Posts

I’ve been attempting to use the latest version of Apple Mail to read my mail. An uncontroversial thing to do, you might think, but I can’t actually manage it. I started Mail about an hour ago, and it has busied itself ever since with tasks more important than letting me read my mail. According to Mail’s “Activity Viewer” window, or the “Reasons Why I Can’t Read My Mail” window as I’ve come to think of it, Mail has been preoccupied updating colours (updating colours!?), synchronising with servers, adding messages, and otherwise keeping the fan on the PowerBook running noisily. ...

I had occasion to be in a bookstore yesterday, and came across Mark-Jason Dominus’s Higher Order Perl. Anyone wanting to do functional programming in Perl has to be seriously demented. Such activity is like reproducing the finest paintings of the Renaissance in excrement, using your finger (to paraphrase a well-known Perl author). But let’s set this basic violation of good sense aside. The book is a rehash, transcribed into Perl, of two classic functional programming texts: Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming, and Bird and Wadler’s Introduction to Functional Programming. ...

Each night, I read a few pages of Lynch and Livingstone’s compendium of natural optical phenomena. Although the writing is a little wooden, and they assume more of a background in physics than I possess, Color and Light in Nature is a wonderful book. So far, my favourite technical term from the book is “glitter patch,” the light from the sun reflected in water when the sun is low in the sky. “Glitter Patch” cries out to be the title of a science fiction novel.

At work, we spent some months wringing our hands over how to harness our increasing number of racked machines in a semi-sane way. In our case, since we work in the HPC arena, we needed a batch queuing system. Ten years ago, I wrote and maintained such a system at Sun. It managed the execution of jobs on about 2,200 computers, and had a user community of several hundred. Although it was a fine piece of software, Sun never did much with it, even though for a while it was substantially superior to Platform’s LSF, and could have made a modestly successful product. ...

I should have known better, but when I was incarnating the current noisy boat anchor that sits on my desk at home, I put a Hitachi hard disk in it. Not specifically one of the notorious IBM-era eat-your-data models, but something much more recent. It made it to about six months of age before developing a perforated filesystem ulcer and bleeding out at about 4am on Saturday morning. I didn’t even notice until Sunday night, whereupon I booted into a rescue environment and attempted a fsck. The fsck yielded many, many short reads, which I interpret as the hard disk telling me “I’ve run out of bad blocks to silently remap, so now I’m going to cack on your data in a way you can’t ignore”. My root filesystem was almost completely trashed, leaving almost 4,000 entries in lost+found. ...

At work, I’m building an application in a combination of Python and C++. Working in Python is sheer pleasure, but trying to build a “shrink wrap” application in Python is a horrible task. The problem is that in order to have any hope of shipping a single package that should work on a number of versions of a given Linux distribution, you must ship your own Python interpreter, and your own versions of any other packages that either have licensing issues or suffer from version drift. ...

I finally sat down to set up Postfix to allow people outside my firewall to send mail using my SMTP server. It was a mildly annoying task, but not too troublesome. Here are my notes on how it worked, in case anyone needs a crib sheet. First of all, my mail server runs Fedora Core 2, and I’m using the default postfix and cyrus-sasl packages that come with FC2. My motivation for using SMTP AUTH (for authentication) and TLS (for secrecy) was straightforward. I didn’t want to configure an open relay, so some kind of authentication was required. I wanted to use PAM to maintain a single list of user names and passwords for my network. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to configure saslauthd, the daemon that is easiest to hook up to Postfix to manage password authentication, to use anything other than plaintext passwords. I didn’t want passwords or message bodies to be sniffable, hence using TLS. ...

It was amusing to come across Google’s announcement of searchable video subtitles the other day. I thought of this applying this idea to a set-top box when I was at Rearden Steel; no, I’m sorry, Moxi; er, make that Digeo. Unfortunately, the CEO was too busy driving the company into the ground at the time for the idea to take root; the entire engineering staff spent four solid months playing Quake 3 before the Digeo purchase.

I’m trying to slog through Jaynes’s Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. It’s a refreshing change to read a book where I spend a good portion of the time clutching my head, feeling hopelessly stupid. This is no fault of the book itself; it’s wonderfully written, and would probably make perfect sense to any reasonably clever person with a strong background in applied mathematics. Unfortunately, my background in applied mathematics is entirely nonexistent, so when Jaynes says something like “let’s assume that variable x is differentiable, so that all of these nice consequences follow during our big long chain of derivations and rewritings,” I am forced to nod my head and grunt. ...

I have just finished reading John Gribbin’s The Scientists, which is a wonderful book on the history of Western science, from the era of Copernicus to the present. The style of the book is biographical, avoiding deep treatment of discoveries in favour of talking about the contributions of individuals. Gribbin enlivens his story with colourful anecdotes about some of the more engaging characters. The overall effect is to avoid the pitfall of Biblical-style genealogy; there’s only an occasional sense of “A lived N years, and discovered idea X, which begat Y”. I was amused to see Gribbin take repeated swipes at Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), who he clearly regards as clueless. ...