Blog Archive: February 2018
Hey, Sydney! Im coming to see you tonight (then Adelaide and Wellington!)
I’m just about to go to the airport to fly to Sydney for tonight’s event, What should we do about Democracy? It’s part of the Australia/New Zealand tour for Walkaway, and from Sydney, I’m moving on to the Adelaide Festival and then to Wellington for Writers and Readers Week and the NetHui one-day event on... more
My short story about better cities, where networks give us the freedom to schedule our lives to avoid heat-waves and traffic jams
I was lucky enough to be invited to submit a piece to Ian Bogost’s Atlantic series on the future of cities (previously: James Bridle, Bruce Sterling, Molly Sauter, Adam Greenfield); I told Ian I wanted to build on my 2017 Locus column about using networks to allow us to coordinate our work and play in... more
SotD: Wish I Knew You
Another Song of the Day that got here because its on the radio right now, and I smile every time they play it. The lyric in full says I wish I knew you when I was young. It resonates pretty deep for someone of my age. Of course, the guys in the band (The Revivalists) are young, but that doesnt seem to get in the way. This is the one, Im sure youve heard it recently: You shine like a star / You know who you are / You're everything beautiful& The Revivalists are a bunch of white boys from New Orleans; until I started poking around to write this piece I didnt realize they were a big complicated band with a horn section and a steel guitar, who stretch out in songs and go in surprising instrumental directions.
DevOpsDays New York City 2019: Join the planning committee!
2019 feels like a long way off, but since the conference is in January, we need to start planning soon. The sooner we start, the less rushed the planning can be. I have to confess that working with the 2018 committee was one of the best and most professional conference planning experiences I've ever had. I've been involved with many conferences over the years and this experience was one of the best! I invite new people to join the committee for 2019. The best way to learn about organizing is to join a committee and help out. You will be mentored and learn a lot in the process.
Male Ally Summit 2018 (NYC)
(quoted from the website) The Male Ally Summit comes after a successful event on March 13, 2017 in NYC called, "The Role Male Allies, Advocates, and Mentors have in Retaining Women in Tech", we had over 180 in attendance. We know this year will be just as impactful. This year we bring back some of the same amazing speakers such as David Smith and Brad Johnson who are co-authors of, "Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women"; Evin Robinson (Co-founder, New York on Tech); Matt Wallaert (Chief Behavioral Officer, Clover Health). We add to the agenda, Heather Cabot (Co-author, Geek Girl Rising); Bryan Liles (Software Engineer, Heptio); Avis Yates Rivers (CEO and Author, Technology Concepts Groups International), Dennis Kozak (SVP of Next Generation Portfolio Strategy, CA Technologies) and others!
SotD: Cant Get There From Here
For a lot of bands, theres one song thats special because its the first one you heard on the radio and you thought Whos that?! I dont know if Cant Get There From Here is my absolute favorite R.E.M. song; Man on the Moon has great surge-and-flow, Losing My Religion is the greatest car singalong ever. But anyhow, its a fine piece of work. Side-note: The title of the song is inconsistent, sometimes appearing with the apostrophe, sometimes without. This was in the early eighties, I had a long commute to work and at that point there was a Vancouver radio station that played interesting new stuff, and I heard a lot of later-famous bands there before most people did.
XORcise
XORcise (??.z??.siz) verb 1. To remove observations from a dataset if they satisfy one of two criteria, but not both. [e.g., After XORcising adults and citizens, only foreign children and adult citizens were left.]
Next HDR software
I've spentwasted over a week on HDR Express 3, but I'm still no closer to a solution for my ghosting. What alternatives are there? Off to search for best hdr software, and of course got lots of responses. Interestingly, I didn't see HDR Express in the list. For some reason, picked on Aurora HDR, number two from this list. Download and installation went smoothly, and it seemed straightforward ( intuitive ) enoughuntil I tried to save a file. Ah, you don't save, you export. OK, I can live with that, though I'll probably continue to bitch and moan for a while. And then it offered me: Save as "JPG files" (*.jpg) Where did the experts go?
HDR Express: final sting
So I've given up on HDR Express 3. As planned, sent them an email pointing to my diary articles. And they had one last surprise for me: How do I enter the email address? So I filled out the (required) fields and hit Send. It flagged all the fields as required . So I tried again, and got: So somehow they had moved the email address to the bottom.
SotD: Cello Suite #5
Today features the first artist to make a return Song-of-the-Day appearance: J.S. Bach. The music is the Cello Suite #5, a showpiece for basically every cellist whos ever performed, and an object of study for every serious student who gets a couple of years into the instrument. Cover page of the manuscript of the Suites by Anna Magdalena, Bachs second wife. The cello suites were written sometime around 1720; each has six parts, adding up to something over twenty minutes of music. So theyre long, and almost unbearably intense, so you dont usually hear them all at once, although Rostropovich apparently played them all night in 1989 at the fall of the Berlin Wall - theres a brief video.
Reviewing Ethics
I used to do quite a bit of reviewing on TripAdvisor; enjoyed the feeling of contributing and used the service when picking hotels and restos. But then I realized that this little warm glow was really all about making money for Silicon Valley VCs, and I have a major attitude problem about that. Which raises the issue; Is it ethically OK to participate in review sites at all? [Spoiler: Yeah, sometimes, but definitely not on Google Maps.] Now, as for TripAdvisor, turns out the original VCs got their exit in 2004 when IAC snapped up the site, then it was spun off as part of Expedia, then split with Expedia with an add-on IPO in 2011.
Podcast: The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 05
Here’s part five of my reading (MP3) (part four, part three, part two, part one) of The Man Who Sold the Moon, my award-winning novella first published in 2015’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It’s my Burning Man/maker/first days of a better nation story and... more
HDR Express, yet again
I've been trying to use HDR Express 3 for a week now, and I have yet to create a single image. Yes, it's Microsoft space, but surely I can master even that. After the last attempt I decided that I should watch the video tutorials after all. So I fired up the program, once again cursing the mouse, and selected tutorials from the main menu. It wasn't a video tutorial after all. It was the document hidden inside the program about which I complained about earlier. But this time I found a way to save it! So now at least I can look at the manual on another display.
SotD: Mannish Boy
This eventually became Muddy Waters signature tune, which is sort of a pity because there were usually more interesting songs in his set, but he seemed to genuinely love it, and brought so much to each performance that you had to join in the love. I managed to see most of the big-name bluesman, mostly in a pretty elderly condition, but those are still highlights; I even interviewed Willie Dixon for the student paper; I seem to recall asking him what he thought about white college kids joining his audience and he looked at me like I was crazy; Blues is for everyone, man. I saw Muddy at the long-gone Ontario Place Forum in Toronto; he was really old and had to perform sitting down; then lurched out of his chair for Mannish Boy, busting some moves and hollering Im a MAN! ; it was so awesome.
Nvidia
Mail from Nvidia today asking me how I liked my support experience. I've described this in painful detail, notably the absence of a real online bug report submission and the fact that the support person wasn't aware that the problem was solved in a newer version. But what got me was this: Submitted Online ? How? If they really have that option, they're hiding it well. Hopefully my comments will get read, and they'll fix that. ACM only downloads articles once.
SotD: Cream
This my fave Prince song, by a mile. I suspect that makes me a heretic, and is also wildly inconsistent because its got none of his guitar shredding on it, which almost makes me grin ear-to-era. But its a pure pop gem, a thing no song should ever apologize for in any company no matter how august. I am in no way a Prince-ologist. I never managed to catch a live show, but wouldnt have missed the chance. What else can I say? His Super Bowl half-time show was maybe the most intense ten minutes of music by anybody ever. To quote myself on the day: I get the feeling that Prince decided some heavy rain would help his visuals and he had so much mojo going into this particular Sunday that God took his call and set it up. I hated most of his slow-jam moaners, and the extra-stupid ...
Server down!
Mail from Callum Gibson this evening, telling me that I (my proxy) had disappeared off the IRC channel. Strange. The proxy bip, runs on the external web server www.lemis.com. It occasionally hangs (I think there's a file descriptor leak somewhere), but I had just restarted it. Off to take a look: === grog@www (/dev/pts/1) ~ 1 -> uptime 11:13AM up 6:22, 2 users, load averages: 0.58, 0.59, 0.52 The server had gone down again! That's the second time this year. Somehow RootBSD is not what it used to be.
Offensive code of conduct
It's no secret that I'm opposed to codes of conduct , specific interpretations of what the codifiers see as good behaviour. Apart from the fact that there are too many of them, all with loopholes and inconsistencies, they shouldn't be necessary in the first place. Six years ago I decided against attending linux.conf.au (seasonal URL) because of their insistence on a code. Two years ago I noted a perceived issue with the FreeBSD Code of Conduct, requiring (in their view) an overhaul of the code. Now it's there, and we had a long discussion (as it happened, started by myself, though I didn't stay in the thread for long).
SotD: Spinning Centers
This is from Unknown Rooms, a very beautiful collection by Chelsea Wolfe. Its a little unusual for this series in that its hardly a song all, just a floating, ethereal musical moment three minutes and nine seconds long. But you wont regret listening to it. The cover of Hiss Spun, her latest as of this writing. Im at risk of misrepresenting Ms Wolfe here; this may be floaty acoustic loveliness, but shes mostly a hard-edged electro-goth drone doomster. If you go to a show (which I recommend), expect a lot of dim lights and guitar roor. Having said that, the roaring dimness will have tons of musical integrity, just as the glowing light of Spinning Centers does.
?Stop Mang Fun of Me?
Somebody recently asked me if I am the star of bash.org quote #75514 (a snippet of online chat from a large collaboratively built collection): <mako> my letter "eye" stopped worng <luca> k, too? <mako> yeah <luca> sounds like a mountain dew spill <mako> and comma <mako> those three <mako> ths s horrble <luca> tme for … Continue reading "“Stop Mang Fun of Me”"
FreeBSD: how stable
Discussion of my recent panic on IRC this morning, and John Marshall expressed surprise that I was running FreeBSD-STABLE on my machines. Why? That's the most stable version. But not according to John: jrm: huh. grog uses -STABLE. groggyhimself: Is that good, bad or ugly? callum: I would consider it sensible groggyhimself: My thoughts too. I was wondering what jrm was thinking. jrm: it was an observation jrm: my understanding was never to use -STABLE unless it was absoutely necessary jrm: as it is anything but 'stable' - and is not even guaranteed to compile - despite its name.
HDR Express: still no luck
My previous attempts with HDR Express 3 were less than successful. But OK, since I can't comfortably access their manual (it can only be displayed from the running program!) , I was going by what seemed to make sense, not necessarily what you should do with Microsoft-based programs. And then it occurred to me: I had come to this program because of a book, The HDRI Handbook 2.0 , by Christian Bloch. The obvious thing (apart from the discrepancy in version numbers) would be to follow the instructions there. Went to some trouble (connecting a DVI cable from dischord to my right-hand monitor) to be able to start the program on dischord, something that I hadn't been able to do before because of the rdesktop bug.
SotD: Submission
Submission was a late addition to (most versions of) Never Mind the Bollocks, Heres the Sex Pistols, which anyone will tell you is Culturally Important. But mostly its just a really great rock song, which reveals that in among being Culturally Important, the Pistols were a highly competent and heavily rehearsed hard-rock band. Note: The picture above is inaccurate because Sid Vicious bass parts werent usable on Never Mind the Bollocks; the (pretty decent) bass youre hearing is by guitarist Steve Jones. Most people reading this are probably way too young to remember what a big deal the Sex Pistols were.
nVidia pain, next step
I've had a lot of pain with the nvidia driver for FreeBSD lately: first the performance bug I experienced last month, and then yesterday's panic. The two are not completely unrelated: as the result of the performance issue, I'm using an old version of the driver. Could it be that only this driver causes problems? In any case, I had a rather strange request from the person handling the driver bug: Can we get video showing performance drop when only single display is connected to the gpu?
SotD: Walk Like an Egyptian
By The Bangles; OK, one of the most cheerful songs ever recorded, with a hilarious video. But its got a good beat, you could dance to it. And at 50° North Latitude where I live, well take any February smiles we can get. Seriously, listen to the song, watch the video, youll smile, how could that not be a good thing? Even better, stand up and do the dance around the office. What can I say? The band is tight, the vocals and harmonies are razor-sharp, the guitar sound is good. Playing this kind of music at this tempo is tough; they knew what they were doing.
Panic!
Updated the system on teevee today, as I do about once a month. The last time was: FreeBSD teevee.lemis.com 11.1-STABLE FreeBSD 11.1-STABLE #2 r327971: Mon Jan 15 10:55:53 AEDT 2018 [email protected]:/home/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/sys/GENERIC amd64 Nothing very interesting there, which is why I almost never mention it. Today it finished, I rebooted, went away briefly, and came back in time to see the system displaying: reboot after panic: page fault writing core to /var/crash/vmcore.1 Huh?
SotD: Take Me To The River
You can call this one of the great songs in just about any musical conversation and youll get no argument. A great big swirl of the sacred and the sensual, with a razor rhythm and lots of chances to show off. It was written in 1974 by Al Green and guitarist Teenie Hodges for Al Green Explores Your Mind; it wasnt a hit, particularly, although a cover by Syl Johnson did OK. Then, four year later, the Talking Heads covered it on More Songs About Buildings and Food,, and that was a really big deal. The Heads had a following who liked their light-punk Manhattan sound, and this was a surprise.
Lookalikes
Did I forget a period of my life when I grew a horseshoe mustache and dreadlocks, walked around topless, and illustrated this 2009 article in the Economist on the economic boon that hippy festivals represent to rural American communities? Previous lookalikes are here.
More playing with HDR Express
My previous experience with HDR Express 3 was not the most positive, but then, it is a Microsoft space program. Maybe I'm trying to do too much at once. Let's take one step at a time. Fired it up again, this time remotely from euroa, and confirmed once again that I got a black screen. Started it locally and migrated to rdesktop, again with no problems. This time I took the normal interface. And once again it insisted on looking in C:\Users\grog\Pictures. But this time the Preferences screen looked completely different, and in particular didn't allow me to set a default folder.
SotD: Into the Dark
In full, I Will Follow You Into the Dark, by Death Cab for Cutie off their album Plans. This is a solo acoustic thing, stripped down to nothing but a lovely tune and a haunting message; both will stick to you, even if you heard them a million times on the radio a decade back. No personal connection here; I dont know anything about Death Cab, think its a dumb name for a band, dont know any of their other songs, wouldnt recognize any of them if I met them on the street. I just heard it on the radio driving a kid to school, and was hooked: If heaven and hell decide that both are satisfied/Illuminate the Nos on their Vacancy signs. Ive never been in a close-up-with-death situation, but it feels like the singers captured that feeling.
Trying HDR Express
My last attempts with commercial HDR software were with Franzis HDR Projects 4. Not an unqualified success: in fact, an unqualified waste of money. On the other hand, the method I'm using now, using enfuse, doesn't handle ghosting at all well, so it's probably time to look further. The next one I found was HDR Express 3 from Pinnacle Imaging Systems. I downloaded a trial copy a few days ago, but have only just got round to trying it out. The view on startup was unexpected: That's certainly minimal.
E-M1 USB problems
I read photos from my cameras to the computer using a script called syp. It uses a feature of the Olympus file naming scheme. The names are of the form PMDDNNNN.JPG, where P is an (apparently) arbitrary letter, M is a one-character abbreviation for the month (1 to C), DD a two character representation of the day of the month, and NNNN a number that is incremented for each photo. The P can be changed to just about any character you want, so I have changed it on all my cameras to identify the camera (1 for the E-M1, 2 for the E-PM2, 3 for the E-PM1, and 4 for the E-M1 Mark II).
SotD: Do You Love Me?
Normally I write Song of the Day a few days ahead, and today I woke up on Valentines day and realized that days song was symphonic stuff by Brahms, which is great but not perhaps the Language Of Love. To make up for that, Ill send you all along a Happy Valentines for a few days back with a song thats about nothing but love, by Nick Cave. Nicks released a lot of good music over the years; this is off (sticking with the V-Day theme) Let Love In. It might be the album highlight but there are other gems too.
GPS pain
What time did we pick up the prescription at Health First yesterday? It was somewhere between 15:30 and 16:00, but I didn't note the exact time. Never mind, I have a GPS navigatortwo, in factso I can use something like GPS Visualizer to show where I was. But that shows two serious issues. First, the track is extremely inaccurate. In Ballarat, we parked between Eyre St and Dana St, a block south of Health First, and walked north along the west side of Doveton St. When we left (by car), we turned left into Dana St and left again into Dawson St.
SotD: Fine and Mellow
This is a song not only performed but written by Billie Holiday; it was a hit in 1939, the flip side of the beautiful but gruesome Strange Fruit (the fruit was a lynching victim). Fine and Mellow is sad too, but a fairly standard man-treats-me-bad blues. Its a treat for the ears and the heart. You cant write about Billie without dipping into cliché: Victimized as a black and as a woman, drank herself to death, endless sadness in that story. Im actually not a devotee, quite a bit of her music goes bye me. But others, like this one, grab hard and dont let go.
My Kuro5hin Diary Entries
Kuro5hin (pronounced “corrosion” and abbreviated K5) was a website created in 1999 that was popular in the early 2000s. K5 users could post stories to be voted upon as well as entries to their personal diaries. I posted a couple dozen diary entries between 2002 and 2003 during my final year of college and the … Continue reading "My Kuro5hin Diary Entries"
SotD: Death Dont Have No Mercy
Death Dont Have No Mercy is a very old, very dark blues by Rev. Gary Davis which has been covered lots, by Dylan and the Dead among others. But today Im plugging a live version recorded by Hot Tuna in 1992. Hot Tuna are a very rootsy outfit. For those who dont know, they were the Jeffersan Airplane faction that didnt go Starshipping; guitarist/singer Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady. They play blues and country and swing stuff, with a lot of extended guitar/bass breaks, always sitting down. This is on a live album called Live At Sweetwater Two, and I saw them play more or less this set a few months before they recorded it.
Do We Need a New Internet?
I was one of the interview subjects on an episode of BBC’s Tomorrow’s World called Do We Need a New Internet? (MP3); it’s a fascinating documentary, including some very thoughtful commentary from Edward Snowden.
SotD: Ashes the Rain and I
The James Gang was a stripped-down band that mostly played primitive rock and roll (which I love) very well, and Rides Again is an example of that, but Ashes the Rain and I isnt primitive at all; five minutes of contemplative beauty. Disclosure: Joe Walsh has been, and remains, one of my musical heroes; a guy with a reputation for dumb stuff who really doesnt seem to be dumb at all. Plus, his guitar tone is second to, well none might be taking it a bit high, but it sure sounds great. If I keep doing this, hell get a rocker into Song of the Day.
The 2018 Locus Poll is open: choose your favorite science fiction of 2017!
Following the publication of its editorial board’s long-list of the best science fiction of 2017, science fiction publishing trade-journal Locus now invites its readers to vote for their favorites in the annual Locus Award. I’m honored to have won this award in the past, and doubly honored to see my novel Walkaway on the short... more
SotD: Brahms Variations
Today, lets do classical music, as in a great big splodge of orchestral goo by a dead German. Brahms op. 56a and 56b is a set of variations on a theme; he thought the theme was Haydns, thus called it Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn. But now they think the Haydn attribution on the theme is sketchy, so now youll see em labeled sometimes as the Saint Anthony Variations. Anyhow, this is a super tasty splodge of goo, the kind of thing orchestras exist to play. Brahms, the year before the Variations were published. Brahms early career was up and down; he was in his late thirties before he got much traction.
SotD: Jah Glory
Third World have always had had a different sound, leaning quite a bit on sweet harmonies and instrumental flavors. Its reggae all right, but impure like most great music, and sounds as tasty as anything you can imagine. Jah Glory is such a sweet welcoming thing, a soaring song of worship. (You dont have to believe in Jah.) I saw Third World once in Toronto, I think part of the big Caribana festival, in a soccer stadium. The concert promoter had really screwed the pooch; the stage was one side of the field and when we filed in we found ourselves bottled up in the stands on the other side of the field, with the grass fenced off and a handful of cops lined up between the stands and the field.
The Shoemaker's Children Go Barefoot
Earlier today I submitted the camera-ready version of a technical briefing on mining Git repositories , which Georgios Gousios and I will be presenting at the 2018 International Conference on Software Engineering . I was struck by the complexity and inefficiency of the administrative process.
The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 04 [FIXED]
Here’s part four of my reading (MP3) (part three, part two, part one) of The Man Who Sold the Moon, my award-winning novella first published in 2015’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It’s my Burning Man/maker/first days of a better nation story and was a... more
Podcast: The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 04
Here’s part four of my reading (MP3) (part three, part two, part one) of The Man Who Sold the Moon, my award-winning novella first published in 2015’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It’s my Burning Man/maker/first days of a better nation story and was a... more
The demise of the file
More and more my objection to modern digital devices is pointing in one direction: inability to manipulate files. Thirteen years ago I grumbled that this new firefox browser had lost editing functionality. More recently I've been grumbling about inability to move data from one place to another without going via a server, more than likely at the other end of the world. Today I had another example, also involving another rant favourite, Android. I received an SMS message from somebody, something that I don't see in a timely manner. And I wanted to answer it. With an SMS? Heaven forbid! That's what email is for.
Backups and image integrity
Over to Chris Bahlo's house today to get my backup disk number 6, which I used for my photos from November 2013 until March last year, when it became too small (only 4 TB). Since then it's been sitting on a shelf at Chris' place. That's just what I need for the video backup I've been working on for the last week or so. OK, newfs and start backing up. But what about the content? It contained are all my photos up to a year ago. Yes, I have three other copies, but what if they're all corrupt? How can I even tell if they're corrupt at all?
SotD: Dear Darling
Mary Margaret OHara, a daughter of Toronto, hasnt recorded much and hasnt had hits and these are terribly sad things because shes a gem, a wonderful unconventional songwriter and singer. Her stuff gets pretty far out over the edge sometimes, but Dear Darling is a lovely straight-up country tune, hardly weird at all, or only in places. Ms OHaras performances were legendary in Toronto of the Eighties, and when she finally went into the studio and came out with Miss America, people thought she was on a rocket to the Top of the Pops. Despite, one hears, a parade of record-company executives throwing themselves at her feet, shes only ever recorded once since then, on the soundtrack to the 2001 move Apartment Hunting.
Hey, Australia and New Zealand, Im coming to visit you!
I’m about to embark on a tour of Australia and New Zealand to support my novel Walkaway, with stops in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, and Wellington! I really hope you’ll come out and say hello! Perth: Feb 24-25, Perth Festival Melbourne: Feb 27: An expansive conversation about the imperfect present and foreseeable future with CS... more
SotD: Mercy Street
Nobody could call this obscure; Peter Gabriels So sold a kazillion copies and was right in the center of the zeitgeist for months back in the late Eighties. The songs were good, the sound was good, and (especially) the videos were good, which really mattered in 1986. Mercy Street was not one of its big hits, which always astonished me; I thought it by far and away the albums highlight. So isnt innovative or groundbreaking or anything; the song structures are conventional and the melodies are unfussy. The production quite properly focuses on Gabriels vocals, which on this record are outstanding in their artistry and just the sound of his voice, a pleasantly-rough English tenor, mostly singing in the comfortable center of his range.
Photo Antiphony
Mobile-phone cameras are better this year than last, and next year theyll be better again. The notion of carrying around a heavy chunk of metal and glass called a camera is becoming difficult to defend and this makes me sad, because I like cameras. Using the big fat Samyang 135mm F2 is giving me strong opinions about what a camera has to be to become the anti-phone, the one youll take along even though theres a good camera on your phone. This piece contains 7½ pictures, 1½ of which could have been captured with a mobile camera, and one of which was.
Disk power supplies: the solution
I've spent several days looking for power adapters for my external disks. I've found a couple on eBay, but they all have connectors with 2.5 mm internal diameter ( guaranteed to fit both 2.1 mm and 2.5 mm sockets ). I know better. But then it occurred to me: ask Chris Bahlo. And sure enough, she had exactly the power adapter I was looking for, on indefinite loan if not to keep. Finally I had enough power adapters for all my disks. And then I discovered: Feb 11 09:25:04 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): READ(10). CDB: 28 00 00 d6 d9 36 00 00 08 00 Feb 11 09:25:04 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Feb 11 09:25:04 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition Feb 11 09:25:04 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI sense: MEDIUM ERROR asc:11,0 (Unrecovered read error) Feb 11 09:25:04 teevee ...
SotD: Fantaisie Impromptu
After the hot guitar a couple days back, I thought some more flashy soloing would be fun, and the world currently has nobody flashier, on any instrument, than pianist Yundi Li, who seems to have rebranded himself as YUNDI. But I ended up at this Frédéric Chopin Fantaisie which has, yes, flash, but lots of music among and between it, and Mr Li really seems to understand Mr Chopin. If hes coming to your town, I recommend grabbing tickets; hes obviously a really good pianist but also a showman. One of his gimmicks, which I really like, is that when its time for him to play, he strides onto the stage, plunks down on the piano bench, and his fingers hit the keyboard about 0.5 seconds later.
X-rays for Leonid and Zhivago
While I was in Bannockburn, I asked Greg Coates for copies of the X-ray files, something that they had done in the past. He seemed confused, and suggested taking photos of the screen of his laptop with a mobile phone! I explained that this had been done in the past and suggested that he send me the files as email attachments. He said that he would see what could be done. Later I received a mail message from Charyn, surname unstated, giving links for the images, starting with http://itxviewer.com:8080/itxviewer/index.html. No response from the server. nmap showed: rDNS record for 104.155.198.195: 195.198.155.104.bc.googleusercontent.com Not shown: 997 filtered ports PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 1022/tcp closed exp2 5432/tcp closed postgresql Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 16.88 seconds So ...
VicEmergency app
Petra Gietz told me that there was a fire in Napoleons yesterday. Did I hear about it? Of course not. I don't have the mobile phone app necessary to get the reports. But why not? I have a mobile phone, and (presumably) the app is free. So why not install it? Now I know: First, try to install: Why does it need access to my photos?
SotD: Broken English
This the title track from Broken English, an album by Marianne Faithfull, on which every song is good and some are terrifying (not this one). I was sufficiently impressed by the album that I wrote a whole blog piece on it a few years back. Like I said there, Ms Faithfull has a lot of history and a lot of baggage; all worth reading about, and there are lots of places to do that that arent this blog. In 2009. No longer a goddess nor a burnout, just a grown-up. Whats interesting about Broken English is that its from well into her career, with a lot of glory and wreckage in the rear-view.
The power connector conundrum
External disk drives now almost invariably come with a 5 V power adapter that plugs directly into the mains and delivers power to the disk via a 2.1 mm IEC 60130-10 type A connector (and not the 2.5 mm variety). And clearly I get one with every disk I buy. But where are they? Disks die much faster than power adapters, but I have many more disks than adapters, and it's becoming a nuisance. OK, off to eBay to buy a few. What do you call them? Wall wart? None found. Power supply? No, that has too many false positives. Finally eBay told me: Power adaptor.
Stuck sprinkler
Looking out the window this morning when I got up, the garden bed looked particularly wet. Time to reduce the sprinkler time? Not quite: the sprinkler was still going, and had been for at least 3 hours. Dammit, has my sprinkler program hung or crashed? A known bug issue is that if the program stops abnormally, it won't turn the sprinkler off. But no, the program wasn't running, and the sprinkler relay was off. No crash. Power cycled the relay board. Nothing. The sprinkler solenoid itself had stuck on. That's not the first time I've had that problem. In fact, this particular solenoid was a replacement for one that failed, purchased conveniently just over 12 months ago, so that the warranty had expired.
SotD: Pride and Joy
Its been mostly gentle and sophisticated around here recently. Lets turn to Texas and fix that; Pride and Joy, by Stevie Ray Vaughan, is about the simplest blues holler you can imagine, with a happy message and some smokin hot guitar. Wow, Stevie Ray has been dead for 28 years. The last time I saw him feels like yesterday; it was just weeks before his death. Stevie Ray had managed to achieve sobriety after a lot of years of hard partying; like many sober addicts, hed gotten to the point where the alternative was a coffin. Anyhow, that night when I saw him, he made a touching little speech about being sober, and how you had to take of yourself to be there for the people you love.
More network congestion
My network performance is still not good, though it's not as regular as I thought. But how do I report it? I'm not happy with the packet drop measurements I have been making, and so far I haven't got round to hacking netstat to produce the kind of information I want. But there's a standard test that every [IR]SP seems to use: Speedtest.
SotD: Sodade
Cesária Évora is probably the only person youve ever heard of (now that youve heard of her) from Cabo Verde, which is an island group 570km west of Africas westernmost point. She was a really great singer and recorded lots of fine collections of music. Its hard to pick from among them, but Sodade is a fine example. I dont know much about Ms Évora or about Cabo Verde either. Miss Perfumado, from which Sodade comes, is probably her best-known work. All of the songs on it are good, and in fact everything Ive hear from her is pleasing to the ear.
More network problems
Into the office this morning to find that my packet loss rates had gone through the roof round midnight. Looking at the raw data, I found packet drop rates of up to 75%, and several TCP sessions had timed out. This doesn't match the regular pattern I had been seeing so far. But why don't Aussie Broadband and the National Broadband Network know about this stuff? It seems that neither of them have monitoring in place. Time to complain? No, I don't like those packet drop rates for a different reason: they're implausibly high. Even 2% or 3% causes severe performance issues, but I'm not seeing anything that severe.
SotD: Both Sides Now
Anyones list of top songwriters would include Joni Mitchell, and any list of her top songs would include Both Sides, Now. Theres little I can say that will add value here, just give it a listen and itll improve your day, any day. Notes It was recorded by Judy Collins first, not Ms Mitchell. Speaking of recorded-by , check the list of cover versions, helpfully organized by decade; oh my goodness gracious. I can remember once when I was stage manager for a concert, during the endless hours of take-down, load-out, and clean-up, someone put a tape on the auditorium PA that had a cover by a warm-voiced male singer, and since it was only a half-hour tape I heard it like six times, and to this day it remains the voice I hear when I think of the song.
More network investigations
It's been a few days since I've updated my network statistics page, and it's now showing a very clear pattern of congestion from 18:00 to 24:00. There are still a number of loose ends, in particular the question of whether ICMP packet loss has any particular relationship to TCP packet loss. Well, netstat can show TCP packet loss: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/5) /usr/src/usr.bin/netstat 161 -> netstat -p tcp -T Proto Rexmit OOORcv 0-win Local Address Foreign Address ... tcp4 0 460 0 aussie-gw.50060 streamerapi1.fin.https tcp4 5 0 0 aussie-gw.60748 110.141.224.69.61829 tcp4 44 0 0 aussie-gw.20026 S0106004063d9302.6905 tcp4 145 62 0 aussie-gw.27601 ...
SotD: Joan of Arc
This is a song by Leonard Cohen, but Im talking about it as performed by Jennifer Warnes. It may not even be Warnes best cover of a Cohen tune, but its good enough to be any days song, and the recording is special. Many years ago, Jennifer Warnes released Famous Blue Raincoat, a collection of Cohen songs, and did very well by it. Its a fantastic record; Warnes inhabits Cohens tunes completely. Which is a neat trick, since shes got a big, creamy voice as wide as a river and smooth as satin, while Cohens voice is exactly none of those things.
Nominations for the Hugo Awards are now open
If you were a voting member of the World Science Fiction Convention in 2017, or are registered as a voting member for the upcoming conventions in 2018 or 2019, you are eligible to nominate for the Hugo Awards; the Locus List is a great way to jog your memory about your favorite works from last... more
Ports maintenance
For some weeks now I've been getting automated reports of build failures of enblend on the FreeBSD test boxes: Subject: [package - head-i386-default][graphics/enblend] Failed for enblend-4.1.4_15 in build ... !!! Jail is newer than host. (Jail: 1200056, Host: 1200054) !!! !!! This is not supported. !!! !!! Host kernel must be same or newer than jail. !!! !!! Expect build failures. !!! ... c++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -isystem /usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include -D_THREAD_SAFE -pthread -D_GNU_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -I../include -I../src/layer_selection -O2 -pipe -fstack-protector -isystem /usr/local/include -fno-strict-aliasing -Wno-c++11-extensions -isystem /usr/local/include --param inline-unit-growth=60 -O2 -DNDEBUG -Wall -MT enblend-enblend.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/enblend-enblend.Tpo -c -o enblend-enblend.o `test -f 'enblend.cc' || echo './'`enblend.cc c++: warning: argument unused during compilation: '--param inline-unit-growth=60' [-Wunused-command-line-argument] In file included from enblend.cc:181: In file included from ./enblend.h:43: In file included from ./assemble.h:43: ./include/vigra_ext/impexalpha.hxx:197:43: error: no matching constructor for initialization of 'std::auto_ptr<vigra::Decoder>' ...
SotD: Diaraby
Todays song comes from Africa (first in the series); Diaraby is a slow dreamy electric African blues with exquisite singing and guitar, by Ali Farka Touré; seven minutes of pure musical joy. Lets start our trip to Africa in Mali, famous among other things for being the location of Timbuktu; and for its music. In 1994 Ry Cooder and Malian musical godfather Farka Touré collaborated on Talking Timbuktu, which includes Diaraby and is one of my very favorite recordings. Its a cant-miss record, cheerful yet deep, bluesy and African, especially appropriate for sitting outside on a warm day. I read the back story once of how Mr Farka Touré got into playing music that sounded simultaneously like John Lee Hooker and African campfire music, but I cant remember it.
SotD: Happy
The song-of-the-day recently has been trending a little bit to the eclectic and the obscure. Enough of that, lets dish up a hearty serving of meat-and-potatoes rock-n-roll. Happy is a simple stripped-down hard Stones rocker, vocals by Keef, with a nice tune, tasty chord changes, and you know what? I need a love to keep me happy too. You have to be a little nervous plugging the Stones in the era of #MeToo; their work includes dark splashes of shocking misogyny. But Exile on Main Street has less (cant actually pull any to the front of my mind), so well cut them some slack.
First Purples
Its a tradition that I blog a photo of our crocuses the first time each year that Im home and theyre open and theres some light. In the Pacific Northwests late winter, we use some light in a forgiving kind of way. The big-ass new 135mm F2 lens was quivering in the camera bag for a chance at these little guys, how could I say no? The lens works well, but when I say works I mean the photographer does a whole lot of work to get the focus happening. It took really a lot of shots to come away with three that were usefully sharp.
More eBay pain
Various mail from eBay today. First, one that was completely unintelligible. The Subject: line was Subject: eBay will begin intermediating payments on its Marketplace platform . What does that mean? Looking up in the OED didn't help. The verb intermediate (with long last vowel: /jntYÈmi?djejt/) has four meanings, only one of which is in common use: To act between others; to mediate. So we need a direct and an indirect object. But here I only get one: eBay is happy to announce plans to further improve the customer experience by intermediating payments on our Marketplace platform.
SotD: Ne Nehledej
Im pretty sure Ne Nehledej, which is said to mean Stop Searching , is in the Czech language, because Iva Bittová is Czech. I dont know that much about her and frankly this Song of the Day mostly exists to highlight remarkable video, but Ne Nehledej is a nice song and Bittová is a great entertainer while also being out there on the edge. She sings and plays violin, and is as much performance art as music. But (unlike some performance artists) this performance is all about music. Its a bit confusing, because this song appears on Bittovás eponymous first album from 1986, but then theres another 1994 album with that title, which in that listing is translated as No, Do Not Seek .
SotD: More White Flags
Yesterdays White Flag isnt the only song of that name. I want to share one in particular, a minor hit by a minor band ( one-hit wonder would be charitable) called the Leggatt Brothers, because I think its brilliant, a forgotten gem. But theres no live video and its not for sale digitally, so I loaded up the entry with a few extra White Flags. First, we have Joseph, a band featuring three sisters whose surnames are Schepman and Closner (I can see why they didnt use either), singing burn the white flag; not bad! Second, some guy named Dave Barnes; didnt get far into this one, but hey, you might love it.
The 2017 Locus List: a must-read list of the best science fiction and fantasy of the past year
Every year, Locus Magazine’s panel of editors reviews the entire field of science fiction and fantasy and produces its Recommended Reading List; the 2017 list is now out, and I’m proud to say that it features my novel Walkaway, in excellent company with dozens of other works I enjoyed in the past year. The Rift,... more
SBS on demand
Yesterday I had lots of pain trying to register Garry Marriott for SBS on demand, and noted the slow responses and the poor image quality. The image quality is probably SBS' fault, but what about the rest? Decided to sign up with a Real Computer. Result: yes, much of the pain is thanks to SBS. It turned out that I already had an account, but I couldn't access it because they wouldn't accept my password, which was most certainly correct last time I used it. Send password reminder? It didn't like the email address (also once correct). OK, sign up again.
The daily net monitoring
One of the interesting things that I saw in my network logs yesterday was that the latency (more accurately, ping time to the next IP address, affectionately called radiation-tower.ausssiebb.net) had dropped. Two weeks ago I had stated that it ranged from 15 to 50 ms, but yesterday it looked like it had dropped to generally under 20 ms. OK, we can track that (blue trace): Yes, indeed, it's looking a lot better, barely ever over 25 ms. But later it became clear that things deteriorate in the evening, with packet loss rates exceeding 20%: What else can I add to these graphs?