For those of you using the Mac mail program out there, you may want to check out this housekeeping trick. Basically, it cleans up the inbox database, which can become fragmented from extended use. I don’t have any hard evidence to prove things are faster, but things do feel a bit more zippy when I’m navigating my mailboxes.
I ran across Speedtest.net several months ago on Digg, and since then every time I’ve wanted to use it, I’ve had to search Digg to remember the name. When it made the front page again today, I figured I’d just stick it in my blog so it would be easier to find. I guess this post is more of a bookmark than a real post, but if you haven’t tried it you should check out Speedtest. It’s a nice flash-based, graphical internet connection speed tester.
This video shows some of the upcoming new features in Parallels, such as coherence mode. Looks really cool. I haven’t installed any of their pre-releases because I don’t want to risk hosing things with my Windows installs, but I can’t wait until the final version.
I just downloaded the release canidate for .NET 3.0 and less than a week later, Microsoft goes and releases the final version. Back to the downloading board…
I must say though, the new version is pretty slick. The new Windows Presentation Framework is awesome, I’m just starting to learn the ins and outs of it.
I want my entire desk to be made of this stuff. Awesome.
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=j_han&flashEnabled=1&
These guys have apparently solved the problem: http://www.spanningsync.com/
When that comes out I might actually start using Google calendar. If I get over the idea of Google knowing what I’m doing 24/7. What would be really cool is if someone would offer the same feature for iScrybe, when that comes out. That would be money.
As I mentioned previously, I recently graduated from the University of Illinois. Unfortunately, I also graduated from academic discounts. Specifically, I was looking to pick up a copy of MATLAB for some data analysis problems I need to hammer on for work, only to find that Mathworks does a remarkably good job at checking if you are currently a student (we’re talking send us proof of your current enrollment here).
Anyway, I don’t have “grips” to drop on this (thanks Mike and Ben) so I went in search of Open Source MATLAB alternatives. The following is a list of the major players out there:
Of these, Octave or Scilab is probably the most complete as solution to the problem (though it’s not 100% compatible with MATLAB). Scilab was written by INRIA (who also brought you OCAML), so they know what they’re doing over there. Octave also a great alternative available on many platforms. I wasn’t able to get it via fink, and I didn’t want to manually install it, so I set up a separate Debian machine to run it. I’ve been pleased.
I also gave Freemat a try on my Mac. I was pleased that it provides a visual environment and installs easily on both OSX and Windows. I found it somewhat limited in its graphing capabilities. Octave has been working well for me. Octave actually defers to gnuplot for its graphing, so it’s very full featured. There are a few quirks, but it works fairly well.
Update:
For a more complete listing of MATLAB alternatives, visit
http://www.maths.lth.se/matstat/stixbox/matlabfaq.html
See the section on “Are there many Matlab-type environments?“
UPDATE: Another site listing possible open source math programs can be found here.
Sage was recently mentioned on Slashdot. I haven’t had a chance to to try it out yet, but it looks like it could be the new forerunner. It aims to bring together other Mathmatics software and lets you program in Python rather than some obscure proprietary language. Definitely something worth checking out.
I just installed the new version of Parallels Desktop for my Mac (Build 1940) and I’m already seeing improvements. Previously when I’d try to access shared folders, it would take almost a minute for the folder to come up in Windows Explorer. (Shared folders are folders that act like network folders but are really just shared between Windows and the host OSX operating system). Props to Parallels for at least fixing that problem. I’ll write more if I come across any other stunning improvements/problems.
I was doing some research on .NET scripting this afternoon and I ran across this really great article on some of the possibilities out there. Articles from the mothership are available here and here. Maybe Dusty and I should consider adding this as a section to our book, VBScript is an option…I’m sure the kids would love it…
I found a paper I’d misplaced for a while (previously mentioned here). It’s my old Eigenface project from CSCSI 5561 at the University of Minnesota (Computer Vision class). Just thought I’d throw it up here in the hopes that Google would index it and someone else working on face recognition might find it useful.