What's it all about, Alfie?

Today I decided to look at as many runtimes for CIA as I could reasonably afford to do. To start, we had the ISP vs. sparky, and that's a good place to start because I believe the ISP was running a dual Pentium III/600MHz machine so I don't need to even try to run CIA on anything else in my office. What I decided to do next was to check out the Compaq TestDrive systems where I could easily have temporary access to a lot of different hardware - most importantly to some fast Alpha machines to see if I can get the runtimes in the 30 sec. range.

Once you sign up, you get a simple shell account, and that's about it. It's enough for me as they are nice enough to install almost every package in RedHat 7 including PostgreSQL, GTK and all the development libraries. This means that the build on the ES40 took very little time, but I was surprised to see that the execution speed of the compiler wasn't faster than the ISP's dual 600 PIII... maybe it's true that Alpha's are excellent at floating point, but not anything great at general computation. We'll have to see.

The ES40 had a problem mounting the /house home directories, so the testing has been put on hold and I sent in an email about the problem. I'm all ready to do the testing when the mount point is re-established, and then compare this to the runs I did yesterday. I have no idea if it'll be any faster, but Compaq didn't have any faster PIII systems.

OK... they got the mount points working and I was able to run CIA on the ES40 Alpha system - what Compaq says is their highest powered machine in the Test Drive program. It seems right as it's got at least 8GB of RAM - probably more. Wow! Anyway, here are the numbers:

This shows that if we spend a bundle, it's possible to get the servicing times in the 30 sec. range. My guess is that the ES40 is at least $30,000 - but that's just a guess. It's one of their top alpha machines, and it shows. Nice times.

Today has been pretty uneventful. Late yesterday I had to re-arrange my 2kVA UPS as it was interferring with my SGI's monitor - a little wobble in the lower-right-hand corner of the display. Annoying, so I had to un-stack the units. Also, the stacked units were covering the CD-ROM drawer on tux so I needed to un-stack them regardless. At least now the distortion is acceptable, but I've got a lot of stuff in this office, and it's hard to keep the interference down.

I've run pupdate on sparky which updates my Solaris 7 installation with all the current patches from Sun. It's normally a real pain to do this by hand, but this script I wrote makes it a lot easier. It seems they keep cranking out patches or updates to existing patches on a regular basis and I need to keep checking to stay up to date.

I have received word from RedHat that there are a few packages that need updating and yet my traditional mirror doesn't have them yet. I've seen some of them on RedHat's ftp site, but I have always had problems getting things from RedHat's site simply because it's so busy. The files are there, and they'll make their way to the mirrors in a day or so, I just have to be patient.

Things are going well besides all this... it's quiet, but that's good too. I heard from another headhunter who saw my resume on a web site and wanted to present me to another company. I said "Sure", and we'll see if anything comes of it. No other word from the other places that I've been talking to. Tomorrow is my last official day at BankOne - after that I'm on the package which is both good and bad. Lots of emotions tied up into this place... of late, most of them are bad.

Well... Joesph's home from school, so that's good. I'll go play up there for a while and take the phone with me in case anyone calls. It's been a slow day for Science... wish I had Dexter's fountain of ideas to work from - that little guy's got a lot of spunk.

Late today I got a message from the project lead for bidwatcher asking me if I could go through the CVS files for bidwatcher and make sure everything is there. I jumped at the idea and made the changes and sent back a diff file for the latest changes. It's nice to be able to help out in projects like this. I really like doing it. Well... it looks like my changes will make it into the next release of bidwatcher. Yippee!

One of my current interests is the communication between machines for the purposes of solving a problem. Like having a 'calculation engine', or 'valuation server'... machines that did a non-GUI activity very fast and was available for anyone to use with a minimal of fuss. A few months ago I heard about XML-RPC and the more I read about it the more interested I became. I've always liked good, solid RPC designs - CORBA, RMI, but this is nice in that it has clients and servers for a host of languages - PHP, Perl, Tk, Python, C/C++, Java. These make it very easy to host on a platform that's just about anything you want, and have a client come in from just about anything.

This morning I decided to get into it a little more and picked up a PHP client/server implementation from Useful software that works fine on the PHP 4.03pl1 I have installed on sparky and barney. What I wanted to do was to set up a server on sparky and hit it from a client on barney.

The docs don't give you a lot of help here, but it doesn't take a lot to figure it out, either. Basically, you need to install the directory in a central location. I chose /usr/local/xmlrpc-php on sparky and /usr/xmlrpc-php on barney - these are reasonable defaults for Solaris and Irix, respectively. Then I edited the PHP files so the include() directives pointed to the installed directories. Finally, I linked the server.php file to my public_html directory on sparky and copied the client.php to my public_html directory on barney. I could then edit client to point to sparky and /~drbob/server.php.

At this point, I was able to go to barney and pull up http://barney/~drbob/client.php and it worked perfectly!. I couldn't have asked for a better result. The XML-RPC standard uses XML over HTTP, so it's a natural to have a server written in PHP. With all the capabilities PHP has, it's easy to see that any complex processing could be shelled out to any language and the only thing the PHP server needs to do is the basic interface. Very nice.

Now I'm in the neighborhood looking for a good project to use this on. One that comes to mind is the Quip Solver. It takes a cyphertext and a key and returns a plaintext. This would be OK, I suppose, but it's not exactly what I had in mind. Maybe I'll do it just for fun and practice... But I'm still looking for a better project.

Today I finally received the other half of my APC Smart-UPS 2000 that was supposed to arrive yesterday with the first half, but got lost on the truck and arrived today. After letting it sit for a few hours (as recommended by the docs), I moved it into place taking the 900VA UPS that was covering barney and putting it on wally. The 2kVA now covers tux and barney and is operating at a very low load. Excellent! It's nice to know that I can now put all three major machines on the net and have them protected nicely against outages.

Today in a slightly different order...

I had some really good interviews on Friday. Glad to have them. Both groups thought I was more than qualified for their projects/positions, and I was able to really talk to both of them at the depth that I want to to try and get to know someone. The first person believed they had the ideal group I've always been looking for - but I think he was a little too impressed with my qualifications. I got the sense after he said "You're more than qualified for any position we have..." that he was concerned that I might not like being at the level I would be at in his group. Don't know. I'll certainly have to learn more about that place before I can make a decision.

The second place was a gas - huge new project, lots of problems, lots of visibility, very little time. RedHat Linux is a target platform, and that's an overall combination that's very attractive to me. The work would be in a large distributed computing environment and there would be all kinds of challenges to overcome. When we pulled it off, it would certainly be an impressive feat. Very much a career highlight project.

Don't know what will happen, but it's great to have good interviews.

I had a problem on Saturday with getting the weather forecast from The Weather Channel. I think the most likely possibility is that the MediaOne cable modem went down. This is aggrivating. What I decided I needed to do was to make it a little more robust and put in a looping mechanism that would re-try the grab after a delay of 10 mins. This seemed reasonable, and I put in a fail-safe that if the time became 11:00 am, it'd fail outright. Hopefully, this will mean that I have less problems missing data from the moring pulls.

On the CIA front, Joel has been trying to get a lot of work done as quickly as possible in the last few days of this week. He's going on vacation next week, and wanted to get something for Dako to look at before he left. I had plans, and that made for a conflict that I'm not at all sure Joel was happy with the outcome. But that's life... The Dako slides seem to be giving the code a hard time, but I honestly haven't done more than put the slides in the system, and run two of them through. I didn't spend any time looking at the results, but when I do we'll see how well we're handling the Her2 process, in general.

Also, it's the end of March, and it's snowing outside. I'm tired of the cold. This has been a very long, hard winter, and I'm ready for a break.

I had to change the script that processes the page from The Weather Channel's site because they changed the format of the information. Not a big deal, but when you're scraping stuff off the pages, it's a constant battle to stay abreast with their changes. It would be much nicer if they simply offered a database link that I could connect to... 🙂 In any case, the change was pretty easy to make once I knew what the problem was.

Then I received a call back from one of the headhunters I'd been dealing with in my latest round of job searches. The company I had interviewed with a few days ago was still uncertain about me - and the only negative things they could think of were the fact that I didn't wear a suit, and what they considered to be my limited experience with C++.

Now I don't usually rant in this journal, but here's something I'm going to rant about... I've been doing C++ work for over 15 years - OK, not every day all 15 years, but I don't write Java every day, all day, and I'm still outstanding at it. Yes, I've taken a few years off from C++ - sticking primarily to C and Java and web tools, but I'm as good in C++ as I ever was. More importantly, the technical interviews I've had with this company have all seemed quite fine with my technical skills. So much so, that they've said to my face the C++ isn't an issue. But to the headhunter they say different.

So it's one of two things - they are looking for a reason to ding me, or they aren't honest to me or the headhunter. Either is bad. Both means I don't like them.

Then there's the dress code. Now I'm not a slob - I'm very neat in appearance, and take great pride in a clean cut appearance. I bathe regularly, brush my teeth twice a day, and make sure to wear clean, pressed, clothes.

But not a suit.

I don't mind if others want to wear one, and I'll admit that there may be deep-rooted emotional damage in my background that is the root cause for this aversion to suits, but I just won't wear them. I don't own one. I can't image buying one. I own three ties, and only wear them and a sports coat in times of death and marriage. I look very nice in a button-down collar Lands End shirt and slacks. I always have polished shoes, and never try to pass off "hiking boots" as business shoes.

But that wasn't good enough for this one person. No... he was surprised that I didn't wear a suit to meet with the President of the company. Now mind you, the President himself wasn't surprised, it's this other person... but that's beside the point. The person making this judgement upon me was unkempt, wore hiking boots, and for an IT Director had the most incredibly messy desk I've ever seen. While a certain amount of clutter is normal, once the clutter stands for more than a few weeks, it fails to have any value and just indicates sloppy organizational skills. This was the man passing judgement on my dress...

Thankfully, experiences like this make me all the more convinced that this is not a place I want to work. For if they make these judgements in light of their own incredibly poor showing, then it's a situation that's bound to be bad sooner or later. I'm a very neat and orderly person, and I couldn't care a whit about what someone wears - so long as it's neat and clean. But if this place, or even just this person, is making these kinds of judgements about me, and then not being honest to either me or the headhunter, then I'm glad they're only so-so about me. I'm certainly only so-so about them.

I'm willing to give everyone a second-chance. I think a lot of the problems we have these days is because people rush to judgement and don't give second-chances. So if this place were to call me and talk up-font about these issues, I'd probably be fine with it. After all, maybe he'd had a bad day and maybe he worshiped the ground the President walked on. I don't know. But I do know that one rush to judgement is fine - so long as it's talked out. Failing to talk it out, or making another is unacceptable for me.

And so the search continues...

Last evening I realized that I really didn't like the fact that from the Journal pages you couldn't get back to sparky's home page. Clearly, this is a UI problem, so I decided to add a menu bar at the top of all the pages to make it easier to navigate. The first version of this was to have the non-current pages appear in the menu bar. I didn't like this because it meant that the menu kept changing - which is bad form, I think. Then it hit me... have the current page appear in-place in a different color. This works very nicely. I can tell where I am and can get to every other place easily. Very nice addition to the site.

This afternoon I finally received the cable I purchased through eBay that converts 50-pin SCSI to 68-pin SCSI so that I can cable from sparky's CD-ROM to the 36GB Quantum Atlas IV external drive that I also purchased through eBay. When I had all the components I needed, I powered off sparky and went about adding in the drive.

It's pretty straight-forward, but I had forgotten that after I run format to partition the drive, I needed to run newfs to make the UFS file system. Oh, I knew I needed to run something to make the filesystem, but I had forgotten the command. A few hits on the man pages, and I found it. Nice, that Unix... Anyway, it took a little bit but I got everything moved around like I wanted. Basically, this new 36GB drive is /usr/local where I have almost all of the stuff that's continuing to grow - the apache site(s), the PostgreSQL databases, etc. So now they have so much room to grow it isn't even funny. Also, I've freed up a lot of space on /usr so it's not crowded any longer.

If I need it, I can certainly move my development directory to /usr/local/development with a link back to my home because most of the development stuff is tools and libraries - not code that I'm actively developing. Nice plan, if I need it. Right now, I've got plenty of room on all partitions and that's good enough for me.

I've also done some more CIA runs today for Joel. They are taking a lot more time than I had originally hoped. The latest run took 2002 sec. or about 33 min. 22 sec. That's not even remotely close to responsive even if we assume a six-fold increase in processing speed - which I doubt we'll get from the web hoster Joel's signed up with. So... it means that we are going to have to have an asynchronous method of operation. Something where the pictures/images are submitted, and processed, and later the results are generated and available for delivery/pick-up.

I'm thinking that this may not be such a bad idea... what if we made it such that you needed our client to send in the image and specific information that you, the user, have to provide to make it work. Then, we get a little help on the local end and also control who gets into our system. Just an idea... chances are, it'll still be better if we can keep away from any client-side utilities.

UPDATE: I ended up making a /usr/local/src and moving all the canned source out of my Development directory to that location. Now I've freed up a lot of space on the 4.5GB drive that is /user and put all the sources in a very reasonable place. Kudos, dude.

Over the weekend I spent more than a little bit of time working on getting an old Jaz drive working on barney, my SGI Indigo2 machine. The SGI FAQ says that it's as easy as pie, but what I found was something different - at least for me. In the beginning all was going well, and then I heard what I believe to be the "Click of Death". After that, nothing I could do would bring the Jaz disk to life.

When I looked inside the drive mechanism, it appears as though the drive heads had been mashed. It was the oddest sight. I have no idea what caused the problem, but I'm worried that putting a new Jaz drive on barney will only act to increase it's hunger for more drives, so I decided not to try again. Besides, I really didn't need to the Jaz drive on barney - it was just a good use of an available resource to backup important files that sat on that machine.

Then this morning I checked out a few more web sites for possible jobs. My search hasn't been as successful as I'd hoped, but thankfully there's no hurry. What I'm looking for in the meantime is an interesting project to keep my mind occupied and my skills sharp. I've been working on CIA pretty much non-stop for the last several days, and need a break. Don't know what it'll be, but I need to find something to balance it out.