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GRAFFITI -- December 08, 2008 thru December 14, 2008>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
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December 8, 2008
2216 - Happy fast big cool drive. Yep, after much travelling, my new 320G Seagate 7200.3 Momentus drive showed up, just before 1800. I started SuperDuper running, fed the dogs, and got all the normal Monday evening stuff done. After 2000, it was done, and I followed the directions at this site to swap the new drive in. There was a bit of a hitch, which I described elsewhere:
There are 21 TINY FRICKIN' SCREWS. When I dropped the first one, and it bounced ... I gently reached over and closed my office door, before the dogs came in an licked it up. Then I spent 10 minutes on my knees looking for it. Joy, found it.
When the second one dropped, I got bloody lucky - it had a significant horizontal vector and might have disappeared had I not blindly snatched it out of the air with my left hand. Of course, I've used up all my good luck...
My first big test was getting Jerry's column formatted and on the wire. That's done, and I still have 1.362 ergs of energy left, so I thought I'd drop by here, say hi, and let y'all know what was going down. It sure is nice having 200G of free space, rather than just 11G. At 11, you start to think, "I can't download three Linux DVDs - there isn't room. Sigh." Now, no need to worry. Anyway, long day today, another one coming up tomorrow, ciao!
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December 9, 2008
2215 - I'm done. I finished my Final Project, and submitted it. 40% of my grade done in the last 5 days. Yay. Whew! Tired, now, too tired to consider how much Obama's Senate seat was going for on eBay. Ciao!
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December 10, 2008
2111 - While the soundtrack for Wrath of the Lich King plays in my background, I took a short break from relaxing for the evening to get the dishes done, roast some El Salvador Santa Rita Full Natural (yeah, I got my Sweet Maria's shipment today), and prep the scene for grinding it fresh, right before my shower at 0600 tomorrow. Oh, yay, and I'm off-call for the next three weeks, pending any emergencies and short term coverage as the holidays progress. Back to the game for a short while. Then a good night's rest... Ciao!
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December 11, 2008
2132 - It's pissing down rain. This is the same band of moisture that was snowing in Mississippi this morning. That was one weird continental weather picture. Thoughtlessly, I did not get a screenshot of the image - I seriously thought there was something wrong with the radar down there until I saw a confirming story on a news site later in the day. Anyway, we're under floodwatch here, and should be transitioning directly from that into a winter weather advisory in time for tomorrow's morning commute. Then, by Monday, back to the 50's. Eerie, if you ask me.
BBedit. It's my editor of choice these days. I'm doing more and more work on Harmony (the MacBook Pro), and Bluefish isn't a native OS X app. I'm also going to be trying to get back into coding a bit, one of these days, and like that ring thing that dragged Frodo around Mordor, One Editor To Rule Them All is a good thing, if that editor meets the needs. BBedit is a considerably more industrial-strength product that Bluefish is. That said, I love the latter on Linux, where there isn't a BBedit.
The Return of the Black Widowers. It's a book of the final collected Black Widowers stories from Isaac Asimov. They're puzzle mysteries, really, and quite fun. I picked that up at a book store down in North Carolina while we were visiting, and finished it the other night. Now I'm into The Diamond Age (or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer), a fun yarn by Neal Stephenson from back in '95. I have the sense that I've read it, but can't remember a darned thing so far, and I'm a quarter of the way through it. I'm still trying to decide if I'm goint to go for Anathem one of these days. I also have a stack of magazines that piled up during the school weeks, and a hint that there's some Terry Pratchett under the tree for me this year. So I'm not hurting for recreational or professional reading.
I'm not listening to anything at the moment. While we were at the used booksellers joint in Winston-Salem, I snagged a couple of early-to-mid-'90s ZZ Top discs, XXX and Antenna. They follow Eliminator and drop back a bit into the better blues-y Tex-rock style that they owned before their (hopefully conscious and financially rewarding) descent and traverse of the MTV glory years. The music wasn't as good, during the '80s, but the girls, ah, the leggy, leggy girls ... as Joliet Jake once said, "How much for the little girl? Sell me your women!"
It's still pissing down rain, about half an inch since I started this post. But then I've been lost in Blues Brothers on You Tube for the last 20 minutes, sigh. Now the evening's mostly gone. I'd best organize some stuff and get some useful reading done. Ciao!
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December 12, 2008
2212 - As the fan spins down... Sounds like the title of a computer-based soap opera, eh? In this case, just as I opened up BBedit to work on this post, the fan on Harmony spun down from fairly high revs to near-inaudibility. I'm doing a third-tier backup of the important stuff off the MBP over to Slartibartfast. Here's the commandline I used:
(hfstar cvf - /Users/bilbrey --exclude "/Users/bilbrey/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music" \
--exclude /Users/bilbrey/Movies | gzip -1 -) | ssh slartibartfast.orbdesigns.com \
"(cd ~bilbrey/backups/Harmony && cat - > harmony.bilbrey.20081212.hfstar.gz)"
Since I was gzipping that stream prior to pushing it out on the wire, it can be a fairly compute-intensive thing to run. Just a moment ago, the fan spun up again, as the CPU temps touched on 75° C. Yeah, this thing has always run hot. I'm considering opening it up again one of these days, and redoing the thermal compound - a reputed culprit in these early Core 2 Duo MBP thermal challenges. But back to the script... So I'm grabbing my entire home directory, but excluding the Movies and actual music library, using hfstar. hfstar is a version of Gnu Tar that works with the OS X HFS file system, and saves all the special sauce that the standard tar (yeah, the one shipped with OS X) can't handle. For regular files, there's very little lost if the resource forks and other special goo isn't there. But there are apps in my home tree - and those depend on the right stuff, if I ever wanted a restore to work.
The output from hfstar (I keep wanting to invert the 'f' and 's' when I type that, dunno why) is piped through gzip, and send via ssh to the Linux server, where I use another chained pair of commands to cd to the correct landing directory, and use cat to direct the data to an appropriately named file. With a couple of quick modifications, that can easily be made into a script. I'd rather use rsync, though, but rsync may also not grok HFS. I do need to look into that. Oh, whoops. I got distracted, and the evening's gone now. Ciao!
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December 13, 2008
2023 - Oh, hey now. House cleaning, a nap, and a meatloaf made with ground beef from Alderspring Ranch. Yum. We have a couple of top sirloin and a roast from them as well, that I'm saving for sharing with family guests around the holidays. But the ground beef looked too good not to try some. So I thawed two pounds of beef, and combined that with one large, finely diced onion, three cloves of minced garlic, a cup of oatmeal, one large egg, two or three teaspoons of crushed red pepper, and a bit of freshly ground sea salt and black pepper. Mix thoroughly, put into a loaf pan (in this case, an 8x11 glass pan, and bake in the oven at 350° F for an hour. Veg and potatoes to suit - makes a heck of a dinner, and lots of yummy leftovers. Anyway, a dull day, if delicious at the end. Ciao!
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December 14, 2008
2036 - I baked another ten dozen chocolate, chocolate, chocolate chip cookies today. Yum. We watched some PD James, and had a turkey/green bean goulash for supper. Not much else to report on the home front.
On the war front, progess is, I guess. This week, but two casualties reported. When things start getting better, I balance hope against the possibility that the bad guys are pulling back and regrouping before another round of Loonies With Explosives vs. The Good Guys. I don't mean to denigrate loonies in that remark. But folks whose idea of a good time is to use kids with suicide vests to blow up soldiers while they protect a bus taking girls to a school ... that's not dedication, that's loony. At this point, I think we (I mean our administration, here, and only by way of generous attribution of motivation) merely want things stable enough so that we can bring our men and women home. Funny, since that's what most of the loonies with explosives claim to want, too, I don't know why they don't just settle down and let us go home. Oh, right. They're loonies. But they're dangerous loonies, some of them are smart loonies. So we (and by we, I mean our dedicated men and women of the United States Armed Forces) fight, and sometimes die for the cause. Our condolences to the families and units of the fallen:
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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