Author: cdwan

I am so horrified by the news out of New Orleans.

That said, let this be a lesson on how rapidly civilization itself can collapse. So far as I can see, the fundamentals of society have gone bye bye in that city. There are reports of armed gangs of rapists roaming the streets, people shooting at the rescue choppers, etc.

Anyone who tells me that “it’s all going to be okay” in the face of economic collapse, plague, food shortages, or any of the other totally possible massive disasters on the horizon – they would do well to look long and hard at New Orleans right now and then tell me how this is caused by anything more or less than a sudden severe shortage of food coupled with a massive outbreak of disease.

Now, I am going to go listen to Jazz and think calm thoughts.

So far as CNN is willing to tell me, there’s a sniper firing on the patients being evacuated from the New Orleans hospital, and the Superdome is on fire.

That’ll teach ’em.

Think it might be useful to have the National Guard around? I have no idea whether the current deployment in Iraq is affecting their ability to offer domestic humanitarian aid, but it can’t be helping. That’s all I’m sayin’.

The Onion has finally put the majority of their archive back online. I am strangely drawn to “WASHINGTON, DC–Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that “our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.”

Of course, in more heartening news, we have: ‘Miracle mouse’ can grow back lost limbs. Looks like they even have an injection that gives normal mice this power. It was only a dozen or so genes, or so they’re saying.

details

My cat stares, fixed gaze
At the space under the fridge
Do I want to know?

Update on the debugging: We’ve traced it to a spontaneous reboot. Not a process dying, but a reboot. That’s different. The damn machines are rebooting at random intervals once we get them fully loaded. They die suddenly, with no message in the log files. When they come back, the only message to indicate why they rebooted is some crap about a “PMU signal -93”. Turns out that the PMU is the Power Management Unit, and the code is actually the result of some whack bit masking. -93 translates as “a watchdog process told us to shut the hell down, so we did.”

I got in touch with the person at Apple who knows such things, and asked his advice. Basically, we (1) set some debug flags in the kernel (2) set up a method to capture the death debugging screams as it goes down (to determine which watchdog requested the reboot, and why) and (3) wait for it to die again.

That was several hours ago. The reboot has gone away. Entirely possible that the debugging flags “fix” this particular behavior.

Oh, I hate computers.

Running a stupid test, on a stupid cluster, to flush out a stupid non-repeatable error, so that we can fix it. Basically, the damn thing dies “every now and then” with no discernible stimulus. Wrote up a crap-tastic test suite to stress each of the following factors in turn: Network, CPU, disk reads, disk writes, jobs in the queue. Right now it’s busily populating 20 different files from 20 different computers with lines of the form “I was here at $date”. If that doesn’t provoke the error in an hour or so, I shall have all 20 computers computing Pi for several hours. If that doesn’t kill it, they will begin to talk to each other very rapidly. “Hello?’ “hello.” “hi?” “hi.” “Hellooooo?” “Hi.” “Can you hear me now?” “How about now?”

In other news, there is a cat in heat in my neighborhood. It has been mrowling loudly for about four days now. If anyone has a male cat that needs lovin’, please send it to my street. This “mrowl, mrowl, mrooooooowl, mrow, ow,…” needs to stop.

My brother is starting college tomorrow. Moving into a dorm in Maryland. Out into the world. Sadly, all the serious truths that I would share are of the form “self evident once you know them, and meaningless if you don’t.” I mean, seriously, you can tell an 18 year old to floss, but until you have those first few dreams about your teeth all falling out … you don’t really know that you need to floss.

more stories from the weekend

Pictures from the beach

You know, the NWS isn’t quite ready to say “the vengeful hand of God is about to scour New Orleans from the face of the earth,” but it’s pretty close:

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Just watched the Battlestar Galactica miniseries (the new one, from 2003), and it’s remarkably good. The reworked human/cylon thing is very good … and the subtle touches like the fact that the Cylons believe in God really make it work. The Luddite angle (all the newfangled ships got eaten alive, while the old ones weren’t vulnerable to hackage) appeals to me. I’ll be getting the first season when it comes out.

Plus, Katee Sackhoff (“Starbuck”) is darn cute.