Older blog entries for jmg (starting at number 78)

When I was at home over the weekend, I saw the book that was the third book I couldn't remeber. It is Ringworld Throne by Larry Niven. It was ok, I liked the earlier Ringworld books better. I just didn't get into it.

Oh well, it's interesting dealing with Sun Enterprise stuff if you haven't ever delt with it before. Learning about disk trays and all that fun jazz. Do they ever take a LONG time to POST too.

gregf:
Interesting article on Thailand's sexual reputation, though I think that not all of it made it. Could you post the rest? or email it to me? Thanks.

Personal:
Well, I haven't written a diary entry in some time. I can't claim that I've been busy, because I really haven't, though I have started a new job a Azanda Network Devices. I'm now their CAD Tool Manager. They are a startup doing QoS on silicon for OC192 and OC768 speeds. Things are going well, need to decide how much of a job I want to make this into, but my experience at my last job, Credence is definately helpful.

I've also read a few books. Most recent is Enchantment by Orson Scott Card. A very good read. I read it over the weekend. Previous to that I read Memoirs of a Geisha which helped me realize how many misconceptions I had about geisha. I forget the book I read before that, but it wasn't as good as the previous too, so I don't feel to bad about not remebering it.

technik:
Thanks for the link to the OpenSource PKI Book. I've been thinking of bring up a site where instead of passwords, I use certificates. The only problem is that I had issues with getting pyCA to work, and none of the documents out there tell you how to take the public key generated by Netscape (by using keygen) and create the required document for import into Netscape. There's plenty of other documentation, but they seem to think you should already know how to do it, and completely ignore it. Oh well, I haven't made any progress on the site in the months since I decided to start working on it, I'll probably just end up having to use crappy username/password for it.

schoen:
Also, don't forget that if the decks get too out of order a person will likely compensate with a longer run, so you have to add in a compensation for how many cards are remaining. As an avid card player (and one who hasn't developed a perfect shuffle), I have a decent idea on how it works. Also, don't assume that you'll always have a run of at least one card. Plenty of times a person messes up and skips a card between two runs of the other deck. So, I'd add a modifier to p depending upon the difference between the two remaining decks. Just my thoughts.

mobius:
Thanks for pointing out Bridge Builder. It's a great game. I don't have the egineering background you have, so it's quite funny to see how I finish the levels. I managed to get past 10, but my bridge still collapsed. If you get the train far enough across the bridge before it collapses, the front part of the train can pull the last car off the bridge and complete. I think they should probably include a spec that the bridge must be intact to complete the level. The budget on 10 is just too darn low.

I was impressed with my abilities on level 7 and 8. I only spent 75% and ~62% of my budget respectively. Now on to playing level 11.

Finally got past level 15 after reading the hints and then realizing, counter-weights, duh! After seeing the 1st and 2nd place bridges, it made me be able to build my level 10 bridge w/o having it break. Decided to send in my level 10 bridge that breaks, but works to the authors. I think they need to add in a new parameter, weight of the bar. Right now I think they only add a constant for each point as apposed to how much "material" is there. Oh well, at least I get to say I completed the game, and would give my right arm for a copy. (Can't give my left arm, as that's the arm I write with!)

Code

Been a while since I've written in my diary. Guess I just haven't had much to write about.

Last week I got a bit bored and decided to improve upon ffsrecov. As of yesterday, I released a new version of ffsrecov, version 0.5. The source is freely available. I originally wrote it for FreeBSD, but it will probably compile under other *BSD's w/o problems. I also recently got it compiled under Solaris, but I haven't tested it with any file systems.

The new version adds a lot of new support, like support for >2gig file systems (previously I mmap'ed the FS), using raw devices to extract files (if you have read permissions to the root raw device, you can grab the password database off it), among other things. For a more detailed list of changes/improvements, check out the FreeBSD port commit message which I detailed most of the improvements.

Over the weekend I started working on my B-Tree code, hoping to provide some more performance improvements to it. My last generation of B-Tree code would spend about 50% of it's time moving keys and nodes around as it inserted and deleted keys. It is also very apparent from the benchmarks of my B-Tree code, that main memory should be treated as secondary storage. Due to cache size granularity, you can find the proper node size where B-Tree code performs best. Increase or decrease the node size from this, and you won't get optimal performance.

Hmm, I think I should write a paper on B-Trees with all the work that I've been doing with them.

Life

Saturday was dwhite's birthday. So we went up to SF with a few other people to celebrate it. I was late getting notice about the movie because I went for lunch and didn't bring my cell because it needed charging. I did manage to get over to his place in Mountain View from San Jose (Burbank district) in 11 minutes. We headed up to Metreon to see the Mexican, and then after that headed over to Cha Cha Cha's in the Mission. Always expect a couple hour wait trying to get seated there. Had some good food and then headed down the street to Doc's Clock. I ended up being the designated driver for Doug, and we didn't get back to his place till 4am.

Long night, but the next morning I did get to see Clockwork Orange. That movie was quite interesting. I really didn't feel like I was watching an old 1971 film. Maybe it was because they remastered it for DVD and it looked nice and new. Definately want to read the book now that I've seen the movie. I'm sure the book will be much more interesting and have a lot more philosophical statements to make. It'll be a while, as the book I'm reading now I pretty long, and I'm only on page 200 of about 600 right now.

Whee!

Boy, that was an entertaining procedure. I recently upgraded my BIOS on an old K6/225 (FIC PA-2007), but after the upgrade, the machine would just sit there and beep at me. So I did some research trying to find free flash EEPROM burners or something else that I could use to flash a new bios. Then it dawned on me. I have other FICA motherboards, so why don't I boot up another machine, pull that BIOS chip, put in the broken one and flash that one. Yeh, it was a crazy idea, esspecially considering that I don't have another PA-2007 motherboard. So I booted up my PA-2005, pulled the old bios, and put in the broken bios for the PA-2007. Now the flash program was complaining that I'm flashing it with an old bios. So, I decided to upgrade to the latest release code for the BIOS (1.13CD13 instead of 1.09CD12) and then the flash program took that, and flashed the bios. Put the new bios in the other motherboard, and walla! The machine boots now!

I'm glad that's over now. So, if you need to flash a new bios, just use another machihne if you have too. Though who knows what could of happened to the machine.

I'm finally in the last stages in the battle against Strep throat. Damn, that was hard. I haven't felt this bad in a long time. Massive stuffed sinuses, swollen throat making it hard to swallow. Because of the stuffed head, I had to breath through the mouth which isn't fun, but I managed. One I started taking the meds Sunday at 7pm, It wasn't till thursday that I really started feeling better, and today, as long as I stay on Ibuprofen and Sudafed I'm pretty damn close to 100%, breathing through my nose, being able to swallow whatever, etc. Ahh, nothing to drive you crazy than like being locked away with yourself for company for a week. Sure I did make it on on Sunday to see the doctors. Monday did some back grocery shopping. Relased you hadn't done to well and had to go back again both on Thursday and Friday. Of course at least I claim I wasn't thinking clearly as I was sick. Heheh.

zarq:
Check out Richard Steven's APUE (Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment) which contains documentation on this pretty deciently. He has it written in a generic enough matter that you it covers all the major platforms and stuff. If you're doing Unix programming, you must have a copy of this book.

I'm having a problem of mucas being discharged down my throat w/o realizing it. Made me want to over load the discharge method and raise an event to notify me to blow my nose. :)

That's right, I was going to grab some food before I headed off back to bed! :)

Well, just got back from the Hospital. It's offical, I have Strep throat. Good thing I caught it now and before it advanced to rhematic fever which just wouldn't be anymore fun. So, starting on the antibotics, and of course not going to work tomorrow. Should still be contagious for the next 24 hours. Gotta hole up at home, and maybe watch a few more movies while I'm here, assuming I have the strength. Hey and maybe even read more of my physics text book! :)

Better go get some food and take the first of the antibotics.

P.S. I did write a more expansive diary entery a few hours ago, but this one will supercede it in the recient diary entires list.

I finished reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (ISBN: 0345342968) on Thursday I believe it was. Definately interesting. I had started this book shortly before Christmas, but I had misplaced it. So that's why I read it so quickly. That and it's a short book. It's funny, in the afterword (or coda) he says: "Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel." Funny that a novel about sensorship was sensored itself. Was thinking I wasn't going to be able to include the MARC record, but here you go:

001 4768383
003 CU-UC
005 20010211081127.3
008 870928c19871953nyu            00 0 eng d
020    $a 0345342968
035    $9 4768383
040    $a VVX $c VVX $d CLU
100 1  $a Bradbury, Ray, $d 1920-
245 10 $a Fahrenheit 451 : $b Fahrenheit 451 -- the temperature at which bookpap
er catches fire, and burns ... / $c Ray Bradbury.
260    $a New York : $b Ballantine Books, $c 1987, c1953.
300    $a 179 p. ; $c 18 cm.
500    $a "A Del Rey book."
500    $a With an Author's afterword.
546    $a English

The past two days have not been fun. I've come down with something and finally made an appointment for today to have it looked at. Haven't been able to get any sleep the past two nights as my nose is so runny that I can't find a decient possition to sleep in. It was so bad Saturday morning that I was thinking of going to the Emergancy room, but found that some IBprofin reduced the swelling in the back of my throat making it more managable. Sometimes it's nice being sick, but when you can't sleep, being sick just sucks.

Oh, does anyone have a flashrom burning in the bay area? I reciently tried to upgrade my FIC PA-2007 motherboard with a beta bios, and now the machine doesn't even like a ISA VGA card it in. You turn it one, and it just beeps at you. :( Need to burn the old BIOS back into the chip. (or test with another bios that is not beta).

alisdair and ajv:
In the day-n-age of dynamic web content, why pregenerate them? I wrote a cgi script a while back that will generate thumbnails (and downsized versions) of my images when requested. I of course store the resulting image in a database so I don't have to regenerate them every time. Plus it autogenerates indexes for the images too. ls *.jpg > somename.indx and I have an index. As for that, why not use jpeg + pnmutils? djpeg | pnmscale -xysize 175 175 | cjpeg -optimize? That's what Unix was designed for, putting commands together to build a bigger project.

Hmmm, realized that I'm really hungry right now. Off to find some food.

RyanMuldoon:
I agree filesystem versioning is nice, but take a look at VMS, it had this. There are a lot of cavets with this, like the fact that you have to delete old versions to free up disk space, etc. and how many times have you saved a file just because of habit? If it was an optional on, then it might be useful. Though with NetApp snapshots and snapshots supported under SoftUpdates, you aren't to far from supporting file system versioning.

A friend of mine mentioned that you might want to check out BeOS for filesystem metadata. Sounds like you can have "virtual folders" that contain queries of the meta-data. So you can have a folder of all of your mp3's or other such things. I haven't ever used BeOS myself, but probably something to checkout.