Viewing profile — vallismortis

It was centered half a mile from Berkeley Lab at 2:56am, on the Hayward Fault. Knocked out the elevators in my building and one other building, but other than that no obvious issue…

For what it's worth, there was an earlier "Cyber Cafe" just off the campus of Michigan State University in the early to mid-90s called Emerald City Cafe. They had 128k ISDN connect…

Do they have any 2003 Explorer Sport Tracs down there? Because they have the only 1L2Z-3551729-AAPTM parts remaining in existence that haven't been destroyed by sun damage. It woul…

I love XSL. There are some problems that it is absolutely stellar at solving. NCBI recently changed their JATS schema. No need to change any code, just modify the stylesheet and ev…

Nevada, seriously. This is an 'electronic craps table' where the House controls _literally_ all aspects of the game, and the players are being prosecuted for 'playing wrong.'

Twenty years ago, I moved from Michigan (a state that uses fluoride) to Mississippi (a state that doesn't use fluoride). My dentist at the time told me that I was going to end up w…

This is exactly the conversation the wealthy want us to have. A buddy of mine left a job recently. He worked in IT security for a plastics company that you would all recognize. In …

Every encounter with AT&T has felt like a scam to me. I tried a mobile hotspot two years ago on a 14 day free trial. One bar of signal, so I returned it the same day I received it.…

I've never seen the Wright brothers beaten up like this. One brother died trying to improve their invention, and the other died in extreme poverty in a small apartment after suffer…

I've had really good experiences with Better World Books. However, I do wonder how they source some of their stock. I've bought several books from them that have historical value a…

Wow, ageist much? My wind model is F77.

Ok, you're crazy. The GPL licensing issues alone would be a nightmare for them, and possibly unsolvable from their business perspective.

Welcome Manna. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

I'm still not - um - disabling, ah, hyperthreading, because, I'm paying for, ah, 4 cores on a 2 core ah, processor.

A lot of produce is already molding by the time it gets to the shelves, it just isn't visible to the consumer. I would love to see that problem fixed.

That won't fix the problem. The NHC uses an ocean model, but the transition across Florida requires the application of a hybrid land/water model, which results in a large divergenc…

Two great examples are the goo.gl URL shortener and the custom site search widget. These two services actively break parts of the internet when they stop working.

I once received a book in the mail that contained about half a dozen live scorpions in it. The environment isn't as hostile as you might think.

I have a library of old (1870's-1930's) books on bacterial and fungal taxonomy, and I'm cautious not to breathe too deeply when I handle some of them. Many of these may have been u…

One step further (multi-layer Manhattan distance) will also get you optimal DNA, RNA and protein sequence alignment (Myers, Gotoh and others, 1977-1981). The edit path (often disca…

It has been a part of every budget proposal since 2017. It was only removed from the FY2020 list this past March as part of a deal to get the budget passed: https://lahood.house.go…

https://www.pjstar.com/news/20170523/trump-budget-calls-for-...

Maybe publicizing these outages is the main reason the post-mortems are made available.

I find the post-mortems helpful. I don't want to make the same mistakes with my infrastructure, and it gives me something to reference when, for instance, the upper management deci…