Category Archives: Tech

Tech

Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex

A groundbreaking study has just come out that used various MRI techniques to map the structure and function of human brains. We are working with MRI experts to do similar things with the heart. Here’s a figure from the paper illustrating the process:
Brain Mapping

The study was done by an international team of scientists, with first author Patric Hagmann. Because it was published in the open-access PLoS Biology, you can get the whole article, online or in PDF form, here, regardless of your university affiliation or lack thereof.

This is really cool. It’s the first step in a new era of reverse-engineering the brain, and the body in general.

Another company I won’t continue doing business with

Slashdot | GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers

A GoDaddy Vice President has been caught bidding against customers in their own domain name auctions.

I had been pretty happy with GoDaddy, despite their annoyingly busy web site, as my domain name registrar. I’ve even recommended them to other people. Now they go on the list of companies I refuse to do business with, including but not limited to Citgo, AT&T, and Wal-Mart. I’d like to refuse to do business with Comcast, but they have me over a barrel in terms of alternative choices, natural monopoly and all that.

This sort of personal boycott follows from my realization that money has supplanted voting in our capitalist society (and I have no quarrel with capitalism), and that both with politicians and with corporations, it’s important to vote with your dollars. In the case of Citgo, the two are combined.

Cisco VPN Client Error 51 After Leopard 10.5.3 Upgrade

JHU uses Cisco VPN for outside connections to the university network. Unfortunately, this requires using Cisco’s VPN client, which is not really available for free download on the internet at large. Normally when I have a problem, I just re-install it, but the current version provided by Hopkins refuses to install on 10.5.3, citing a wrong O.S. version number. “Must be 10.4 or greater.” So 10.5 !>= 10.4? Anyway, what’s the problem I was trying to fix?

After upgrading my workstation from 10.5.2 to 10.5.3, the VPN client refused to load with a message about “Client error 51”, saying it couldn’t find the VPN service. This may be related to my use of an external USB wifi adapter, but it was never a problem in 10.5.2. Regardless, I found that restarting the VPN service fixed the problem. As an administrative user, I had to run this:


sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

Now everything works fine.

Spore Creature Creator

I finally tried the Spore Creature Creator yesterday, and took a little movie. I then discovered the the software includes a mechanism to auto-upload videos to YouTube. Smart on their part. My first attempt is below.

Firefox 3

After checking my most important extensions for updates (most had them) for Firefox 3 compatibility, I took the plunge and upgraded to version 3.

So far it seems pretty snappy, though I’m not used to the new look.

If I hit any snags as I use it, I’ll update this page.