Archive for April, 2005
-
30 Apr 2005
I saw Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy last night. It’s the first movie since Lord of the Rings I cared enough about to see on opening night. Here’s my very short spoiler-free review: Despite a poor review from Douglas Adams’ biographer, and mixed reviews overall, it was much farther from terrible than it was from fantastic. It was more silly than wry, but it was surprisingly faithful to the book. And despite a number of departures from the canon storyline, all of the changes still felt Adamsesque. I was definitely happy with the movie.
Discuss -
27 Apr 2005
Nine Inch Nails has made their entire upcoming album, With Teeth, available online for free. Granted, it’s a non-standard and weird streaming method, but it works fine through my work’s proxy. I love this.
-
26 Apr 2005
This is my old 1990 Toyota Camry. I purchased it for (I think) $2700 in the summer of 2000. It was the first car that I ever purchased with my own money. My previous car, a white power-nothing Mazda 626, was given to me by my parents after I totalled my first car: a 1989 Toyota Camry that despite the similarities should not be confused with this one.
-
25 Apr 2005
My parents put up a bunch of pictures of Brian’s new apartment. Granted, it’s bare-bones right now, and photos from next weekend will probably be more accurate, but you can tell from those pictures that it’s pretty big. Good party pad, from the looks.
-
22 Apr 2005
What’s the attraction behind printing things out? The new guy at work has printed at least a dozen emails this week, and also printed several of the documentation pages out and posted them in his cube. When I’m showing him something, I’m sure to say “This has a Wiki page. You can just copy and paste these commands I’m running, just like I’m doing right now.” But he has to write down every command I run on a big ol’ pad of paper.
I’ve been trying to stay virtually paperless. I take notes on my PDA instead of dead trees. I do have a notebook handy in case I need to do something that requires it, like diagramming an application or environment, but I rarely have to use it. I kinda feel like the wasteful habits of my co-worker are invalidating my good intentions. Looking around me in the last week, I’ve seen a lot of desks covered in stacks of papers, and I’m finally realizing how common this is. Why do so many people need paper copies of everything, when they just end up being unused clutter?
-
19 Apr 2005
WE’RE GOING TO E3!!!!
-
18 Apr 2005
-
15 Apr 2005
Hooray, Connecticut! It’s a great day for equality, because the CT legislature has passed a bill allowing gay civil unions! Granted, it needed to have a provision attached saying “those people definitely don’t get to marry”, but this is a massive step in the right direction. The state has become the first state to allow civil unions that didn’t have to be forced into it by the courts.
Update 21 Apr: The Senate approved the bill, and Republican Governor Jodi Rell signed it yesterday. Simply amazing. I can almost (almost) forgive her give-him-the-chair tirade. Also, this story illustrates perfectly the difference between blue states and red states. As glassdog says:
The Texas Republican Party has decided that it’s better to take a kid away from Steve and Chip, who love them and take them to school every morning, and were saving up to go to Disneyland this Summer, and put them in a state-run orphanage.
-
14 Apr 2005
I’m starting to really like the looks (not to mention the rumored specs) of the upcoming PalmOne Tungsten X (a.k.a. LifeDrive). Since my current PDA is a six-year-old Handspring Visor, this would be a tempting upgrade.
Unfortunately, it’ll probably end up costing nearly as much as the LCD screen I’m fantasizing about considering.
-
11 Apr 2005
Our new 3par storage mega-arrays at work are something else. They have some amazing hands-off features, and are extremely fast, but they also call home. They send the manufacturers statistics and apparently also our configuration information. It’s a little disconcerting, but it does have one interesting advantage. Occasionally, they notice something is wrong before our NOC does:
From: Ken Hardin
Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2005 10:01 PM
To: Unix System Administrators
Subject: Transfer overdue for 3PAR InServWe received an alert from our monitoring system indicating it has not received a heartbeat file for over 4 hours from one of your 3PAR InServ storage servers (serial number [XXX], called nw-3par-02, in CT). The last time we heard from it was around 15:30 EDT (today, 4/9/05), and at about the same time there were network errors reported by the other InServ (S/N [XXX]). This probably indicates some type of network problem.
-
10 Apr 2005
M just looked over my shoulder at the list of blogs that I read, and said “Do you really read that much shit every morning? How do you ever get any work done?”
-
7 Apr 2005
Once a process in Linux is running for more than 24 hours, it’s impossible to get an exact measurement of its start time from ps. The best you can do it something like this:
lingalls@foobar:~$ ps -o "user pid stime tty comm" -u lingalls
USER PID STIME TT COMMAND
lingalls 32237 Apr06 ? gconfd-2
lingalls 11813 Apr06 ? gnome-session
lingalls 11940 Apr06 ? utaudio
lingalls 11950 Apr06 ? utslaunch
lingalls 11951 Apr06 ? utmhscreen
lingalls 11960 Apr06 ? utaction
lingalls 11975 Apr06 ? ssh-agent
lingalls 11979 Apr06 ? bonobo-activatiWhich is completely unhelpful. So I wrote a script to calculate the accurate starttime from information in the proc filesystem. Shared here for your conveniece:
stime ()
{
if ( test \! -d /proc/$1 ); then
echo "No process $1";
return;
fi;
U="`awk '{print $1}' /proc/uptime | sed -e 's/\.//'`";
N="`awk '{print $22}' /proc/$1/stat`";
D="$(( (U-N)/100 ))";
perl -e 'print scalar localtime(time - shift)."\n"' $D
}Copy and paste that script into your bash or ksh session (or append it to your .bash_profile or .profile), and then run “stime PID”.
-
6 Apr 2005
Reading through this four-and-a-half year old thread on the demise of MetaFilter bends my mind. I find it extremely ironic that the linked article complains about the increase of noise to signal in the blue, but the comments are some of the most well-thought, cogent, and intelligent things I have ever read on MeFi. I wonder what the author thinks about the current state of the site.
-
5 Apr 2005
Congratulations to Brian for getting his first full-time job at TV Guide On Screen in Bedford, MA, outside of Boston!
Update: Also, he passed the test he needed for graduation! Hooray!
-
2 Apr 2005
This is a test of the moblogging interface that I’m setting up. Some other weirdos are going to be testing this interface as well, so any questionable things inside are not necessarily my responsibility.
Read more…