Inert Ramblings

Blog

  • Turn Back the Spam of Time

    Article: Turn Back the Spam of Time
    By: Brian McWilliams

  • Gee, math is easy!

  • Douglas Adams – The More Than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide

    Asteroid 18610 was discovered by Felix Hormuth. A longtime fan of Douglas Adams, it was confirmed on May 09, 2001 that he was to name Asteroid 18610 Arthurdent after the hero and protagonist of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

    Science Fiction writer Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels, died of a heart attack on May 11 at the age of 49. Only two days before his death, approval was given to name asteroid 18610 Arthurdent after the hero of the series. Apparently word of this did not reach Mr. Adams before his death. The name was proposed by the discoverer, Felix Hormuth, who discovered it in February, and hopefully Mr. Adams did know of the proposal.

  • Dinner

    • Teriyaki beef
    • Teriyaki chicken

  • Search Engine Roundup – Initial Research and Testing

    I’ve started looking into search engines for indexing large amounts of data. Although the primary reason for this is to start organizing my personal data collection, it will also come in extremely handy on the file servers at work. I’ve started to reach critical mass when it comes to the amount of random garbage I have floating around on miscellaneous file servers and I now need a much better indexing scheme.
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  • Lunch

    • Leftover venison chipsteak with homemade hot pepper low carb marinara suace

  • Breakfast

    • Spicy soy nuts
    • 2 pieces beef jerkey

  • Dinner

    • Ground beef chimichanga with nachos, beans, rice, salsa, sour cream and guacamole.

    Oh, yeah, and did I mention that last night I cheated?

  • Large-scale indexed and searchable personal archives?

    Like most geeks, I’m a complete packrat when it comes to collecting copious amounts of seemingly useless information. Years of saved email, textfiles, Web pages, ZIPs, PDFs, Word documents, etc. Underneath the surface of that raw data is the occasional gold nugget of priceless information that, although not yet of value, may some day shed light on a future conundrum. It is for this reason that I have been religiously archiving all raw inbound and outbound data processed by my collection of machines since the early nineties. And it is this massive collection of information that has saved my butt on more than one occasion as I pulled an answer to a problem out of thin air because I remembered that someone emailed me about a similar issue four and a half years ago.

    Over the years, my collection started out as a few megabytes and now spans a hundred or so CD-Rs and the majority of an 80 GB hard drive. As more files are collected the archive grows and becomes even more unwieldy. Unfortunately, this has turned the archival process into more of a frustration than anything else. Find and grep only go so far and a misplaced answer is worse than no answer at all. I won’t even touch on the subject of how many times I’ve searched for a piece of information that I know I have but can’t find due to my lack of a proper index and search capability.
    (more…)

  • Lunch