Humming Asus LCD Display

I recently got an Asus VE276 LCD Display. It looks nice in the shop and is quite wide although i am not as satisfied with it as the previous DELL display (that had better pixel density and also a USB hub and in general it felt that the DELL had lot higher quality standard). I am not either fully satisfied with the colors either, and the “unsharpness” that it has. You can’t really compare the two displays in the same class. But this post is not about comparing DELL vs. Asus but about the humming sound this display has.

Anyway, i have noticed that it hums for instance when i transition from a dask screen to a white screen (it is noticeable when you are using exposé on a mac when i have it connected to my MacBook Pro).
It is not a very high sound, but it is noticeable.

The other day i got disturbed by the humming because i thought it had increased, and it was constant. I noticed however that this sound came from a different source. It came from the built in speakers and got silent when i turned the speakers to mute via the screen’s menu. It also stopped when i unplugged the audio cable that it connects with.

So.. if you hear a loud humming from your screen, if it has one, try to unplug both ends of the audio cable and see if stops.

Just wanted to give heads up if anyone encountered the same thing.
(If you have any tips on getting rid of the faint humming when you view a bright/white screen, please let me know in the comments.)

Have a nice day.

p.s i don’t remember the model of the dell display but i will add it in a comment when i find out, although, it had also some problems, it started as one vertical line across the screen that was visible a while after you started it. Later it got thicker and is about three pixels wide in one single color.

Neutrinos traveling faster than light according to CERN measurements

Ok, the big news is this: Researchers have gotten results that would indicate, if true, that something could travel faster than the speed of light. This is not supposed to be possible according to Einsteins theory of relativity because nothing should be able to travel faster than light in vacuum.

However, researchers have now measurements (15 thousand of them) that says that neutrinos (sub-atomic particles) travelled at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light. They now invite other researchers to try and find out why these measurements turned out as they did. Was there some kind of systematic error, or do we need to redo much of what we understand about physics.

here is the press release from CERN about neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light.
And a lot of people have already managed to post news about this news.
here is gizmag and XKCD two nerdy sites that i follow.

Spider leg moving by itself after it got detached from the body

My wife had me come and look at a spider leg that kept moving by itself after she had picked it up and the leg got loose from the spider’s body.

I do wonder what would cause the leg to continue moving this long after it had been severed from the spiders body. I have no idea. Could the impulses frmo the spider somehow travel through the moist surface of the sing? Nah, that doesn’t sound plausible. Hmm… I am not sure how the mechanics of spider legs work.

How long will it take?

Estimating how long a task takes, for instance in programming, is always difficult.

Here is a bookmarklet that you can use. Create a bookmark with this as the url

javascript:var units = prompt("What is the unit (days, months, hours, coffees)?");var t1 = parseFloat(prompt("How long it will take, if everything goes right?"));var t2 = parseFloat(prompt("How long will it take, knowing how some things usually go wrong?"));var t3 = parseFloat(prompt("How long will it take if everything goes wrong, and there are lots of unforeseen issues - you are 99% sure you can get it done within this amount of time"));alert("It will take " + Math.round(((t1+(4.0*t2) + t3)/6.0)*10)/10 + " " + units);

The algorithm used is this:

t1 = how long it takes if everything goes as planned.
t2 = how long it takes if there are some problems along the way
t3 = how long it takes if everything goes wrong (this is the time that you are 99% sure it takes to finish it even if everything goes wrong)

(t1+(4*t2) + t3) / 6

Connection upgrade

before (1024/512 kbps)

after (Full-Rate 8, up to 8Mb/800 kbps, minimum 2048/512 kbps)

The tests were conducted over a wireless network at home on a MacBook.

XKCD on Perl, Python and Regular expressions

Python

Lisp

Regular Expressions

p.s if you go the xkcd and hover over the comic strips, you get even more fun.

Tahko MTB 2008

I participated in the Tahko mountainbike marathon this summer for the first time. I was in the 60 km race (there are also 25, 40, 120 and 180 km alternatives as well).
For the 60 km, there were three starts, at 9:00 the “hot group” started, at 9:30 those that aimed for a time under 5 hours started, and lastly at 10:00, those who aimed for a time over 5 hours started. I started in the middle of the last group. There were 860 participants in the 60 km for men, I came at 550 place, with a time of 5hours 10 minutes and 8 seconds 🙂
I am fairly pleased with the result. There were a lot of bikers on the track, so i might have gotten a better time if i had started in the middle group, but then it would have been psychologically worse since people would have passed me, instead of me passing them. I went for the fun of biking, and had no particular goal besides finishing. I really enjoyed it. My recently purchased hydrapak drinking bag came in handy, since both hands were needed while biking. And i had filled it with sports dring, which provided me with an even blood sugar level, and water to prevent me from cramping.

Here is a clip form the race.

My brother participated in the 120 km race.
100% of the members of our mountainbiking club 4seasonMTB participated.

Next year i’ll maybe participate in the 120 km race… if i have practised enough.
An interresting detail that can be found from the results is that the winner of the 180 km (three laps of the 60 km track) had 15 min better time when he had finished 2 laps (120 km) than the winner of 120 km. That is something…

A milestone in my life…

An era hs passed in my life. I have finished school. Yesterday I handed in the application for my Masters degree, which they will mail to me when it is ready. The official date of my graduation from the University of Helsinki / Department of computer science (Where, btw, Linus Torvalds also went) will be 31.07.2008. But all is done and finished.

If you want to read my thesis, you can find it here:
Christoffer Björkskog: “Visualizing social network activity on mobile browsers.” June 2008.

I am currently working for HIIT (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology) as a research assistant for the UIx (Ubiquitous Interaction) research group. We will have our third child in the end of August/beginning of September. We will move to Skutnabba/Pedersöre in the end of July, from where i will work remotely for HIIT at least until end of September

I hate to argue

Even though i am right most of the time 😉 i find it meaningless to waste time arguing with people. Especially when people are just arguing for the sake of arguing. But if I argue, it is pointless to argue back, because I never argue unless I am 100% percent certain I am right, which means I am right. End of discussion.

Nice little tool

I stumbled upon the following interresting little tool:
http://translate.google.com

I, was reading commeonts for a youtube clip, and there was one comment in arabic that i wanted to know what was. I first tried babelfish.altavista.com that can translate webpages but there was not a arabic transation possibility. So i googled for arabic-english translation and found translate.google.com that can translate webpages and also translate text that you can paste in.
I found it very useful.

I have used babelfish.altavista.com several times when i am trying to find some solution to some programming error and the only discussions about a certain error message have been in french or spanish. Then it has helped me to just enter te url to a page and babelfish translates it for me.
translate.google.com has the same feature as well.

It can translate Arabic, Chineese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italin, Japaneese, Korean, Portugese, Russian and Spanish to English or the other way round. Another interresting thing is that if a translation is not really good, you can improve it. This way google takes advantage of collective intelligence so that its system can be taught by experts (you) all around the world.

It also provides a widget that you can put on your webpage that translates it into a language the user desies.

I decided to put the tool to a little test.
I entered the text i wrote earlier in this blogpost.

I stumbled upon the following interresting little tool: http://translate.google.com
I, was reading commeonts for a youtube clip, and there was one comment in arabic that i wanted to know what was. I first tried babelfish.altavista.com that can translate webpages but there was not a arabic transation possibility. So i googled for arabic-english translation and found translate.google.com that can translate webpages and also translate text that you can paste in.
I found it very useful.

And had it translated into German:

Ich bin auf die folgenden interresting kleines Werkzeug: http://translate.google.com
Ich war für eine Lesung commeonts youtube Clip, und es wurde ein Kommentar in arabisch, die ich wollte wissen, was war. Babelfish.altavista.com ich zunächst versucht, die Web-Seiten zu übersetzen, aber es gab keine Möglichkeit, arabisch transation. Also i googeln für die arabisch-Englisch Übersetzungen und translate.google.com gefunden, die Web-Seiten zu übersetzen und auch übersetzen Text, den Sie einfügen können in.
Ich fand es sehr nützlich.

That was translated to French:

Je suis sur le petit outil interresting suivantes: http://translate.google.com
J’étais pour une lecture commeonts youtube clip, et il a été un commentaire en arabe, que j’ai voulu savoir ce qui était. Babelfish.altavista.com je tente tout d’abord, les pages Web à traduire, mais il n’y avait aucune possibilité de transation arabe. Also i Google pour la traduction arabe-anglais et translate.google.com trouvés, les pages Web, ainsi que de traduire de traduire le texte, que vous pouvez insérer in
Je l’ai trouvé très utile.

And that was then translated back to English:

I am on the small tool interresting: http://translate.google.com
I was for a reading commeonts youtube clip, and it was a comment in Arabic, that I wanted to know what was. Babelfish.altavista.com I try first, web pages to be translated, but there was no possibility of transaction Arabic. Also i Google for the Arabic-English translation and translate.google.com found, web pages, and to bring to translate the text, which you can insert in
I found it very useful.