The collected works of josehill - Page 15

I'm actually impressed that NASA was able to cut through the red tape to try and see if anyone would try this. It's not unusual for a hungry vendor or someone with more skills than credentials might try to solve a problem like this for little or no compensation in the hope that it will lead to a larger, better funded project.

For example, I gave a public talk once where I described a problem I was having, and a year later, I got a call from a software developer who was in the audience and decided to try to solve the problem. He said, "I have a prototype. I'll give it to you for free along with future upgrades if you give me feedback so I can refine it into a product and sell it to the industry." He had, in fact, solved my problem with the prototype, so I found a way to scrape together around a few thousand dollars to cover his immediate expenses, and he ended up doing well delivering the product to others, in part by saying that "Josehill at GlobalMegaBigPharmaCo is an early adopter and loves it!" Win-win for everyone.

dexter1 wrote: It is true that allocating project-millions for HPC machinery is actually easier than recruiting support and programmers on a project after that initial big budget spend.
For years I am trying to get faculty heads and ICT bosses around the fact that they should change the way projects are budgeted: Not prioritizing acquisition funds of hardware and software from whoever gives you the best deal, but also allocate money for developers who can teach researchers new skills in writing code and new ways of performing computation.

But man, that is frustratingly hard

Indeed. Proper planning for the full cost of running a project effectively is surprisingly rare and difficult in the wild. Expertise, training, and long term support somehow seem to be assumed to be freely available, yet they usually are the things in shortest supply!

This looks okay on my system:

Could it be a problem with the UTF encoding of what you are entering or perhaps an issue with your browser's encoding settings?

Y888099 - what are you using to post to the forum? Firefox? Safari? Lynx? Edge? IE? Something else? What version? What character encoding are you using?

I repeat my suspicion that your posting mechanism is using a UTF encoding that the forum software is not expecting, since others have been able to enter your problematic strings without trouble.

ClassicHasClass wrote:

josehill wrote: Anticipating root canal.

Ugh. And how did that go?

In the end, not too badly, but a few minutes into it, we discovered that the novocaine hadn't fully taken effect. It was my fault, really, since I had forgotten exactly how numb you have to be to be truly numb, so I gave my dentist the green light to begin a little prematurely. Once we got that sorted out, it went smoothly.

The most interesting thing for me was the hydrocodone-ibuprofen I took after the procedure. I only took two pills over the next 24 hours, and then I stopped the course, since the pain had dissipated. I was fascinated by the realization of just how much I had gotten used to all the minor aches, pains, and general creakiness that I've accumulated over the years in the rest of my body. The hydrocodone masked all of them, and honestly, I felt like a kid again.

It's in such moments that one begins to understand the temptation to abuse pain medications.

Now my main Windows machine is downloading the Creators Update. As far as I can tell, there aren't any new features in it that I particularly care about, aside from the miscellaneous security updates.

Pass the morphine.

I just fired up a VM running 32 bit XP SP3 and loaded Chrome Version 49.0.2623.112, and that is what I am posting this message from. As the code above demonstrates, I am not able to duplicate the problem.

ClassicHasClass wrote:

GL1zdA wrote: Superdome X machines are already available.

What do those run? Surely not HP-UX (I haven't kept up with HP's product line after PA-RISC got axed, though).

HP officially supports Windows Server, RHEL, SLES, and vSphere on Superdome X.
http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/pub ... =c05333408

Y888099 wrote:

Hakimoto wrote: OK, I think then we can all agree that the bug is not with the forum software...

Not sure, it doesn't happen on other forums

Are you using a "code=php" tag instead of a simple "code" tag?

Y888099 wrote: Simple "code" tag.

Since nobody else here has been able to duplicate your issue, I suggest that you go to the phpBB website to see if anyone has filed a bug report that matches your issue. https://tracker.phpbb.com

If there are no such reports, then consider filing your own bug report, providing detailed information about your local posting environment and the explicit steps you take when you experience your problem.

For example, here is a report that seems similar to your issue, but it appears when using the "php" qualifier in the "code" tag and does not appear when the qualifier is not used. https://tracker.phpbb.com/browse/PHPBB3-9105

guardian452 wrote: I found out recently one of my favourite prog-rock groups had more than one album. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_(Canadian_band ) I have FM's Black Noise on vinyl and CD You should listen to it. It didn't get me into music* But I eventually learned marimba and my dad gave me this record when I bought a record player in my teenage years. I was kinda into synths for a while... I've only owned a jp-8000 and it wasn't necessarily by choice (it was free), but I had a lot of fun with it.

**so, my uncle was a drummer and got me into that when I was barely old enough to sit upright. May have been to spite my mother

I saw FM a couple of times back around 1980 or so, when I presume you were still haploid! They opened for another Canadian act that you may have heard of, Rush, on a few tours. I remember when they turned off the arena lights (either Madison Square Garden in NYC or the Byrne Arena in NJ), and the bow for Ben Mink's electric violin lit up in rainbow colors. The young teenager version of me saw that and said, "Whoaaaa! Duuuuude!", and stuff like that, if I recall correctly.

I'm not sure I'd actually use it, but I might just get a license because I like to encourage this type of project.

johnnym wrote:

jan-jaap wrote: Achilles heel: you have to keep it up to date.

Same here, but I think you always need to keep an inventory up to date, regardless what tool you use

By far, the most important point. An inventory that is kept up to date in a paper notebook is infinitely more valuable than a sophisticated, semi-automated, barcode/RFID-enabled system that is not kept up to date.

Hakimoto wrote: In fact workplace nonchalance is probably the largest danger in my field. You'd be surprised how much energy is contained in seemingly small amounts of substances that are incompatible with each other.

I very strongly agree about that! Familiarity, expressed as nonchalance, is not at all the same thing as safety, but it often seems to be mistaken for it, whether in the lab or in other areas where potentially dangerous materials or equipment are used. I used to work for a global corporation that was large enough and in enough dangerous areas of operation that it was unusual to go a year without an industrial accident somewhere in the world resulting in one or more fatalities. The company rather sincerely wanted to do something about that, and it invested considerably in the design and rollout of a global safety program.

As we became better at collecting and analyzing comprehensive safety data, it quickly became obvious that the vast majority of incidents did not involve new/inexperienced staff, fatigued staff, or other commonly expected factors. Instead, most incidents involved experienced staff having otherwise good days who had allowed routine and experience to desensitize themselves to the inherent dangers of the materials and equipment they were using. At the time, a lot of people rolled their eyes at the safety initiative, especially those who didn't work in obviously life-threatening areas, but I am convinced we ended up saving lives, limbs, and eyes throughout the company because of these insights.

Hakimoto wrote: :lol: Nah! The vast majority of cooking in those books is illegal in most jurisdictions as you're setting out to make a (with a high likelihood) controlled substance with the intent of human consumption.

When I was in high school (way back when), we extracted nutmeg in a project and showed by an analytical technique called gas chromatography that there were different substances in the extract, including myristicine, which is psychoactive. But, of course, we're talking microgramme quantities here and it's not like anyone stood at the exhaust of the GC machine to inhale what came out!

As for the chemistry, "psychoactive drug chemistry" is no more or less dangerous than other organic chemistry. If you do it right, it'll work out just fine and you don't blow yourself up in the process. If you don't, well... .

I'm reminded of a few blog posts by one of my former coworkers, Derek Lowe, who now is a medicinal chemist at a Boston-area pharma company:

• Chemistry sets - http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ar ... istry_sets
• A whole series of "Things I Won't Work With" - http://search.sciencemag.org/?q=things% ... ork%20with

For anyone who is interested in the "real world" of drug discovery, especially through a chemist's eyes, his blog is a superb resource and is very well written.

PS. While I am not a practicing chemist, I hold degrees in biochemistry and biophysics, and I still maintain my membership in the computational division of the American Chemical Society and other societies. Over time, however, my career has moved more and more to the "bio" and informatics sides of things, though it looks like I'll be undertaking a substantial cheminformatics project this summer.

dexter1 wrote: I think that the word chemist in this context is a bit misleading since i think the OP means creating Pharmaceutical compounds by regular chemistry master students (of which i happen to be one). Or do Americans/Brits use the word "chemist" to designate "pharmaceutist"?

I never came close to creating something fit for human consumption. The laboratory simply is off-limits for anything human consumable. Well, except for perhaps my synthesis of Cinnamon acid assignment. All the folks at the laboratory were sniffing at me and my cabinet.

Good point. I had the same thought when I read Oskar's original post, but then I got caught up in the subsequent discussion.

American English uses the word "chemist" to refer to someone with a chemistry degree or someone who works in a chemistry lab, in a chemicals production facility, or perhaps in a chemical education setting. British English speakers additionally use "chemist" to refer to a person whom American English speakers would call a "pharmacist" or to a business they would call a "drugstore." A modern American English speaker would never use "chemist" to refer to a pharmacist or a drugstore and probably would not be aware that there is an additional meaning to the word in British English unless they had traveled to countries where that usage is common. Also, although "pharmaceutist" can be found in American dictionaries as a synonym for "pharmacist," I've never actually heard an American use "pharmaceutist" in conversation. "Apothecary" would be the most likely (but relatively rare) alternative in American English, in the same sense as the Germanic "apotheker."

From a technical perspective, it's pretty clear that a careful, competent chemist with proper equipment can make many compounds that are fit for human consumption without too much difficulty, at least in small quantities. The trick is consistency, especially when scaling up to produce larger amounts of a compound. Many people, including professional chemists who have not worked in the area, vastly underestimate the difficulties involved in compound scale-up and formulation. A major cost component of many pharmaceutical R&D projects is figuring out why a reaction that works great in a 10 mL test tube doesn't even start or only produces miscellaneous brown goo when you try to carry it out in a 10 L reaction vessel, never mind a 10,000 L tank. Worse, you might figure out how to scale a process to large volume, but for some reason, it only works on Tuesdays.

Shiunbird wrote: Well, there's this bit of schizophrenia in Windows 10... if you use the Settings application, it won't assign all e-mail tasks to Outlook. You need to also do it in Control Panel.

I agree -- that general schizophrenia is a major annoyance with Win10. I've gotten used to looking at both the Control Panel and the Settings app to make sure config choices are complete. That said, I've been running Win10 on my primary Windows system for a little while now, and after the initial round of configuration and customization to make the system work the way I wanted it to work, it hasn't given me any routine trouble that is worse than the routine troubles I see with other OSs, including Linux and macOS. It's not as coherent as Win7, but so far, it's been ok for me.

I really miss the old Annoyances.org website and the associated O'Reilly books , especially the ones written by David A. Karp. They were great sources of reliable ways to "fix" Windows and other tools. I guess the recent fashion of developers continuously tweaking features and rearranging and otherwise messing with UIs has made it impossible to write anything that qualifies as "authoritative" for more than a few weeks, hence the proliferation of stupid, redundant, out-of-date "Top Tricks"-style blog posts that seem to litter the net. (Microsoft is far from alone in this, of course.)

FWIW, I've found that the Classic Shell Start Menu alternative makes Win10 (and Win 8.x) a bit more usable by providing a more consistent and logical means to access many functions than what Windows itself includes.

Original post/thread deleted. Reminder:

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Any posts concerning pirated software or offering to buy/sell/trade commercial software are subject to removal.

yetanother**ixuser wrote: snagged a nice powerbook g4 12" from a local fleamarket. its fully loaded and in near mint condition. useless but beautyfull

That is one of the top five Macs that Apple ever made, IMHO. Congrats on finding one in such great shape! The soft aluminum case on that model attracts dents, scratches, and other signs of wear and tear. I used mine on the road for several years, and it looks like it was used in battle.

I still have mine (also 1.5 GhZ/1.25 GB but with an upgraded HD), though I don't fire it up very often any more. I kept it around mainly to run older versions of TurboTax in case I was audited, but it has been long enough that the audit window has closed on those tax years. It's still a nice writing machine, and Adobe CS2 runs very well on it. Perhaps its best use these days is for running older Mac software using the Mac OS 9 Classic environment under Tiger. Aside from running on a G5 Mac, it's pretty much the fastest "Apple supported" Classic experience you can get. (The 1.67 GHz Powerbooks should run Classic faster, but they don't feel like they do, at least to me. Perhaps that's because they have to push more pixels around their larger screens.)

robespierre wrote: The full set was only produced for 6.5. Point releases came as overlays, with quarterly updated Applications CDs.

That's not correct. The "full" ASE/AWE sets were revised several times to include updated point releases, development foundations, libraries, and other disks in the shrink-wrapped package.

Unfortunately, I don't think that there is a complete list of ASE/AWE part numbers on the net.

I forget lettering scheme for the ASE/AWE part suffixes, but they do not strictly correspond to sequential numeric releases. I may be mistaken, but I think that some of the kits were specific to particular regions or hardware options. There are a handful of examples listed on the wiki at http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/IRIX_6.5_E ... _Revisions

Y888099 wrote: May be the nicest machine which can carry MorphOS with you when you travel

Is that true? I was interested in trying MorphOS on that hardware a while ago, but the last time I looked, MorphOS didn't support the NVIDIA GeForce graphics in the 12" G4 models.

coolfox wrote: interesting, so I guess the only way to tell is to open one up huh.

If you do, please let us know the result so that we can add it to the wiki. Of course, you'd be welcome to add it, if you're so inclined.

tingo wrote: I prefer Mini vMac for running classic Mac OS software: http://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/
PowerPC? Too new

I've used it to emulate a Mac Plus. A very nice piece of software!

coolfox wrote: Even has the original receipt and the monitor that came with it (monitor isn't boxed though).

According to the receipt, it came with the WebForce Authoring bundle. In addition to the neat little plastic badge on its case, it would've shipped with a bunch of SGI-specific web development tools that were state-of-the-art back then, as well as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. If the box is complete, which is pretty rare these days, it has lots of interesting things that will be fun to explore. (My first SGI was a similar WebForce Indy, with a little more RAM and a 180 MHz R5k. I wish I still had it!)

A while ago, Dodoid scanned in a WebForce review. Worth a look - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/724 ... Review.png

commodorejohn wrote: I just plunked down for an SX Andromeda II from Rondo Music.

Very cool! I hadn't realized that Rondo Music still was around. They started as a small family business a few blocks down the road from where I grew up in NJ. I used to go there often as a teenager and drool over the idea of someday buying a Les Paul. (At the time, the most I could afford was a cheap, no-name, imitation model.) Unfortunately, the main store closed at least a decade ago. When it closed, I heard that one of the family members was going to try to make a go of it as an online store run out of New Hampshire. Nice to hear that they are still in business!

robespierre wrote: But all PowerPC macs can run the Classic environment in OS X 10.4.11.

Not exactly. Only G3/G4/G5 machines officially could run OS X. Machines based on the 601/603/604 PowerPC CPUs were limited to various versions of the classic MacOS. (Sure, there were patches and workarounds that would let OS X run on some of these older PowerPCs, but I don't think anyone would find that to be much fun, especially if trying to run Classic on top of OS X.)

The closest thing to it that is true is that all PowerPC Macs that support OS X 10.4.11 or earlier versions of OS X or MacOS can run some version of the classic MacOS, either directly booting into a supported version of the classic MacOS or by running the Classic environment in a supported version of OS X.

(Sorry: I didn't mean to be pedantic, but hey, this is a vintage computing forum. Are there groups with higher percentages of pedants than vintage computing forums? )

Dodoid wrote: The only MIPS SGI workstation released during my lifetime was the Tezro.

I think I'm going to go to the park, sit on a bench, and feed the pigeons for the rest of the day.

PS. Always happy to see Diego back on Nekochan!