Travels and Images
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Lancaster
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Saturday 7 December 2002
Saturday - I woke up at five am. Bah. I thought that
there was going to be a space station overpass, so I prepped by dressing
warmly, putting fresh batteries in the digital camera, and getting the tripod
out. Only - no space station. Eventually I went indoors and checked
the
Jtrack 2.5 web page
. The station, and shuttle, were on the other side of the world.
Either changed their orbital path during the night or I was looking at the
wrong orbital track or time yesterday. Strange... So, much to the cat's distress,
I went back to bed.
In the afternoon I installed new operating systems on the laptop and new
main system - and they all seemed to work OK. Remarkable. I have yet to
check the networking, but I'm hoping there will be no problems. I've been
considering getting a wireless access point, but decided to wait until some
of the current tasks are completed and out of the way. There are a couple
more, well - six or so, systems that need some TLC of one kind or another.
Sigh.
The horrible Kodak software still can't recognize the camera. I guess I'll
have to get an adapter/reader for compact flash that can act as a mass storage
device - annoying. The Olympus is so much the better camera.
I was going to use the Mercedes 300SD for some errands today, but the battery
was dead. Hmmm. I apparently left the glove box open, and that little light
drained it, over a week or two. I've been out of town on weekends - which
is when I normally drive it - for the last couple of weeks, and it hasn't
been started. So, I pulled out the battery charger and gave it some juice
for a few hours, after which it started fine. I let it idle for fifteen
minutes - tomorrow I'll drive it around, and check the fluids when warm.
The new cat feeder arrived. It works well but there is a problem. Apparently
it was designed for much larger food pellets, and the cat food cascades
out in vast quantities. Instead of a cup, there is perhaps ten or
twenty cups - it emptied the hopper! So I'll have to do
some customization on it. Interestingly it uses an archimedian screw attached
to a motor and timer, which is what I was considering building, way back
when. If I somehow block most of the screw it should fix the problem.
Friday 6 December 2002
Friday - coming home there was an interesting optical
illusion while driving. Coming home from the base the highway goes
up a slight grade, so that the lights of Rosamond cannot be seen. There
was some cloud cover and the pitch black clouds in the west made it look
for a few seconds like the road just ended in a cliff. Then I came up over
the brow of the hill and the valley lights were obvious.
There was also a moron whose jacked up pickup truck headlights were literally
higher than my car roof (but who had illegally operating fog lights right
at eye level to make up for it). This fog light/driving light plague is
spreading - I have seen big commercial trucks, semi's, driving with them
now, as well as punks in Honda Civics'. It's ridiculous, but nothing a stiff
fine ( $500, say, per offense ) wouldn't cure in a hurry.
The lights reflect the fact that the Antelope Valley is really growing
- from a few tens of thousands when I arrived nearly twenty years ago,
it is now probably near a third of a million or so. The traffic reflects
it, unfortunately. The up side is that there is a reasonable chance that
one may be able to buy something for Christmas up here, should he be so
inclined.
There is also a slender crescent of a new moon tonight. Quite beautiful,
ghosting in and out of the black clouds in the dark dark blue sky.
Work, well, was tedious. Redhat 8.0 installed successfully, as an upgrade.
All the cluster networking stuff still works, including PVM, so that's
good. By default a lot of the R command stuff is disabled, along with ftp
and other networking options in RH8, so it was nice to not have to redo
that stuff. IANANW - "I am not a network weenie". Most of what I
wanted was also installed, the new XFree86, the new Mesa, the new X11, and
even a new g77/gcc compiler. Alas, there was still a missing GL/aux.h file.
I never got to research that, because I was sidetracked by another code
not reading a simple ASCII file correctly, even though it worked OK with
the old RH7.1 g77. I spent several hours tracking what turned out
to be a MSDOS <cr><lf> versus unix <nl> thing. Sigh. I
have been through this before, though usually it's just a minute or two
of frustration before I figure it out. Oh well. The fix: open the file with
vim, do :set fileformat=unix n the command mode,
and save the file.
My coworkers are entertained by my frequent, "Hey - another new
screen saver" outbursts. It's pretty cool, there are so many on Linux
that after weeks I am still seeing new ones. And of course, RH8 probably
has even more....
Thursday 5 December 2002
Thursday - still working on compilations. I installed
OpenMotif
using the RPM method
, and it seemed to work. However there were the GL libraries that I referred
to earlier. Sleuthing uncovered the fact that the particular include files
of interest were not installed by OpenGL/Mesa
, but rather were the responsibility of
Xfree86
. The 7.1 OS doesn't install them by default, but 7.3 and 8.0 do. So,
after tearing my hair out for a while I decided to try installing Redhat
8.0 on one of the cluster boxes, and see what happens... It would be nice
if it works, but we had to leave for dinner at 4:30.
Dinner was at the Tokyo Steak House. I'm not a big shrimp fan, but theirs
tasted a little fishy to me tonight. But the steak and chicken were both
nice - I ate too much. Again.
Edward L. Beach has passed away. Tom Clancy has written an obituary,
here
. Beach was a naval officer and submariner, from World War II on, and
wrote the classic "Run Silent, Run Deep", and others. As Clancy puts it,
he lived what he wrote...
This evening, with a little help from Tim, I did a lot of the hardware
installation of my new main machine. I'm too tired to fiddle with all the
little wires and stuff, but the motherboard is in the case, along with the
hard drive, floppy, and CD-R/W. So I'll get it tomorrow or this weekend.
Since the warranty from Fry's runs out soon I need to get on it. Hard drives,
for example, usually fail in a couple of hours if they are to fail at all.
I'll probably put LINUX and Win2K on it.
Wednesday 4 December 2002
Wednesday - back at work with a vengeance. I worked about
twelve hours. Often work seems a very regressive task. I may want to do
task A. But to do A I need to do B and C .
B is straightforward, but C requires that I do D ,
E , and F first. And so on. It has, on occasion, taken weeks
to work up to task A from its' dependencies.
I found that if I used the correct switches that g77 under Redhat
Linux 7.1 showed about the same speed improvement over the RS/6000-595 XLF
compiler, nearly 4X, that Compaq (Digital) Fortran 6 does when running
on the same hardware under Windows 2000 Pro. Impressive. I also spent a
lot of time figuring out various library and compilation switches. I got
a simple CFD program compiled and working, and I almost got a plot program
to work...only now some bits of the Xwindows, Motif, and parts of OpenGL
seem to be missing. More research needed there. I can use Redhat's Packet
Manager - RPM - to install stuff, but I hate to mess around with modifying
XFree86 - everything windowish depends on it operating properly.
Oh yes, the eye doctor. Well, my prescription hasn't changed much, half
a diopter or so, but I'll get new glasses as the current pair are old and
scratched up.
Tuesday 3 December 2002
Tuesday - no work. There was a dentist visit
in the morning, and a visit to the optometrist in the afternoon - both
went well. I also did a little christmas shopping, and stopped by Barnes
and Noble. Shame on me.... Lunch was at the local 'Baja Fresh'
- steak fajitas. The evening was kind of shot because the drops that that
eye doctors give didn't wear off for hours, so it was blurry television
and not a bit of internet or reading until after about 9:00 p.m.
Monday 2 December 2002
Monday - got up at 3:00 am, headed down to
Lancaster. Napped for an hour and then went to work for eight hours or
so. Then, as promised, stopped by a friends to do a little algebra tutoring
and catch up on some stuff. Home and in bed by 11:30 pm though... It was
nice to see the sun rise through the valley fog, quite picturesque. Fortunately
the fog was light, not enough to make driving difficult.
I saw an interesting presentation on the Australian HYSHOT program.
The leader, a scientist from the University of Queensland, talked about
how they designed, constructed, and flew a scramjet combustor test article
on a shoestring budget. Quite a feat - Dryden has had a scramjet combustor
sitting, waiting for a flight, for years.
Sunday 1 December 2002
Sunday - for some reason I've been a day
late in posting recently. Ah well, holidays... After sleeping in, we watched
the Green Bay game on tv, then my brother had to head south. After that
my father and I watched the 49ers' beat the Seahawks, or watched the Seahawks
beat themselves - sometimes it's hard to say, exactly.
During the game my brother called to say that the Interstate 5 was
stop and go, and to take the 99 freeway. I think I'll stay one more night
and leave very early in the morning instead.
Up at a little after six a.m. this morning I saw the waning crescent
moon next to a very bright star in the east -
Venus, a planet actually
. I grabbed the digital camera and snapped a shot:
Despite trying various combinations, of exposure and F-stop,
I was unable to resolve craters on the crescent moon. One of these days
I'll get it right...
Picture of the Week
Photo Notes: When my brother
leaves the house, his dog, Duke, is desolate, and sits waiting for him
to return. Sometimes it can be hours...
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