I'm not the only one

Michael Mitzenmacher has a blog.

Nortel is bankrupt

Nortel has completed its stunning fall. Eight and a half years ago, it was Canada's most valuable company and an international technology juggernaut; today, it is a hulk to be most likely sold for parts.

Nortel's boom years coincided with my first few years in grad school. They made it well known that they were on top: student recruiting events were well-funded, profs were getting Nortel money for research, and everyone (save those destined for academia) expected to be working there one day. I still have a Nortel mug on my desk from those happy days when they couldn't give away enough free stuff.

But now. Say you had bought one share of Nortel stock on the TSE at its peak on July 26, 2000, which (following a reverse split) would have been worth $1,231. Even if you had sold that stock a year ago, on January 14, 2008 -- when times were still relatively good and long before the fall's economic crisis -- you would have recovered $12.89 -- about a penny on the dollar. (If you had sold that same share yesterday, it would have got you $0.39.)

By comparison, the legal minimum price in Ontario for 24 bottles of beer is $25.60, and the amount you would receive for returning the empties is $2.40 -- a better investment over peak-to-year-ago-Nortel by roughly a factor of nine.

All five Zune users are furious.

On New Year's Eve, every 30 gig Microsoft Zune in the world crashed simultaneously. The reason? The firmware couldn't handle a year longer than 365 days, and 2008 was the first leap year since Zune's release.

The proposed fix: Drain the battery, recharge, and don't turn it on until New Year's Day.

Molecular communication: Shameless self promotion

Here's my new paper about molecular communication -- I give an abstract mathematical model and some ways to bound the information rate (both above and below):

A. W. Eckford, “Molecular communication: Physically realistic models and achievable information rates,” arXiv:0812.1554v1 [cs.IT] 8 December 2008 (submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.)

Comments are always welcome.

This surprised me, but probably shouldn't have.

Today I received a French-language grant from NSERC for review. So that's why they ask you whether you can read and write French.

Reminding ourselves why we bought a Mac

I dug a 6-year-old laptop out of the closet and brought it to the office. I haven't been a Linux user for several years (or at least, not a Linux administrator -- my desktop runs some flavor of Linux, but is centrally administered by our very able and quick tech staff, so that doesn't count), so for a laugh, I wiped it out and installed the latest Ubuntu -- version 8.10.

Linux has certainly come a long way in the handling of hardware (and it helps that all the hardware on this machine is ancient). Ubuntu recognized and configured both my sound card and my PCMCIA wifi card (yes, the machine is old enough not to have integrated wifi).

But at the first attempt to run Xorg (the windowing system), the resolution was stuck at 800x600 -- Ubuntu apparently failed to recognize the laptop's video driver. The screen's full res is 1024x768, and this is the kind of machine where smaller resolutions are not stretched to the full screen, so I feel like I'm staring at a postage stamp in a sea of blackness.

A little research found that the problem might be solved by running a configuration tool (displayconfig-gtk) and manually specifying the driver. Apparently this was fine for Ubuntu 8.04, but the tool was dropped from 8.10. Here we read:

As Xorg has improved this past year, an unfortunate side effect of these improvements is that it has rendered several design assumptions in displayconfig-gtk obsolete. So, starting with Hardy we are no longer putting displayconfig-gtk forth as a primary configuration tool, and are putting our development focus into the Screen Resolution applet. As a result, we do not plan to fix this ...

So my only recourse is to find and manually change the Xorg configuration files. Thanks, Ubuntu, for a couple of hours of my life that I'll never get back, which may or may not solve the problem.

The whole thing reminds me why I stopped using Linux in the first place, and makes me want to hug my Macbook.

Macleans to York: You Suck

The Macleans university rankings are out. York members hoping for some good news are out of luck.

Overall ranking:

"Comprehensive" category: Tied for 9th out of 11 (last year: 8th)

Reputational ranking (and GTA universities for comparison):

"Best overall": 29 out of 48 (U of T: 5, Ryerson: 19, UOIT: 31)
"Highest quality": 27 out of 48 (U of T: 4, Ryerson: 23, UOIT: 43)
"Most innovative": 25 out of 48 (U of T: 8, Ryerson: 15, UOIT: 24)
"Leaders of Tomorrow": 32 out of 48 (U of T: 5, Ryerson: 16, UOIT: 21)

The take home message: In no category do we finish in the top half. In the public eye, we're getting spanked by Ryerson. Ryerson! And we're not much better than a university that didn't exist six years ago.