Santa Fe Institute short course

Something to follow up:
SFI short courses:

Santa Fe Institute's Short Course on Complexity: Exploring Complexity in Science and Technology  September, 2012 San Francisco Bay Area

Buddha Statues around the world

Ten Famous Buddha Statues

source: aloshbennett's photostream

I've seen two of ten.

Installing VMWareTools on Debian Lenny

Not officially supported, requires some tweaking of the version of gcc used.

Basic process, not annotated

 

apt-get install binutils cpp gcc make psmisc linux-headers-$(uname -r)

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/

tar -C /tmp -zxvf /mnt/VMwareTools-x.x.x.tar.gz

umount /mnt

ln -sf /usr/bin/gcc-4.1 /usr/bin/gcc

cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl
 
ln -sf /usr/bin/gcc-4.3 /usr/bin/gcc

reboot

For details, see the source from this blog.

Isaac Asimov on Ignorace

Couldn't have said it better.

From Difference Engine to Analytical Engine

Charles Babage is considered among the founders of computer science.  In his life time, he designed and partially built a Difference Engine.  The Difference Engine was designed to be a mechanical calculator for solving polynomials using the method of finite differences.  Due to financials and other problems, this project was never completed in Babbage's lifetime (it was, however, built, two in fact, in recent years; one is one display at the Computer History Museum in San Jose.

Modern build of the Difference Engine

The New York Times is reporting that a project is underway to build Babbage's Analytical Engine.  The Analytical Engine was supposed to be a general purpose, programmable computer.   Unlike the Difference Engine, plans for this machine are not complete.  That, however, didn't stop Ada Lovelace from 'programming' this computer, winning her the title of world's first computer programmer.

Plan for part of the Analytical Engine

partial mock-up of Analytical Engine

Watch Porn: Exploding Time

Harry Winston and Denis Giguet partner to make one of the most unique (and expensive) watches.  Words can't really describe it, so here is the vid:

The designer, Denis Giguet explains and demonstrates the watch here:

With over 500 parts, 166 jewels, and a price tag of around a quarter of a million, I'll have to live with just the videos.  Full details here

Glass Steam Engine

Great video of an all-glass steam engine.  No seals were used- just well fitting glass.

SSH auto login, no password, with security

Title is a mouth full, but very important.

SSH allows one to generate a  public/private key pair and use them for logging in without a password.  Very convenient.  However, most people do this in an insecure way, by using a blank passphrase on the private key.  If you set a pass phrase on the private key, then every time you use it to login to a remote machine, you'll need to enter it, which defeats the utility of key based authentication.

A three part article by IBM goes into the details of how SSH works, and how to use public key authentication while still maintaining the security of your private key.

Its a bit involved, but definitely worth a read.

Moore's Law: From this to that with an ENIAC

The ENIAC is considered the first general purpose, programmable, Turing-complete computer.  It was, quite literally, the size of a room:

For the machine's 50th anniversary, folks at the University of Pennsylvania implemented the entire machine on a single chip:

This chip is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.