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Easy access to 6 years of Medical Physics

During the course of doing literature searches, I frequently find myself looking for back issues of Medical Physics. That means looking them up online or making a trip to the library to dig up the articles I’m looking for.

Fortunately, there are ISO images of Medical Physics availble for 1997-2002 (hopefully 2003) soon, which you can download and burn onto CD (and which I have done already). Then you have to remember where you put those darned CDs. And if you’re anything like me, that ends up being in the desk drawer with a bucket load of other things, and they end up getting all scratched up.

Then I stumbled on a couple of articles about building a virtual CD jukebox. What a fabulous idea!! And it’s so easy to do! So that’s just what I did. Took a while to FTP over a gig worth of ISO images to my Linux server, but once they were there it was a piece of cake.

And thanks to Samba, I have quick and easy access to 6 years worth of Medical Physics mapped to a network drive on my Windows computer. If I need to go any further back, I’ll have to go online or to the library, but usually I’m not pulling anything from much later than 1997 anyway.

I suppose getting the article I’m looking for online isn’t much more difficult. Just a few clicks away on the website. The virtual CD jukebox method doesn’t really get me any more ease of use, but it is neat, and I did learn something from it. This has a higher geek factor I think.

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Journal Club: Characterization of Organic Illumination Systems

This paper comes out of the Western Research Lab at Compaq: Characterization of Organic Illumination Systems. Making organic things emit light is a very trendy topic now, with a good deal of research going into OLEDs (organic light emitting diodes) and similar devices. This paper from way back in 1989 is an interesting read on some early investigations on the subject. They do some very interesting investigations on materials you find in most kitchens.

Abstract:

Recent anecdotal reports of novel principles of illumination have stressed qualitative aspects. This note presents a quantitative study of an organic illumintation system, characterizing the temperature and current-flow properties of the system as functions of time and device parameters. Theoretical and practical implications of these measurements are discussed.

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Wrestling Samba

Samba is a very cool tool, especially if you have a mix of Windows and *nix servers and clients. But it seems like every time I have to do anything with Samba, it’s like pulling hair and teeth to get everything to work properly. On paper, Samba is easy to set up and configure. In real life, I always end up wanting to pitch the Windows box out the window.
You read through the Samba man page, set up smb.conf to do what you want and then go to the Windows box and try to map the share you just set up. Then all you get are message boxes from Windows claiming the username and password are invalid. Or it works fine on one Windows box, but doesn’t work on any other ones. Or only one account works, but none of the others. Nothing wrong with what you put into smb.conf. Works just fine on the server with smbclient. Just the stupid Windows boxes refuse to work properly.
Argh.
Update: Ok, finally got things to work nicely. Upgrading to Samba 3.0.2 did the trick. I guess the docs I was using and the Samba version I had installed didn’t quite match up. Still want to pitch my Windows box out the window though.

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Kickass server admin tool

The other day while setting up Samba on our RH 9 box, I found out about this very cool sysadmin tool called Webmin. This thing is absolutely amazing. An entirely Perl/web-based application for helping with server sys admin. The primary purpose appears to be to provide a nice usable GUI for configuring and setting up the vast array of server software you will find on a typical server. It’s all module based, so there is a module to help you deal with Apache config, setting up Samba and Samba shares, NTP, Sendmail, Procmail and more. All kinds of good stuff. No more wading through config files and trying to remember where the config file for whatever daemon is located.

Of course, you still need to know what you’re doing, and not every single configuration option for every daemon or config file is available. This is no substitute for sys admin knowledge. It just places all the config stuff in one easy to access location and provides an easy to use interface. Very sweet indeed. And best of all, it’s open source!

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The concert

The concert over the weekend was ok. Loud, very loud. My ears are still ringing. I’m not really a big fan of rap and hip-hop music, but my wife is, and she listens to it so that means I listen to it too.

We actually ended up with some reasonably decent seats. Halfway up the first tier behind the left corner of the rink, with the stage at about the far blue line. The people on stage were still pretty small, but visible through the crowd.

The concert opened with someone named Tamia who sang pretty well. Next up was Missy Elliot who had a pretty active show, although I couldn’t understand a word she was singing/rapping about. Then came Alicia Keys, who I thought was by far the best part of the show. My wife thought so too. Sang well, played some great piano and really played to the crowd. Last up was Beyonce. Made a good entrance, but I thought the performance was lacking. My wife thought she did too much dancing and running about the stage, and not enough singing. And a lot of the time I thought her background instruments and singers drowned out her singing. The rest of the audience seemed excited enough about her though. A surprise appearance by Jay-Z really sent the audience through the roof. I think the crowd got more worked up when he popped up on stage than they did about Beyonce.

And that was the concert. 100+ dB of ear numbing noise, shrieks and drums and probably about 120dB when Jay-Z came out.