Yet another PHD Comics episode that rings true. This is what happens when one tries to read a paper that’s more of a brain/data dump than a well-crafted exposition of research.
I’ve found that no amount of coffee helps, and beyond a certain number of cups, I don’t actually feel tired. Instead, my brain just shuts down while awake, and 10 minutes later I snap to, realizing I’ve been staring at the page with no comprehension.
Last night, just as I was falling asleep, I heard my phone ring out a text message tone. (Incidentally, it’s this sound, a customized version of one found on the Monty Python website. It can be startling.)
I leaned over to look at it. The head node from the cluster was checking in to let me know it was feeling a little warm (80 degrees F). The temperature in our server room keeps creeping up. Today it was blamed on a campus-wide chilled-water problem. The cluster is only using about 1/4 of the cooling capacity in the server room, and is almost the only machine in there. We should not be having these problems.
I use the IPMI capabilities of the head node to check the internal sensor every ten minutes, and it emails and texts me if the temperature exceeds some threshold. It is hard, though, to get a good idea of what’s going on from a single temperature at a single time. Has the temp been slowly rising? Has it jumped from 77 to 95 in ten minutes?
To make this easier to check, I wrote a little script that generates a plot based on the last 24 hours of my temperature log. You can see the results below. The image below is pulled straight from the cluster, so it should be up to date regardless of when you’re viewing this post. If you’re looking at it pretty shortly after this is posted, you can still see the spike that woke me up and the sharper one that got me worried this morning.
The temperature is of course not jumping like that — the precision of the sensor is limited. The rightmost edge is “now”, if that’s not clear. I used xmgrace to produce this plot from the command line / script. If you’d like any of the code for this let me know.
As another blogger I know recently stated, this is not really a political blog. Nonetheless, this important enough that I need to bring attention to it.
The senate recently passed a new version of the Protect America Act that gives retroactive legal immunity to companies like AT&T for the illegal wiretapping of Americans that they have done in the past several years. The White House is pushing really hard for this to pass in the House now, because it grants immunity for their past illegal activity and that of their ‘friends’ at AT&T et al. However, if they were so desperate for continuous coverage, they would have accepted congress’ offer to extend the current PAA by three weeks, which they did not. Why? The extension did not provide immunity for the telecoms.
The EFF (to whom I donate regularly) has been pushing hard for over a year to get AT&T in the courts over this. This bill would totally halt their progress.
The Republicans in congress have walked out in protest, and are trying to say that the Democrats are compromising national security. This is nonsense. There are plenty of legal mechanisms for wiretapping with a warrant.
Please, take the time to call your representative’s office and let his or her staff know that you support their efforts to stop this bill. Or, if he or she is a Republican, a little chastisement might be in order. The list of representatives is here. It took me all of five minutes to find William Jefferson’s phone number and call his office.
As a guideline to help you, here’s a good basic framework of what to tell them, keeping it short and sweet:
Cuore di stagno, burattino…
Originally uploaded by orticanoodles
I think this is a skateboard design, but I’m not sure. Nice anatomical heart on the right one, though. Happy Friday everyone!
I’ve been reading Neal Stephenson’s “In the beginning was the command line”, which was written nearly ten years ago. In it is a paragraph that is nothing short of prophetic:
Likewise, when Microsoft’s position in the OS world is threatened, their corporate instincts will tell them to pile more new features into their operating systems, and then re-jigger their software applications to exploit those special features. But this will only have the effect of making their applications dependent on an OS with declining market share, and make it worse for them in the end.
Hmm, like Vista and the latest Office?