Ramblings

So far I have mostly enjoyed the Rama series. I read quite a few negative reviews of the second and third books, mostly because the writing style wasn’t consistant with the first, but trying not to let those reviews influence me, I ead them anyways. I must say that overall the series has held my attention. I do find myself occasionally skimming a paragraph or two, but those are usually sections that I have already realized bear very little on the actual story. Clarke, who is the credited author, spends a good deal of time in ‘flashbacks’ that I think I can see coming and consequently simply skip. Rarely do one of those flashbacks have any real bearing on what is happening, it’s simply his way of doing some character devlopment. As I embark on book number four, which seems to be longer than the previous two, I’m attempting to keep an open mind. The reviews do tend to be mostly positive, but I don’t know if that is simply because the citics gave up before they made it to book four …

Well, Gollum appears to have been rejecting *all* email for about the last day. I turns out that an upgrade of Perl went horribly wrong, resulting in an unusable installation. The mail server uses Perl for all the virus scanning and anti-virus stuff, so without Perl, all mail was just held up. It looks like things are settling back down now that I’ve gotten the Perl install fixed.

I started playing with distcc last night in preparation for building Gentoo on my old laptop (Gimli). I certainly don’t want to do all the compiling on a 200MHz laptop. I’ve got both Gollum and Aragorn (my desktop) to throw in the compile pool. Gollum is around a 1.5GHz machine, while Aragorn clocks in at just over 2GHz. I did some compiling from both those machines last night testing to see how much of an average speed boost I can get out of distcc. There is a noticable difference even when the localhost is the fastest on the network, I can’t wait to see how it does from the laptop.

I’m on a mailing list (CSC) for church sound/video/lighting techs, although there are many other professions represented as well. Recently there has been a thread running about how some people misinterpret the most normal signals. Here’s a little excerpt from the discussion:

Curt wrote:
>Someone on stage might perceive an awkward glance from the sound guy at
>precisely the wrong moment as meaning something terrible, when in fact it
>was just a reaction to the burrito that the sound guy had for lunch that …

This is so right on. I’ve actually seriously offended someone on stage
before because I made a face about something totally unrelated to them. In
one case it was my own wife and she was terribly upset about it. In these
cases I was hearing something that was wrong with the way things were setup
at the same time that they were nervous about their personal part of what
was going on and my unintentional negative feedback was the last thing they
needed.

So the next time something doesn’t work, or halfway through the first song
you realize that a toddler has reset the compressor settings or maybe
completely re-eq’ed the entire system for you, remember that the angry face,
grimace, or wince of pain may be interpreted by those on stage as directed
at them and you just might hear about it later…

Bill Apodaca

Humor is good for you. Make sure you read this understanding that it is satire.

I guess I should put a comment here about books.quad4.org. We have updated the book data for Fall 2004, so all the major features should be up and running with good data. I would eventually like to spend some time auditing Scum’s PHP code that runs the site. There have been a few items that he has mentioned over the last few years that I think I might be able to enhance or just plain get working. He definately has the design capabilities that I totally lack, so for now now visible changes should ever appear.

Well, it’s official. I finally broke 150,000 miles on the ‘ole odometer. Unfortunately, I was unable to get a picture at exactly 150K, as my camera lens was all fogged up (it’s very humid outside). Here’s a picture of just six miles over, taken this afternoon.

As some may have noticed, Gollum mysteriously dropped offline last night right at 9PM. I wasn’t able to do much troubleshooting until about 10, when I realized that I could still get to my router, just not Gollum. I was able to ssh into my machine on the same network as Gollum, but was unable to get anywhere else from on campus. I got home about 12:15 after doing laundry on campus and hooked up my monitor and keyboard to Gollum to see what was going on. It looks like Gollum freaked out over something and triggered a kernel panic. This, unfortunantly, required a reboot. The reboot caused the RAID to be unmounted uncleanly, forcing me to wait until almost 1AM while it rebuilt itself. Once the RAID settled down, things were back to normal.