About me

NYGeek is a computer scientist working in various technology companies in New York City.  His real name is Marc Donner.  This blog contains his personal thoughts and comments and none of his employers'.  There is at least one other person who uses the tag NYGeek, so do not assume that this tag on another site comes from him.

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Two Intel NUC servers running Ubuntu

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A week or two ago I took the plunge and ordered a pair of Intel NUC systems. Here's what happened next as I worked to build a pair of Ubuntu servers out of the hardware: I ordered the components for two Linux servers from Amazon: Intel NUC D54250WYK [$364.99 each] Crucial M500 240 GB mSATA [$119.99 each] Crucial 16GB Kit [$134.99 each] Cables Unlimited 6-Foot Mickey Mouse Power Cord [$5.99 each] for a total of $625.96 per machine. Because I have a structured wiring system in my apartment I didn't bother with the wifi card. ... Assembly was fast, taking ten or fifteen minutes to open the bottom cover, snap in the RAM and the SSD, and button the machine up again. Getting Ubuntu installed was rather more work (on an iMac): Download the Ubuntu image from the Ubuntu site. Prepare a bootable USB with the server image (used diskutil to learn that my USB stick was on /dev/disk4): hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o ubuntu-14.04-server-amd64.img ubuntu-14.04-server-amd64.iso diskutil un...
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Important Patents - Procrastination

Some years ago I realized that once the USPTO decided to allow business process patents they would have to allow patents for behaviors as well.  I quickly wrote up a bunch of important behavioral patents.  It took a while and some back and forth between my patent attorney and the USPTO examiners, but I was finally awarded a large number of behavioral patents. Here is one of my favorits: Procrastination The royalty rate is quite high, to discourage people from procrastinating.  It took me a while to get around to sending out the first batch of invoices, but I finally got them in the mail several years ago.  Sadly, no one seems to have gotten around to sending payment.
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Quora Greatest Hits - What are common stages that PhD student researchers go through with their thesis project?

I have been posting on Quora since April of 2014, earning top writer status in 2017 and 2018 and running up, as of this writing, 5.6 million views by Quora readers. While many of my posts are of limited interest, I'm inordinately proud of some of them.  With this post I will begin retrieving some of my particular favorites from Quora and reposting them here on my blog. There is some fun history behind this particular post.  Back when I was a grad student at CMU back in the 1980s I was friendly with Jeff Schrager, a fellow grad student at the time, and he posted a hilarious item in, as I recall, rec.humor.funny, an early netnews group.  The item was titled "How Many AI People Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb" and I admired it so much that I tracked it down and put it up on this blog some years ago (https://nygeek-blog.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-many-ai-people-does-it-take-to.html). Several years ago someone posted the question, "What are common stages that PhD studen...
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