me.wyattanderson.com

Site Launch - The Peter D. Watson Center

Wyatt — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:38:59 +0000

Part of my work for the UR PSC Department entails working on and maintaining various other sites, including a site for the Peter D. Watson Center for Conflict and Cooperation. Today, I launched my new design for the Watson Center. It’s not very advanced or particularly striking, but I take pride in its simplicity and cleanliness. Click the image below to check it out.

Excuses

Wyatt — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:30:55 +0000

So I know that I said I’d make an effort to update this, but I think my general lack of motivation this summer is putting a serious damper on things. I’m just not really doing anything exciting enough to blog about, although at work I did make a pretty cool system to generate custom PDFs from a PHP web app using LaTeX. I think I’ll do a writeup of that pretty soon, as I think it’s a pretty novel solution. I’m probably gonna start working here at the University of Utah again on a web UI project; I’ll post some details once I figure out where that’s going.

Upgrading a MacBook Pro

Wyatt — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:35:25 +0000

Having already put a 7200RPM drive in my MacBook which I’ve now given to my father, I decided to put a 320GB, 7200RPM drive in my new MacBook Pro, along with 4GB of RAM, and it’s made a substantial difference (my XBench scores after the upgrade are included).

For 2 years I had a black MacBook that was my primary Mac, and towards the beginning of the year I upgraded its internal hard drive to a 100GB, 7200RPM one, which made a substantial difference in terms of not only raw speed but also responsiveness. The decreased seek time of a 7200RPM drive can make huge difference in productivity with a laptop, so for anyone hesitating even remotely I would suggest the upgrade.

So, specifically, I put a WD Scorpio Black 320GB 7200RPM drive and 4GB of G.SKILL DDR2 in my Penryn-based MacBook Pro. Following the directions posted at ExtremeTech, which were easy to follow, I slid in the new drive and RAM and then booted off of the Leopard DVD which allowed me to easily restore the entire machine from a Time Machine backup. I was actually quite impressed at that; I made a point of backing up right before I shut down the machine and then after about an hour of installing the drive, formatting it, and restoring from backup I had the exact same machine in front of me, only this time much faster. For reference, my XBench scores after the new drive and RAM installation are here.

A place to start.

Wyatt — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:26:00 +0000

I’ve had various WordPress installs and excuses for blogs across the internet in previous years, and I’ve always had some form of personal homepage, but I’ve never really formed a habit of maintenance and updating them, but I guess that’s the quintessential excuse for blog failure. I’d like to have somewhere to collect my thoughts, mus (I almost said “musings” there. I’ve got to try to encourage myself to not be so cliché), programming notes, etc. so I’m going to make the quintessential blogger’s promise of content. It’s likely that no one will even see this post for a few days, or even weeks, but I’ve gotta start somewhere.So, this is the start of my new blog, me.wyattanderson.com. I’m just going to use it as a whiteboard, basically, where I can collect my thoughts on various things technological and not. I’ve often found myself lacking a place to post programming snippets, thoughts, techniques, etc. and I think such “scrapbooking”, if you will, is valuable at this stage in my professional life. I think it’s good to keep track of the solutions I find to problems, so that I can actually re-use some of the “reusable” code I’ve been writing. I imagine it should be easy to whip up some sort of WordPress plugin or whatever to use google-code-prettify to highlight syntax. So, we (or I, depending on whether or not I ever push this) shall see where I get with this.