Hey! Following Robb’s recent blog post about an implementation of Life as a GLSL shader, I now present to you a Mac OS X screensaver in the same style (using his shader and the original GPULife source).
Monthly Archive for January, 2009
The plan was for Jayne (the machine that serves this blog, the rest of my web stuff, Robb’s blog, lots of code, backups, etc.) to be a reasonably stable and very large (storage-wise) machine. The storage part worked, more or less, but the stability is ehh-not-so-much. I have a very consistent problem with libata, but it’s not clear why…
Anyway. Here’s the facts:
- I’m using Debian unstable, with Linux 2.6.28.
- I’ve got a Shuttle case, and a 100 W PSU (!!).
- I get the libata errors above, but only after the machine is up for two or so weeks.
- I didn’t get the error at all during a one-month-long winter break, but it happened once again, two weeks after coming back to RPI.
- The problem has never happened when the case is open and a large house fan is on top of the case, which was true for a significant part of last semester.
- After the problem occurs, the machine must be left off for a few hours before it will successfully restart.
- The disks never report getting anywhere over about 44 degrees C.
- Only the root partition ever acquires any errors. Not the big (1.2TB) main partition.
- The total potential power use of the system is well over 100 W, and Shuttle recommended against putting both a Core 2 and two disks in this particular combination of case/mobo/PSU.
Any ideas?
I’ve thought about it a lot, and cannot seem to come up with a reasonable explanation. If it’s power, software, or the cables, the cooldown time doesn’t make any sense; if it’s the disks, running for a long time doesn’t make any sense, and I’ve spent a lot of time beating on the disks to try to reproduce it and cannot; if it’s heat (which seems most likely), the fact that it’s 20 degrees C under the acceptable working temperature of the disks makes that make very little sense (and I never get SMART warnings or anything, just libata transmission errors!)…
If not, I’m pretty sure a good bit of RCOS money this semester is going to head towards a new case/mobo/PSU (keeping the CPU/disks/memory/etc. from Jayne). Unfortunately, that will end up being a much bigger case… I’d also, in that case, have a really adorable little case that would almost definitely work fine with a single disk/an Atom/etc… anyone, anyone?
It’s been a long time (20 days) since my last post – in that time:
- I’ve moved back to RPI and gotten settled in.
- We have a new President! And he’s already doing a much better job. *high hopes*
- Robb and Matt (and Nate!!) and I have started our next project after Seed. I can’t tell you about it yet, because we want to wow everyone once it’s done.
- I sat through a 3 hour lecture by RMS, who then stayed in Matt’s dorm room, down the hall, and went to dinner with Robb and Matt! (more about this experience later)
- I finished and ordered the second revision Intervalometer PCB, this time, for a “dual-core” intervalometer!
- We’ve had two weeks of class. LITEC is … incredibly disorganized but awesome; Graph Theory is boring and, so far, a repeat of DSA; ModComp… we’ll see; SD&D is strange because it involves designing and writing software with a group of people that I don’t know (they all seem cool, though!).
- Seed got a writeup in Ars Technica, which was reposted to Slashdot and OSNews, and prompted #seed on Gnome IRC to become slightly busier than usual!
- I got Seed working reasonably reliably on Mac OS X, and am working on MacPorts packages (waiting on a new gir-repository release), and wrote a Seed/Clutter Pong, though it’s really rough and useless at the moment!
- WebKit passed revision number 40,000. This would not be notable except for the fact that Matt has spent most of his waking hours attempting to create Arch binary packages for every single revision of WebKit.
- New pictures! Not much, just of all of us (and of Matt’s RMS-signed laptop), but still cute!
It turns out it’s really hard to take photos of snow, on a tripod, with an old manual-focus Nikon micro lens… especially when it’s well above freezing and all the snow is melting. Oh, well!
I don’t write about music much (nor make lists of things, here, much), but I figured I’d share the six most obviously perfect albums, in case any of the few of you here hadn’t listened to one of them…
This started as Robb and others poking fun at me for calling Boston’s Boston a perfect album… so I set out to find a small set of albums that I was OK with calling perfect, instead, so they wouldn’t make quite so much fun of me…
“Perfect” means… every song is one you wouldn’t mind running into at any point, but also the album as a whole works together… and makes sense. And stuff. I don’t have words for music, really…
All but one of the albums are from before I was born, and the remaining one is still 14 years old… this is mostly because of my musical taste, of course, but I think (unfortunately) that the production of “epic” music is probably declining… you can blame it on the studios, artists, society, whatever… I don’t know what it is, for sure, but I’d certainly love it if someone repaired the situation!
|
Boston – Boston (1976)
This album was the soundtrack for most of my high school career; it remains the most consistently complete and perfect album I’ve ever heard. Some (Robb/Gino) call it overproduced, among other things… |
|
Radiohead – The Bends (1995)
I was only recently introduced to this album (and Radiohead in general) by Robb/DJ/Savannah last year. The first half makes for great music the first time through; the second half takes a few plays, but eventually it’s hard to hear just one song and stop without completing the album… |
|
|
The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
For a long time before I knew any music, I had a single CD of Beatles songs. It turned out most of them were from Sgt. Pepper; hearing them in context made them all the better! |
|
Pink Floyd – The Wall (1979)
The longest album on the list, at 80 minutes, The Wall is one that’s been with me for quite a while now. You also can’t claim to have listened to it until you’ve listened to it through nice headphones… there’s a whole additional… album, if you listen right. |
|
|
The Beatles – Rubber Soul (1965)
A significant part of Rubber Soul was the soundtrack for freshman year at RPI; it’s also my favorite Beatles album, now, despite the fact that it’s comprised of some of their more ignored-but-still-approachable songs. |
|
Genesis – Invisible Touch (1986)
I was introduced to Genesis by Dad, who has a bunch of albums on CD, including this one. Besides Domino, this album feels short and to the point, which probably contributes a bit to its “perfection”. Not complaining about Domino, either, because it’s definitely the best song! |
|
Robb, Matt, and I finally wrapped our the second Seed release this week! It’s the cumulation of almost two months of continued work…
I completely updated the tutorial, and it uses a new coding style which we’re going to use universally from now on (I also partially updated Lights Off to this style…) It should definitely work on Fedora now, too!
There are packages for Seed in our PPA, if you use Ubuntu. Matt has provided us with a Arch package that builds from SVN, as well. Otherwise, grab it from SVN and build it yourself:
svn://svn.gnome.org/svn/seed/trunk
A slightly shortened version of the Changelog, after the jump…