Author: Eugene

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New airport passenger x-ray screeners

An Associated Press article in today’s Post and Courier grabbed my interest today. It’s about a new airport passenger screening device that uses scattered x-rays to detect weapons and explosives.

AFAIK, many states prohibit the use of radiation on people unless it’s for medical purposes. I’m sure that someone will manage to get an exception for these types of machines given time. There are still ethical issues with exposing masses of people to radiation, no matter how low the dose. Most people are paranoid enough about radiation (mostly because of lack of knowledge). Now the TSA wants to unnecessarily irradiating hundreds of thousands of people with low, but not trivial radiation doses just to get on an airplane?

I smell much controversy coming up if the TSA gets their way with these units.

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MicroBe Cards

Because my wife is a biology person (where I am decidely not), I occasionally end up getting introduced (willing or not) to various biology and chemistry related topics. So when the latest issue of New Trail (the University of Alberta alumni magazine) arrived, arrived I saw an article about something called Microbe Cards that I thought she might be interested in.

MicrobeCards are like baseball cards. But instead of pictures of athletes, you get pictures of different microbes. All sorts of nasty looking germs, virii, fungi and the like.
The front of each card has several pictures of the organism (electron micrographs, microsope images, sometimes x-ray images, etc) so you can see what they look like. On the back of the card is a description of the microbe, effects on people, symptoms, possible treatments, and short descriptions of what the photos on the front are.

Developed by a U of A prof (another reason I’m plugging these cards), the cards are organized in colour coded groups: gram-negative, gram-positive, fungi and parasites, and viruses.

I bought a couple of packs for her and she thought they were just the coolest thing. For their size, they pack a good deal of information for reviewing characteristics of particular microbes.

You can find the cards at Amazon.com or at the University of Alberta Bookstore.

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Nifty blogging software

Ok, today I’ll plug the blogging app that I’m using here, MovableType.

One of our radiologists asked about possibilities for setting up some kind of online logbook that residents could use to log the procedures they perform. My first thought was that it sounded like something a blogging app could do. I searched the web looking at different blogging apps that met 2 criteria: source code available, and low cost (preferably free). This one had the most features for the best price that I could find. Installed it, got it running, played with it a little bit, then they decided to go with some other software.

So MovableType sat around on my system unused for a few months, until I decided to try out the blogging world. Cranked it back up and here we are now.

Turns out that MovableType (MT) is a pretty flexible app. It’s written in Perl, easy to install, and is extremely configurable through the use of plugins, templates and style sheets. One of the plugins lets me put the latest weather for just about any location I can find. Very slick. There’s quite the list of plugins available that do many different things. Plugins are also written in Perl, so should be pretty easy to write, if you know Perl (which I don’t).

If you’re searching for blogging software for your site, I’d check this one out.

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Computer upgrades

I’m stoked. Stuffed a new 160GB hard drive into my computer over the weekend. Best Buy had an amazing deal on them last week. Retail price $199. With $100 in mail in rebates, the price was $111 with tax. 70 cents a gig…can’t beat that.

So now I’ve got the 40 GB that came with the computer, 160 GB partitioned into 30/140 GB and an old 3 GB drive that I’ve now dedicated to virtual memory. Had to take out the 2nd CD drive, but it wasn’t getting used much anyway.

My main reason for getting it was to give me storage space for video capture, with the Pinnacle Studio Deluxe video capture hardware/software I bought a few months ago. The video capturing worked pretty well, but the existing 40GB hard drive I had just wasn’t cutting it. The software has some issues, but nothing too major that I’ve run into.

Now I’ll have ample storage to tackle one of my first big projects…converting our wedding video to MPEG format. This video editing thing is going to be interesting and fun I think.
Next upgrade will be adding an extra 512MB RAM (2×256 MB RDRAM). I should do it soon while RDRAM is still relatively cheap.

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Resurrected website concepts

Those of you who were surfing the web a few years ago might remember a website called SixDegrees, circa 1998-2000.

It was an interesting website based on the ‘6 degrees of Kevin Bacon’ idea. You created an account and linked yourself to friends, who were linked to other people and so on and so on. that way you and your friends formed a network with all the other thousands of people signed on as well. Pick any two people, and the website would compute how many ‘degrees’ away the two of you were. I always thought it was pretty cool. It shut down at the end of 2000, for reasons I’ve not been able to find out yet.

Recently a friend of mine sent me a link to a similar site, Friendster.com which is based on a similar concept. It’s not quite as full-featured or as easy to find people to link to as the old SixDegrees site was, but this one still seems interesting and worth checking out.

People interested in more ways to meet others (for purposes other than dating) with common interests should check out another website with an interesting concept that I ran into a little while ago: Meetup.

The idea behind this one is simple. They have a big long list of things people are interested in. Software, programming, Slashdot, gardening, etc. Go to the Meetup site, register and tell them where you are. Then search the list for things that interest you, and see who else is interested in the same thing in your location. Then once a month, you vote on a location to ‘Meetup’ (usually restaurants or bars) and if there are enough of you, you all meet at that location and get together to discuss whatever.

A good concept I think, providing a way for people who probably otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to meet each other in regular life. I’ve been to a couple of Slashdot meetups in the Charleston area, although haven’t been able to make it to much more for other reasons.