A couple of improvements for google maps

Take a look at the San Francisco terrain in Google maps:

It looks a little ridiculous because of the buildings popping up all over the place. The hot new LIDAR data is pretty badass in some places like mountains, cliffs, and other sharp terrain features, but I seriously disagree with using it in urban centers. Don't get me wrong, it's super cool that they can show you altitude data of all the building tops, but think of it this way: how many people are walking around on the building tops? Maybe a few. 

The vast majority of users are bound to the earth's surface: city streets and sidewalks. More importantly, if I'm walking or riding my bike across the city, the building tops don't affect my trip, only the street level elevation. So here's an idea: when you show me terrain on Google maps in urban areas, use the street level GPS elevation data from streetview cars.

OK, now take a look at these directions to San Francisco from Mountain View:

We all know the travelling salesman problem is one of the hardest around, but there are like a million better ways to get going on the highway in the right direction. It would be awesome for Google to provide an API so that aspiring data scientists could try out their best shot at this hard problem and compare results with the standard algorithm. How about that?

Video compression and Rick rolling in youtube.

Over a beer last evening, we were musing about whether youtube uses ensemble compression to account for redundancy in video submissions. Specifically this came up while looking for the lonely island 'on a boat' rick roll to nail a friend, when we realized the vast quantity of google videos with that one clip. If all the rick rolling videos were ensemble compressed, the famous clip would only have to be stored once, as opposed to the thousands of times it is currently probably stored on the Google servers. In addition to this and all the troll songs, charlie the unicorn clips, and other memes, this would definitely save a lot of disk space.

4GB memory upgrade for the Acer Aspire One D270 (ok, 3GB working so far...)

The measly 1GB my AOD270 shipped with had be balking, so I ordered a 4GB upgrade, slotted it in this afternoon, and am now running a full 4GB in this bad boy. ;-)

I mostly followed the instructional video on youtube for the AOD255 with the below exceptions. Everything through popping out the keyboard was exactly as advertised in the video. Once I had it up, taking care not to pull out the delicate ribbon cable, I removed the five screws labelled 'door' (as opposed to the four indicated in the video) which are circled in the photo below.

I then pressed firmly down on the slot box labelled 'door release' to drop the bottom panel (arrow below).

I accidentally broke one of the small clips at the back of the panel (i.e. battery side) which does not release by pressing down. To avoid breaking these three clips, you just need to pop down the clips on the other three sides (i.e. front, left, and right), then slide the panel toward the front of the laptop. They're not really clips as much as slide brackets or something I guess, and I photographed the broken one below.

After that it's pretty straight forward again. The only thing I would add is that to remove the old memory module, you just need to lightly press the two side spring clips off to the side of the chip from the end near the small indent in the chip as photographed below. The chip will then just pop up and you can pull it out. Inserting the new chip just requires pressing it into the slot then down to secure the clips.

 

At reboot the BIOS indicates a full 4GB chip installed, but some operating systems will only use 3GB since the Intel Atom is only a 32 bit processor.

To enable the full 4GB memory you need to use an operating system with physical address extension (PAE) (e.g. Ubuntu linux 12.10 or later). Apparently PAE is enabled by default in the Ubuntu 13.04 kernel which I'm running, but it doesn't appear to be working for me, since I only show 3GB of used memory:

$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 3091772 kB...

The Intel Atom N2600 supports PAE according to:

$ grep -i PAE /proc/cpuinfo
24:flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm movbe lahf_lm arat dtherm

... and my installed kernel definitely has PAE enabled:

$ grep -i PAE /boot/config-3.8.0-19-generic
451:CONFIG_X86_PAE=y

I tried installing the pae kernel just in case that would maybe do something, and while the package installed, it looks like it didn't change matters.

sudo apt-get install linux-generic-pae linux-headers-generic-pae

I checked dmesg for PAE but didn't see anything. Maybe I'll return to this another day, but I think I've had enough for tonight.

Well OK, for now it looks like I'm only getting 3 of my 4GB, but that at least beats the prior 1GB. Hooray!

UPDATE: I even flashed the BIOS from v1.06 to v1.09 and I'm still only getting 3GB. Shiz.