| I hope this won't affect Björk |
[Oct. 11th, 2008|11:33 pm] |
Hold on a sec. Interests rates were always a way of saying an investment is high risk. Such that I feel a little foolish currently having 39/40th of all my savings in a relatively high interest rate offshore bank that is frequently seen advertised here (although, they are AA- rated, which is slightly stronger than those dodgy banks that have collapsed in Iceland (and I lived 26/27th of my life below the poverty line, so if I lose all my money now, I won't find it too difficult to go back to a poor-student lifestyle, because I'm still living it more of less (minus the copious bottles of single malt in my collection))).
We always knew that the anti-terrist laws were just a smokescreen to be used as a convenient placeholder for any law you, as party in power currently, could desire for (with opposition usually remaining completely impotent when it comes to objecting to any law passed under an anti-terrist umbrella), but Britain has decided that risk takers within its own borders get to trump a soverign state. I guess that's just Britain doing the same old same old. |
|
|
| Cultural review |
[Sep. 29th, 2008|07:45 pm] |
Last week, some of the Poms at work ("Anglo-Australian" means that we are mostly composed of Poms and Scots) were saying how Australia doesn't have very much of a culture. Of course, this was the 4th consequetive day in which we had beer and/or drinks during and/or after work, so it it quite clear we have a beer and drinks culture.
So I present two attempts at culture:
Instant review: Australian Top Gear
5 thumbs down.
Completely unfunny boring propagandafest. None of the humour of the British cousin, but lots of dickheadedness.
Keating, the musical
A month ago, due to a tragic accident with the VCR (I forgot to set it before going out), I missed "Keating, The Musical" on ABC2. This just turned out to be a boon, because digital TV recorded onto my single-channel VCR would have sucked. I have only just taught myself to navigate myself around a decent bittorrent client, and found that some kind sole was seeding a recording of Keating on ABC2.
So I plonked myself down tonight with a glass (or three, hic) of scotch, and attended. Keating was written by a fellow Kibologist (who also is/was a band member of Interröbang Cartel) who amazingly, seems to have social skills (hard enough to come by) when in front of a national audience!. The best bits? I really don't remember; I'll have to watch it again tomorrow. The bit when Howard entered was good. I certainly do hope that Costello was watching as Keating was trying to pry power from Hawke. I recognised Hewson's caricature, which is impressive given that this was 5 years before my voting age. I forgot where a few people fit in. I certainly learnt a bit (Kernot and Evans‽). It may perhaps be a danger sign to my political knowledge to be learning things from a political musical.
Whatisname was correct about over half the population wanting Keating's babies.
No other country can claim leaders as lovable as Hawke and Keating. |
|
|
| Financial meltdown |
[Sep. 26th, 2008|05:32 pm] |
Me, I get nervous about the prospect of fucking up the autoguider, and having one of the less experienced telescope operators not being able to observe without it, causing the loss of a night. And for it to be on my head.
But that's not important in the scheme of things; it's just science. Wouldn't it be embarrassing to fuck up in all of your basic assumptions[1]? The anxiety would kill me. How could you sleep knowing that if you make a mistake in your assumptions, that you could affect a whole nation of peoples? Or worse, the world? It'd be like rocking up to work in the morning, reading the fault logs and find that your worse fears are true, and that even then, you didn't think of the consequences your small failure would have? You proverbially fucked up the autoguider, and the telescope ran away and crashed into the floor, crushing several small children and their pet duck?
Bullshit assumptions such as the assumption that housing prices must always monotonically rise, that rising housing prices are good, and that therefore we can build all of our house of cards on this assumption? That it is safe to build an entire house of cards using other peoples cards? That are merely virtual cards?
Next time, invest in a pyramid scheme. Much safer.
It almost makes you want to regulate something.
Oh well, it doesn't matter in the end. We're fucked anyway, if you watched this week's Andrew Denton interview of Tim Flannery.
[1] I wrote this lastnight, but couldn't find the AFP article I had read in the dead tree version of last week's paper. Damn licensing restrictions. Maybe the new world order won't have IPFreely laws. |
|
|
| Kittens |
[Sep. 25th, 2008|07:56 pm] |
My favourite cafe was on the TV tonight, but I still say the cats are going to kick their arse. I still think the Hawks are sellouts for moving out to Glen Waverley.
I am shamed to have posted a second sport related post in 2 years.
Oh well, it won't happen next year if the cats' aren't in the finals again. |
|
|
| My uninformed opinion |
[Sep. 22nd, 2008|08:40 pm] |
Dearest police investigators speculators,
Obviously there was no other vehicular involvement. I'm glad you're so certain on that issue. But cyclists don't just fall off their bikes in the middle of the city and die from head injuries. The ground doesn't move fast enough to cause head injuries leading to death, even from 2m fall heights if there was no accelerant involved. I think you'll find there was an underlying cause. |
|
|
| Famous again! |
[Sep. 21st, 2008|09:44 pm] |
Oh look at that; we're in the news again.
It turns out that the supplier of the rest of the food the hospital are still able to serve is my mum and step father. And they haven't been paid recently either. Woops.
Good thing they're locals and he's highly sympathetic to the cause of the actual hospital, if not the administrators, but we certainly live in interesting times. Despite having a large fancy hospital, these administrators were responsible for getting rid of our obstetrics ward several years ago, thus causing women to have to be driven 170km to the next nearest hospital (most people seem to opt to relocate to the coast for 6 months instead, sometimes not coming back).
In completely unrelated news, half of our local council was kicked out at the elections last week. |
|
|
| Catlike typing dectected! Eject! |
[Sep. 18th, 2008|11:07 am] |
Does anyone know of a linux program that detects cat like typing in an X session, configures the soundcard to ignore the headphone jack sense switch (hda-intel in my case -- I can misconfigure it at modprobe time to ignore the switch, but don't know a way of doing it online), turns the volume up to 11, and yells "get off the fucking keyboard before you press the power button!!"? Because I haven't yet fitted a Mollygaurd to my laptops' power buttons and one of them at home just stopped responding. I'm guessing, based on where I've been finding her when I get home these last few days, and what's been typed into an open xterm window, that she's either held the power button down for 10 seconds, or typed fn-f3 (she's been known to type ctrl-alt-backspace, so I wouldn't put it past her to work out the suspend combination).
I'm this >< close to giving her up to my mum. I need a furless cat that doesn't sleep on keyboards. |
|
|
| Brute force meets precision engineering |
[Sep. 17th, 2008|11:26 pm] |
If anyone has ever thought "why is it so hard to servo a telescope", wonder no more (this post prompted by a similar musing from the lead programmer of the new Telescope Control System as he works the final few bugs out of the servoing control).
We need to maintain pointing accuracy to 1 arcsec and tracking accuracy to 0.3 arcsec, when the sky is scanning around at 15 arcsec per seconds (incidentally, we have a model of the atmosphere that has proved good for 35 years, with the only inputs being temperature and pressure, and the peak wavelength being observed and thus to correct for. This model compensates for the fact that the position of a star shifts by about an arcminute with respect to its true position, towards the horizon).
1 arcsec at the end of a 12.7 metre long 116tonne tube subtends 60 microns. So we have to track the 260 tonne total mass at 1 mm per second, maintaining 20 microns. Furthermore, for a moment of inertia of 5000 tonne m2 (a guess), a 400 gram (a guess based on a scaled calculation from a similar system, but I could have my physics wrong) force (ie, many times smaller than the force exerted by the 2df robot whipping around the field plate at the top end of the telescope) is sufficient to form unwanted 0.5 arcsec oscillations. Oh, and while there's a windshield at the dome aperture, I'm sure some of those 100km/h gusts still get in and buffet the structure.
Our telescope is slow compared to other newer and smaller telescopes. We have a chain of gears on both the sets of drives (each with anti-backlash arrangement) going up to the Z gear on the drive, and a similar chain of gears back to each of the encoders (which we are also in the process of replacing because the wiring turns to dust anytime anyone sneezes on them. It turns out, only military suppliers are able to supply to us. And they get somewhat nervous about us having such encoders). We can see and have to correct for each combination of pairs of teeth of each gear. The famous gear error is the 2.4 minute error. We stopped heating the oil 5 years ago to try to get rid of turbulence induced by several tens of kW of heating from within the dome, but haven't re tuned the gears since then.
Tonight, we got to see a talk from the guys putting together Skymapper on the other side of the moutain. The contractors for that telescope are also military folk. They talk of gymbles that can slew artilery across 180 degrees worth of sky within milliseconds. I haven't yet seen their telescope slew - I think they're intending to balance it and tune its servos first. |
|
|
| Is this what they call "Ironic" (I never was good at English)? |
[Sep. 15th, 2008|11:37 pm] |
I can haz a mouse problem. I have several mice, actually. They all jump. I suspect it's the cat fur that gets into the optical detector.
Are there any cat fur resilient mice out there (any variety, as long as they come neutered -- we're just getting rid of the last vestiges of balled mice at work, and I'm not volunteering to take them)? Or does anyone want a long haired persian lapcat? Make sure you get rid of all your fleece jumpers first. Especially the red ones -- the white fur shows up horribly against the red fleece jumpers.
And she scares the mice.
Hold on one second. Optical mice still work with sticky tape sticky side up over the hole so you've just got a flat base. If it truly is a hair problem and not just a cheap crappy Dull mouse with dodgy electrical characteristics, then I'll report back as to whether this suceeds in the long term.
EDIT: nope, fail. |
|
|
| LHC coming online |
[Sep. 14th, 2008|06:44 pm] |
I know some people have been concerned about the LHC creating black holes.
Fortunately, they have a webcam to demonstrate just how seriously they take safety. |
|
|
| Angelique Flowers |
[Sep. 13th, 2008|06:34 pm] |
If you are one of those pro-life-at-all-costs morons, you need to read this (and watch the video).
Now.
I do not understand what is going on inside the heads of those in the Victorian senate who voted against this.
I also have to admit that I don't understand the Hippopotamus (Hypocritical?) Oath. Anyone who possibly thinks that they have a duty to preserve someone so that the last thing they do before inevitably painful death is to vomit fecal matter, rather than letting them die peacefully, is a roo loose in the top paddock. |
|
|
| Beautifying xterm, and/or wasting opportunities to get back into dayshift mode post nights |
[Sep. 12th, 2008|04:28 am] |
Like Andrew, I decided a few days ago to change my entire environment over from ISO8859-1 to UTF-8 (dammit, what was wrong with US-ASCII anyway, apart from being invented by the Americans?). The driver was querybts erroneously (debian bug 487674, 497641, 213470, etc) putting out utf-8 when the terminal wasn't capable of it, so every now and then the terminal would lock up. This started happening everytime for some bugs, and I traced it down to querybts (recently?) outputting cutsie wutsie symbols:
14) #487789 [i||☺↝] [apt-cacher] apt-cacher locks when using checksum and requiring it concurr
I also had always found it mildly annoying that at some time in the past, I had to play with the 8 bit clean settings in /etc/inputrc for some reason I can't recall, which meant I then had to redefine all the other key combinations that were now being interpreted as 8 bit key combos:
"�": forward-word #\M-f
(where � was the iso-8859-1 representation of what came out of C-v M-f)
But UTF-8 always seemed to cause me more problems. Logging into systems would all get confused, etc.
But I found that if I set LANG=LC_MESSAGES=en_AU.UTF-8 (utf8 on some systems, but UTF-8 always seems to work), logged out completely so any new xterms inherited the right environment, and changed all of my systems so they don't explicitly set LC_MESSAGES to en_AU (ISO-8859-1) fixed that.
So next, the only font I found that could render both the characters in querybts's output, and any characters I could find on the net/in my spam folder, and displayed 0 with a dot in it (a feature I only just discovered during my experimenting (had been using the default "fixed" in xterm for years), which I found extremely useful and all of a sudden indispensable), and allows arbitrary rescaling, was DejaVu. So, in ~/.Xdefaults (and ~/.Xresources, symlinked):
!http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/hints/xterm-sensible.html
XTerm*VT100.faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono
XTerm*VT100.boldFont: DejaVu Sans Mono:style=Bold
XTerm*VT100.faceSize: 11
However, setting the face sizes for shift-kp+/- was unreliable:
!doesn't seem to set the relative sizes as monotonically increasing - can't slot default size=11 in between facesize4 and facesize5
!XTerm*VT100.faceSize1: 1
!XTerm*VT100.faceSize2: 5
!XTerm*VT100.faceSize3: 7
!XTerm*VT100.faceSize4: 9
!XTerm*VT100.faceSize5: 14
!XTerm*VT100.faceSize6: 17
So I went back to defining non-xft fonts which set the scaling and the default font size relative to the other selectable fonts, which xft then overrides the actual fonts (but not their sizes) with:
!When using xft fonts (facename below), these below just set the relative scalings and where the default font size fits in relative to the other font sizes
!XTerm*VT100.Font2: -efont-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
!XTerm*VT100.Font2: -misc-fixed-medium-r-*--12-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
XTerm*VT100.Font2: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-8-80-75-75-c-50-iso10646-1
XTerm*VT100.Font3: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-13-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
XTerm*VT100.Font4: -efont-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
!XTerm*VT100.Font5: -efont-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
XTerm*VT100.Font: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
XTerm*VT100.Font5: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
!XTerm*VT100.Font6: -efont-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
XTerm*VT100.Font6: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
(efonts is from xfonts-efont-unicode and xfonts-efont-unicode-ib)
Annoyingly, displaying an xterm over a ssh connection to 1000km away was very slow at drawing the fonts. Paging up and down in pine would cause redisplays to take a few seconds (and scrolling through my spam folder line by line was impossibly annoying), compared to instaneous redisplays in the past. So for remote pine sessions (displayed within an xterm started remotely via bindings within gbuffy), I overrode the font selections to go back to non-xft rendered fonts, and selected a large font size (that's how I read email - I'm getting blinderer) manually:
xterm -geometry 125x28 -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1' -xrm 'XTerm*renderFont:false' -e pine
But gee fixed-24 looks ugly and blocky, looking like it has been rendered at the incorrect size. If I select via shift-KP_- the next smallest font (defined by XTerm*VT100.Font5 = fixed-20 above), then it looks fine. Another twisty passage to this spagetti was my spam folder. I actually found I had been using the fact that pine would display "??????" for anything international. For me, international==spam, which makes for a very useful mental filter - if I see a block of "????", then it speeds up my visual processing a hell of a lot compared to seeing
+ N 7902 Thu11am john-patrick chun (7041) База данных
So I overrode the xterm that starts the spam folder version of pine with
env LANG=POSIX LC_MESSAGES=POSIX pinexterm -f spam
Now finally, pressing meta-q in an emacs session to justify text was screwing up, as was meta prefixes in bash and readline, outputting strange characters or worse. So clean up all that crap I had in /etc/inputrc, and set 8 bit clean mode:
# Be 8 bit clean.
set input-meta on
set output-meta on
set convert-meta off
and tell xterm to send meta chars as escape prefixes instead of a high bit in ~/.Xdefaults:
!to get meta characters to be able to be input in bash and emacs in an xterm:
!http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/hints/xterm-8bit.html
XTerm*VT100.utf8: 1
XTerm*VT100.eightBitInput: false
XTerm*VT100.eightBitControl: false
XTerm*VT100.eightBitOutput: true
Remaining issues: the terminal (specifically, readline history recall in bash) sometimes gets confused and repositions the cursor up a line everytime the up arrow is pressed, until enter is pressed (on some unknown line that you can't read because the display lines are messed up), whereupon history will function normally again. Under circumstances I don't yet understand or can reliably reproduce. I wonder if the "stty sane" in my $PROMPT_COMMAND is interacting with the 8-bit clean mode and/or some other method of playing nasty tricks?
The ℃ symbol Andrew talks about doesn't seem to be in my copy of DejaVu, and I get a square box at least in xterm (and can't be bothered firing up openoffice to see what it thinks).
Strangely, rescaling the fonts in the non-xft rendered xterm sometimes get rid of the abilty for the querybts symbols to be rendered properly. Not all of the -fixed- sizes were created equally.
Non xft rendered fixed-24 (the incorrectly scaled one) leaves dags behind.
The dash is a bit too short for my tastes. Yes, I know it's typesettically correct, but my tastes are set in stone now, unfortunately. ls --color looks silly when the dash is only a few pixels wide, and gnu/posix didn't standardise on the em-dash when choosing the character used in setting commandline switches.
Nice surprises: Now I can cut and paste scientific/international stuff from a webpage, and paste into an xterm (slrn, the bash prompt, etc) without getting missing characters or strange side effects, because meta is now effectively now sent out of band.
Summary
Now, where's the interrobang key on my keyboard?
Lunix on *my* desktop finally enters the 19th century. In most of my xterms (I've got a tiny little xterm that sits in my FvwmButtons that is only just wide enough to display 'ncal -3', and stays on all virtual screens, for doing quick nasty one liners, like start up other xterms or aforementioned 'ncal -3'. Because it's tiny, it needs to be a small font, and fixed still works best for that)
Incidentally, it's probably a good thing that the new Telscope Control Computer appears to be fully operational as of a couple of weeks ago[1], because I don't think the old interdata supports UTF-8 (not that it has ssh or indeed telnet either - wouldn't fit in core or on the disks). Expect the old interdata to be decommisioned over the next 6 months. Anyone want nixie and/or nimo tubes? I won't vouch for the core memory - it actually developed a core parity error 2 nights ago - I walked past it on the way back from the tearoom, and it was startingly obvious that it was stuck - the flickering front panel register and program counter lights are very notable in their absense. I didn't bother exercising (mpg and asf also in the same location) the Big White Lever, because the new TCS was functioning so well without the old Computor Control System. I encouraged the dinosaur herder over a beer today to pull the Big Red Switch, but he wasn't having anything of it. Something about tempting fate. And 37 year old paper capacitors in power supplies.
[1] Modulo decreasing numbers of bugs of lesser importance - although I did alert my boss today^Wyesterday to the fact that the servoing algorithm is entirely suboptimal (the D term in the PID loop is set to zero) compared to modern servo algorithms employed on the likes of the VLT despite the fact that the world expert on telescope servoing algorithms wrote the source code to ours |
|
|
| Long nights |
[Sep. 8th, 2008|10:11 pm] |
I accidentally walked 11km up past this little rock to the top of the Grand High Tops[1][2] a couple of days ago (from the carpark at the bottom of the valley in that photo). In the 2 hours before dinner and impending doom^Wnight shift. My legs, back, butt and arms still haven't forgiven me. Accidentally? Well, we had 2 hours available, and I wanted to show an observer the area (the weather has managed to be bad every single time I have been onshift this year, so I've barely been out all year). We decided to go on a short walk, but we were having too much fun. So we went to the next peak. And then the next. And then the next. And then we were 150m from the top with 30 minutes left before we had to be back at the car, so we decided we'd might as well go up there as long as the terrain wasn't too difficult. Got back to the lodge just as dinner was being served. I'm sure I more than compensated for the 2000kcal my HRM reckoned I had burnt (sorry Fred Watson, but you weren't in the lodge soon enough, so I ate your roast chicken). Photos might come later when my walking partner gets back to her laptop (I forgot my camera).
We saved lastnight from the evil forces of dark-and-lack-of-photon. In an unprecendented event, the observer that had been on for the past week didn't realise they still had one night left (staff astonomer, required to support service queue observing after his own run), and disappeared early. 5 minutes before dinner, the next observer arrived at the lodge, with the hope of getting a quiet relaxing night of rest in order to be able to be fit to observe the next day. Upon arriving, said observer was told "I'm glad you're here, our real observer seems to have gone back home. Do you want us to do an instrument change and you get started early if this weather clears?" (And I was half joking. Silly us. We should have just gone to bed early and pretended it was cloudy all night). 6 hours later, we completed the instrument change just as the clouds were parting (it usually takes 5 staff 6 hours, although the tech and yours truly only performed the bare minimum to get us going), and we have the rest of the night available. Are we good or what?
Incidentally, Trimble & Ceja, 2008, Astron. Nachr., 329, 632 calculate that the telescope I am driving right now is the most productive (in terms of number of papers) and has the highest impact (number of citations) of any 4 metre class telescope in the world, and we have the 5th highest productivity of *any* telescope (in front of Gemini (HAW HAW! How much money did we waste there, again?), but behind the Hubble Space Telescope (not a bad class to be in), VLT, Keck and 2MASS), and also 5th highest in impact (behind HST, Keck, VLT & SDSS). Not bad going for this humble little operation. It's because of dedicated staff like yours humbly truly that we get such good results :) Seriously, we do better than Gemini? Burn! On! Them! (ok, so it was early days for both Gemini 'scopes still, during the sample period of 2001-2003 (first light in 1999, first science in 2000).
[1] Gah! Siding Spring. There's only 1 (and no one I know has actually found it).
[2] The article talks of the stair cases. National Parks and Wildlife Service are currently building part of it. They've got a lovely path cut into the rock zigzagging its way upwards, but they're building stairs that go straight up, and will block off that track. With handrails and barriers every few flights (to stop people tumbling down if they slip. They'll only fall 20m before crashing into the unforgiving metal barrier, instead of going to the bottom). On some misguided attempt to get sued less I guess. Because if you just have a track, and someone falls over through their own negligence, they might be tempted to sue NPWS. Whereas if they build stairs, and the careless fools fall over, they won't be tempted to sue NPWS. Or something. Or worse, if the stairs actually fail, in which case, people will actually have valid grounds to sue NPWS. Am I too elitist? Am I wrong to want tracks unspoiled by the craposity of "civilisation" and lawyers? To not have my experience in the bush spoilt by handrails and barriers that only get in the way? |
|
|
| Gnome is user friendly |
[Sep. 2nd, 2008|12:50 pm] |
I installed debian on my mum's machine lastnight, since windows is giving her such trouble. For the first time ever, I let the installer do its thing instead of tweak everything the way it should be (ie, fvwm, etc). Gnome *looks* quite slick. It even does some things correctly. It's a tentacled mess of undocumented crap, however I didn't let that affect me because it's not my machine and I don't have to deal with it. It suspends, resumes, resizes the screen, and does other things that it should for someone who won't be going into it too deeply. Sure, NetworkManager has no idea how to set up a working network, but I'll shoehorn resolvconf and pdnsd into it later today after I go home, copy the .debs onto a usb thingy, and ride over to mum's house to install it. Then I imagine that the only thing to hold me up would be the fact that mum doesn't remember her email login passwords.
But now, at work, things are a different matter. I am getting an observing machine set up, and have to deal with gnome a lot deeper (since these are embedded computers that have a single purpose in life, I'd rather just run fvwm or window-manager-less). Well, deep enough to open up gnome-terminal. OK, so read a manpage. Close the manpage with an aim of copying some text. Alternate screen switching bites me. OK, work through the menu options to preferentially disable alternate screen switching, or failing that, at least switch back to the alternate screen temporarily so I can copy what I was going to copy. No dice. Neither can I set titeinhibit in an X resource. Gnome's dumbing down bites me. You can't do either. Plenty of people on the net offering suggestions like removing the tite strings from the term definitions (actually, I want something analagous to XTerm.VT100.tiXtraScroll, because I like the screen at least clearing, just not losing any of the scrollback buffer). Fuck that. Or set -X in $LESS, which of course does a fat lot of good for any other program such as vi, or emacs, or ...
What's the point of switching screens if you can't even switch screens on demand?
Who came up with this shit, and are they proud of themselves? Does anyone actually *use* this crap? Or do they just point and drool? User friendly, my arse. |
|
|
| But at least I feel safe |
[Aug. 27th, 2008|10:08 pm] |
What can I say? I'm disappointed that such a surprisingly large number of people have bought into the fear, uncertainty and doubt.
And yet the study reveals that almost 40 per cent of voters believe the Government should be doing more to prevent terrorism
Do more what? Prevent what terrorism? The only people I see wanting to commit terrorism are those that want to blow up the TSA to rid the world of a small number of really really really stupid people.
Taxpayers' money we waste on excessive counter-terrorism measures is money we can't spend reducing the gap between white and indigenous health - or, if that doesn't appeal, on buying Olympic medals.
-- Ross Gittins
Good to see the Hollowmen back on TV. I had been missing them. |
|
|
| Amusing crash, not bike related |
[Aug. 23rd, 2008|02:00 pm] |
Now this is a blogworthy event (not much else has been). My computer actually crashed, and I wasn't doing anything silly and hardware related at the time. It certainly crashed in an amusing fashion.
The machine had been running under quite a high network, cpu and process load, and was running quite warm (but not too hot). I just noticed that a file I had asked a multithreaded program to save hadn't hit the disk yet (as in, wasn't even appearing in a directory listing). Then I noticed the time in my $PROMPT was about 7 minutes behind the real time, and about 7 minutes behind the time output in a previous $PROMPT. Various commands started failing when they were trying to get file information (but not always). Most of my $PROMPTS started hanging. Nothing in dmesg telling me what was wrong (other than CPU temperature related warnings). Load wasn't increasing through the roof, but load wasn't being updated because obviously time had stepped backwards. Eventually the mouse stopped responding (perhaps when time started going forwards relative to the point at which it stepped back). And all I had was alt-sysrq-s-u-b (which was recalcitrant itself).
Weird. I might have a virus :)
Hey, at least it gave me a chance to restart X and try out the fix to bug #491526. |
|
|
| Google streetview |
[Aug. 5th, 2008|08:33 pm] |
They drove through my little town, taking pictures of my flat, my work (the enormous white phallic (yet fuzzy, and hence SFW) thing in the background. If they asked, I'm sure we would have let them up to the dome), and the two ginormous hills between my flat and my work? Cool! (Not that I'm going to show you where I live :). That's a lot of effort to go to for the sake of a town with 2500 people in it. But most impressive, is that they must have driven through town in December last year, because they drove through the flooded weir at the bottom of town. In the one time it had been flooded in the past year. I was going to call them stupid, but most of the water had already gone -- it had been up to the top of the road at its heights. Those floods were really rushing. Clearly, the satellite view pictures had been taken at an entirely dryer time. |
|
|
| Lavoisier madness |
[Aug. 5th, 2008|06:49 am] |
I woke up to a dream this morning, where this little thing, resembling one of the fat blobs we saw on Dr Who a few weeks ago, was running around mad in a cage, bashing itself against the walls. I said "must be the soul of the Lavoisier group -- must be mad from too much carbon dioxide and cigarette smoke injestion, and Exxon Mobile just pulled life support. Shoot it"
Of course, like all good dreams, it didn't quite make logical sense. Carbon dioxide and cigarette smoke injestion don't cause rabies like symptoms, and you wouldn't put such a case on life support. |
|
|
| real coffee |
[Aug. 1st, 2008|03:55 am] |
He said he did not expect his business to benefit from the closure of the nearby Starbucks because the customers who went there were "not interested in real coffee anyway".
Says Gloria Jean's.
Cutting. So very cutting. Coming from Gloria Jean's. |
|
|
| Sysadmin appreciation day |
[Jul. 26th, 2008|02:49 am] |
While I was busy yesterday moving accounts around on machines in an attempt to decommission all of the Slowaris machines that I can find, while I was busy rescuing the observing software from a spontaneous breakage in the behaviour of the communication between 2 machines, while I was busy RTFS in an attempt to find which particular menu option allowed us to close the hartmann shutters (inadequate documentation combined with a new support astronomer combined with suboptimal software UI design), while I was busy documenting my own software, while I was busy researching how to fight with horrible closed source software like vmware and nvidia drivers, while I was busy unsuccesfully hacking that horrible open sourced snd_hda_intel driver to get my damned system beeps back (now that the world is going the way of snd_hda_intel, I forsee this problem becoming much more pervasive and annoying), while I was busy researching how to fight with an inhouse version control system and instrument control networking environment, I completely missed the fact that it was sysadmin appeciation day.
I want my hugs.
In other news, I've had too much coffee, and/or the adrenaline is too strong today. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
tau_iota_mu_c's journal