the last fleeting seconds

How do you count almost 40 million handwritten paper ballots in a matter of hours and declare a winner?

via The Associated Press: AP Top News at 9:03 p.m. EDT.

A very good point.

I always like photographic stories: here is a great one about the election by Boston.com:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/06/irans_disputed_election.html

I know I’ve been lacking in posts for a while, but here’s a cool way to track current events: Twitterfall. This is tracking the twitter tag #iranelection.

Almost remiscent of Neo, scanning news articles about Morpheus in the beginning of The Matrix

Microsoft promises ’search 2.0′

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft promises ’search 2.0′.

…except I can’t see it, because its a U.S. limited role out.

at least I’m going back in 2 weeks. Sucks for the people who are here all the time.

I currently have 3 boots–Windows 7 RC1, Windows Vista and Ubuntu.

Because I’m in exams, I haven’t really had the patience to use Windows 7. However, in Vista, I was using Ext2 IFS for access my Ext3 partitions. However, I would semi-frequently get a message from Windows that the “device needed to be formatted” before I could access it.

Annoying, especially as I have 2 internal ext3 partitions as well as my external hard drive. Hence, I moved over to Ext2Fsd.

There are 3 ways to mount with Ext2FSD:

1. DefineDosDevice, which will expire at next reboot;
2. Auto-mount via MountMgr, which is what the designer suggests for removable hard drives. I’ve been using it for my external, and it works perfectly. It takes an extra 2-5 seconds to recognize the drive, and Ext2 Volume Manager must be open for it to recognize the drive. As an added bonus, you can flush the cache before removing the drive by right clicking on the icon in the corner–not easily possible with Ext2IFS.
3. Finally: create registry entries to permanently mount the drives. This is what I’ve done for my internal Ext3 partitions, and it works perfectly.

In short, if you are looking for some way to use Ext3 in Windows, I’d strongly recommend Ext2FSD. In coming weeks I’ll test it with Windows 7 as well. Will update at that point!

Feel free to ask any questions. I’m always looking for a break from exams.

I was at this show!!! I love Emily Haines. I was so happy when she was talking before this song.

Something about being around people who are doing what they love makes me really happy.

BBC NEWS | Politics | The Full Story: PM’s questions.

Check out this video of PMQs yesterday–David Cameron challenges Gordon Brown on not calling an election. Actually, all of the questions are quite good. If you don’t have much time, just look at the first 15 minutes or so.

I always hope that Mike Hancock (the MP I work for in Parliament) will ask a question. Unfortunately, its unlikely (there are 640+ MPs) and only 15 minutes of questions.

I can’t help but note that there are almost NO allegations about Lib Dem MPs expenses. Maybe this will help them, come an election? My bets are on one before the end of the year.

The United States has a program by which you can text SWAT to 20222 to donate $5 for the humanitarian crisis in Pakistan.

It’ll result in a charge on your cell phone bill. Deductible, I assume.

Here’s a link which explains the program, and has a video of Sec. Clinton announcing the program and what other things the United States is doing to help.

Edit: the money goes to “help the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees provide tents, clothing, food, and medicine to hundreds of thousands of affected people”

Also, note what she talks about in terms of the cell phone information broadcast system at 5 min or so. Sounds interesting…will be more interesting after we can see how it gets implemented.

I was trying to burn Windows 7, RC1 to a CD earlier tonight. I kept hitting an error that said, “The media’s speed is incompatible with the device. This may be caused by using higher or lower speed media than the range of speeds supported by the device.”

After doing some searching on the Internet, I found that the problem may have been caused by old firmware on my DVD burner. So, I went up to the support.dell.com site to download some new firmware.

All well and good.

Then my DVD driver wasn’t there. I though, maybe, the driver software was hidden somewhere else. So, as an XPS user, I fired up the Dell XPS chat, and asked the rep, who then:

1. required me to re-enter all of my information
2. couldn’t pull up the system
3. informed me the system had been transferred to Dell UK (because I asked for a new RUBBER FOOT in January)
4. because my part number did not match any of the parts on the support site, I must have a defective drive (without ever asking what problems I was having with the drive)
5. he could not help me, because the system had been transferred to Dell UK
6. doesn’t have a toll-free number for Dell UK (which is just insulting, I refuse to pay 20p a minute to get a defective drive fixed.) [and which, after looking around on the support site, for about 30 seconds, I found one for XPS support.]
7. this concluded with him refusing to transfer the system back to Dell US–there are forms I must fill out to do that, despite the fact I NEVER TRANSFERRED it

an atrocious waste of time. and i still don’t have my RC. and now i’m just pissed off.

My favorite moment:

”

Me:
and you are certain that, despite the fact that the part I have installed is a different part number, with a different name, that this is the correct driver and that the problem is that there is a need for hardware replacement?
Rep:

There may be a need for parts replacement if it is not working and the driver is not applicable for your syste [sic]
”

Of course. Because the WRONG DRIVER is not applicable, my DVD drive is defective.

This is the PREMIUM XPS support. I shudder to think what normal Dell support must be like.

For your amusement, the transcript  follows:

(more…)

It takes 40 minutes to fly London – Amsterdam.

It takes >3 hours to fly London – Funchal

Some bonus tidbits:

It takes ~6 hours to fly London – NY

It takes ~9 hours to fly London – Seattle

Now, using the A* algorithm, determine a route from Funchal to Sydney

Ha. You can’t! I didn’t give you enough information!

I think that was only funny to me.

I just had my artificial intelligence and neural computing examination. It went surprisingly well. Hopefully I’ll still feel that way when I get my results.