Archive for May, 2004
May 31, 2004 at 12:31 am · Filed under General
Ok, if it isn’t already obvious, I had my surgery on the 21’st and it was a success (so far). I can now eat just about anything.
There isn’t much else to say. I was mostly worried about the actual pain and wierdness of being in surgery, but that part was actually easy. I had a great anaesthesiologist who tried hard to be a funny or with, but painlessly installed an IV and meds to prep me for the surgery. When I woke up in recovery, I just started talking about stuff. Then after a little bit, I moved myself to a table/recliner. Then I put on my own clothes (this is right after surgery). They told me I had some demerol on board, so that is probably why the surgery was so easy. After a little bit of talking, I saw my wife and I went home. I think I went back to sleep.
The next few milestones are the tricky ones.
Now, after a nice sleep, my pain medications are gone. If you had general anesthesia, then your digestive system is trying to get back online. You may experience pains or difficulty just doing the simplest things… like burping. So for the two days after the surgery, I had pain from the incisissions, and digestive issues. There were some painful moments, and coughing or laughing was not a good thing to do.
After that, everything was better, and the pains are gone. I also had some ice-cream and normal fatty foods.
Life is good again.
My thanks go out to people in the medical profession, and my sympathies go to those who have physical pain in their daily lives.
May 30, 2004 at 9:08 pm · Filed under General, Humor
You know what silicon valley needs… it needs a pub. I mean, look at Shrek2 or Star Wars or any D&D module. There is always a pub. How else are you really going to find a person of particular talents. It would be fun to meet the local people who are interested in say 1980’s console hacking, or people who have access to a gigabit of IP bandwidth, or a kernel hacker who knows the VM for a particular OS like the back of their hand.
…Silicon Valley needs a pub.
I recommend the snack bars at Fry’s. They should have a thing at each table that labels the occupants ’skillz’
May 30, 2004 at 9:00 pm · Filed under General
Ha, just found an old article from 2000. I photo copied it for some reason. It was an old ” silicon alley reporter” (New York) magazine article on the future of the wireless revolution.
Needless to say, some group called Ovurn Research predicted 1.192 billion wireless subs, 322 million wireless internet users, and 373 million mobile ecommerce buyers. The article goes on and on about WAP and buying stocks from your phone.
All of this did not turn out, of course. I think cellular is cool, but the reality is that SMS messaging to friends is a Europe thing. I think they do it just because it is cheaper than calling, so the user base adapted and learned how to do it.
Will there be some good new uses for wireless. Sure. Will we all be buying ring-tones, or videos to watch on a sub 1″ screen, or sending emails. Probably not. The form factor doesn’t match.
May 30, 2004 at 3:53 pm · Filed under General
Took a trip on down to Surplus Computers and got a new Microsoft Explorer mouse, a Digital Multimeter, and a USB drive.
All were inexpensive. The mouse has the new tilt-wheel technology. So far, I’m not impressed, but I’ll give it a little more time. The multimeter was $5 and had a battery. I tested the multimeter today and it is an excellent multimeter for the price. You can’t even get batteries for under $5!
May 29, 2004 at 5:30 pm · Filed under General
I don’t think the WOPR would have ‘learned’ in time with passwords like this 
Password 00000000
May 29, 2004 at 5:12 pm · Filed under General
I hate slashrotsometimes. I don’t know why I keep reading it, but I always get so upset when I read some article that shows how linux centric or inexperienced their ‘geeks’ are.
Todays rant is about the recent post on “Is Swap Necessary”. It is 2004 and the Linux kernel gang is finally getting hip to reality. Here is the article.
First, computer memory and performance are not ‘one size fits all’. Second, swap in the old days was an entire process granularity. Paging went to the ‘page file’ and Swaps went to a ’swap file’. It is important to make the distinction.
As for the topic of paging, and the algorithms behind aging pages from the VM (cache or executable/text), I am a firm believer that production systems should avoid having a SWAP system enabled. Why? If you are building a production system for the internet, you will expect certain guarantees on performance. Therefore, you will weight your data requirements and only allow a certain number of resources to be consumed by one box. If you do your job right, you will not require a paging file. If you don’t, and you have swapping, you will go ‘hmm. why is machine 73 doing only 1/100th the load it can typically handle’. Swapping will cause the system to still work, but perform poorly. In some cases, so poorly, you will not be able to login and fix the problem. If you didn’t have the page file, your kernel should kill the process that went wild, which will now let you get in and fix the issue.
The bottom line is that I cannot think of any high-performance applications which would stay near their high-performance levels WHILE using a page-file for a backing store.
As for the post, in general…. I come away with this with several feelings.
OS research is dead and the inexperienced admins are running the discussion. There are very few nuggets of advanced technology in the real linux kernel. If we had real OS research, we would see more of these inovations in the kernels.
There is also a lack of good documentation or books that will give these people the real know-how. I mean, there should be a man page that states explicitly how the Linux, Freebsd, or Windows VM system works and what parameters they operate with. Solaris was getting near that point and they even had some innovative techniques. I’m sure Windows NT/XP has some as well, but I can’t find the easy docs for that (nor have I looked). Still, it’s only the third parties that publish the documentation on these simple systems rather than Sun or Microsoft.
The internet is still learning, and it is still in the dark ages. There are still serious communications problems on the internet (noise - think SPAM or newbies). Too often the wrong voices are crowding the right ones. If there is a slashdot topic on how to eliminate system noise, I want to see the posts from the research leaders of that field. Instead, I see this newbie post with a bunch of newbie conjecture or posts marked ‘funny’ that should be marked as ‘attempted funny’.
Occasionally, I read the comments on posts like that, and I notice that the vast majority of the respondents does have a forebrain. However, it is still a culture of self-proclaimed geeks which aren’t academics. What does this say about me that I read this computer-world yellow-journalism?
May 14, 2004 at 11:34 am · Filed under General
Microsoft has put their WTL library on Sourceforge here. This is great news since it is a good set of tools and now they can get even better!
May 12, 2004 at 3:35 pm · Filed under General, Humor
Back in the old eGroups days, after the merger with OneList, I was doing a tour of our datacenter for the CEO, Michael Klein. As I was getting near our cage, I did something that I do every now and then, something dumb - but funny. I noticed a cage that used machines like ours, and I proclaimed to the CEO, “look these guys are starting to use machines like us, people are noticing our great ideas.” Within a minute, one of the ops guys working for me turned a corner and I told him the same. He smiled and said, “Uh, that is one of our new cages”. I turned a nice deep shade of red in front of Mr. Klein and smiled.
(I thought of this today, as I was looking at a GUI timeline on the web and noticing how the early Mac UI was like a Lisa, until I noticed that it was a screenshot of the Lisa
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