Patrick’s weblog, featuring posts dating back to 2002 on topics including technology, open source, networking, and various technical adventures.
In addition to being a computer science nerd and a part-time policy wonk, I’m also a bit of a commercial aviation nut and, like Louis CK, I think flying is pretty amazing. This year I’m on track to take about 75 flights, mainly in the…
About a year ago I ditched Ubuntu and MythTV on my media center box for Windows 7 Ultimate. To be honest one of the main reasons I did this was for NetFlix, but also because I got tired of having to tweak my media center…
I’m 32, married, a professional scientist, and I have a confession to make. I play video games. Worse, I feel guilty about playing games. I often feel so guilty that it saps much of the guy from the game, turning it into some perverse drudgery…
I hate the concept of New Year’s Resolutions with an utter passion. It’s arbitrary for people to pick a single day and decide to change everything. Some people might call these resolutions, I call these personal development goals. None of these are dramatic changes from…
Following on the heels of my somewhat successful predictions regarding Open Source for 2010, I now my present my 10 predictions for Open Source in 2011. On the PC front Netflix will continue to require Silverlight for streaming, although they’ll finally get their act together…
As 2009 came to a close and 2010 started I decided to put all of my schooling and research to good use and attempt some short term prognostication. I entered the realm of people making predictions for 2010. Here’s a recap of my predictions for…
Important This report and analysis is still in the draft stage. I’m open to new data, criticisms about my model, grammatical/writing fixes, and suggestions about how to make it better. There are three ways to leave me feedback. You can leave a comment at the…
Academics live and die based on references. A variety of tools exist to manage references, from the sadly ubiquitous EndNote, to manually curated BibTeX files, to some people who just type their entries by hand with each paper. A variety of web aware citation management…
Around work and with friends I’ve obtained a reputation as the go-to-guy for computer hardware, particular home theater and media center computers. I was really excited about the new Dell Inspiron Zino HD, a tiny little box that can pack a dual core Athlon processor,…
I spent the last few days at the FOSS2010 Workshop in Irvine, CA. It’s an interesting little workshop that brought together some of the best minds in Open Source research from academia, industry, and practice. The goal was to develop a roadmap for the future…