Notes: SSD edition
Some notes from the past week:
- It is incredibly easy to be an impostor in a more academic party. First of all, most of the people will be already intoxicated to the point where bullshit science can’t be discerned from actual science. This is good as I can just say random facts I remember from Popular Science.Another acceptable thing to do is to just ask questions upon questions. “What’s your research? … Oh that’s so cool! Tell me more about it! … So does this connect to insert scientific news here? Wow.” That’ll burn around 5 minutes minimum.The main problem comes when you run out of questions in the initial barrage. It also fails when the person is laconic or can’t speak English.
- Installing a SSD is extremely easy, but installing operating systems are hard. Right now, I have around 8 entries on my GRUB menu before I migrate everything over to my new distro.I followed the mount guide provided here, which seems intuitive enough on where to put mount points. I’ve also learned that
mount
and
df -h
are my friends. There’s also that good GParted software.
- The Lloyd Trefethren numerical linear algebra book is quite good for a quick overview of the subject. It doesn’t get bogged down with the analysis, and generally refers to other books (mainly the Van Loan) throughout.
- Holy shit URF mode.
- I need to be more brave in a certain subject….
Damn
Didn’t even make top 500 for Putnam this past year. What a disappointment for me…
Flowers for Algernon
Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the cave.
I read the short story on my way to Boston, and it was incredibly thought-provoking. If such an operation is real, would I choose to take part in it? To be able to glimpse into a far brighter world, and then submerge back into the clouded abyss that limits my mind seems…
Man, I honestly don’t know how to put my feelings about such a thing to words.
I assume that I will remember I had the operation, and remember my brilliance during those few weeks which I could understand everything. My life after I returned to the normal state would be unpleasant to say the least. “I used to know this! I used to understand this! Why can’t I do this anymore!”
But how I wish to glimpse into the mind of a genius; to see a larger picture, even for just a few minutes.
Ray Casting with JOGL
I won’t post the entire code here, because it’s pretty damn ugly. But here’s what I ended up doing:
- I used the
gluunproject
statement to find the beginning and end points to extrapolate a line from.
- Now that I have a line, I use the formula provided by Wikipedia using the vector formulation of the line.
- Simply do a loop over the vertices and find the minimum.
Sorry for note posting recently… I got caught up in things… 🙁
VTune Profiler Error: “The Data Cannot be displayed, there is no viewpoint available for data ”
The solution to this if you’re using the GUI on Linux can quite possibly be that ptrace_scope was set to 1.
From the Intel forums:
Note: In Ubuntu 11.4, you may need to disable ptrace_scope.
cat /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope; “0” is expected, if it is “1”,
Then do
$echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope
Took me a while to find… hope this saves someone some time.
More Magic Practice
Goodness, this week has been busy.
I decided to cheat and use just a sleight by itself here. It took some 20 takes before I was satisfied though…
Position-based Dynamics: Start
Got collisions to work!
Hash
Doing another SPH implementation for parallel computing. It’s amazing how fast adding a hash table, instead of looking at all particles does for one’s speed. 1429.22 seconds to only 327 seconds. That’s 5 times as fast!
Garlic
- Using fresh garlic is amazing, especially compared to those minced-garlic-in-a-bottle. It doesn’t instantly become brown and cooked after you put it in hot oil. Same thing holds for ginger versus the ground ginger you find in the spice aisle.
- I’ve somehow found the art of frying chicken with minimal oil. It tasted decent, but it was still literally fried.
- Basting oil is amazing. Adds so much aroma to roasting brussel sprouts.