How Not to Take a Midterm

February 15, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I have to be honest with you... I'm not the best of students. That's why it's not too surprising that I got up this morning worried I might have some assignment coming up that I had forgotten about. I checked my syllabi and sure enough, I had a midterm today in my earthquakes class. The downside was I hadn't at all studied for it, but the upside was I actually knew about it before the test itself. In the body I'll give you an encapsulated version of how not to go about preparing for a midterm, but yet how to get off lucky and hopefully get away with it. — Continue Reading...

Fun from Lecture Notes

February 15, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I'm reviewing for a midterm that I think I might have today, and came across this from lecture notes explaining stress vs. force.

For example: considering the effect of a fat woman wearing flats vs. one wearing spiky heels. The total force on the floor is the same. But the normal stress on the floor is much larger right under the spiky heels because the acting surface is much smaller. The spiky heels will clearly do more damage to a wooden floor (want to try it on your feet??) when the floor gets stepped on.

Political correctness has not yet completely taken over our lives.

Speeding Things Up

February 11, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I'm trying something new here to speed the blog up. Basically with the server issues I had to downgrade the processor, so for now (until I go buy new hardware for the server) I'm actually proxying requests here and to blogdowntown through to my desktop machine, which is a fairly fast Athlon with 1gig of RAM. Apachebench says that tripled how fast requests are served, so that seems like I good change to me.

Yikes

February 11, 2005 by Eric Richardson

More in my series of computer problems... I noticed something weird going on with my server late last week. Then today, well, things got weirder. Like a load over 3.0 with 98% idle CPU and a zombie kswapd. I know that doesn't mean much to a lot of you but to me it means something seriously weird is going on. So I tried to reboot, and got the ever fun Kernel Panic. Right now I'm running again on a different motherboard and CPU, so it looks like the cause may have been hardware. I'll try to break the whole ordeal down more later, but for now I'll just let this load average graph scare the UNIX folk among you:

I realize my cropping cut off the legend. The high step is about 10. First step about 3, second about 6.

A Tale of Two Campaign Emails

February 11, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I got campaign emails this morning from both Antonio Villaraigosa and Bernard Parks (not personally... just as a "neighborhood leader"). I don't think at this point I want to make much of a comment on the politics of the race, but I've fine to instead take a minute to look at the technical merits of their email solutions. — Continue Reading...