Older blog entries for nutella (starting at number 190)

Randomist Expositions

1. Rant. At work Microsoft Excel is king. I have mentioned the numerical inaccuracies in the statistical procedures but I also hate having to deal with the limitations, especially the age-old 256 column limit and the inability to use available memory effectively (I'm going to show you a useless small fraction of the sheet and then pop up Out of Memory error boxes every time you try and do something). There's also the inability to insert a "This cell is blank" code or any kind of missing value. I feel the strong desire to create a little PostgreSQL database to generate the tables (e.g. 8000 rows x 320 columns of indirect data) but, to create a solution that is usable by everyone it has to run on local machines and so needs to be done in Excel. Why, Jim, why! The irony is that these tables will end up in JMP which is a comparatively database friendly program.
2. Subversion. While working on half-year performance evaluations I introduced my technicians to My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable. I am pretty sure that this is a firing offence. Since I am on my way out one of my technicians revealed that they used a couple of books; Perfect Phrases for Performance Reviews [Max & Bacal] and Effective Phrases for Performance Appraisals [James Neal], as low-tech buzzword generators and had been commended for their reviews by our management. I need to create scripts for automatic generation of evaluations based on these texts.
3. Observation/Question. I could't remember the URL for the above site and so typed MNFSIU into Firefox's address bar (mis-remembering the name as "System"). I was sent to an unrelated site and wondered how the target site had been decided. It turns out that the site is the first result if you try MNFSIU in google. Can anyone confirm that Firefox tries to use google to resolve partial URLs? Okay, I just suffered from an uncharacteristic bout of non-laziness and RTFM and it does appear that Firefox uses google in "I'm Feeling Lucky" mode for its "Browse by Name" capability. Interesting.
4. Sad. I had to say goodbye to my summer intern this evening. They were darned good. EF I'm gonna miss you! Since she was planning on returning next year I felt obliged to fess up and explain that I probably wouldn't be around.

Seize Power!
Seize Power! This is the only way forward. I've been trying to be too polite which means that nothing's being done. Maybe something would have happened in six weeks or so. With what I have to deal with on a day to day basis I've had enough and told them to get on with it and take the quicker route. Thanks to this I'll probably not last until the end of the month. Hurray! Naturally, as soon as I triggered this great leap forward I heard news about another important thread in my life and that appears to be moving more quickly than anticipated. This probably doesn't make much sense to someone who doesn't know what's going on in my life. It isn't really meant to, but basically I am in this frame of mind except that this time it is a geographical reversal.

Mea culpa I forgot to acknowledge the cocktailmonkey's birthday. Many happy returns to you and I am glad to read that you had a great day. If the events in the above paragraph come to pass I should be able to offer you (and sundry monkeys) tea or crêpes or TNICNAZ in person, in about a month or so.

GPS-empowered odometers are the new digital watches
On Saturday I took a trip to Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore (the National Parks website seems to be b0rken at the moment). As I was crossing the visitor centre car park a couple on bicycles swung in from the road and stopped nearby.
Husband: "Honey! 47.98 miles!"

I shouldn't have been surprised that all of the car parks near the beach were full ("come back after 4 p.m.") but the ranger on duty at the inland centre was very helpful and pointed me to the Cowles Bog Trail which, at a little over 4 miles, takes you through the lakeside vegetation and over to Bailly Beach. At around lunchtime the trail was deserted and the sandy soil and resulting plants reminded me nicely of hiking in the Bay Area. The beach was strange as it is set aside for people to pull up in their boats, and there were many many boats anchored in the surf, each with a family group on the sand adjacent to their boat. It is a strange place for a picnic as, at the western end of the beach, there's a coal-fired power station that intermittently spits out an impressive amount of yellow smoke. Nevertheless it seems to attract plenty of people with big boats. I was sure that I saw Steve Martin playing in the water with some kids, but then again I was sure I ran into Red Green and Harold on the trail on the way back to the car. Having seen the volume of sand I tipped from my shoes before getting back in the car I am now convinced that the supposed inland migration of Mount Baldy is caused by this kind of transport.

A nice side-effect of the trip to the shore was that I could take the skyway to and from the city (I294 is a total mess at the moment) and see the skyline in toto. In fact I could also see it through the haze when I was standing on Bailly Beach. Chicago's skyline always impresses me and reminds me why I was attracted here in the first place.

"Mr. Duckman, I don't believe I've ever cut myself on a urine sample before."
One thing about hiking in the heat, but with a cool lake breeze, is that you don't realise just how dehydrated you are. Until later.

If this is really going to be my last year in this area maybe I ought to nip over to the state fair in Springfield next weekend. I was reminded of this by a big poster in the mall advertising the 400 pound cow made of butter ("a state fair tradition for 70 years"). Alas, I couldn't find a web image of this state tradition, although it looks as if Iowa has their own butter cow, and typically it weighs in at nearer 2000 lb. Hurray for the Hawkeye State.

Nothing particularly important, or even coherent, to say but another month has slipped by. A couple of important processes are reaching satisfactory conclusions. I'll write more when I am able.

I'm reading The Salmon of Doubt and am enjoying it. I had initially misinterpreted some of the early reviews and had thought that the organiser of the book had tried to create a new Hitch Hikers book with unused fragments of Mr. Adams work (maybe something akin to Trail of the Pink Panther) but thankfully it is just a collection of those fragments, some Hitch Hiker related, and more like Last Chance to See.

Once again I am back from house and pet sitting up in Cheeseland. Gus continues to excel at flatulence and drool production. Personally I just enjoyed the commute in the sunny mornings and evenings, and especially the views of the big clouds that seem to be this part of the world's forte.

I had a good conversation with a colleague in another department who is interested in Linear Programming and other similar problems I have been playing with. He pointed me to some useful packages. Much of this is written for R, which seems to be gaining more and more ground. I was interested to hear that he believed that the understanding that the statistical functions in Microsoft Excel are seriously broken is now more prevalent. Since other commercial packages, such as JMP are rather pricey there seems to be a move towards R (and maybe e.g. Gnumeric). Hurray!

Sometimes I have the feeling that there is so much to be known that I'll never have enough time to take it all in (at this stage in my life this is more a source of wonder than frustration). It is thus comforting to find that when reading supposedly disparate topics in parallel that there are occasional points of overlap. These occur infrequently enough that my opinion on the vastness of my ignorance is unchanged but it cheers me to see that there are some occasions for synergy.

The latest example occurred after I had been reading about game theory as a possible way to tackle a broad series of problems (alluded to here) in a formal and quantitative manner. More recently I was trying to expand my knowledge of dose-response relationships as I had been quizzed about more complex curves by my summer intern. In particular we are working with a system where the dose-response is bell-shaped (which, for some reason known only to mathematicians, is formally known as "U-shaped") and the biological reason for this is a product of the complexity of the system (which is why I am looking at stochastic analysis of the processes). I know very little about this area and so, after a brief detour into understanding Hormesis, I am looking at papers on analysis of U-shaped curves using the beta distribution. I need to read up on the beta distribution and, lo, many of the texts choose to illustrate the probabilities with game theory examples, such as the Prisoners' Dilemma. I realise that, while my initial questions were quite circumscribed, the two questions (1. rational decision making, 2. analysis of a non-classical dose-reponse) were not in vastly different subjects, but glimpsing a point of familiarity while venturing in unknown territory was a source of some comfort.

I know that the main problem I need to solve at work involves balancing multiple, somewhat overlapping, somewhat conflicted endpoints. Having read a short chapter in a book on Linear Programming and the Simplex Algorithm I was fascinated to discover GLPK. This appears to be highly recommended by many web pages devoted to Linear Programming. It looks as if I'll need to dig into yet another scripting language (MathProg) to see if this will be of use to me. This is just after I was getting used to Dizzy and CytoScape (not that I'm complaining as both of those are great).

I am looking forward to being back in the Bay Area next week, if only for a couple of days. I hope that the job interview there works out.

GAR-de-GAR-GAR-GAR!
Yesterday I brought my personal laptop into work to make use of the bandwidth while running apt-get update in the evening. This is a pain as the company firewall is difficult to traverse (http only). I told apt the proxy settings and let it rip and all appeared to be well. After a while I just saw a series of time outs with nothing getting through. I didn't know if I had been spotted sucking down lots of files and had been throttled by The Man or if this was a network glitch or if the mirrors were busy with folk anticipating sarge. I thus messed around for some time and eventually admitted defeat. I arrived this morning, fired up my office machine and found out that they had decided to retire the proxy server last night right at the time of my updating. What are the odds?

Two out of three ain't bad
Thanks to eBay I have taken care of two of the ToDo list items I mentioned earlier. I now have a functional Sun keyboard (the old mouse works fine with it so the problem must have been the flimsy socket on the older board). A couple of days ago I also received a secondhand Asus P2B motherboard to allow me to reassemble my "spare parts" headless box (used for playing with bind and mail, print, file and web serving). I have a plain P2B motherboard (7 years old) in my main Intel box so I trust that model. Actually the new board is a P2BLS with onboard ethernet (Intel eepro) and SCSI (Adaptec U2W). The former is a nice touch. As I believe I mentioned when I built it that I am using a "pizza style" case with the expansion cards held horizontally on PCI riser cards (maximum of two). There's no way I can add an AGP card. In the past I had trouble with the Abit motherboard as IRQ sharing meant that I could only use one of the available PCI slots. During intended use this had to be for the ethernet card so I had to leave the lid open and jam in a PCI video card when configuring the box. Thanks to the Asus board's better design I can now leave the video card in place on the riser and even have room for another card (I'll probably try a second network card). I don't have any spare SCSI drives at the moment so the onboard SCSI will be wasted. Current setup is PII/350, 512 MB PC100 ECC RAM, TEAC floppy, TEAC x32 IDE CDROM, 2 x 20 Gb IBM IDE drives (7,200 rpm) and generic TNT2 PCI card. I flashed the BIOS to the latest (1012) version and all is well. I had wiped the old drives during the Great Backing Up of 2004 and so added a bare bones Woody install from CD. All appears to be recognised okay. I'll think about the second network card and may swap the CDROM for a spare Sony DVDROM and then go for the full install.

"..the kids are all hopped up.."
I don't have much access to music at my place of work (apart from some surreptitious listening with headphones while typing). I should thus have learned to be more careful about what I listen to during the commute as it might stick with me for the rest of the day. Yesterday I spent most of my time humming Sheena is a punk rocker and realising that I had more energy than normal. This was unfortunate as I was stuck in two three-hour meetings. At least my mind was free...

I have big blister on my thumb as my brakes started squealing occasionally during the drive and I was wondering if one of the calipers was sticking. I found out which one was the culprit by accidentally touching the disc while examining it. Ouch. I soused the mechanism in WD40 and things are moving more freely now. I suppose I could just have switched on the Ramones again and turned the volume up...

"They" say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully. I don't know if I now associate that concept more with Moist von Lipwig from Pratchett's Going Postal or Jeffrey from Overcompensating or even Tyler Durden (whereas this "Samuel Johnson" character is just trying to steal all their fame) but I am a big fan of (real or imagined) deadlines. Currently I am using even the vague possibility of a job and location switch to kick my own arse into taking care of a dead motherboard and a dodgy keyboard and maybe even a dead laptop. These have been on my To Do list for so long they were written in cuneiform.

I am still taking virtual tours with Google maps. Today I wandered over to Pulgas Water Temple. It is quite clearly distinguishable in the satellite image. I want satellite images of the UK. A mere street map of my childhood is not good enough.