Tomorrow, I have lunch with the devil Microsoft. Mmmmm, free lunch. No such thing you say? Humbug.
Tonight I sit up much too late and watch Galactica. Still making my way through the first season. By not watching tv, I get to be massively efficient in my TV selections. Finished Firefly last night, and I plan to have season one of Galactica finished “real soon now.”
Starbuck is still a cutie. A maniac, but a cute one.
Today was something of a wash.
I had planned to swap 10GB of RAM from one beastly machine into another, to do a really fair comparison between them when they were each loaded to the gills. Sadly, there was some sort of socket incompatibility which meant that I couldn’t use the 2GB DIMMS that Intel is lending us. Oh well. I thought that a DIMM was a DIMM … but apparently not.
I broke out the corporate Amex and bought a 500GB FireWire drive, so that we can begin to test our software *before* releasing it. Previously, we’ve released software that publishes large volumes of data, having tested out the small and mid-sized cases … but lacking the infrastructure to exercise the large ones. Hopefully, this was a good idea.
Then I got on the phone with this dude from up North. Said dude has been sending in support requests piecemeal every couple of hours throughout the holiday weekend. I decided to just call him, rather than try to respond to all those. Bad move. First piece of information he gave me was that the machine was behind a firewall, not connected to the network, and in no way would I be allowed to log into it. Just not possible. We were on the phone for two and a half hours, with me offering one command at a time for him to laboriously and incorrectly type and misinterpret. “I run this on the portal?” “no. The node. Type it in the terminal you’ve got open on the node.” “Terminal?” “Yes. The terminal you opened just 45 seconds ago.” “What does this ‘terminal’ program do?” “AAAAAAAAAA Stabbity stab stab stab!”
I took to emailing the commands to him, so that he could mistype them (cut and paste? Nah). I would send the message and say “I’ve sent the message.” Silence would ensue. “Have you received it?” “Yes.” “Please type that command into the terminal.” “You’ve mentioned this ‘terminal’ before, where do I find this program?”
After about two and a half hours, on a whim, I tried to ssh into the hostname that I heard him muttering. It asked for a password. I went for broke: “What’s the root password?” He told me. I was in. He had mispelled “cluster.private” as “cluster.privat” in the initial setup. I fixed that, the system started working. I congratulated him and got the hell off the phone.
Later in the afternoon, I learned that I’m going to travel up there next week to complete the install. All he was *supposed* to do was verify that the wires were plugged in correctly, so that I can do the install when I arrive. He decided to go the extra mile.
I’m *so* not getting those hours back.
redmed and I flew down to Dulles on Wed. Then we rented a car from Budget (“We’re cheap, we only have one shuttle bus!”) and drove the two hours south to my parents new digs. Interestingly, it was snowing as we headed south. Global warming my butt. On the way south, we stopped off at a Pho restaurant. One thing that Providence desperately needs is a thriving Vietnamese community to support a couple of awesome noodle soup restaurants.
My parents have fixed the place up amazingly. 30 years ago, it was a tiny farmhouse on 7 acres. Most of my real phobias and fears come from very real dangers that existed in this place (poisonous snakes, spiders, …). Now, it’s an estate with a historic outbuilding, several sheds, a pond, productive fruit trees, and the other trappings of just plain awesome. They’ve converted it from a hippie hide-out into a very cool country house.
We stayed in the school house. When they bought it, it was a decrepit shed being used for hay storage. They’ve fixed it up into sort of a grand rec-room / guest house / great hall. It’s about 300 feet down the road (one decent sized field) … which was enough to give a feel of total independence. It was interesting: Many of the trappings of the house where I grew up are jumbled around in there. Bookshelves, couches, tables and chairs, musical instruments. The memories that came back were entirely random.
Also, there was the new kitten. He’s a cute but aggressive little guy. He kept going after my feet. Also, he was positively desperate to nurse on my fingertips. Problem: Very, very sharp little teeth. His name is max, but I quickly started calling him “cactus.”
We both broke our pseudo-vegetarian habit of a year and a half and indulged in the turkey. Free range, organic, and my mom and sister cooked it. Surprisingly, my guts handled the unfamiliar animal protein very well. I don’t feel guilty about this at all … but I also see no reason to go back to eating meat on a regular basis.
My brother is familiar with Katamari Damacy. The rest of the fam looked on in horror and confusion as we sang the theme song over coffee in the mornings. Apparently at haloween, someone in his dorm wrapped himself in duct tape and just taped all kinds of random crap to himself. He was, of course, a katamari.
My sister flattered me by wanting to play chess.
My dad has purchased an Apple Powerbook (15″), which I helped him configure and update.
My brother and I tried to figure out how to work an old boomerang that we found in the house. We agreed that to use it as a weapon, the most effective approach would probably be to sneak up on whatever you were hunting and use the boomerang as a club.
On returning, we stopped off for the 10pm showing of the new Harry Potter movie. I wasn’t a big fan. Probably the stench of puberty that pervades the whole thing. I was sort of able to skim those chapters in the books. Watching stammering teenagers gawk at each other just isn’t my thing. Dark magic, on the other hand, is scary and cool. Plus dragons. Oh yes … here there be dragons.
Today has been consumed by raking, buying groceries, and generally trying to catch up on life.
Everyone who has done martial arts in any form has at some point wanted to demonstrate their prowess by breaking stuff. Usually this takes the form of breaking pine boards. It’s easy, gratifying, and a decent way to make sure that you’re hitting with sufficient speed and power to do damage to the thing you’re hitting. Plus, you get to make kung-fu noises while you do it, especially if you’re in your own basement.
I was watching a documentary on Bruce Lee, and there was a comment from a film producer that one of the really impressive things in Bruce’s demo tape was that he was able to break “dangling” boards.
Curious, I rigged up a “dangling” pine board in my basement, and tried out my best kick on it (right side kick, thanks for asking). I don’t think that the board was impressed. After a few minutes of various attempts, it’s still hanging there intact. The only evidence of my efforts are some footprints. The kung-fu noises didn’t help.
Bruce Lee was a major badass.
–UPDATE–
On the instruction of my teacher, I went after it with a front punch instead. Snapped right in half. Apparently it’s all about speed and timing.
Q: How hard is it to shoot off a lock?
A: Very hard.
I spent an hour and a half on the phone with an engineer from Intel today, which came down to the following suggestion: “Use the super secret, magic ‘-xP’ option in your builds.” Apparently the intel compilers default to making binaries that maximize (within reason, jrtom) the number of CPUs on which the binaries might be able to run. The near mystical “-xP” instructs the compiler to instead assume that the binary will always run on the processor where it’s being built, and to make use of all the cleverness at its disposal.
I have yet to run any tests with these new binaries of unparalleled beauty and power, but the builds sure are chatty now!
asn2ff4.c(713) : (col. 6) remark: LOOP WAS VECTORIZED.
I really want to see it say:
sec.c(381) : (col. 4) remark: DAMN! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?
That’s probably a different flag though.
I was just getting settled on the train coming home, got the laptop out, cell-phone wireless connected, Bach Suites wired directly into my brain, ticket taken. Sadly, the woman in front of me has apparently crapped herself. And slept through it. Snoring.
Holy hell, this train is too small. Must flee.
I am so filled with a raging desire to install this emulator on the badass demo machine (8 core Intel Xeon), and use it to play Katamari.
But I won’t, of course, because it would be wrong.
Sometimes the world tells you things. You just need to pay attention and figure out what you’re being told.
This is not the paranoid schizophrenic line: “the voices on TV, they’re actually talking to me!” This is the observation that in the sea of stimulus I receive, some patterns jump out at me. One possibility is that this is nothing more than my subconscious writ large. Selection bias working such that I notice what’s already on my mind. I’m willing to accept that, because from my point of view, the whole world conspires to let me understand what I’m thinking about. It’s a cool system.
This month, I’m thinking about when we’re going to see the first nonhuman intelligence. The first AI. I’m reading The Singularity is Near by Kurzweil. I’m also watching my way through Galactica, in which machines try to kill us all. Yesterday, capital_l pointed me to this note which alludes to the idea that Google’s media project (in which they’re scanning the contents of several libraries) is not intended for a human to read, but for an AI. It raised the question of where we are most likely to encounter the first machine intelligences.
So, where are our machine overlords going to come from? Here’s my list of guesses:
* Google / The Internet
* Secret government project
* Computer games
