tkh’s blog

Colloquium

Today’s talk was ‘Line drawing on a raster device’. I didn’t realize until half of the talk that the speaker is Jack Bresenham. Ed (my advisor) met him at SIGGRAPH and found that he is a UNM alumni, so Ed invited him for the talk here. He developed a very famous line drawing algorithm called Bresenham’s Algorithm and it is still used for drawing lines on many devices. His talk was the development story of the algorithm. The algorithm was refined by customers’ feedback (aka. complaints!) and thus it’s more like enginerring hack than research. It was a really nice talk.

Panther

Apple announced that it will introduce a new version of MacOS X called Panther at WWDC. I’m really excited to see new features added to OS X. My only concern is if it would be a free upgrade or not.

Tax Return

Just finished filing out federal & state tax return forms. This year was much easier because I kept the last year’s forms. Though I had to fill out paper forms for the federal forms, I could use web for the state return. It would be really nice we non-resident alien could use TurboTax for the federal tax.

Backup

I think I found the way to enable Travan drive’s hardware compression. I just used ‘mt defcompress 1′ to set the flag in the drive. Now I’m writing my home directory (11GB!) using tar. I enabled the multi-volume option, but still not sure if it really works. Wait and see…

Travan 2

I compared the sizes of different tapes. The top one is an 8mm tape which I used to backup my home directory when I was undergrad. The left one is Travan and the right one is DDS tape. When I was working, I used it to backup important data such as customers’ CAD data.

Travan

I got a Travan SCSI tape drive today from a local NMLUG member. Its capacity is 4GB uncompressed / 8GB compressed and the physical size of a tape is about the same as Exerbyte(8mm tape). As I forgot to get a power cable for the drive, I haven’t connected to my Linux box yet and don’t know how well and how fast it works. Anyway, I can backup my important data weekly.

Long Day

Just finished reading a paper on Andrew File System. It is very intersting that AFS keeps security and scalability. I have no idea why our CS department use AFS for our file server. I think a descendant of AFS is called Coda and implemented in Linux kernel. Maybe the reason is just we are accustomed to NFS too much?

Bush

I happened to watch Bush’s news conference this evening. The funniest words he said in the conference is “People don’t like war, and I don’t like war.” How can a person called ‘War Machine’ say this? He is BS. He also mistakenly said IEAE where he was supposed to say IAEA. My only hope is that the media is getting against the war. Bush should resign!

Mouse

I bought a mouse for iBook. It cost $19.99 after mail-in rebate. It’s ridiculous that we have to fill out a rebate form and send it to the retailer to get a rebate. Apparently retalers/manufactures expect for some people not to send in rebate forms.

BTW, I connected the mouse to USB port and it immediately detected. I also downloaded and installed the conifguration tool. It has an extra button and I assigned it to open my home directory. It’s very useful and I can’t imagine my iBook life without a mouse. The trackpad comes with iBook is just not useful: the pad is too sensitive to my hand and jump the pointer around the screen when I type and only has one button. I’m not a Mac enthusiast and hate the ‘one button’ philosophy. You need to press ctrl click to show the context menu? It’s way easier to click the right button.

ISP

Seems like Comcast, my ISP, raised the upstream speed of the internet connection. When I subscribed to Comcast, they claimed that the upstream was 128kbps, but now I can get around 250kbps, so probably they raised the upstream speed to 256kbps. This is really nice, because I’m running a web server and people would be comfortable downloading images.