mosfet9

TSHIRTS

2008-11-24T12:02:00.000-08:00

Andrew and I just opened a cafepress t-shirt shop.
We have excellent products!
Scientists -- come get your very own "Science is hard" t-shirt or mug here!

Gmail/Firefox/Os X feature complaint

2008-08-09T15:48:00.000-07:00

I wanted to send my .profile file to a friend the other day. A couple of things made this more complicated than it should be:

* When clicking on the attach filename textbox in gmail in Firefox, a "file upload" dialog comes up, so it's impossible to type or paste a filename into the textbox. This happens in Firefox in Os X (but works ok in Firefox in XP). I just sent Gmail support a message about this.
* The "file upload" dialog box (a standard Os X dialog) also does not allow you to type a filename, you must browse to the file. This is an Os X problem.
* The "file upload" dialog does not show hidden files (such as .profile), and there appears to be no option to change this.

So I ended up having to copy the file to a name that does not start with a period, and browse to it in order to attach it, which took up lots of time (almost 3% of the time it took me to write this post)

Os X feature complaint

2008-08-09T15:47:00.001-07:00

When a file ends up in the trash, there is no way to restore it to its original location (as in XP or Windows 2000). WTF. Apple, please fix this in the next release of Os X! Kthxbye.

Why I hate Subway

2008-06-27T16:55:00.000-07:00

Today I bought my lunch at Subway, which (besides pizza) is the only food (I use that term loosely) offered by UW during the summer. It's open from about 11 am to 1pm or something ridiculous like that. I've had about zero positive experiences at subway, and have encountered the following absurd events.

1) (today) - A regular 6" sub costs $4.59. I wanted turkey so I ordered a turkey sandwich; there was a picture of a sandwich with turkey with those little peppers around the outside, so I got that. When it was time to pay, my bill came to $7.34. Um, when did Washington state up its sales tax to 60% ? So I was like "WTF lady" and the Subway lady pointed out that I ordered the peppercorn turkey sandwich which is more. $2.16 more in fact. For a bit of fucking pepper on the turkey. I complained and she gave a blank stare, then pointed out again that my sandwich costs $6.whatever plus tax. Fuck you, Subway.

of course this reminded me of the following ridiculousness

2 ) a few months ago I went to Quizno's (a step up from Subway!) I wanted a sandwich with turkey, bacon, and swiss cheese. I asked if I could have one, and the answer was.. "No". "No?" I asked? "No, that's not on the menu. You can't have that". Actually they offered to give me that sandwich for the same price as the turkey bacon avocado ranch sandwich. I didn't want to pay for avocado that I wasn't getting, so I agreed to the whole sandwich + guac. It tasted like rotten garbage.

3) several years ago (I still remember this crap) - I ordered a cheesesteak sandwich at Subway; the gentleman behind the counter proceeded to use his little tweezers to put some "steak" onto a paper plate. He then put that on a miniature lab scale, weighed it, realized that he gave me about six grams too much, and used the tweezers to take one fiber of meat off of my portion and put it back into the bin. The sandwich ended up tasting like shit anyway.

Compiling HTK on Mac OS X Leopard

2008-04-19T21:16:00.000-07:00

There's no documentation on the HTK website for compiling HTK on Leopard, so after scouring the web and the HTK boards for a little too long, I discovered that there are two tricks necessary for making it work:

1) ./configure --build=i686-apple-macos
this option is necessary for it to properly recognize ARCH:

2) add "-I/usr/include/malloc" to CFLAGS in the Makefile

3) make all; make install; success :)