Respect

Full Rate, Full Pressure
Straight Down the Course, All Out
Victory For All

Frustration

Spheroid Radius
Changing the Convergence Rate
Complex Code Ensues

Numerical Accuracy

Note: When computing values that need to be numerically accurate and calculated quickly carry any integration inside a summation when only one term in the summation contains the variable of integration. This results in a massive reduction of things that need to be computed. That is all. Carry on.

Daily Haiku

Azalea Blooms
Songbird Twitters Cheerfully
Sunlight Filters Down

Haiku-a-palooza

Cherry Blossoms Blow
Near a Tumbling Waterfall
Wind in the Willows

Tall Aspen Reach High
Hawk Soars Over the Meadow
Brother Bear Sleeps

New Seahorse Release

We've just pushed a new version of seahorse out the door. Please give us a hand with shaking out any remaining bugs before the 2.18 release by grabbing it and using it. You don't have to even be a 1337 2.17 using hacker to help, all of the new features work properly using libraries available in 2.16 and the appropriate non-gnome libraries, of course.

Qualifed

This morning PhD qualifier results for Clemson University's ECE Department came in. The electromagnetics group had a great showing with all 6 members that took the qualifier passing. Congrats to all of my fellow group members! Now get back to work !

Google RFE

If anyone at Google is bored and needs ideas for their 20% time, look no further!

• Add the ability to poll confirmed guests to events in Google Calendar. This would be useful when ordering sandwiches or other food items for meetings or deciding where to go out to lunch.
• In the interest of indexing and making all information available, Google could run an OpenPGP key server that synchronizes with the key server network. When searching for a name with the main search app, a key could be returned as a search result. In GMail, signatures of messages could be verified and a UI element could be presented to the user.
• Add Google Checkout to Google Apps for Domains. This would allow groups to sell merchandise, collect money for events and trips and accept donations. Perhaps in the interest of not being evil have reduced or no fees for confirmed non-profit organizations as long as they use Google Words on their Google Pages site.
  

Those are a few of the ideas I have at the moment, but rest assured if I see any of them implemented I'll post more. :)

The greatest depression ever!

Given Dave's post on investing with leverage, I'd like to point out that the Great Depression wasn't so much caused by the Stock Market Crash of 1929 as the fact that people had posted their homes as collateral for loans to invest in the stock market. When the market crashed and the lenders saw that they weren't going to be repaid, they started foreclosing on houses and farms set as collateral. With people losing their jobs and homes the Great Depression set in.

Cautionary tale aside, people invest with leverage all the time. In a short sell, one sells stock borrowed from others with the promise to return it by a certain date hoping the price will go down and they will pocket the difference. In a long sell, stock is purchased at the current price with money the investor has borrowed, often from the brokerage itself,
with the hope the price goes up and they will pocket the difference. In both of these cases, the non-leveraged portion of the investor's portfolio is used as collateral. Performing long and short sells requires a margin account with a brokerage of some kind.

Additionally, investors at the Prosper Loan Market Place are using their high credit ratings to secure sub-prime interest loans to invest in other loans on Prosper. Because the loans on Prosper are unsecured, the speculator could be burned if enough of their purchased loans default. They would still be on the line for making the monthly payments on the money they borrowed. I think investing in these characters is attractive for a lot of people because they view it as safer because their money has been lent to a person with a good credit rating to protect. However, one never knows the confluence of events that could occur. The speculator's loans could default and they lose their job leaving them to default on their own loan.

I think the real lesson here is that "investing" with leverage is entirely speculative and as a general rule no more than 5% of your portfolio should be held in speculative investments.

Disclaimer: The above does not construe actual financial advice. If you lose all of your money it's your own fault.

Righteous Anger

Phillip, I'm sick and tired of how you are going on and on about Americans as if we're some homogeneous group. Not every American likes Bush or voted for him (I've voted against him twice now). We don't all like the war in Iraq, and not just because we're having trouble there now. We also are not universally for the death penalty.

You blame the government we "re-elected", but the government we just elected that is sweepingly different from the current one hasn't taken office yet (It will in January). I don't expect Bush will ever see the inside of a court room in the Hague, but he should be investigated, impeached and tried criminally here.

I can't speak for all of GNOME Planet's denizens, but probably a fair share of the Americans that belong here agree with your sentiment. I just hate how you're expressing it.

Financial Independence

After reading jamin's blog post with links to desperate measures to get out of debt, I had a discussion with one of my office mates about how one gets into that kind of trouble in the first place. It turns out it is really easy to make the mistakes that get you there. If you aren't there already, there are some things you can do to avoid it.

• Pay off your credit cards in full every month. Making only the minimum payment will result in you paying for that geek gadget or shiny object long into the future.
• Save for your big purchases. If you have been lusting over some new toy that you simply can't live without, set aside money every month until you can afford it. You've been living without it this far and will avoid interest charges when you do buy it. In fact if you put your savings in a high yield money market account such as ING Direct's (disclosure: I have been very happy with my account there.) you could actually make money on the deal.
• Establish a safety cushion. Sock away at least 3 months worth of living expenses if you're single and more if you're not. If you have the cushion and hell breaks loose, you will be able to rely on savings instead of credit cards while you weather the storm.

There are plenty of more things you can do, but those are some of the biggies. Just remember that as the compound interest of the credit cards can work against you, if you have the money invested it can work for you.

Code of Conduct

I've been following the discussion concerning the Code of Conduct on the foundation-list and agreed with one poster that is concerned about "signing" something on a wiki. I have now signed the Code of Conduct and made sure there is no question about what exactly I was signing.

I invite my fellow Gnomies to do likewise using Seahorse's Epiphany plugin, panel applet or Gedit plugin or gnupg on the command line (If that's the way you roll).

Looking Back

... at this past rowing season it went rather well. In my first year rowing my single, I took 1st in the lightweight single at the Chattanooga Head Race, Head of the Tennessee and Head of of the South. At the Head of the Tennessee, my first place contributed to a Clemson Crew sweep of the lightweight men's events including the four and eight. At the Head of the South my roommate Matt and I beat our roommates, the Chris's, in the Champ Double event to take second in the maiden race of the team's new WinTech double (bragging rights are to be assumed). I'm a bit disappointed that racing season for me won't resume until Masters events begin in the summer, but have decided on training for a marathon in the meanwhile. Hopefully, I'll be able to increase my ability enough to feel comfortable entering next year's Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston.

I'm proud of all of the club's rowers work this semester and look forward to seeing some fast times from everyone in the spring.

Seahorse 0.9.6

We kicked a new release of the Seahorse development branch out the door last night. This is the first release with our Epiphany plugin and management of gnome-keyring passwords. There were some usability fixes committed and several crashers fixed as well. You can read the full release notes here and grab the source from CVS or GNOME FTP. A Slackware package is already available in Dropline GNOME's 2.16.1 Pre-Release.

Good day Sir! I said Good Day!!

Today was indeed a good day. I confirmed results from code that computes radial and angular prolate spheroidal functions (fixing several bugs along the way) which moves me one step closer to performing computations. My new sculling oars from Concept II shipped today, a whole 12 days before the predicted ship date. That's the kind of thing that makes me have warm fuzzy feelings about a company. Never you mind that all oars ordered from them are custom made.

Food Science

Yesterday and today have been spent in the kitchen.

Yesterday I finally brewed up a batch of Raspberry Hefeweizen that I've been meaning to. The partial boil went swimmingly and the yeast started actually started this time, but fermentation was a bit slow to start. I can only assume I didn't get the temperature of the wort down to 70 degrees Fahrenheit quickly enough. The airlock was cheerfully bubbling away this morning though and the out gas smells good, so I'm hopeful for a good batch of beer in the end. I'll get around to posting pictures of my kegerator for homebrew at some point.

Today I decided to try my hand at pasta; specifically ravioli. So far the pasta and the filling are made (so far so good). I was going to serve them for dinner tonight, but a roommate asked me to switch dinner nights with him so they're on the menu for tomorrow night. I'll probably finish making the ravioli sometime this afternoon.

Keg-a-who

After much drama with the FedEx man, I have finally received the CO2 regulator that was holding up completion of the kegerator I've been not-so-secretly building on my porch. I still require the ability to attach my second 5 gallon cornelius keg, but at the moment it's empty any way. Hopefully in a few days I shall sample the fruits of my labor with a freshly carbonated glass of birch beer. Cheers!!

Epiphany Goodness

Those of you paying attention to d-d-l would have noticed that Seahorse was proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.18 recently. One of the concerns brought up was that it wasn't integrated enough and to that effect an Epiphany plugin should be created.

Such a plugin now exists! Jean-François Rameau of #epiphany did the majority of the work by creating a framework for adding items to the context menu and handling mozembed calls to change the text in entry fields. After struggling a bit with build magic and sprinkling with libcryptui and dbus calls I checked it in this afternoon.

More work needs to be done but it's usable. Future work includes decrypting, verifying and signing the contents of text fields. At the moment the plugin works with the additional comments field on b.g.o but doesn't handle the message body field on GMail.

I've created an Epiphany component under Seahorse on b.g.o. Please file bugs there.

Welcome Seahorse Fans!

As those of you paying attention to g-a-l have seen Seahorse had two releases today, 0.9.2 followed quickly by 0.9.2.1. Even with that slight hiccup, today's been a good day for the project. There were 17 CVS commits and 11 bugs were marked as fixed. Thanks goes out to slomo and chpe in #gnome-hackers for their patch contributions! :)

The release announcements are here and here for 0.9.2 and 0.9.2.1 respectively.

Here's today's outrageous ChangeLog.

Gentle Giant

I'm glad to see Luis using Gentle Giant to move. They support the olympic dreams of rowers by giving them jobs while they train and Giants have won more olympic medals than Ireland.