Ansuz

Curses, foiled again

I just came home to an unusual silence. No fans. My main desktop computer was not running. That's especially bad because it is supposed to come up all by itself in the event of a power outage. On further investigation, it seems to be in pretty bad shape. After a power cycle the fans and power light come on, and the drives sound like they're spinning up. The DVD tray ejects when the button is pressed. But there's no signal out of the VGA port, no response or LED flashes on the keyboard, nothing on the network. These are not good signs. It looks like something is really seriously wrong with this machine.

Between backups, RAID, and the other computer hardware I have around here, I'm sure I won't lose data and will be able to continue more or less carrying on my life. It's going to be rough if I can't get this machine or something very much like it up and running again soon, though. Any email that came in between when I last used it (around six pm) and whenever it crashed (could be as late as eleven) will be sitting on those hard disks until I get them hooked up to a machine that works. My main backup machine didn't work last time I tried to use it, and was slated to be decommissioned, so I don't know if I'll be able to use it to recover the main main machine. I'm writing this from the laptop, through the firewall (which is still fine).

And if, as looks to be the case, this machine is mostly or entirely a write-off, then I'm faced with the question of whether to get a new one now, or wait until after my move and have one less thing to move. I don't know if I can realistically run off the laptop alone all the time until then. At the very least I need to get a machine with a DVD burner up and running so I can back up the laptop's drive. I also wonder what I'll do with the scratchbuilt geodesic sphere case the apparently-dead machine is in, which I have never even quite finished building; unfortunately, if the electronic guts of the machine are dead then I think the sensible thing to do is write that off as well. It wouldn't be practical to to try put a new machine's insides into the sphere.

Fixing the JED dealbreakers

There are many things I like about the JED text editor, and for a number of years it has been my preferred editor for working on C code. However, it has a number of misfeatures that make it unacceptable for other tasks for which I need a text editor, so I have generally been using JED only for C code, and JOE for most other things (including, notably, English-language writing of both fiction and nonfiction in LaTeX and flat text). Just recently I had occasion to try to edit some C code on my laptop, which had a fresh default installation of JED, and it was a horrible experience, and I realized that I had, years ago, made a number of customizations to JED that I'd long since forgotten about.

For my own future reference, and anyone who might be facing a similar situation, here are some notes on changes I made. I decided while I was at it to try to not only bring the laptop's installation up to the desktop's standard so I could use it for C, but also fix as many as possible of the issues keeping me from using JED for other things on both installations, so that I could at least consider adopting it as my general editor instead of mostly using JOE. It remains to be seen whether JED will be able to serve as my all-purpose editor, but so far I've been liking it once I sorted out these issues.

So much for Twitter

I have a Twitter account under the name mattskala, but I no longer endorse Twitter because their newly-mandatory "OAuth" system treats open-source client software as second class. We were warned about this, and apparently it's been in effect since September 1, but the first I knew of it was a vague awareness that my automatic word counts weren't getting posted. It turns out that now it's no longer possible to authenticate to Twitter with HTTP "Basic" authentication; you must go through the human-readable Web interface, or authenticate via something called OAuth. So it's a lot harder to just send an HTTP transaction with a simple utility, and have an update posted. The API has become much "heavier."

Cross Product, chapter 15: The eleutherophobe

Again Mella returned to the tripod and lantern. There were faint clinkings. Maybe she was cooking up a stir-fry in the wok. That wasn't really a very amusing thought; I was getting bored fast. I was tempted to turn around and see what was going on, but I'd been told quite explicitly not to do that, so I didn't. That moment was when I first noticed, what, a shimmer? a disturbance? in the forest in front of me.

Satoshi Kon, 1963-2010

I was saddened to hear that my favourite anime director, Satoshi Kon, died last week. The link is to a goodbye letter he left behind.

The battle hymn of the Royal Dwarven Kilted Axemen

I got sick over the weekend, probably from all the stress, so for the past few days I've been working from home, and not working very hard. I've also been playing a lot of Dwarf Fortress. This has involved a steady stream of exclamations along the lines of "Goddammit what kind of mother carries her baby into the extremely dangerous aquifer layer?" and "Caution. Siege engine practice area." After one fort got wiped out by goblins (the goblins only killed a few dwarfs, but then the others were so upset they flipped out and started killing each other) I decided that the next one would have a proper military, and that turned out to involve a unit called the "Royal Dwarven Kilted Axemen." So, naturally, I had to share the below.

Cross Product, chapter 14: In a midnight choir

Late on Saturday afternoon I was lying on a soft, mossy slope in the sun, looking up at the clouds and thinking of not much of anything. I had gotten so far into the whole thing of moving no muscles except my eyes, that I didn't even turn my head to look when someone came and lay down on the ground next to me, even though it was so close that I could feel all the moss along that side of my body depress slightly with the weight. When she spoke I recognized the voice as Taylor's. "What are you doing?"

Update

I've reached agreement in principle with people at the University of Manitoba for me to go there as a postdoctoral researcher. Details are still to be worked out, but it looks like that'll be my next career step. At least until I learn enough Japanese to pass the entrance exams for TouDai, thereby fulfilling a childhood promise.

Cross Product, chapter 13: Every possible Universe

Far too early and far too loud, Taylor was hip-checking me in my sleeping bag and saying "Wake up, sleepyhead! It's morning!" I pried my eyelids open and indeed it was. I didn't feel like I had been asleep more than ten minutes or so. She, of course, looked perfectly rested and satisfied. I should have requested lodging in a "non morning people" tent, or better yet convinced the others to help me tie her to the cold steel frame of the telescope support for the night as a sacrifice to the mosquitoes. Make her beg for a place in the tent, and behave herself when and if it was granted. I bet Jeff and Rick weren't awake yet.

Cross Product, chapter 12: Crimson and pearl

I stood on a bared mound of rock watching the yellow Sun sinking into the trees. It almost lined up with a straight row of hills, and I wondered if it would line up with them perfectly on some special day, like a solstice or equinox. I wondered if I would get to see the green flash. I've read that during sunrise and sunset there's a moment where the angle is exactly right for atmospheric refraction to bend the green part of the spectrum down to ground level, but you can only see it when the observing conditions are perfect, and I never have.

Disabling the "same directory as current tab" brain damage of KDE's konsole terminal emulator

So, you have a new laptop computer. You install the latest and greatest Slackware Linux on it, and it naturally comes with a newer version of KDE than what's on your desktop machine. You open the "konsole" terminal emulator as usual, work for a while, and then when you're ears-deep in /etc/acpi/events or somewhere, you open another tab and Whoa! you aren't in your home directory as you expected, your new tab is ears-deep in /etc/acpi/events or some such Godforsaken place.

Well, the first time you figure you just made a weird mistake and typed cd /etc/acpi/events/or/some/such/Godforsaken/place without realizing it (and then, fnord-like, didn't see the command in the terminal window), and you automatically type cd again to go where you meant to be and you carry on. But then it happens again.

So you resolve to lay off the crack pipe for a few days, grit your teeth and type "cd" again, and so it is only on the third time it happens that you finally decide maybe it's not just you, and you make appropriate experiments and discover the horrible truth: the KDE developers inflicted this on you as a deliberate feature! When you open a new tab it will pry into your bash process, figure out where you are, and put the new tab there to prevent your escape. Heaven help you if you weren't using bash.

That ought to be the end of the story, since they at least had the decency to put a check box for it on the "Edit profile" configuration dialog. Below the fold, what happens if you uncheck that box...

Cross Product, chapter 11: Whiteshade simple

Rick winced in pain as he eased into a kitchen chair, and Mella was immediately all over him. She tore the bandage from his leg and gazed alertly at his cut. Looking up at him, wide-eyed, from where she knelt on the floor, she said, "You're hurt! Let me heal you." "Well, I -" he began, clearly uncomfortable, but the witch wasn't listening. "I will make for you a poultice of wolf dock," she said with odd formality, "and covet my neighbour. Don't move." She stood, and dashed into the hall; before I could follow, she was back with a thick worn paperback book in one hand and a root in the other.

Cross Product, chapter 10: Yes means no

Late afternoon we started looking for a place to camp. We had hoped to reach the summit, but we'd made slower progress than we had expected, and it looked more reasonable to camp about halfway up and go for top in the morning. This was not consistent with my experience of walking all the way to the top and back in one day when I had been alone; I guess the heavy packs were slowing us down a fair bit more than we'd thought. Fortunately, the other side of carrying heavy packs was that we had plenty of supplies and could easily stay the whole three-day weekend; even if we ran over a little, none of us would really get in much trouble if we missed half a work day on Monday.

A note on similarity search

Hi! I'm a scientific researcher. I have a PhD in computer science. My doctoral dissertation is mostly about the mathematical background of "similarity search." That means looking at things to find other things they are similar to. I've travelled the world to present my work on similarity search at scientific conferences - and some very smart people with very limited funds chose to use those funds to pay for me to do that.

Argument from authority has its limitations, but I would like to make very clear: I am an expert in the specific area of how computers can answer questions of the form "Which thing does this thing most resemble?" Gee, why would I mention this right now?

Cross Product, chapter 9: Jugging for cats

When I started going to Scouts, it was the first year that they let girls join. I could tell you a few stories about that, to be sure, but they wouldn't be as interesting as you imagine. Despite what everybody says, sex really doesn't make that much difference to kids. At four in the morning under three layers of sopping wet nylon and a tarp in the middle of the forest far away from Mom, after a dinner of hamburgers that your patrol leader didn't really cook properly, you have other things to think about than the fact that there might be an actual member of the opposite gender in the next tent over. Lord Baden-Powell said that every Scout ought to sleep with the windows wide open, and he said that in England, too, where the climate is no laughing matter. Maybe he figured it would keep the kiddies "continent" if they were chilled into suspended animation, but more likely he was just nuts.