zen.org Communal Weblog

There was a grad student here that wrote a Perl program to compute the Jaccard coefficent of some Blast data. The Mac he was using has 8G of memory, but come to about 2GB of memory usage Perl would crash. I reworte it into two programs, first to dump all his data to a gdbm file, then processed that file using the Jaccard coefficent. It never used more then 2G and finished, it took like a day longer to run but we got what we wanted. This all happened a few months ago, and for this and other reasons we moved that project to Solaris.

A few days ago one of our sysadmin was investigating a complaint on why Perl on MacOS X was slow. He built the same Perl twice, one using the system’s malloc(3), the other using the malloc shipped with Perl. Using the original program computing Jaccard coefficent, with a small dataset, it used 1,220 CPU seconds with Apple’s malloc, but only 605 CPU seconds with Perl’s! I asked him to run it with the full data set. Apple’s malloc crashed after 116,700 CPU seconds and ~2.3GB of memory. With Perl’s malloc it used 65,469 CPU seconds and finished after using ~2.8GB of memory.

So happy SysAdminDay!

When Brendan was at Widener he got himself a television.  When he moved to the Bay Area he left it.  Ever since then I’ve had it, and it’s been getten worse and worse.  The tuner has always been fine but the picture has been getting smaller and smaller.  Somebody once told me that if you don’t mind putting a solder gun to it you can replace the broken chip.  I put it out on the curve last night.

Up came waltzing a black man, he picked it up and shook it.  Across the street stood an old truck with a latin man waiting in the cab.  Off they drove with Brendan’s television.  I’d like to think it’s life has just begun.

Our Toyota Pirus has this feature that you don’t need to put your key in the car to drive it.  So when 余艾蕾 and I drove off this morning I didn’t notice that I was driving off using the key in 余艾蕾’s pocket, not mine.  When I got to work, however, I was unable to unlock my office door.  So I sat down and started working at the PC in the hall, rather then at my Mac.

Apart from figuring out how to turn on the Dvorak keyboard, and having it pop back to QWERTY for no reason that I could tell, the PC was not that bad to use.  There is just one thing to know, don’t use Microsoft software.  Once I started using software not shipped by Microsoft all went well!

So Microsoft makes a passable operating system, but really crappy software.

I have been using most of my pants to work around the house, so most of them are not up to wearing to work. As construction is nearing an end, a couple of weeks ago I drove a bunch of old pants to a local church that takes old clothing donations, including all my jeans. I almost threw out my old jeans, but I thought they could be used for patches. Why patches? It seems I have big balls. All my jeans had holes right where my gonads are, I put patches on and they wore holes through the patches.

Yesterday Zoë and I went to Sears, and I got two new pairs of Levi’s, 505 and 550. Today I’m wearing the 550s, so I’m sitting at work with oddly blue pants. Tomorrow, or shortly there after, I plan on wearing the 505s. The test is to see which pair wears through first. When I lived in San Francisco, Levi’s home city, I got a pair of 506 jeans, after years they had no gonad holes and I wore the the entire pair down to nothing. But Levi’s don’t make the 506 cut anymore, I think 560s are the closest that are currently made.

Maybe next time I’ll order a pair of 506s and give that the gonad test. Maybe I should give up Levi’s Jeans.

After today, all of my primary and secondary teams are out of the world cup.  Primary teams for me mean the USA and Sweden.  Secondary teams mean anybody in CONCACAF.  After that comes underdogs and anybody playing Brazil.  I guess I’m just glutten to loose.

On Sunday’s full moon, Daphne had just made some fried rice and cooked some collard greens chinese style.  I was taking some bits out to the compost heap and I saw my first firefly of the year.  I guess summer is now here for me.

Perhaps to Pat’s chagrin, I will make another Ubuntu post. Like I did last April, I tried Kubuntu on my PowerPC at work. It didn’t report the audio card not working. If the sound card worked or not I don’t know, the fan got too loud. Also, the mouse didn’t work, I don’t know if the mouse worked with the beta version, I was too worried about turning it off.

Noticing the new Ubuntu was out I went to the download page.  Like most ISO images, just under 700M. Having but 800M left on my home directory I choose to download it to the /tmp directory on the root partition, which has about 4G free. I start the torrent. As the afternoon went on, I had a healthy download and upload speed. Six o’clock, time to pick up Zoë, the torrent was done but still with a healthy upload speed. Thinking I was being nice I left the torrent running for the night….

Rain, much needed rain all night, but the drought watch continues. Thunder and lighting too. No need to water newely planted trees today. The weather man says more rain today. It’s today?

…I yawn as I get my cup of coffee, and sit at my desk. Time to try an install, /tmp in empty! An up time of nine hours. Stupid thunder and lightning, causing a blackout to reboot my computer and wipe my /tmp directory. Relaunching my torrent, slow download time and no upload time. Rats!

The kitchen is about done.  The counter came in yesterday, when I come home today the sink should be up and the dish washer working again.  The down stairs bathroom is about done too, and useable.  The last part, and the smallest of the three changes, the upstares bathroom.  Demolition started yesterday, led paint flakes flying everywhere.  So much so that Zoë spent last night at my parents house, and is likely to do so again.

The best part about tonight, I get to start moving back into the kitchen.  I’ll be moving pots and pans out of the living and dining room and into the new cabinets.  Just in time too, next week the Cherry Grove Organic Farm pickups start, at least a week earlier then last year.  It’s so exciting.

Being reminded by a recent comment by a Ms. Colleen of Tomahowk, WA to a a post I made about Wood Ducks, I was reminded of a happening last Sunday. Zoë and I where walking along the Delaware Cannel, we spent about an half hour just looking at one of the old locks, being soothed by the sound of the water gushing though. On the way back I was looking for wood ducks, but spotted three male mallards slowly swimming by.

“Look Zoë,” said I, “three ducks, mallards.” Zoë looked, and pointed and said “duck.” The first one swam over to the side, and out from under a rock hanging over the water he poked a female mallard out, and all three of them jumped on her back and starded duck humping! While one of the males quickly gave up and swam away the other two where rentless to this poor duck maiden. Quacks, water splashing, most of the time the lass was totally submerged. Zoë and I stared, am I to hide a nearly two year old of such things?

Everything worked out in the end. On of remaining two male ducks left, and the now consummated couple seemed very happy together. In all it took two or three minutes. Given the homosexual necrophilia tendencies of the male mallard, maybe such other actions should not be surprising.