SWHarden.com

The personal website of Scott W Harden

Data Mismanagement

Summary: The author wrote a Python script to analyze data from a CSV file containing information about mice in cages, including their sex, strain, age range, and whether they are alive or dead.
This summary was generated in 85.76 seconds from an original post containing 1,687 words.

Disappointing Sweaters

Summary: The writer of the blog post is disappointed with a story that they were asked to read, which contained an unoriginal and unsatisfying ending.
This summary was generated in 60.79 seconds from an original post containing 567 words.

Molecular Purgatory

Summary: The program requires 24 hours of coursework, but only 18 hours are required for the core courses, so students must take 6 hours of elective courses to complete their degree requirements.
This summary was generated in 61.58 seconds from an original post containing 303 words.

Enamored by a Past Life

Summary: The user is wondering if their thoughts and feelings about a past life reveal more about their psyche than they can consciously describe or understand.
This summary was generated in 47.09 seconds from an original post containing 849 words.

Fixing Slow Internet in Ubuntu

I recently swapped my two main PCs in my house. The “headless” (no monitor) media PC (whose job consists of downloading, storing, and playing movies) connected directly to my TV, and our standard desktop PC which my wife uses most of the time. I decided to do the swap because the media PC was way nicer than our desktop PC, and since the media PC is just playing movies and downloading torrents, I figured the extra processing power / ram / video acceleration could be put to better use. Anyhow, I decided (in both cases) to completely start fresh by wiping hard drives clean and reinstalling Ubuntu linux (I’m using 8.10 currently). However, after the installation I noticed a peculiar problem. I’ll quote it to emphasize it…

Browsing the internet was very slow. When I’d click a link on a website, it would take several seconds before it seemed to even try to go to the next page. The same thing would happen if I manually typed-in a new website. I tried disabling IPv6 in firefox’s about:config and in the /etc/init.d/aliases file, but it didn’t help!

The solution for me was simple, and since I spent a lot of time searching forums I know I’m not the only one with this problem. Disabling IPv6 was suggested in 99% of similar posts. My solution took a while to uncover, so I figured I’d write it here. The basic problem is that my DHCP (auto-configured IP address) settings were screwed up, and my manually setting them I fixed the problem. Here’s what I did…

Start by right-clicking your network icon (wireless in my case) and selecting connection information

Check out your current configuration. Is a local address (192.168.*.*) set for the primary DNS server? If so, that’s your problem! Note your secondary server. We’ll set it as your primary…

Continue by right-clicking your network icon (wireless in my case) and selecting __edit connections*. Open the tab corresponding to your internet connection (wired or wireless - wireless in my case), select your connection, and click __Edit

Use this screen to manually enter the information from the information screen you saw earlier, but making sure not to list any local IP addresses as the DNS servers. Save your settings, close the windows, and the problem should be immediately corrected. Leave “search domains” blank, that’s important too. Good luck!!!