Monthly Archives: August 2009

Hearty Friday – Holter Monitor



RIMG2975

Originally uploaded by Nikita Kashner


Happy Friday everyone! This week’s picture is not of a heart per se, but of someone wearing a Holter monitor. It’s basically an EKG recorder that one wears around for a while, and it keeps a record of the electrical signals. They’re typically used (as I understand it) to find elusive electrical problems with the heart that don’t show up during, say, a short office visit.

Here’s hoping Ms.Kashner’s heart is doing fine.

Inbox Census

Per Matthew Cornell’s Inboxes of Our Lives post, I decided it was time for an inbox census.

  1. Mailbox – this is outside and gets dumped into the next one before anything else is done with the contents
  2. Landing strip inbox – This is a letter tray. I throw in mailbox stuff and anything I find around the dining room that needs to be put away. This is emptied primarily into the inboxes in the office downstairs. Sort of a transitory inbox, like the mailbox.
  3. Shower slate – Yes, I have an inbox in the shower. It’s a plastic slate designed for use by scuba divers. Great for those ideas that always seem to hit you in the shower, far from most paper, pens, or electronic note-taking devices.
  4. My side of the dresser – We have a long, waist-high dresser in the bedroom. Typically my receipts and so on get dumped there. Now and then these go in the landing strip inbox and are processed from there. This needs revision so that there’s a proper inbox, plus probably a tray for the things that live in my pockets. This is also mainly a holding location.
  5. Desk inbox – This is one of the main inboxes, where all of the stuff from upstairs and that I generate at my desk ends up before it’s processed. Pretty conventional GTD.
  6. Computer desktop inbox – I have a folder on the Desktop on each of my computers called Inbox, which is symlinked to my home directory as well (mv foo ~/Inbox/ is handy). I’ve tried putting these on Dropbox so that I only have one inbox across all of my computers, but some of the files end up being pretty large, which clogs the Dropbox sync. So I don’t do that anymore. Important: any program that has an optional default download location, I set to dump files in this directory, not on the desktop or a ‘Downloads’ folder, which is totally a one-trick pony.
  7. Other computer inboxes – I have a number of shell accounts on clusters, my web server, and so on. Each of these has an Inbox, but it’s typically used only locally. For example, if I need to send some files to our cluster, I usually scp them to machine:~/Inbox/. Then I know where to find new files on each machine.
  8. Jott – I normally check Jott using Jott Express, on my computer. I’ve started using Jott Express to add new items as well, rather than writing them on pieces of paper and putting them in the paper inbox. The nice things about this are (1) I can add to it via SMS, (2) I can add to it via a voice call, which is transcribed, and (3) it’s the same on all of my computers, as it’s hosted on Jott’s servers.
  9. Work bench – Okay, this one is really sad to look at. Whenever anything needs filing away in the storage room, I throw it on the workbench. This makes the workbench useless for actual work. I need a big box on the workbench, or to put stuff away directly. I do like batching the storage room stuff, so I think I may go the big box route.
  10. Meditation notebook – If you’ve ever tried mindfulness meditation or the like, you’ve surely experienced the flood of things bouncing around in your head that you didn’t even know were there before. Meditation can be like going through David Allen’s trigger list, only better. A lot of teachers will advise you to just let the thoughts pass. That’s anathema to a GTD fanatic like me. Why let them continue to bounce around in your head (or — eek — disappear)? They need to be out! On paper or something! So I keep a notebook and pen nearby when meditating. When something important pops up, I write it down and go back to meditating. The thoughts don’t bother me any more, and I know that they’ll get into the system. I typically empty this one right after sitting.

I think that’s it. Clearly there are some inboxes that could use tweaking. I didn’t explicitly realize before that I had ‘feeder’ or ‘holding’ inboxes and ‘real’ inboxes, but there it is. Most of them arose because I find I’ll inbox (did I just verb that?) things more readily if there’s an inbox handy, rather than having to go downstairs or whatever. How many inboxes do you have? Any strange or otherwise interesting ones? How many are feeders?

Quoted in another article on CardioSolv

The whole article is here.

The HPC service lets the small, five-employee company do the heavy lifting that would otherwise cost a fortune. “With what we could purchase out of pocket, we’d have to bootstrap very slowly, or look for VC [venture capital] funding,” said Dr. Brock Tice, the vice president of operations at Cardiosolv, a privately funded medical research firm. Instead, Tice uses a new HPC on-demand service from Penguin Computing called Penguin on Demand.

…

While Cardiosolv has its own small cluster on the premises for calculations, Tice estimates the resources he rents from Penguin would probably cost $500,000 to build, and other cloud options weren’t suitable.

“We can’t use [Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud] EC2, since there’s a lot of latency between the nodes,” he said.

Story on CardioSolv in The Register today

Here’s my two bits from the story:

Brock Tice is one of those scientists. As vp of operations at the Baltimore, Maryland-based CardioSolv, he works to model, yes, the heart – simulating its mechanical and electrical activity. And though he can run some simulations on Amazon’s cloud – or on individual local machines – more complex models require HPC. “We’re [sic] tried on Amazon and it just doesn’t scale,” he tells The Reg. “We can run on single EC2 instances, but if we need to scale up to a dog or human heart, it’s just impossible.

“The connections between Amazon’s machines are Gigabit Ethernet and they’re shared. If you fire up 10 machines and you want to run them like a cluster, some might be in the same rack, and others might be halfway across the data center, five or six switches away.”

You can find the full story here.