from being strikingly adorable to purple-color lovers?
Well, for one thing, on our search for life in other planets, it means not always searching for the same observable things we see on Earth at present, like the dominance of color (green).
[If you want to look up more information about these news snippets I write about, I'll start putting some keywords to look out for]
Keywords: retinal, halobacteria, archael bacteria
penny April 10th, 2007
Not all of these are specific to humans, but nonetheless, just as interesting:
Female stem cells work better. (also here) Remember the buzz about stem cells (and cloning) before? Stem cells are present in our bodies, and they are capable of renewing themselves so that they show promise in medical therapies for many diseases. There are now indications that stem cells from females are much more effective in regeneration than those from males. The sturdier sex they say 
Females do better if they wait a while. This is in context with a particular type of birdcalled Green wood hoppoes. For them, the theory of having offspring early in life maximises the number of offspring you will have does NOT apply. At least not for the female. It seems that the birds, when they care for their young, end up being isolated from the social group, and hence become physiologically “less fit”, causing them to die much earlier. So the much more mature female birds who are more adapted to “being alone” are able to reproduce much more in their lifetime since they live longer. Doesn’t this make you think about the analog in female human life?
[off-topic] Funnily enough though, this piece of news also reminds me of the “True Love Waits” seminar we had in high school. I dunno about you guys, but I think private schools, especially the sectarian ones [though they claim they are non-sectarian.. they are!!] have a tendency to indoctrinate kids too much that they turn out as biased people with an unleveled sense of judgment. I don’t really know at this point whether I want my kids to turn out this way.
Fewer men are being born in recent years. Researchers cannot explain exactly why this is so, but their latest findings in a study in the US and Japan show that there are less male than female births. They are looking into environmental and nutritional (and also late age) factors that cause men to be “less likely” to father boys. Sex ratios are important characteristics of a species that serve as indicators of the “health” of our kind. Not to alarm anyone, but this seems to me that in the long run, women will be fighting over scarce men. Paano na ang freedom to choose?
Very scary thought.
