Funnily enough, an antievolutionist brought a recent article on evolvability to my attention. The paper, “Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvability without the Pressure to Adapt”, by Joel Lehman and Kenneth O. Stanley, is on PLOS One. Here’s their abstract: Why evolvability appears to have increased over evolutionary time is an important unresolved biological question. Unlike […]
Life has been a bit demanding lately, so it has been a while since I last worked on the Raspberry Pis. I had a notion that I might dragoon the Pis into serving as compute engines for a simulation I wrote in Python, and that got me motivated to get new Raspbian images and set […]
The Mayan apocalypse failed to appear, so I had a nice New Year’s day here in Florida. The temperature got into the 70s here, and not too breezy, so Diane and I worked on various things that all too recently would have been too hot to do comfortably. But here in the evening, I’m reflecting […]
One of the courses I enjoyed most in my Ph.D. program was taught by Prof. Kirk Winemiller on population dynamics. There are various collections of models in various languages out there, and multi-model population dynamic applications. But I still think that there is some utility to rolling my own. Since 2009, I’ve gotten more into […]
I am looking forward to getting a Teensy++ 2.0 microcontroller board. Teensy is a low-cost, small microcontroller based on Atmel AVR technology that uses USB for the programming interface. USB can also be used by the device running the user’s programs in a variety of modes. Teensy is something that I expect to solve a […]
I’ve moved on to the official Raspbian release. This OS image using the hardware floating-point capabilities on board the RasPi and is noticeably faster than the Debian “squeeze” image was. It allows me to reboot when I’m powering the RasPi from my USB hub, something I couldn’t do before. I’ve also tested a total of […]
Well, I spent my Saturday morning programming a C# application for Windows Mobile 5 to periodically record audio. I was aiming to set up a data logger using the Raspberry Pi board I’ve got, but I’ve run into enough problems that I decided to look at another approach. The idea is to log acoustic data […]
Mike Dunford of “The Questionable Authority” blog relates an on-going negative experience with United Airlines. His wife is in the US military and has 15 days of leave to meet with Mike. The 15 days began when her flight arrived from Afghanistan in the USA. However, her connecting flight on United Airlines was cancelled due […]
The author of “md5crypt” considers it no longer safe for use in password encryption. This affects various *BSD systems, including FreeBSD, since md5crypt was long the default encryption applied to passwords in the system. Now, though, md5crypt is susceptible to brute-force attacks using GPU hardware that makes breaking an 8-character password something that can be […]
I had the chance to work with my Raspberry Pi some more late last night and this morning. Quite a lot of stuff works, given that the board design is essentially at a state of “ready for the software developers to do their thing”. But some things are not quite there, or behave oddly. My […]
I checked the UPS tracking number periodically today. My Raspberry Pi was marked as delivered at about 2:30 today. When I got home, I found the package. I still needed to prepare the SD card, so I brought up the RasPi Wiki instructions for SD card setup and went with the Debian Squeeze distribution to […]
I got email from Newark today saying that they had shipped my Raspberry Pi. I should get it this week. They also sent an invoice, having charged my credit card. The item itself is $35.00, shipping is $5.00, and tax is $2.28, for a total of $42.28. Way back in early March, I called Newark […]
I’ve been going through biosonar data and while the SciPy specgram method is serviceable, I was interested in a short-time Fourier transform (STFT) implementation. There are a couple of ad hoc routines on Stack Overflow and the like, but I’ve started off with the Google Code PyTFD module. There are others out there as well, […]
I ordered a Raspberry Pi Model B computer from Newark, so now I’m waiting for stock to catch up with the truly phenomenal initial demand. If you are wondering what the Raspberry Pi is, it is a small computer board based on a Broadcom System On Chip (SoC). The SoC is ARM-based, so the operating […]
Some time ago, I wrote about making a modular curriculum vitae in . Since that time, I’ve had to update the contents. Things change. Colleagues request current CVs to include in grant proposals, and given the current state of public sector employment it is no bad thing to have the CV ready to go. But […]
Have a look at this article on the BBC site. There’s just so much wrong. The mobile telephony companies are toting up projections of profit from SMS and MMS messaging and seeing a shortfall as a “loss”. “I think it’s a growing threat which is manageable through the right tariffs and the right costing,” Mr […]
As noted here before, I’m working through refreshing archived data, mostly from CD-ROM media. I’ve run into a whole batch of CD-ROM disks that are in good physical condition, but which mostly cannot be read. I’m trying some tools that I’ve seen recommended, but would be open to suggestions. But the whole point of getting […]
I don’t know what other people got up to this weekend, but mine has been pretty well filled with computing projects. I’ve been working with my friend Marc to try to get to the bottom of the Verizon FIOS connection foul-up. We each ran TCPDUMP on our respective machines while making a request that could […]
I have two new trouble tickets with Verizon FIOS as the connectivity situation continues to be nearly completely non-functional, as it has been since January 10th. The one entered from the Verizon Business FIOS side of things is TXP08R8CY. During the hour-and-a-half tech support conference call needed to get that one going, I happened to […]
I have a bit more information about the connection difficulties I’ve been having with my ISP, Verizon FIOS. I have a residential account in Palmetto, FL with Verizon FIOS. Mostly, it works fine. I can get to a host of web sites without difficulty, and the transfer speeds are great. I do remote system administration […]