Computers

Man Vs The Machine “Watson”

Posted on February 14, 2011

When Watson first debuted in 2007, it was laughed out of the room. It couldn’t understand the question and just shouted random, search enginey answers…like some “friends” of mine.

IBM went back to the drawing board and created the fastest natural language analytical computer processing system in the world. Watson has access to 200 million documents, in seconds. But most of all, Watson understands. Watson gets the question. Or in Jeopardy, it interprets the category, takes in the answer and figures out the question.

Tune in today (Feb 14 – 16) to watch Watson go up against Ken Jennings and some other Jeopardy champ whom I’m too lazy to Google his name.

Watson doesn’t look like your average computer. “He” resembles a server room with racks of servers in cages. He’s about 8 cages of computing awesomeness. Now if only they gave Watson the SNL Sean Connery voice, I will be most impressed with IBM.

02/14/2011
Computers, Jeopardy, Skynet, Watson

How Fanboys See The OS

Posted on January 2, 2010

1 Dead Computer; 2 New Machines

Posted on July 20, 2009

Macbook Last week, I lost my Dell Inspiron 531. I bought that Dual Core AMD64 in Sept 07. I definitely worked that thing. All of my data is fine as my 1TB (2 500GB drives) are working. That’s all I really care about. The motherboard appears to have overheated and burnt out. It won’t boot past the dell bios splash screen.

I have a similar machine at work except it’s a Quad Core. I also have a piece of shit Vaio I also purchased in 2007. I guess they weren’t making solid machines that year cause I am ready to ditch this thing. It wasn’t even a reliable backup last week. I am rocking a loaner Vostro. And you know what? It’s a lot faster than my 531 had been performing the past few months.

I Alienware ‘ve been really thinking about getting a Macbook Pro later this year. It will be 10 years since I left Mac and it looks like they made a couple of *minor* improvements. But the time has come for me to get a real desktop. A real machine that can handle all of the home-made porn work I do. I want a serious graphics card, a serious set of processors and a motherboard that can handle it. I want at least 6GB of RAM, if not 12. Most importantly, I want this kept quiet and cool.

The Alienware Area 51 x58 with Liquid Cooling is the perfect machine and just under $2000. That’s pretty much the same price as the Mac — unless I decide to go with the 17.

My choices aren’t cheap, in fact they are pretty high-end, but well worth it. I think it’s about time I take care of my personal hardware. This is what I do. What it do? San Dimas High School Football Rules! (Sorry @davidgagne, consider it quotable-gangsta tourettes)

Editors note: just in case it’s not perfectly clear, I am purchasing both of these computers in the upcoming months. That is my ultimate decision. I need both.

Grid No More

Posted on October 13, 2008

I had to leave Media Temple’s grid service hosting and upgrade to a dedicated box. Normally I would be outraged at the host and demand all of my money back and blah blah blah. Time is sensitive and it took them less than 30 minutes to provision a CentOS 5 box fully configured and ready to host. I don’t understand why the host.conf file in Plesk can’t come with .htaccess override turned on. It’s a pretty phuking standard option. That’s for a different rant, I must not digress.

I had to leave the grid because something wasn’t right. The site would take almost 20 seconds to load. I ran a tracert and it hit all of the hops in milliseconds. Perhaps something was wrong in the DNS Zone file? Or maybe, just maybe, the magical grid is just slow. It’s being taxed. It’s being raped by other sites and applications. The grid is being taxed and raped and my site is unfortunate victim.

San Fransisco based Servepath has just released their Grid. To combat all the taxing and raping (this is San Fran) they are allowing you deploy as many servers on the grid as needed. You can downgrade during off hours and upgrade to a cluster of 8 virtually dedicated servers on the grid. Their service also allows for the allocation of dedicated IPs. The only slight problem, it’s slightly pricey. You pay per CPU hours, per RAM hours and bandwidth. I ran the numbers and even with 1 server and not 1k of traffic, you are paying $150 a month. For sites that expect tremendous spikes in traffic (Shoebacca I am looking your way) but don’t need a cluster of 8 Quad cores and 2 load balancers, this is for you.

So moral of the story, Media Temple, phuk your taxing and raping slow as phuk, grid!

is_home() Only Works at Home

Posted on August 1, 2008

It’s friday night and I am blogging. Better yet, it’s friday night and I am working. So while we are dorking out…I might as well take this time to bitch about a function I discovered in WordPress.

In the pre 2.5 versions, there is a function called is_home(). This is deprecated (no longer used but left for backwards compatibility). Any decent programmer will automatically assume this is a Boolean function. It will return a 1 if we are indeed on the homepage and 0 (or blank) if we are not. Pretty simple…right?

Well for some reason this function wasn’t working…even on the homepage. So I had to look it up. I read through the WordPress Codex and I felt like a GIANT douche bag looking up is_home(). I have been coding for over 10 years and I am looking up is_home().

With no help from the documentation I have discovered that is_home() will only work if you are not setting a static page as your homepage. You MUST be using index.php (or home.php) and have it set to show your dynamic posts. But index.php and home.php are template pages specifically for the home page.

So this code checks to see if I am on the homepage on the homepage? Huh? Exactly. This is like me calling you at home and then asking if you are at home.

The only scenario I can see this actually working is on an included sidebar, footer, or header. But even then, what are you adding that can’t just be added to the homepage template? I guess WP got rid of it for a reason. But now for the real quesiton…what da phuk am I am doing home right now? :’(

Old Shit

New Shit

Tags