booting from sdhc on acer aspire one

finally got my aa1 to boot with root on the sdhc card. these instructions are really good, and this reference is good, too. (though he is of the opinion that the nand flash write cycle limit is nothing to worry about, and i used to think that, too, but.... i wonder if my swap and ext4 fs had anything to do with the built-in ssd drive crashing so completely and painfully. this time i'll be going ext2 retro, just to be safe.) had to boot from a usb drive (yeah, ssd is that hosed... can't even spare a few mb for a boot partition. heck, i can't even alter the partition table.) but it seems to be booting. now i wonder if i can hack this case open and put the usb drive in the unused bay...

flashed my aa1 bios

my acer aspire one seemed to be having hardware issues, so i flashed the bios from 0.3310 10/06/2008, InsydeH2O Rev. 3.5, vga bios IntelV1585 to... the same thing. it's the latest version on acer's website, but i reflashed it anyway in case it had been munged somehow. i used the FLASHIT.EXE and zg5ia32.fs method that doesn't require any freedos junk. but it doesn't seem to make any difference.

mutual information for linearly dependent rvs

i can't remember if i had recorded this anywhere, but i want to make sure i have it because it took me a little while to derive. if x1 and x2 are both uniform random variables on [0,1] and y = a*x1 +(1-a)*x2, then the mutual information between x1 and y is ln(a/(1-a)) + (1-a)/(2*a) nats, where ln is the natural log. this is a useful result for testing mutual information estimators because it's on a bounded domain so might converge more quickly than functions of exponents. the key to deriving this result is to realise that the marginal pdf for y is a trapezoid, and be careful about the log base when using the chain rule/integration by parts.

imperial websites

www.imperialbaseball.co.uk www.bright-futures.org.uk www.icfinancesociety.com

cheap hotels in london

http://golondon.about.com/od/londonhotels/tp/cheaphotels.htm tune hotel is supposed to have really cheap rooms available, but i can find them on the online reservations.

PlayerPiano

cool tool for showing 'interactive' presentations of python code. you can type random keys and it looks like you're typing in a fake python shell while it just runs your doctests (like an old-fashioned player piano with the punchcard scrolls). fast, easy, and frees you up to think about what you're saying instead of what you're typing. just don't let anyone ask questions -- they might want you to change something!

impressive -- pdf slide presenter

cool little presentation slide viewer, does transitions, overview screens, highlight boxes, and cursor-following spotlights. written in python with xpdf as the renderer. runs on windows, mac, linux. also allows for hyperlinks, so my page and overview links from beamer should still work. not sure about embedded movies, audio, or 3d objects, but... still cool.