Dustin Hess

#rant#

I just got a replacement drive (5400 RPM) consistent writes of 80 MB/s and reads of 120 MB/s. Count me as a happy camper.

So I have begun to struggle with slow SATA speeds again. My old tricks didn't work, and I was looking for a way to test all of my hard drives in a equal playing field so I could isolate the problem properly. Which got me think about a RAM Disk. It's a pretty simple concept, part of your computer's RAM is used as a storage device similar to a hard disk. The upside is that it's orders of magnitude faster than any hard drive or SSD that you could possibly have. The downside is that if your power gets interrupted, everything in there is gone.

It's gettin colder, winter is a comin.. Are you excited? I am.

I have recently gone from a normal cell phone toting 20 something to a weirdo with only a skype account with an online number.

First, the change from being always available to only being able to take calls at home has actually been quite liberating. People know that they are best off to email me anyways, but this just hammers the point home, with me and my peek, I will respond to an email in a matter of minutes, where a phone call may take hours to reach me.

For those of you who aren't familiar, folding at home is a distributed computing project that uses the unused processor cycles of millions of computers around the world to perform calculations for the Folding project at Stanford University. The folding project is attempting to understand how proteins fold during the creation of new cells to discover how diseases like cancer and AIDS start and are spread. The end goal is to eventually find the cause, and develop a cure.

First off a "Peek" is a email only handheld device that operates on a cellular data network (T-Mobile). It costs $9.99 ($59.99 for the fancy version), and it offers a no contract way to have unlimited email on the go for not much change ($20-15/month).

http://www.getpeek.com has all the pictures and information that you could want or desire.

First day:

It has just been released as a public beta, and if you use facebook, you need to give it a try. Just go to http://lite.facebook.com, and login just like you normally would.

Originally meant for regions that had little to no access to fast internet, lite.facebook has a slimmed down interface, which makes the site look much more clean, and load quite a bit faster than the regular version.

It has a re-designed program launcher optimized for devices will small screens. The launcher uses low resources, is very finger friendly (if you have a touchscreen), and generally just makes the experience of using a netbook that much easier.

That being said, there are some small issues that I have yet to figure out.

First, it is distributed as a .img instead of the universally accepted .iso. This presented me with several difficulties and I am not sure why they chose this much more obscure format.