How to Get into Medical School (Part 1)

From the horse’s mouth:

DeanDanielRemickMichigan (May 30, 2006 5:07:28 PM)
Americorps, Peace Corp, Teach for American, First author publication in either Nature or New England Journal of Medicine, 4 months of research in Antarctica, just to name a few.

RobertRuizMichigan (May 30, 2006 5:07:51 PM)
professional ice hockey player, National Champion football player, editor of campus newspapers, peace corp., teach for America, opening free clinic in Baghdad, former lawyer, Ph.D’s, etc.

DeanDanielRemickMichigan (May 30, 2006 5:07:56 PM)
Also biking across America to raise money for charity. Donating a kidney to a relative also comes to mind.

Too bad that Berkeley stresses out its students so much that they don’t have time to do any of those amazing things if they want to keep their grades high enough to be even considered in the application process. Perhaps that’s why I’m recommending to all of my friends’ siblings to go to UCLA instead.

Investigation of Linux Performance/Responsiveness Regressions

Hey all you faithful readers. I recently saw this article and was shocked to realize that yes, I too have noticed *Linux* (not Ubuntu alone) become slower and less responsive with the latest kernel and gcc releases. So, I’ve decided to gather more hard data and pinpoint the precise cause of this slowdown. My findings will be updated here and on Phoronix, where I’ve posted a thread.

Thanks and feel free to contribute your findings and experiences.

The Dismal Science

Economics is called the dismal science for good reason. The knowledge one gains from study is almost useless in predicting future events, but rather allows one to have an almost perverse insight into why something happened by being forced to watch the process unfold like a grotesque surgery on oneself. I think the reason most economists are gloomy is that they are forced to confront some fundamental limitations (see: unlimited wants, resource distribution, Malthus, diminishing marginal utility). On the other hand, ignorance truly is bliss, especially for those who don’t know what 401k plans are.

You know it’s real bad when lawyers are jumping abroad, and sex workers are penny-pinching.

In other news, those of us who have been following Barack Obama’s cabinet picks are breathing a sigh of relief. I think we who supported Obama did so in spite of his liberal voting record and held our noses at his protectionist and redistributionist campaign ideas. We knew that John McCain would heel to the Bush line on economics to satisfy his base; we knew Obama was the lesser of two evils and silently prayed for him to adheed to Clinton-style centrism rather than Johnsonesque liberalism.

So far so good on that front. Obama has pivoted rather nicely from his base to the middle of the spectrum over the course of the campaign. His appointees: Christina Romer, Larry Summers, Paul Volcker, Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, Robert Gates, James Jones, and Timothy Geithner are superb scholars and respected bipartisan civil servants. My choices would have been slightly different. I’d reward Chuck Hagel (one of my favourite Republicans) for his support of Obama with the Veterans’ Affairs position. Richard Holbrooke, a life-long diplomat and respected Clinton-era official, should get the Secretary of State position over Hillary, whose pick was as calculated and political as any. Daschle is not quaified for HHS; he should be on Interior or Commerce. Put Richardson, as talented as he is, at HHS instead.

Enough about the appointees. I’m sure your interest is how Obama’s policy changes can improve the economy. Well, on one hand, we are nearing the trough of the business cycle and a substantial recession/correction from the excesses of the real-estate and credit bubbles. Things will undoubtdly worsen before they improve. Monetary policy by the Fed has already been used up; interest rates are lower than they should be and will undoubtedly create a bubble further down the line. The issue is not with the money supply but rather with the paralyzed credit markets. Banks have money but are scared shitless to lend, both to consumers and to businesses. As a result, consumers have slashed spending (they were already at the brink anyways because of maxed out credit cards and home equity loans), and businesses have laid off employees. This caused the economy to spiral downwards.

Obama is proposing a continuation of massive bailouts for major companies, continuing what Bush did at the end of his term. He is also suggesting a record stimulus package ($600 billion or so). I just can’t see any good to all this endless spending. The system was built on the shaky foundations of expecting higher growth and more consumer spending and less savings each year. The only problem there is that once we hit 100% spending and negative savins, there’s nowhere else to go. It’s better to just blow up the system and rebuild with solid foundations; let banks, businesses, and Detroit fail. Slash military spending and close Guantanamo, Okinawa, and German military bases. End social security for the young and let them save for their own retirement instead. Raise the retirement age for everyone else. Expand medicare to cover everyone. Nationalize the banks and impose conservative lending regulations. Gradually repay the national debt and later trim income taxes. Invest in education and lower the cost of doing business to let innovative and agile startups thrive.

HTPC Blues

This Thanksgiving break, I decided to head home to set up my family’s HTPC, which had been recently down for “repairs” due to my installing new hard drives. There are two of them – a 250 GB refurbished WD drive that was sent to me for warranty on my old drive that failed and a 160 GB Seagate scavenged from previous PCs. The chassis is the remnants of a Dell Vostro 200 slim tower and the rest is a mix of some scavenged parts. All in all, it has the following specs: Celeron E1200 (1.6 Ghz, 512kb Cache) bought for free with an Amazon gift card, 1 GB DDR2 667 MHz RAM from the Vostro 200, the same Foxconn G33 motherboard complete with an integrated Intel 3100 GMA video card, and a DVD-ROM drive from the Vostro 200. When I bought it last spring, it cost $499 from Dell Deals and came with a C2D E4500 and a 20in LCD monitor. A pretty sweet deal at the time! The computer connects to the HDTV (Sony Bravia) via a VGA cable and an analog audio cable; it is fast enough to play HD (720p) video.

My parents, being computer-challenged, need some form of windows, so to minimize my support time, I first tried to install Windows XP and immediately ran into a problem with the bios settings for the SATA controller. In IDE mode, the cd would not load, and in RAID mode, the SATA drives were not recognized. The only recourse was to move the computer to Vista.

On Vista, I wanted to keep things simple by presenting only two partitions, one for the system and one for media files made by combining the two drives in RAID-0. Luckily for me, the onboard Intel Matrix RAID can do this and abstract away the number and type of underlying disks. By default though, the motherboard only supports RAID-1, which provides data redundancy but not the increased storage space I want.

Some shrews googling later, I found a few links that described how to install a hacked Dell bios that allows the onboard Intel Matrix RAID to support RAID-0, which is the mode I wanted to use for the partition storing media files. However, when I tried to flash the bios to the hacked one, I was greeted by a message that I couldn’t flash to the same version. Doh! The next step was to create a boot disk (from Windows or from Linux) and to flash from DOS. This worked, but I spent a few nerve-racking minutes at a dark screen with copious red block letters warning me not to unplug the power.

Well, it turns out that Matrix RAID isn’t much to speak of. It’s a fake RAID card that presents a single drive using a dumb controller without much of hardware RAID’s benefits. All split writes/reads are offloaded to the CPU in this implementation. The cynic in me thought that Intel did this on purpose to find some use for the abundance of CPU power we have these days. Matrix RAID’s main failing isn’t the high CPU consumption during data transfers; it’s its inability to recognize two unequally-sized drives in RAID-0. This means that I could only see 320 GB (2 x 160 GB, the smallest drive). The rest of the space on the 250 GB drive apparently would go to waste. *sigh* Linux md-raid doesn’t have this limitation!

There was one more thing to try – pure Vista software RAID. Both XP and Vista on certain versions (I know Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate do this for sure) intrinsically support striping a volume across two block devices. However, when I tried to do this from Disk Management in the control panel by converting to dynamic disks, I got an error message saying that the operation could not be completed. Apparently, a few people have encountered this error before, but there is no fix in the wild. *shrug* Another senseless regression from XP that makes Vista so unusable.

Rather than try to convert my parents to Linux, I decided to just keep Vista on the larger drive and have three distinct simple partitions; perhaps my parents can split the storage of TV shows and movies.

Typealyzer Meme

Typealyzer says:

ISTJ – The Duty Fulfillers

The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.

The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work in their own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it.

Debian (Lenny) Blues

After running Debian Lenny for a while, I’ve got a few things to report.

Performance is admirable and is certainly a step up from Ubuntu 8.04 in terms of reponsiveness. However, not all packages behaved well.

To start off, there was a strange click/buzz noise from the hard drive section, which really freaked me out. I thought that it was another hard drive platter failure, but after deep scanning with smartctl, nothing came up. Investigating a bit more found that the sound was accentuated whenever I played audio. Suddenly, it hit me. The case speakers were being recognized and used as the primary device. Apparently, this is a bug in the latest alsa packages in debian and ubuntu that causes snd_pcsp to take priority over the default sound card. The solution was to blacklist the snd_pcsp module in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Another issue I ran into (not exclusive to debian) is linux not ejecting my WD Passport external hard drive properly. I can “safely eject” from konqueror, but then the LED on the drive doesn’t dim and the head isn’t parked. Thus, when I unplug the USB cable manually, I hear a whirring sound and the drive spinning down, which is definitely not healthy. Careful googling shows that this has already been noted by several people and is actually a bug in launchpad. For me, the following commands allows proper ejection:

1. Safely eject from Konqueror/Nautilus
2. Enter root via su command
3. sdparm –command=sync /dev/sdc
4. sdparm –command=stop /dev/sdc

Replace sdc with whatever your device block name is.

Now onto flash. Ah, since I’m running 64 bit Opera, and Adobe had been dragging its feet wrt 64 bit support, I get a double whamming of incompatibility. The good news is that Opera comes with its own nspluginwrapper, which means that all I need to do is untar the official Adobe 10 plugin and drop it in the Opera plugin folder. Turns out that it’s not that simple. The plugin simply failed to load. Upon investigating by running ldd on the plugin, I got:

libnss3.so => not found
libsmime3.so => not found
libssl3.so => not found
libplds4.so => not found
libplc4.so => not found
libnspr4.so => not found

Wonderful, isn’t it? At least now I know which 32 bit libraries to install to fix the problem. In the course of my investigations, I discovered that someone wrote a nice script that downloads the plugin and installs it automatically on ubuntu. Disclaimer: I didn’t use and can’t make any guarantees about its effectiveness on debian.

Finally, when I had all those things set up, I tried installing Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack (from Lokigames) for some fun. Well, it turns out that the new glibc, kernel, and 64 bit hotness didn’t play well with SMAC. Thankfully, the following guide and forum posts pointed me to disable AIGLX and installing the loki_compat pack. Once that was done, I could play the game.

Fglrx is still a pain though. Warcraft 3 and wine don’t seem to get along well with it. Waiting for a solution to that.

Update: Found the cause of the problem with warcraft 3 and wine. Winehq’s bug database has documentation about the issue. There is already a mmap patch out that fixes the problem and is targeted for release in 1.2.0.

Aside from that, I also encountered a recent issue with UT2004, whose linux binary I installed. The first problem:

crumja@korhal:~/games/ut2004$ ut2004
./ut2004-bin: error while loading shared libraries: ./libSDL-1.2.so.0: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

As usual, google-fu provided the solution (coincidentally also on ubuntu forums). Changing ut2004-bin to ut2004-bin-linux-amd64 in the ut2004 launcher script in the System directory did the trick.

The next error I got was

crumja@korhal:~/games/ut2004$ ut2004
./ut2004-bin-linux-amd64: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Fair enough. Different thread. apt-get install libstdc++5

Most recent issue was with Vmware Workstation 6.5. Although there is no “official” support for Debian Lenny in the 6.5 release notes, I figured that I needed the program enough to risk it. Turns out that sound is a problem as usual with KDE and its sound server artsd. The error I get is either that /dev/dsp is missing or that it is busy. My hunch is that KDE4 has solved this problem, but since Lenny uses 3.5.9 by default, it’s another issue I have to debug. Having encountered the sound issue before, I downloaded vmwaredsp and installed it. Calling vmwarearts did not solve the problem.

My intuition told me that the problem lay in OSS support. /dev/dsp wasn’t listed as a device, so I though that some sound modules weren’t automatically loaded. This page confirmed my suspicions, and after modprobing those modules, starting vmware regularly resulted in working sound.

Revenge of the Taiwanese Manufacturers

For the longest time, (mostly) Taiwanese companies such as MSI, ECS, Foxconn, Acer, Abit, DFI, and Shuttle have escaped notice because they produce products that aren’t well-differentiated. Things like motherboards, A/V solutions, bluetooth receivers, video cards, sound cards, and a variety of other electronics sold at retail by OEMs such as Dell, HP, and Gateway come from these Taiwanese manufacturers. They rely on retail sales because they, being Taiwanese, naturally suck at creating effective marketing for an English-speaking audience. I’m sure many readers have had issues with incorrect grammar and spelling in things like manuals and ads. Also, these companies, save for Asus and Gigabyte, have been unable to distinguish themselves because they compete on price rather than branding or product segmentation. Besides the reputation for “quality” that the two aformentioned companies enjoy, most shoppers and OEMs will not bother choosing between brands on matters other than price. This cutthroat market is known for its low profit margins and high churn/turnover, and this is especially dire in graphics cards. Various names in the industry to come and go (mostly go) over the years are Sapphire, Hercules, XFX, Soyo, eVGA, FIC, Biostar, Gainward, and Leadtek.

Well, now they’re storming back with a vengeance. The NYT reports that Atom-powered netbooks and nettops built by these Taiwanese companies (the surviving ones at least) are making inroads and are displacing traditional PCs as computers of choice for many people. When Atom was first announced, I warned that Intel must be very careful not to cannibilize its own product line because so many people do nothing more than surf the internet and process office documents. Well, now it’s happening, but Intel makes a decently fat profit margin on each Atom processor sold, so it’s not an issue for them.

Career Meltdown?

A friend and I had dinner together a while back, and midway through, we chanced upon the old adage: What’s a nice young Jewish boy got to do to make his grandmother proud? He needs to be a doctor, lawyer, or investment banker and marry a nice Jewish girl.

Well, so much for that. Investment bankers and finance-related fields are feeling the pinch. Law schools are so abundant and have such a low barrier to entry that many graduates have trouble finding jobs (or at least jobs that let them repay their tuition). What about medicine? Traditionally, medicine has been relatively stable in employment opportunities, lifestyle, and compensation. However, with burgeoning health care costs, doctors are being asked to do more with less.

Other attractive and high-status areas for brainiacs to work in include academia and venture capitalism. Well, the number of positions in academia that open up each year is far outstripped by the number of post-docs in search of them. Let’s not even talk about compensation working as a post-doc researcher for the rest of one’s life.

Entrepreneurship? Not here in the Bay Area at least. Venture capital firms are pinching pennies, and getting seed funding is harder than ever.

I guess we can still take consolation in that if everything does go to high hell, we can survive by penny-pinching like Paul Navone. Alternatively, if you live in California, consider becoming a prison warden. With the state of things, it’s going to be a job in high demand.