much ado about data
Jan 22nd 2005WallabyGeneral & nerd alert
Been a good long while now since the last update, so a quick recap:
1. Snow. Cold. Cold snow. Lots of snow and lots of cold.
2. My paper got accepted! whee.
3. Gentoo Linux is definitely fun, with a nice fast machine to install it on. (X11 served up in half an hour.) It’s a bit less fun to install for the first time with one’s advisor breathing (metaphorically) down the back of one’s neck. (Actually, he’s been very patient.) Hopefully, we can get the 64-bit version of Matlab working on the new machine after all; turns out that, while (almost) everything *else* about Matlab 7 runs just fine on the Athlon64 (in WinXP), some of the interpreter dlls are a little bit broken and so nothing works. (It also needs AMD’s math libraries (ACML 2.5, free download) and perhaps some Visual Fortran libraries, free download from somewhere on HP.com.)
The backup plan, if Matlab on Linux doesn’t work out for us, is to try the beta version of 64-bit WinXP. Yeah, it’s an OS Microsoft actually admits is beta. I’m not holding my breath on even getting it to boot. 
4. Time to look for a postdoc. In North Carolina.