I've been working on my downstairs project for most of the day. I figure I put in about seven hours today, mostly installing insulation between the upper and lower floors to keep noise from traveling between the rooms. My kitchen is over the downstairs bedroom, and the family room is above the library. I also finished some electrical wiring (a project I was putting off because it was so nasty difficult to get 12/3 around a 90° corner boxed in by 2x4s on every side. All that work just to have a light in the bedroom closet…
I also nailed in some 2x6s along the bottom plate in the bathroom around the shower so I have a place against which to put the concrete for the custom shower pan, one of the next projects on the list.
Finally, at this point, I can start installing drywall. Or plywood—in the library ceiling—because I'm putting brass tiles on the library ceiling. I have quite a few things to work around, but as I start putting drywall up I'll be clearing space out of my garage, so it works out perfectly. Right now, though, I'm sore, hungry, and thirsty.
I started downloading Starcraft 2 yesterday morning around 7am. Given that it was 6.99Gb, I figured it would take most of the day. I was wrong.
The ETA bounced around 30 to 120+ hours. After I got home, I started digging in to the download client settings, and found the peer-to-peer info page, which showed me that I was getting a whopping 6Kb/s from three different peers, each at 2.0Kb/s.
So I figure the Mac version wouldn't be as popular as the Windows version, but seriously—this was horrible! So I shut down the peer-to-peer functionality (not recommended by Blizzard), and immediately jumped to around 600Kb/s download rate. It finished in two hours.
Starcraft 2 is, however, gorgeous.
- Our new @CarbonLeaf cooler: http://yfrog.com/7f48761214j #
- Waiting at home for the plumber to show up. It's going to be a busy day despite not being at work. #
- Finally got all my network wiring wrapped up. http://yfrog.com/jcs96j #
- Back to work today. Three projects finished at home yesterday. Feet and legs sore from being on a ladder most of the day. #
- Listening to the latest @FootStompin Scottish Music Podcast. #
- Just had Marketing request a change to our existing online database that is impossibly dangerous to make right now. #SorryNextVersionOnly #
- PS The @RiffTrax live show on 8/19 will be broadcast to our local Coeur d'Alene theater this time! #
- Getting all my server to auto-run sysstats and email me reports. Automation is double rainbow. #
- Afraid to show my newly-created server network graph to anyone. They'll want to see it often and it's so much work to produce... #
- Installed a new shower this morning. I was only half awake, but it was easy. One nozzle high with a hand-nozzle. Two sprays at once is nice. #
- Must resist....urge to be....sarcastic! #
- Upgrade-o-rama half way done. Well, job-wise, not time-wise. Tomorrow's upgrade will take FOREVER. #
- Sorry RE the bad blog links. They're fixed. I was experimenting with some Apache rewrite rules and accidentally broke the archive feature. #
- Burned two database backups to a DVD. They were bzip2'd mysqldumps. I had 20.4Mb left on the DVD. #perfectFit #
- Two days in a row at work late. This is not a good trend. #
- On the way to Farragut state park for 4 hours to help out with some service projects. #
Dear Apple,
YOU SUCK. My office's brand new $3200 Mac Pro has to have a specific keyboard because you didn't put an eject button for the DVD drive on the machine! You, sirs, are complete asses.
Plus, your top-of-the-line machines don't work with KVMs. I don't know how business-people use your hardware…
One of my servers went down today. It runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. I don't know what happened, none of the partitions filled up or anything, it just "freaked out." Perhaps something went bad somewhere, and in its defense, it'd been running for 352 straight days.
In any case, after triage I was doing some system checks and I found I'm missing the /var/log/messages file. Weird. So I send a SIGHUP to the syslog daemon and it does nothing.
So I check the /sbin directory and the klogd binary was there, but the syslogd binary wasn't! I had to reinstall syslog-ng. It's hard to track down a problem like this when your logfiles aren't there…
I heard a review of the Canadian show Corner Gas on the Firefly podcast The Signal quite a while ago, and added it to my Netflix queue. It showed up last week. I finally got around to watching it last Friday night, and it was pretty funny. There were some hit-or-miss episodes on the first disk, but overall it was pretty good stuff. I love how the first episode started, even before the credits.
So check it out, you might like it. Eh.
- 9am. Time for some breakfast, and to get back to this new Alastair Reynolds book. #
- Every day, @carbonleaf gets a little bit closer to me. This Saturday, within 100 miles. Concert time! #
- My taste in shows is vindicated! @rifftrax loves @jhonenv's work #
- The Batman of Monte Cristo #movieswithbatman #
- Sad panda. My Kindle I bought from @woot which I've had for 5 days has a screen problem
# - My sad panda Kindle http://yfrog.com/87u5zj #
- Wow, Amazon's cross-shipping my replacement Kindle out overnight. Good customer service FTW. #
- Filed another spam text message complaint with the FCC. I hope those businesses think it was worthwhile. Jerks. #
- A picture of @greatbigsean I took at a concert last year. http://yfrog.com/9dybsxj #
- RT @rosshorsley Today's word is REPAIR: http://myfirstdictionary.blogspot.com - And it is AWESOME #
- Finally broke down and called a repair man to fix the tankless water heater. It keeps shutting off. #
- My copy of @make vol. 23 just showed up in the mail! It's the only magazine I subscribe to. #
- We've determined that our cleaning lady at the office is the offspring of the hideous meat-thirsty Hogulus. It makes sense if you see her #
- Just floored by hearing Heidi Talbot's "If You Stay" for the first time. Wow. Just wow. #
- Off to a post-work meeting. Where people DON'T know how to hold meetings... #
- Updating a laptop to Ubuntu 10.04 from 9.10. So far so good. Let's see how it does on its own. #
- Just found @johnmccusker on Twitter. I LOVE LOVE LOVE his Yella Hoose album! #
- Upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS killed the laptop. No idea what went wrong. 9.10 FTW. #
- Apple admits it's not perfect. Millions of fanboys die a little inside. #
- I was told by a fanboy once that because my Safari browser crashed on the iPhone, I should return it because it's a hardware fault. #
- Updated my browser to Opera 10.60. Really new look. #
- Got forwarded an email from a guy with the last name of..wait for it...BUTT. #
- It is my curse to awaken early every Saturday. #
- Watched Neighborhood Watch ep of @BurnNotice_USA. They kept calling an LTO tape a "tape drive." #myOnlyGripe #
- And @BurnNotice_USA is pretty good technical-wise. A tape drive reads the tapes. I have 3 drives that would have read that tape, too. #
- Just arrived at Rendezvous in the Park in Moscow I'D to see @CarbonLeaf!! #
- Local band sings "Your Love is Like a Milk Machine" and I think they'll never be famous. Surprised? #
- Walking around the park, @CarbonLeaf members are just walking around here too, it's awesome! #
- Just talked to Terry of @CarbonLeaf, super nice guy! #
- . @CarbonLeaf is rocking the stage old school right now. I love how much of their old stuff they're playing! #
- The concert was great! @CarbonLeaf signed our cooler!! #
Tomorrow Carbon Leaf plays in Moscow, Idaho. I've had tickets since the day I found out a couple of weeks ago. I'm very excited to see them live again!
Today I received the Drobo FS I ordered last Friday, along with three 2Tb drives to make it happy.
First off, can I say that in my years of IT work, this is by far the easiest installation I've ever had. All I did was slide the drives in and plug in the network and power and turned it on. Then I walked away. Sheer brilliance.
I installed their software, the Drobo Dashboard, so I could configure the device (from a Windows machine). A few minutes after power-up, there it was in the window showing drives ready to go:
The only complaint I have is interoperability with backup software (I use Symantec's BackupExec), which appears to be available only with the Drobo Pro and Drobo Elite models. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure I can pull data off via the share, but a backup client does a better job of streaming data out than Windows SMB.
Overall, I'm excited to have an appliance to store our data without having to maintain an operating system and all its related hardware. Depending on how things go, we may be switching more of our storage over to Drobo later.
- I always thought sparklers were for little kids. Until I found out that if you strap a bunch together they all blow up at once. #
- Repurposing fireworks is more fun than buying the illegal ones. We're making a rocket sled for a chicken out of Whistle Petes. #
- Next year we should have a contest: $20 of legal fireworks. Biggest bang and best shows for the win. #
- It's a real good thing we're not flying anywhere tonight. My hands smell like gunpowder. #
- Sparkler bomb didn't explode, but it did shoot sparks up in the air and then lit itself on fire. #
- Also: learned how to repurpose Whistling Petes. Wrap in duct tape, then hit repeatedly with hammer. Light, run. Explosion ensues. #
- No work today due to the US holiday yesterday. We don't have enough holidays... #
- HOLY COW I HATE SLICKEDIT!! Stupid retarded program thinks it knows how I want to code. Impossibly cryptic config. Horrible! #
- Most recent #slickedit problem is using Doxygen-style comments in C++. It reformats my comments, inserts newlines where I don't want them! #
- I really need to sit down and record my #slickedit issues and email their support team. It really shouldn't be this hard. #
- Something went terribly wrong converting a class that used std::vector to use std::map instead. Instant FAILage. #
- The awesome diff program #meld saved my pigu. #
- The std::map version ate up 100% CPU time with multiple threads (top reported 199% CPU usage!) and then crashed spectacularly. Not good. #
- Reverted to std::vector version, which uses at most 3.4% CPU time and DOESN'T crash. Es Bueno. #
- Fixed a segfault on shutdown error in my #mud Things are running better now. Need to do a post-mortem on that std::map conversion. #
- Got some good pointers from a cow-orker on boost::lambda, boost::bind, and boost::function re: std::remove_if algorithm #
- I just discovered @WootLive. If they're funny dead, they must be awesome live! #
- Seriously? Do I *really* need to add -fno-strict-aliasing to my compile flags? Grrrrr. #
- Trending topics are feedback loops. I don't like feedback loops. #
- Implemented an "inventory" command in my #MUD Discovered a new issue: `look <item>` only works if the item is in the room, not in inventory #
- Using Valgrind's leak-check tool to search for memory leaks in my #MUD Problem: it'll take over 30 mins to start up due to overhead. #
- Valgrind's CallGraph functionality pointed me to the exact place my #MUD is spending most of its processing time. #
- The cleaning people did something to my office. It smells horrible today. It smells like a vacuum exploded.. #
- Building maintenance guy changed air filters, replaced them with scented odor killer filters. No bueno. #
- Once again, great music on the latest @FootStompin podcast. Bagpipes FTW! #
- My Unicornified Gravatar: http://bit.ly/aUkVSj Unicornify yours at http://tinyurl.com/ydo369p via @TheSmitchell #
- It looks like people use @WootLive like a Magic 8-ball.. #
- FTW! Valgrind helped me determine where my #MUD was spending most of its processing time. Loops are down to <37µsec #
- Absolutely EPIC. (@NathanFillion)http://yfrog.com/596xbuj #
- I must sleep now. I have a head full of YAML and C++. Fighting the good fight working on my #MUD Not much progress, but problems were fixed #
- Eliminated a couple of places protected by mutexes where it wasn't really necessary. My #MUD is speeding up! #
- Yes, I know Weichi. I also learned to play Chinese chess (they have cannon) as well as Majiang. Majiang is my favorite game. #
- Awesome. My Kindle should be here today! #
- Weekly development meeting time. I have nothing to report, but should go anyway. #
- My mom is in town just for today. She's having dinner at her friends house. So much for seeing her... #
- Mom called at 9:30 last night. We will try to have breakfast together this morning before she leaves town. #
- Excitement! Just ordered a @Drobo FS for testing in the office! #
- Busy couple of days. New software release at the office. #
- Why I hate Windows: Prompted me 3 times for my network auth, then told me the remote folder didn't exist. #
- Got my Serenity/Blue Sun t-shirt in the mail. Double Blue Sun Rainbow!! @NathanFillion #
- Looks like For The Win is out. Now it's For The Double Rainbow #FTDR @NathanFillion #
- Made lots of bread today. Have yet to bake any though. #
- Sourdough baguettes are out of the oven. Should have let them rise longer, but they're tasty! #
Today I had a lot of things going on, and I did some baking, too. I made two sourdough baguettes, mixed up a loaf of sourdough that's in the refrigerator, and also mixed 4 pounds of Boule, a round white bread we use for sandwiches throughout the week. The sourdough loaf will be cooked tomorrow, perhaps with one of the Boule loaves too (it makes 4 one-pound loaves).
I seem to do a lot of baking on Saturday now, so I think I'm going to rename it Breadurday.
I haven't done much on the MUD in the last few days, my Kindle showed up the other day, and I've been busy sucking up public domain content with which to fill its little static-RAM guts. I have to say, as much as I love books (and I love books!), a Kindle is a nice device to have! I won't be buying lots of books electronically anytime, but there is a lot of free content available that I want to read.
Now that my MUD (which I've recently settled on the name ForeverMUD) is getting more stable, I thought I'd run some profiling tools on it. Valgrind is a very cool utility made to do this very thing.
When I first started developing, I wrote in a loop timer that keeps track of the longest processing time as well as the average loop time. After the introduction of a large (16,200 room) world map, the loop times jumped from 10-30 µsec to over 190,000 µsec—no bueno.
So last night I ran Valgrind and used kcachegrind to view the results, which showed me this:
Put simply, most of my time is spent manipulating mutexes. I'm going to have to rethink my design, because that's way too much time…
- Back doing the Monday thing. At work. As usual. #
- Fail Whale time. #
- Boss asked me to find the output voltage and impedance of his laptop's headphone jack. Start at motherboard specs maybe? #
- Just tried to boot Win7 Home DVD on a Gateway laptop. Got BSOD. Well, back to XP then... #
- Heh. Thought Ubuntu install stopped working. Turns out the screen saver kicked on. #
- Aww crap. My #MUD build issue from last weekend was a stale library! Lost a weekend of development over a stupid mistake! ARG! #
- You really should see the amazing pictures @SourdoughBaker has been publishing recently. They're fantastic! #
- Awesome! My #MUD UUID system works perfectly. Auto-gen'd 16,226 GUIDs and saved new objects to disk. #
- Tracking down a segfault issue in my #mud now. At least it's progress! #
- The #MUD is doing great now. More testing for GET(), but it looks good so far. Doing some file cleanup. #
- Generated new documentation for my #MUD Uploading to server now. Will publish live tomorrow. #
- Bedtime, but one final #MUD update: My source code and world data, bz2-compressed, are 1Mb now. #
- I *really* need to get my laptop's public RSA key on my work server so I can SSH to it using PKA. It's annoying to not be able to... #
- The game @Diablo 2 is 10 years old today. And we still don't have a sequel. #
- There goes my iPhone again, tarding out and not accepting phone calls... #
- Leaving work early today because it's a fantastic thing to do! #
- Skipping work to watch a movie with my wife. There are women here 12 hours early for the Twilight movie. So sad... #
- 25 minutes on hold with Dell so far. I just need a port replicator replaced! #
- Woo! Finally got through! #
- Cupcakes would be awesome right now... #
- Crap. Forgot the login password to a test Windows 2008 server. Reformat time. (at least I never activated it) #
- Making a new loaf of Italian semolina bread. Looks tasty! #
- Also, failed to find a quality Dutch-process cocoa in Coeur d'Alene. Ended up ordering Callebaut cocoa online. #
- For $149 yes, @woot, I will buy your parent company's Kindle. #
- Closed out several bugs in my #MUD despite playing Rock Band 2 with my brother and baking a loaf of semonlina bread. Yay! #
- More Fail Whale sightings. Maybe we should just call it the FWHALE... #
- *Sigh* Dell overnighted the wrong replacement part. Now instead of one return, I have two. And still no working solution #
- Something I've learned from work: if you schedule a meeting start it on time. And have your crap together so you don't embarrass yourself. #
- Something I've learned from work: if you schedule a meeting start it on time. And have your crap together so you don't embarrass yourself. #
- This has not been a good night for sleeping. #
- Made two pizza crusts with leftover sourdough starter. Also mixed up a batch of bagels, half of which are destined to become soft pretzels. #
- A man, a plane, a canal, Panama! #oneletteroffpalindromes cf. @BillCorbett #
- Finally got the wife to watch the first "Once Upon a Time in China" movie starring Jet Li. #
- Neighbors behind me just started a fire in their yard. It's midnight. If I hear noise from them I'm so calling the cops out... #