I seeded the 2008.05 release candidate for about 45 hours, ultimately shipping a little over 4100 megabytes. I’m going to take a break, because I want to update my DP2-based workstation and get some work done, but, once we have new bits, I’ll getting seeding again.

(I found the actual result: 4237MiB sent up, so almost 4GiB.)

For the Thanksgiving holiday this year, we decided to explore San Mateo County’s section of the Pacific Coast. Dina settled on Butano State Park as our base, which is mostly made of a redwoods-forested canyon, south of Pescadero and on the western slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains. We arrived in the late afternoon, having taken CA-84 through Woodside to San Gregario, and then heading south on CA-1.

We arrived late enough that, after setting up camp, it soon became too dark for even a short hike. It’s been cool on the Peninsula this fall, and it felt cool in the morning. We were all grateful when, with temperatures between 30 - 40 °F (0 - 5°C), Dina made oatmeal for breakfast.

One of the first things I noticed—and probably evident from the use of the flash in the above picture—is how dimmed the light on the forest floor is. The cool, dim environment appears to let some pretty sizeable mushrooms thrive; this specimen’s cap is about 2.5″ (63 mm) in diameter, although apparently there are bigger species around. The ribbon-like growths show a bit of élan.

Ben captured an interesting diffracted view of the forest around us:

Out of the dimness, we drove down to Año Neuvo State Reserve, and worked off a little energy in our walk out to the dunes and possible elephant seals.

As we walked, I watched a raptor maintain a position for seconds at a time, presumably as part of its hunting method. Here are three frames, over a total of 8 seconds, from a fair distance away.

The mating season for elephant seals doesn’t begin for a few weeks yet, so that apparently makes these early arrivals juvenile females that won’t actually participate directly.

We explored Pescadero State Beach and the Pigeon Point Lighthouse, but the formation revealed at Pebble Beach between the two was striking. Apparently, the ocean (and already pulled pebbles) knock out other pebbles and slowly widen the sockets.

We went back for another crisp evening and chilly morning at Butano, revisited a few of the sites on Friday, and headed back—with a detour through Gilroy to sample a bit of Black Friday—in time for a dinner at home.

Photos taken with a Panasonic Lumix LX-2 and with a Canon PowerShot S2 IS.

I just want to mention that I knew Alan before his current fifteen minutes.

One of the features of our home library is a sizeable collection of texts on English diction, grammar, usage, and so forth. (The collection was banished to the back office, but bursts out regularly.) Most of these are focussed on general use, and shy away from the changes in meaning that might accompany use in a technical field. Completely untouched is the smaller subset of technical words that could be useful more generally.

The “wished for general use” word-pair I came up with today is catalyst and accelerant, both of which are precise descriptive words for agents of change. The problem is that a catalyst remains unchanged across the transformation—meaning that there was only unilateral adjustment—while an accelerant, very much a part of the transformation, seems to be exclusively connoted with arson.

Know any example usages of accelerant that attempt to stifle a sense of ignition?

At work, I’ve ended up on many email aliases; since we moved to pursuing open development on opensolaris.org, my subscriptions and incoming email flow have grown tremendously, to the point where they were interfering with my ability to get work done. My present filter setup involves delivery to 56 inboxes.

I’ve had a small email toolset built around the Mutt email client (or mail user agent (MUA) in email-speak). My .muttrc includes $HOME/.mailboxes, which is a list of the mail inboxes into which my procmail filter delivers. The m and check commands use .mailboxes to determine where new messages have arrived. Happily, this infrastructure can easily give me a few hours of reduced interrupts, so that I can get some thinking and writing done.

The idea is to strongly reduce the number of significant inboxes during what we’ll label as “prime” work hours, between lunch and dinner on weekdays. Given the use of .mailboxes outlined above, the solution is pretty easy:

1. Move .mailboxes to .mailboxes.offprime.
2. Take a copy of .mailboxes.offprime as .mailboxes.prime. Prune the prime mailboxes severely.
3. Install these files in $HOME. (My Makefiles do this, and all the mailbox lists and the Makefiles are version-controlled.)
4. Add something like the following using crontab -e:

We want to eliminate mail testing on all mailboxes during prime work

hours. This change means that between 12pm - 6pm, mailboxes is

pointed to a reduced mailboxes file.

0 12 * * 1,2,3,4,5 /usr/bin/ln -sf /home/sch/.mailboxes.prime /home/sch/.mailboxes 0 18 * * 1,2,3,4,5 /usr/bin/ln -sf /home/sch/.mailboxes.offprime /home/sch/.mailboxes

You’re now ready to relax and enjoy reduced interrupt rates, leaving you time to focus on real work… or write blog postings about managing your interrupt rates.

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris mutt procmail ]

At work, I’ve ended up on many email aliases; since we moved to pursuing open development on opensolaris.org, my subscriptions and incoming email flow have grown tremendously, to the point where they were interfering with my ability to get work done. My present filter setup involves delivery to 56 inboxes.

I’ve had a small email toolset built around the Mutt email client (or mail user agent (MUA) in email-speak). My .muttrc includes $HOME/.mailboxes, which is a list of the mail inboxes into which my procmail filter delivers. The m and check commands use .mailboxes to determine where new messages have arrived. Happily, this infrastructure can easily give me a few hours of reduced interrupts, so that I can get some thinking and writing done.

The idea is to strongly reduce the number of significant inboxes during what we’ll label as “prime” work hours, between lunch and dinner on weekdays. Given the use of .mailboxes outlined above, the solution is pretty easy:

1. Move .mailboxes to .mailboxes.offprime.
2. Take a copy of .mailboxes.offprime as .mailboxes.prime. Prune the prime mailboxes severely.
3. Install these files in $HOME. (My Makefiles do this, and all the mailbox lists and the Makefiles are version-controlled.)
4. Add something like the following using crontab -e:

We want to eliminate mail testing on all mailboxes during prime work

hours. This change means that between 12pm - 6pm, mailboxes is

pointed to a reduced mailboxes file.

0 12 * * 1,2,3,4,5 /usr/bin/ln -sf /home/sch/.mailboxes.prime /home/sch/.mailboxes 0 18 * * 1,2,3,4,5 /usr/bin/ln -sf /home/sch/.mailboxes.offprime /home/sch/.mailboxes

You’re now ready to relax and enjoy reduced interrupt rates, leaving you time to focus on real work… or write blog postings about managing your interrupt rates.

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris mutt procmail ]

I’ve been waiting for a new electric fan to arrive. I checked in on the shipment today, and the UPS site reports:

 07/26/2006      5:30 A.M.       THE PACKAGE IS DELAYED DUE TO EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS' CONTROL 

Huh. Well, I hope it shows up soon: it’s still taking a while for the house to cool down in the evening.

It’s past ten o’clock in the evening, but it’s still 88°F—31°C—and there’s little to no wind. That means the back office is a little too hot to be comfortable…

(I’ve realized I need to deal with a much-too-high interrupt rate at work, in part by ensuring I take out a bit of time for leisure. Here’s an entry I started in April.)

Over the past few years, my reading rate has climbed; perhaps I’ve unwittingly dropped a periodical, or maybe I’m getting back to splitting my reading time across a few books at once. In any case, I thought it would be pleasant to get back to recommending recent reading I’ve enjoyed.

When we were in Long Island at the end of our winter vacation, I secured sufficient late night reading to get through three 20th century classics:

• Chesterton’s The man who was Thursday (1907) [Wikipedia] [Gutenberg], which was an entertaining story that appears to have simultaneously pioneered the spy novel, takeoffs of the spy novel, and a number of forms of “postmodern paranoid” storytelling. It would be interesting to contrast with Conrad’s The secret agent (1907), but I won’t have time to work through these contemporary novels in parallel.
• Christopher Morley’s [Wikipedia] Parnassus on wheels [Gutenberg] and The haunted bookshop [Gutenberg]. These were light novels (about booksellers); one of the funniest parts was the introduction given in the edition of Parnassus that I read, which suggested that full comprehension of the novel would only be available to readers born in a three to four month period in the early 1920s. I wasn’t, but the books are still fun—although I never worried about highwaymen, however shabby, in any of my traverses of Connecticut.

One of Benjamin or Nathaniel, and sometimes both, would accompany me to the Redwood City library. We’ve been finding some fun books, plus I can try to read science fiction again.

• Ben and I have been working our way, planet by planet, through Dav Pilkey’s Ricky Ricotta and his mighty robot series. The stories are on the corny side for adults, although I admire the determined construction of a monsters-on-planets cosmology. (Plus the cheese surnames on mouse characters are good silliness.)
• I blitzed through Cory Doctorow’s Eastern standard tribe, and Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist and The zenith angle. I liked the last of these best; the other two were simple. (I like Doctorow’s story ideas initially, but I find that the unfolding is too pat—obvious complications of the hypothesis are ignored.)
• Out of some unknown reptilian duty—I started following this series after my undergraduate degree—I read Robert Jordan’s Knife of dreams, which is the eleventh book in his Wheel of time series (not counting prequels). Apparently, the series will end with Book Twelve and, for what seems like forever, some plotlines appear to be coming to their conclusions.
• From Ben’s continuing exploration of prehistory, I recommend Alan Turner’s National Geographic prehistoric mammals and Tim Haines’s Walking with prehistoric beasts. The latter is a companion to the Discovery Channel series—narrated by Stockard Channing—and appears to be illustrated with high quality stills from the shows, along with expanded text retellings of each episode. The National Geographic book is more of a complete text about the major prehistoric mammal groups. We enjoyed both of these enormously—suggestions on further reading are welcome, as I fear we’ll be off into college texts otherwise.
• My final novel of the quarter was Philip Roth’s The plot against America, which was very finely written. I kept comparing it to the famous science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, The man in the high castle, which is also an alternate history of World War II. Dick’s novel eventually focuses on the detection of wrongness by the inhabitants of his reality; Roth’s eponymous protagonist on more personal disquiet. Recommended.

Of course, none of us stopped reading in April, but a quarterly summary seems like a reasonable balance.

I’ve been wrapping up our tax returns, running reviews and reviewing an actual paper copy. One document (well, two) that I couldn’t find were the bills from the California Department of Motor Vehicles for the car registrations. But I was very pleased to find that they have an online retrieval system to help you find your vehicle license fee (VLF) for 2004 – 2006.

I bet I filed the registration bills in a “special” folder… which I’ll find in August.

Bloglines again suggests the week is shaping up wetly:

Courtesy of bloglines.com:

It doesn’t look like I’ll be packing away the downspout extensions or the portable sump anytime soon…

Most Saturdays, Dina and Benjamin head off to swimming lessons. Nathaniel and I are left to our own devices, which means we go for one of two kinds of walk: a walking walk, where Nathaniel walks, and a seeing walk, where Nathaniel gets pushed. This week, Nathaniel expressed that he wanted to see trains on the walk, which meant a seeing walk.

We headed east towards the Redwood City Caltrain station. On the way, we passed the most recent arrival in Redwood City’s gradual approach to Seattle-class latte infrastructure:

We walked through the station, intending to cross the tracks and visit a couple of the construction sites downtown. When you’re nearly two years old and focused on being an expert in trains and trucks, seeing a truck that can ride on the rails is perhaps mind expanding:

The renovation of the Old San Mateo County Courthouse—now home to the San Mateo County History Museum—appears to involve extensive work on the columns:

Finally, we walked back to the station to see the 10:41 Northbound train,

wheeled into Peet’s to grab a cappuccino, and sipped our drinks—Nathaniel is usually prepared with a travel flask—as the Southbound 26 pulled in ten minutes later. Two trains (and a “train truck”) spotted, we headed home.

The Wall Street Journal has an article, “Clever Gags Score High On Super Bowl Ads”, with best and worst polls to accompany the online edition. We, for a change, actually watched the SuperBowl this year—with appropriate TiVo gymnastics to cover the grossly underestimated duration given in the television listings—and so can comment on the advertisements. The popular FedEx cavemen-and-dinosaurs ad was a hit with Benjamin, as was the offspring-of-monster-and-robot bit from Hummer. My favorite? I think Stunt City [Degree] was underappreciated: the admonishment to the motorcycle deliveryman who has just crashed through the window (”no helmets”) was silent, low-key, and clever.

Oh, and we liked the meteoroid-geologically-becomes-PEBL [Motorola] ad, too.

A couple of people have asked me to comment on the Canadian election last week. Although I was up to date with the limited reporting in The Economist, the two to six weeks of latency in my Maclean’s subscription meant I never really connected with the current situation—I was already rather fed up with the random delays, and am switching to The Walrus as an experiment. In any case, I’ve been in the USA for over thirteen years now; my perceptions of Canada are, politely, distorted by nostalgia.

I did get to admire the CBC election night coverage. Check out the density of this snapshot of reporting from a British Columbia riding:

That’s four distinct presentation areas: (1) riding result, (2) national seat summary, (3) provincial changes, and (4) a message area:

Although there isn’t one in the snapshot above, area (4)’s text messages would sweep in, and were mapped on to a curve parallel to the lower side of the elliptical ring.

The screen is reporting 22 numbers—more when more parties or independent candidates were standing—which seems pretty high for a television graphic (plus the party associations, candidate and riding names, and the riding’s location in the country). The beige field is a good neutral background for the presentation of the range of colours needed to handle the multiple parties participating.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of the confusing artwork behind Peter Mansbridge and his panel, which lacked the elegance of the reporting screen. (The panel’s banter wasn’t that entertaining, but I get the impression Senator Segal is quite an operator.)

As I did last year, I’m again reviewing the year from the perspective of blueslugs.com.

Overview. Over 2005, we served up a total of over 8.3 GB of data, through our standard static DSL line: almost an order of magnitude higher than last year. 5.6 GB was blueslugs.com, while the remaining 2.7 GB was from the new domain, highmaintenancemom.com, which is Dina’s electronic motherhood site. HMM only came online in April, and has been steadily building in traffic. Log analysis translates to over 930 000 hits and over 45 000 visitors. Over the year, 36 blog posts were written on blueslugs.com, three by Dina. Perhaps I'll get to a post a week this year.

Content. The most popular page on the site this year was the introduction of tag(1), a Unix-like command for tagging files. I have a long overdue post that analyzes the incoming traffic associated with the post, which hit a few of the “emergent importance” sites as well as getting mentioned on some individual blogs. (I have an equally overdue response regarding some of the technical and quasi-social analysis of the utility of tag(1).) Pages from Benjamin’s alphabet book are still regularly requested: the alphabet page trailed tagging by only a few hundred hits. (Each had over 16 000.) The grammar page is the top individual page, but the country flags and mathematicians images get pulled in via search terms. Search engine passes and syndication feed pulls are as or more regular than ever.

Beyond the tag(1) release, I ported Audacity to Solaris x86, which helped a few people, based on downloads. The dockapps I wrote a few years ago still get pulled regularly. Most of my Solaris posts are published at my work blog, but I’m still exploring “personal (Unix) computing” posting as a topic to cover here.

My Redwood City writings dropped off; I must get back to this topic, as the downtown theatres are nearly full built, and the commercial changes—new restaurants!—have already started. Or maybe midterm elections will prove interesting…

System. As chronicled, we unexpectedly had to replace the server due to hardware failure. This system is, of course, faster than its predecessor and, even with the higher load of the two sites, is essentially idle. The site data is on a UFS partition with triple mirroring via SVM, but I expect to experiment with ZFS after the next software upgrade.

The system is presently running Solaris 10 03/05 with appropriate patches; the current Web stack was built by hand, as HMM software requirements required somewhat atypical settings. Expect to receive bits served from Solaris Express builds in the next few months.

Future. I doubt we’ll launch another site this year, so I expect no new leaps in traffic. One possibility is a DSL upgrade; I believe the higher speed version approximately twice guaranteed bandwidth, but I haven’t heard anyone talking about what they’re actually getting. Although I like having a camera phone, the camera I bought takes such better pictures that, if I’m going to post pictures, they’ll be taken with a real camera. And I would like to get the backlog of partial posts under control—I started a notebook for post ideas, but I seem to be filling the book, rather than the blog.

By the way, Dina went to Fairbanks a few weeks ago, enjoyed the chilly contrast with Bay Area weather, and had a productive and fun visit. And, to keep karmic scales in balance, I caught a nasty cold for reminding her of the low low temperatures she could expect.

Nathaniel has keen vision; we often see mourning doves on the power and telephone lines that pass by the front of our house and he is happy to point them out. And occasionally, a raucous crow will perch in one of the nearby trees or atop a pole shouldering the local lines. But a couple of weekends ago, he was quite insistent about the novelty of the bird upon the pole’s top:

A good catch: this was the first Merlin I had seen in any of the neighbourhoods we’ve lived in. (I once watched a red-tailed hawk eat a dead pigeon on a corner ledge of MPK17 a few years back, while I waited for a printout one Saturday.)

The little raptor was good enough to stay in place long enough for us to take pictures from a couple of points with a couple of cameras. The above, the best of the lot, was taken with our camcorder (Canon Optura 200) in photo mode—the 10 × optical zoom was essential, and it’s still not a great shot.

It’s a balmy 9°F (-13°C) tonight in Fairbanks, although with windchill it feels like -6°F (-21°C). Why one would be naked and outdoors to verify that measurement is beyond me.

The current temperature in Fairbanks, Alaska is again -6°F, or -21°C.

The current temperature in Fairbanks, Alaska is -6°F, or -21°C.

I’m still a bit woozy from a late night disk recovery at home which kept me up until about 4am Wednesday morning, but I thought I would point out two items in an old area of interest of mine: theoretical physics.

First, Physics Today has devoted a special issue to Hans Bethe. Bethe’s range and impact on physics is astounding to me: his 1967 Nobel prize for determining the nuclear reactions that result in the burning of stars came after many contributions to atomic and nuclear physics, roles at both the MIT Radiation Lab and Los Alamos during the Second World War, and important calculations for statistical physics. Oh, and he performed the first theoretical calculation of the Lamb shift, which validated the idea of quantum electrodynamics. The series of articles by friends and colleagues is excellent and, if you can grab a copy, definitely worth a read. (The site doesn’t have it, on first glance.)

Reading the practical scenarios where Bethe connected theory to a problem at hand, and then kept going, I wonder if Bethe might have been a better role model than my graduate school choice of Lev Landau, the 1962 Nobel winner in Physics (for the theory of superfluid helium, among other contributions). Of course, Landau’s preferred working style involved reclining upon his couch, which is a fundamental contribution I still hope to emulate.

The other item is that an old graduate school friend of mine, Mark Trodden, is, with a group of other—I’ll say young—theoretical physicists, writing a focussed-on-science-but-still-popular blog entitled Cosmic Variance. These are smart folks and, since we all can’t be research scientists, it’s a treat to get a chance to see some distinct intellectual viewpoints. Check it out.

(Maybe if I end up with another involuntary late night of repairs and resyncing, I’ll have a look around and see who else from school is blogging actively. Or just melancholily ruminate on lapsing and relapsing between engineering and science (which is why, when I confessed to dilettantism, I was being quite honest).)

I went to a nice dinner a couple of weeks ago, to celebrate a couple friends’ visit to the Bay Area. The restaurant offered some tasting menus, so the more adventurous indulged in the six course offering, with a variety of tastes and textures. In line with current trends, flavoured foams accented between a quarter and a third of the different dishes served. It turns out some people really aren’t interested in eating foam.

At one point in the meal, a waiter positioned a peculiar spoon at my side, which looked something like this:

The lobster turned out to be in the form of a purée or a bisque (but not a foam), so the bowl of the spoon was needed and the notch only useful for artful dribbling. Notched spoons were also provided for the dessert course, but no other mysterious utensils were manifested that night.

Like RSVP, the CBC’s High Hat is another well-executed card game implemented in Flash. What’s interesting about High Hat is that it looks like a good candidate for playing with a physical deck as well. Maybe a good alternative to hours of War with Ben during the coming rainy winter here.

Recommended.