Author Archives: Mirkules

BootCamp Success!

I finally got around to installing Windows XP through Boot Camp and will document my experience here. I am running a 2007 Mac Book Pro 2.4GHz with 4GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT on OS X Leopard. The point is to have a computer on which my wife can play Team Fortress 2 with me. Her idea. Honest. 🙂

As I indicated in an earlier post, my first hurdle was to get my MacBook’s hard drive defragmented enough for Boot Camp to be able to partition it. In theory, the HFS+ filesystem used by Mac OS X does not get fragmented due to how it was designed and how OS X uses the filesystem (read all about it on Apple’s website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1634).

As one of my favorite professors once said: “The difference between practice and theory is small in theory but large in practice.”
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Linux and OS X miscellaneous stuff

To “burn” a .iso or .img file to a USB device, type:

sudo dd if=bt4-pre-final.iso of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m

where /dev/disk1 is your particular disk. In OS X you can find out by going to the Disk Utility and selecting information on your target drive. In linux, type `dmesg` and that should give you the drive name.

I will be editing this to add more stuff.

OS X Inconsistencies

Many people are surprised to hear me say that I don’t think OS X has a well-designed GUI. As one of my professors puts it (I paraphrase):

Criticism is good. Criticism leads to change. Criticism makes things better.

In this post, I will try to do my part in making OS X better. The following is a list of GUI inconsistencies that bother me on a regular basis with OS X Leopard.
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OS X .htaccess

For some reason, I could not get .htaccess files to work on my system for the longest time. I’ve since upgraded to Leopard, and I eventually just gave up on it (I could do that, since I’m only running a development environment).

Anyway, the solution depends on which version you’re running:

For Tiger, edit /private/etc/httpd.conf AND /private/etc/users/username.conf for the correct directives

For Leopard, edit just /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Days of pulling hair solved because I was looking in the wrong places.

Update: because of the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard, ALL of the above directories were present on my system, but only /private/etc/apache2 was being used.  This is because Leopard uses apache2 and Tiger uses apache 1.3.  Obviously, apache2 uses /private/etc/apache2 instead of /private/etc/httpd.  If you had installed Leopard from scratch, this would not be a problem.

Master’s Project/Thesis

Today, I think I finally picked out my Master’s project, with the help of Dr. Michael Shafae. I will be working towards the Netflix $1 Million prize. Yeah, I am probably late given that the contest went live in 2006, but a winning solution (one that beats the Netflix current system by 10%) hasn’t been found yet.

This raises an interesting question of what is going to happen if or when someone comes up with the answer while I am in the middle of my research. On the one hand, I didn’t win the grand prize, but on the other hand I shouldn’t be doing this for the money anyway, but rather for the sake of knowledge.

Luckily, Dr. Shafae suggested that we concurrently work on visualization techniques for the data and publish a few papers relating to the visualization techniques specifically (of course he would suggest that, he’s a graphics professor to begin with!) and, more generally, publish the data mining techniques I will have explored.

Plus, there’s absolutely no reason I can’t try to improve on the techniques beyond the 10% mark (if I ever even get that close).

However, if I ever do reach the 10% mark, and if I reach it within the lifespan of my graduate career, I will be kicking myself forever and ever for not starting it earlier and eventually receiving the $1M.

By the way, the whole reason I went into this (besides, obviously, the prize and a feeling that I have a shot against these BellKor guys), is because Dr. Shafae and I engaged in a conversation about Singular Value Decomposition and its applications in the real world. I was just curious what it was since it was in the textbook and that’s how the whole thing got started.

Anyway, it’s good to finally have a professor on my side since I am really good at starting projects and never finishing them. I am sure he will force me to show progress every week, which is definitely a good thing. In true professor/mentor fashion, he has already shown me how to keep my references organized using Bibdesk (think of it as painting fences, washing cars, and sanding decks).