My life contains too much cruft, not to be confused with ‘stuff’. For those of you not familiar with the term cruft, I will refer to google:

In hacker jargon, cruft is redundant, old or improperly written code which needs to be fixed, but tends to stick around. Large software projects invariably accumulate cruft. The concept can be compared to Philip K. Dick’s idea of kipple. Cruft is sometimes said to be the software equivalent of dust bunnies.

If you follow the link to google, you’ll see that this was plucked from the also-all-knowing Wikipedia. Anyway, there’s a lot of computer related junk collecting here and there, as well as a lot of automated backing up and cleaning that I would like for my computer(s) to do. I have several machines to take care of.

• Nenya: My desktop system at home. It’s had the current operating system installed without a break since about January 2004. It would have had it installed since around July 2003 but I ran into a hard drive problem and had to switch things around. It’s a Gentoo Linux system, so it’s relatively easy to maintain, but I have about 360 GB worth of storage available for collecting gunk. Attached to this system most of the time is an additional 500 GB of storage via USB 2, in the form of a LaCie 500 GB ‘Big Disk’ which is actually two hard drives in a RAID configuration. It currently has only 128 GB free.
• Galadriel: Once my desktop, then my lab workhorse, this is now my dedicated MythTV box. It records and plays shows, and drives the sound and video capabilities of my TV, which is actually a 31″ monitor from an old Gateway Destination system.
• Arwen: Recently given a fresh install of Panther, this is my first laptop, and my first mac. It’s a 500 MHz PowerBook Titanium. It doesn’t really have any cruft to speak of, but it does need an upgrade to Tiger.
• Lalwende: My 17″ Aluminum PowerBook, currently my workstation at work/lab. In fact, it’s owned by the lab. Since it’s been upgraded to Tiger recently via a wipe and clean install, it has very little cruft. I doesn’t run most of my lab software, which ran fine on Panther. This is an ongoing problem.
• brocktice.com: Not a physical computer, but actually a linode and the host for this website (virtuallyshocking.com) as well. This one’s actually in pretty good shape, as it’s a server, and it doesn’t accumulate much cruft.

The machine really in need of work in Nenya. There’s only 3.51 GB of free space on the root filesystem, which is a problem. The home partition, on the other hand, has plenty of space. I’m sure there are some temporary files hanging around somewhere that can be cleaned out. Finally, I need to tweak my automated backups, sync my multiple similar-but-not-identical music and photo collections somehow, and consolidate my lab data.

The school year is too hectic to allow time for this, but fortunately my summer research affords me some flexibility. This is not a leisure-time activity. It’s an investment which allows me to run smoothly when classes are in session, and it’s necessary. It’s not really enjoyable either, except in the way that having a nice, clean result is enjoyable, kind of like cleaning the bathroom.

I’m starting tonight as I wait for our Opteron cluster to churn out some new data.

Why is this still an issue anywhere?

Caught this one at the Wave Goodbye party yesterday. I could have snapped a lot more but my hands were usually full of free food!

Earlier today I started some simulations. They’re actually “redo” simulations that I originally ran in January, but realized in early February when I got a chance to check the data that they were wrong. I had set one parameter wrong in the settings file (.par file) and then copied and edited this file to use it for each simulation.

A little bit of scripting with sed set that aright, and our cluster, Ares has been churning out data since yesterday afternoon.

I actually ran a little bit of new data in the last few days as well, as I’m prepping for a meeting with my advisor to discuss all of the project results. We’re working this summer to bring our investigation of regional ischemia in two dimensions to a close.

I’m presently at Indonique, a tea shop which I’ve mentioned here before, and will mention again. I want you to go check it out for two reasons. The first is that the more business it gets, the more likely it is to stay around, and I want it to stay around. The second is that it’s a very good tea shop, customer focused, and if you like tea you owe it to yourself to check it out. They even have a policy that if you try something and don’t love it, they’ll dump it and make something else for you. It’s at the corner of Magazine and Upperline, with red and white striped awnings.

What have I been doing here, aside from checking on my simulations? I’ve been studying Hausa, the language of Niger (and some other places, too). Amanda wrote up some tutorials and vocab lists for me so that I could study in preparation for our trip there in July. I’ve been running the words through a program called Provoc (ha… ha) for OS X. I used to use Kvoctrain on Linux, and I still prefer it, but it’s giving me some trouble on OS X, so for now I’m sticking with Provoc.

Once my simulations finish running, I’ll probably need to go back to work and check the data. It’s going to be a busy weekend.

These people are sad. They’re so sad that they’re crying. While eating and taking a video of themselves.