I’ve just watched “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch.
Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. For more, visit www.cmu.edu/randyslecture.
It’s very hard to know what to say, except “watch it” …
Why learn morse code you may ask. Well here’s one person’s thoughts, and seeing as I’m quoting all below (excerpted from http://www.barc.org/2005/sparc_apr.pdf), he’s quoting ZL1AN, so that makes two, and I’m looking forward to when this works for me:
Morse Therapy
– Dr. Gary Bold, ZL1AN; excerpted by Eric Falkof, K1NUN
There was a magazine devoted to the preservation and glorification of Morse Code, Morsum Magnificat
(www.morsum.demon.uk).
Excerpting an excerpt from Number 41, August, 1995, I found this article that summarized my feelings about CW.
“…I know that if I go to bed now [after a stimulating period of intense thought and writing], I’ll just lie awake and the ideas I have to propound in the morning will rush madly about, echoing and muttering in my brain. My solution has always been to fire up the TS-520, limber up the Brown Brothers paddle, put on the cans and exchange CW for a while with someone on 20 metres. After a while the Morse begins to decode itself automatically, and little ASCII strings march quietly and effortlessly through my head.
My pulse-rate slows, and the network theorems and Fourier transforms of my professional life go away. I have almost become one with the radio, a bionic post-processor tacked on the end of the audio chain. CW is the purest form of communication I know, a ‘mind-to-mind’ linkage. The words appear right inside my head, words that were never spoken; uncorrupted by accents, verbal peculiarities, oddities of vocal intonation. They leave no room for other thoughts. Almost like a form of meditation. Very therapeutic. After thirty minutes of that, my metabolism has been slowed right down and I am relaxed. I can go to bed and sleep comes.”
by Gary Bold - ZL1AN.
Gary’s website http://www.physics.auckland.ac.nz/staff/geb/loads.htm has some excellent articles but the one I use most is his Morse tutoring program that, very sensibly, works most on the characters that are the least frequent and the hardest to learn and has some subtle and ingenious features that has bought me back to it year after erractic year, until I can finally copy code off the air. The program is called NZART Morse Tutor - I recommend it highly.
At last - I’ve finally gone on the air using CW (morse code). My first contact was with ZL2MS on 80M (3525KHz). I hadn’t intended to go on the air but the signal was strong, readable - why not I thought - got to start sometime …
Then I found out why all the tutorials on morse code contacts say “write it out first” - I hadn’t of course. Brain turned to mush but Peter was amazingly merciful. The next one will be better, but it’s a buzz anyway.
Morse code is such a simple mode but somehow, elegant.
I use Subversion with Delphi and omitting various files type is a good idea (there’s no point in committing DCU files, backup files …).
You can do this by going to to TortoiseSVN/Settings in the right-click menu and giving a list of patterns for files you DON’T want included in the "Global Ignore Pattern":
Here’s a delightfully simple (well concise anyway) peer-to-peer program - it can run as either a client or a server and if wrapped (as the original was) is only 15 lines of Python.
It’s also a very good example of how concise python can be:
# tinyp2p.py 1.0 (documentation at http://freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.html)
import sys, os, SimpleXMLRPCServer, xmlrpclib, re, hmac # (C) 2004, E.W. Felten
ar,pw,res = (sys.argv,lambda u:hmac.new(sys.argv[1],u).hexdigest(),re.search)
pxy,xs = (xmlrpclib.ServerProxy,SimpleXMLRPCServer.SimpleXMLRPCServer)
def ls(p=”"):return filter(lambda n:(p==”")or res(p,n),os.listdir(os.getcwd()))
if ar[2]!=”client”: # license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0
myU,prs,srv = (”http://”+ar[3]+”:”+ar[4], ar[5:],lambda x:x.serve_forever())
def pr(x=[]): return ([(y in prs) or prs.append(y) for y in x] or 1) and prs
def c(n): return ((lambda f: (f.read(), f.close()))(file(n)))[0]
f=lambda p,n,a:(p==pw(myU))and(((n==0)and pr(a))or((n==1)and [ls(a)])or c(a))
def aug(u): return ((u==myU) and pr()) or pr(pxy(u).f(pw(u),0,pr([myU])))
pr() and [aug(s) for s in aug(pr()[0])]
(lambda sv:sv.register_function(f,”f”) or srv(sv))(xs((ar[3],int(ar[4]))))
for url in pxy(ar[3]).f(pw(ar[3]),0,[]):
for fn in filter(lambda n:not n in ls(), (pxy(url).f(pw(url),1,ar[4]))[0]):
(lambda fi:fi.write(pxy(url).f(pw(url),2,fn)) or fi.close())(file(fn,”wc”))
GeekMenu is a rather polished PortableApps Menu variant that looks really nice.
It can automatically mount a Truecrypt drive or (on untrusted computers) NOT mount, or mount read-only. Plus lots of other features.
To quote
“geek.menu is a fork of the PortableApps.com Menu, adding support for
security features, internet searching capabilities, category support,
autorun apps, and much, much more. It can serve as a replacement for
the portableApps menu.”
The portableApps system is intended to allow you to take all the programs you usually use with you on a USB flash drive and not rely (or save setting) on the computer you’re using.
Vi is one of the ordinal editors on Unix, and now Linux machines. It has a minimal interface but can be very fast and is great if you have a slow connection.
The following was sent by Bonnie VR2/KQ6XA to the HFPack Yahoo email list in reply to
a question about easily decoding HF Propagation Numbers: (quoted with approval and thanks):
A low “A index” is most important! For Low Power Portable DX openings at 10MHz to 30MHz, look for an A index LESS THAN 6.
Here is my RULE OF THUMB for How To Read Propagation Numbers:
Here’s movie of someone (F2FO) making valves - the amplifying part of a radio - in a home workshop. It’s ingenious, quite clear and very clever.
The video goes from bits of metal and glass to a working radio. The subtitling is in French but that doesn’t hinder understanding, as the presentation is quite professional.
The One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative was started by Nicolas Negroponte from MIT as a way of bringing robust laptops to poor children in poor countries for less than $100 each. More details about OLPC at www.laptop.org
The author is a govenor at a girls school in the UK. She has some particularly perceptive comments about mathematics ability or more accurately maths anxiety and parents …
It starts:
The beauty of maths
A POINT OF VIEW
By Lisa Jardine
The story of an Indian clerk with an extraordinary talent for mathematics should inspire young people to see the beauty that lies in numbers.
I have been thinking recently about the way in which stories we are told when we are young shape our adult lives.
I am reading with great enjoyment a new novel entitled The Indian Clerk, by David Leavitt, based on the life of the early twentieth-century Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan …
Halfway down the above article, there’s an audio version (her as broadcast) - Click on the Listen button (there’s a 20 second prelude to advertise a Christmas show and then Lisa is introduced …)
Somehow the audio version seems easier to remember, not sure why …
“HUNGARIAN CHICKEN SCRATCHINGS
A NEW WEAPON IN THE WAR ON ERROR”
Professor Mike Steel
Director, Biomathematics Research Centre
University of Canterbury
12.00 pm Thursday, 11 August 2005 - ScB3.31
ABSTRACT
Professor Steel is completing a series of three papers with Hungarian collaborator Laszlo Szekely, dealing with information loss in phylogenetics. It will deal with issues related to Maximum Likelihood estimation and admissibility. This will be the first occasion that this material has been presented.
