22. December 2008 by emeris.

At crookedtimber there is much anger over Amazon’s pricing system. Looking to verify this I found that while amazon is being evil, it’s not in the way expected. Instead of setting prices per person, they are playing games with shipping costs so that all of their vendors end up costing the same.

Responding to the directions for checking in the original blog post:

I noticed on the top of the page a line that said “This item is not eligible for Amazon Prime when purchased from DigitalEtc. See more buying choices” where the last four words are a link that goes to a page of vendors for this card. At the top there is your $17 card from the only vendor that is eligible for Prime, where as the $10 one is marked as ‘item low price’. That page also notes that the $10.45 card isn’t eligible for either the Prime or Supersaver shipping, and will always cost you $6.68 in shipping.

This is amazon playing games with multiple vendors, not playing games with pricing per person. More interestingly, on the ‘featured vendor’ list all 4 of them are listed as ‘price’ in large letters, and ’shipping’ in small letters, and all 4 are exactly $17.13 when totaled.

I have attached a screen shot

Posted in computer, Econ | 3 Comments »

2. December 2008 by emeris.

Testing to see if this works.  If so it might make me more likely to actually post when I have things I want to remeber.

Posted in computer | 1 Comment »

1. July 2008 by emeris.

mex api

Posted in computer | 1 Comment »

30. April 2008 by emeris.

I work primarily in matlab(2007b 64bit) on a group computational server, hence my main mode of access to the server is through ssh with X forwarding. The problem is that on my laptop I am running the ubuntu 8.04 (32bit) with the compiz eye candy turned on and the java jre does not get along with compiz (from what I gather it has to do with something about repainting frames and swing waiting for the window manager to do that, but compiz never does this so java based programs sit there with grey screens forever, this is a bug in the JRE not a bug in linux and has been fixed in newer releases). The simple solution would be to turn off the eye candy, but some of it does in fact add to productivity (particularly when going from matlab window <-> emacs for code <-> firefox for matlab documentation given the limited desktop space on a laptop screen some of the window manager features are very nice) so after poking around for a bit I found this:
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1003847#post1003847

The summary is that matlab (version 2007b) uses java1.6.0, but installing java1.6.0u6 (java 6 update 6 (the forum claims that update 5 also works which is a claim I saw else where)) and the running
$export MATLAB_JAVA=(location of java1.6.0_6)

everything works wonderfully.  This needs to be done on the computational server as that is the jre that is running matlab, not my local version.

Posted in bug, computer, linux | 1 Comment »