Spinor Info

Here’s a nice plot of yesterday’s power outage, courtesy of my server:

Power on Feb 14, 2009

Interesting how the capacity drop and the recharge curve are both perfectly linear. Makes me wonder how accurate these curves are… do they really represent measured values or just a simplistic guess by software?

On the other hand, both UPSs ran fine for over half an hour, one supplying a server and networking equipment, another supplying a workstation, monitor, and some peripherals. So I really have no cause to complain.

I am test driving Windows 7. Some rough edges (it’s a beta, after all) but I already like it more than I liked Vista. If only Microsoft saw the light and dropped Activation, I might even consider recommending it. One of these days, software companies will realize that penalizing legitimate users is not the right way to fight piracy, but that day has not come yet…

As a contributor to Maxima, I occasionally receive requests from students to fill out surveys. I got one today, and after completing it, felt obliged to add the following comment, which really applies to most such surveys that I’ve seen:

You seem to be concentrating on things like prestige, reputation, stuff like that that I have no interest in and certainly play no role in my decision to work on an open source project. Simply put, the projects I work on I work on because of what they DO, not because they are open source or not. It’s not a self-serving activity… I no more think of it as “programming” as I think, say, of repairing my computer as “screwdrivering”. Programming (or using a screwdriver) is not the goal, but the means to reach a goal.

I work on Maxima because I need it for my research, because its tensor algebra packages were broken and I was able to repair and maintain them, because I need the result, because by participating I can help ensure that the package remains reliable and useful… what others think of me is irrelevant. I left your last question (ranking roles by prestige) unanswered for this reason… you might as well have asked me to rank them by color.

Sometimes, programmers do physics, for better or for worse. Sometimes, physicists do programming, and the result is not always disastrous, sometimes quite the contrary. Bruce Allen, for instance, is a gravitational physicist who developed an extremely useful set of programs for Linux, allowing one to monitor the health status of a hard drive using the drive’s SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) capabilities. He certainly needed it… his cluster has several hundred disk drives in operation. I only have a few, but nevertheless it is reassuring to know that they’ll send me an e-mail, presumably before a catastrophic failure wipes out all my data.

Which of course can still happen. I’ve seen hard drives die a sudden death, with no advance warning whatsoever, becoming an expensive but useless boat anchor.

… two days and several scraped fingers later (after I also lost, no doubt, many braincells to aggravation, not to mention hours of useful operating time of my heart muscle measured by a number considerably greater than the 48 or so that have elapsed since I first discovered that my computer is in trouble) I am finally back in business. All because of a bleeping 10 cent capacitor. But before I complain too loud, I quickly remind myself that during these 48 hours or so, tens if not hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of people around the world were killed, died of starvation, lost their most loved ones, lost their freedom, lost their possessions, you name it… and I am complaining because I had to replace a stupid motherboard and bring my computer back to life?

No, I am not complaining. Still, the last two days were a time I could have done without.

What a bloody joyful day. My main computer is dead this morning. It now even fails to boot. Annoyingly, I don’t have any external SATA enclosures that would allow me to hook one of its drives up to another computer to check for signs of trouble, verify data integrity, and last but not least, make a backup (my last backup is a few days old.) So it’s a trip to the nearest computer store. And once I’m done, my main computer will still be dead, it’s just that I’ll no longer need to worry about what was stored on it (except for the numerous applications, configuration settings, etc…) This is NOT going to be a fun day. Miserable outside, too.

Microsoft is really pissing me off these days. While necessary, their updates suck.

I’m restarting a VISTA machine about the seventeenth time already, because if I try to install all available updates, all of them fail with an undocumented error, even though I can install them one-by-one.

I’ve installed several updates on an XP laptop, and four of them failed; I tried again, then they succeeded. No apparent reason for the difference.

I’ve installed a bunch of updates on another XP machine, but a few were left out. I installed those, too (Root Certificates and Office 2007 Help updates.) Windows didn’t ask for a restart, but the browser went half-dead afterwards anyhow, so I had to restart.

Meanwhile, I’ve just restarted that VISTA machine again.

You’d think that after all these years, Microsoft would be better at this. But they aren’t. One of these days, they’re going to release a patch that will shut down three hundred million computers around the world and cause more economic damage than the current recession. Then, they’ll call it “behavior by design” and charge us more for support.

Update: I’ve narrowed down the problem to a single update, KB958624. It fails to complete installation after reboot, and upon this failure, the system reverts other updates as well. I have attempted to contact Microsoft about this using their Web based e-mail form; I dutifully completed all the requisite fields, only to be informed after I clicked the last Continue that the requested page is not available. Congratulations, Microsoft, for a professional job well done.