it's late, or early
December 12, 2004 by Eric Richardson
So why am I up at 4am playing a computer game? Because I have a paper due on it Tuesday afternoon, that's why. The game is Second Life, and to be fair it's really not a game so much as it is a virtual world. It's the closest thing I've ever seen to the metaverse in Neil Stephenson's Snowcrash. Aside from eating up any and all system resources you give it, it really is a cool deal. Today I finally got Windows running on my desktop so that I could get this up and make the final push for this last paper.
What I wanted to point out right now, though, is how absolutely out of place I am at a late-night Goth party. The first shot shows my arrived-in attire against that of the others. The second shows my attempt to be a little more appropriate for the setting.
The funny part is that in real life I tend to show up to parties dressed just like that top shot. I guess Second Life is a good reflection of reality.
i wondered about that hot smell...
December 12, 2004 by Eric Richardson
My computer freaked me out a bit a few hours ago. It started just randomly turning itself off a little while into a run. I think what happened is that when I pulled an internal hard drive this afternoon the SCSI cable lodged itself against the CPU fan, meaning that when the box got repowered the CPU was running heat sink only. Some internal temp controls were probably shutting everything down when the CPU got too hot.
Now I've got a mess I've got to get back together, and I still need to get Windows running correctly.
bottleneck identified
December 12, 2004 by Eric Richardson
In my living room I have a 10Mbit hub. It connects the computers in the living room, my room, and Chris's room. For normal traffic the fact that it's old and 10Mbit doesn't matter. But today I've been copying a partition's worth of data between my laptop and my desktop. I want to say it's around 10-12gigs worth of data. I didn't think about that when I started, but now a good two and a half hours later I can definitely say that I need to go out and buy a little 100Mbit switch. My transfer rate has been right around 1MB/sec the whole time, which is consistant with being about 80% of the potential for a 10Mbit connection (and 80% utilization is about what you expect to peak at).
If it really is 10gig, it should finish soon. If it's 12 I might still be waiting a while.
oops
December 11, 2004 by Eric Richardson
From a little blurb in the Downtown News about Ed Reyes getting appointed to the MTA board:
The MTA oversees more than 73 miles of bus and railroad lines in Los Angeles County.
That 73 miles is just about right for rail, but since what they wrote includes bus -- well, there's only so much you can include in "more than".
According to the fact sheet, the MTA has 189 bus routes, 18,500 bus stops (isn't that high? almost 100 stops per route?), and 2,100+ buses in service on any given weekday. I really hope all those aren't on the same 73 miles.
I know it's just bad editing, but that's what I expect of the Daily Trojan, not the Downtown News.
eThreads2 update
December 11, 2004 by Eric Richardson
Technical stuff to follow. Avert your eyes if you'd like...
Even though you haven't seen much change out front here, there's been some cool stuff happening on the eThreads2 backend. I mentioned earlier in the week that I had added a memory cache. Well, since then that's been rewritten and reworked to be a transparent part of my normal cache structure. There's still some work to do, but I'm going to throw that after the break.
I just got ping support working again, so now my #1 target is comments. Alan's been getting on me about that, letting me know how I've missed his wisdom without them.
Click the post title to read more...