I went to Hoover Dam on Tuesday and took a few pictures. Here's a pan from the Nevada side, just above the dam. You're facing Arizona, and Lake Mead is on your left.

Mood: accomplished

Inspired by an article by Joey Hess (which I actually read a while ago), I finally managed to clean out my computer and put everything worth keeping into version control. The advantages are worth mentioning:

• Easy migration. I can paint down a basic working environment on any machine I want to use. This can be done without putting any sensitive info on the machine, in under five minutes.
• Backups. I'll always have every version of every file I've created. On a machine across town. This is always a good idea. I've been doing it sort of half-assed, in a way that wouldn't scale to more than two machines and that doesn't keep any history.

Of course, the migration didn't go without some hiccups. The most notable being that I mistakenly deleted all of my homework for the past two years, thinking that I'd already fed it in to the repository when in fact I hadn't. I'd added my high-school-and-middle-school homework archives, then I went off to do something else. When I came back, I was all “Oh, I've done all of ~/school/! I can delete it now!” Then, later in the evening, I blasted away my laptop and sucked down magicked copies from the repository, only to see this message:

[duncan:14:10:30 0 ~]$ svn co svn+ssh://slime5/home/svn/duncan/school/uw
svn: URL 'svn+ssh://slime5/home/svn/duncan/school/uw' doesn't exist
[duncan:14:15:50 0 ~]$

So it's well and truly gone. sigh. Such is life, I suppose. Most of ~/school/uw/ was homework, but some was neat stuff that's mostly gone now; some of it I can recreate but I don't know if I really want to.

And I'm off to the library to get fiction books, so I can hide from reality during finals week. Yay me! I'm so good at studying it's not even funny.

Mood: irritated

While real-time seismographs for your region are always cool to have, google maps overlays are always cooler, being easier to read for laymen and all.

Look what I made today! A project, and a webpage to match. I should do this more often.

I'm rather pleased with myself for asserting that

<chronomex> tribbles are a biological forkbomb

This entry is about keyboards. Skip it if you don't wish to hear what I have to say about typing.

On Monday, Josh and I went to Re-PC in Tukwila. I've been going to their store in the industrial district of Seattle since I was sixteen or so, but I'd never been to Tukwila since it's entirely too far to bike. I ran across an XT keyboard while browsing the bins, and quickly fell in love with it. It's of the old 83-key variety.

There are several things awesome about it. First, it weighs about five pounds. This should never be underestimated. It's a sign that a keyboard has a substantial backing, and won't fall of your lap when typing. It also won't move around on the desk unless you intend for it to move, which is rather important.

Second, it has buckling-spring keyswitches. These are the best keyswitches, like, ever. Before I had ever felt one, I thought that they were rather overhyped. Even after I started, I wasn't completely convinced. I kept bottoming out the keys because I've grown up on membrane keyboards, where the press registers somewhere between the snap and when the key bottoms out. This has conditioned me to type rather harder than is necessary. Buckling spring keyswitches are different in that they positively register when the spring buckles, which also produces the keysnap feel and the sound. (Buckling-spring keyboards aren't exactly quiet, which is why I think my family will start to hate me sooner or later.)

Third, the XT keyboard has a borderline weird layout from the perspective of the AT-derived keyboards that we're conditioned to here in the 21st century. It has no directional (arrows, home/end, pgup/pgdn) keypad; you're supposed to use the arrows on the numpad, which is right where we're used to seeing the directional keys. Also, the control key is where we're used to seeing the capslock key, and capslock is off in a corner. This makes sense for anyone who's used to using control more than capslock, and I suppose that's many people. I really don't understand why capslock has such a primo spot in AT keyboards whereas control is off in the corner.

Josh also got me an IBM Model M keyboard, which is a standard AT keyboard with buckling-spring keycaps. It's awesome as well, but rather less so because of the substandard layout. ;) As soon as I can persuade Linux to grok the XT keyboard's signals, I'll be using it instead.

I probably ought to stop falling in love with keyboards. I have at least seven in my bedroom: one USB Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2 which was my birthday present last year, one Teletype (with a delightful keyfeel but an unknown interface), one Sun Type 6 (icky, feels like typing on meat), two Wyse Terminal (one sort of sticky, the other with no snap at all), one XT, one AT, and one ADB (also sort of icky but not as much as the Type 6).

Facebook's being irritable, like a small child, and won't let me post this.

From the Wikipedia article about MC Hammer's album U Can't Touch This:

On AMD K8-based microprocessors such as Athlon64 and Opteron, CPUID function 0x8FFFFFFF returns the string "IT'S HAMMER TIME" in registers EAX, EBX, ECX, and EDX. The K8 project was codenamed "Hammer" when in development at AMD.

Then supersat confirmed:

21:39:18 < supersat> lulz
21:39:19 < supersat> it works
21:40:19 < supersat> C:\...>hammertest.exe
21:40:19 < supersat> IT'S HAMMER TIME
21:40:19 < supersat> C:\...>

Mood: amused

He's speaking this evening.

When reading my website statistics, I noticed that many people were coming from blog.Wired.com. Apparently they picked up on Symantec picking up on my virus. It's about time; I put the page online in early 2006 and Google indexed it on 13-Jun-2006.

So apparently Symantec has learned and posted about my Ovid calculator virus. Is this a win? I'd say so.

I learned this by way of Drusian Gionvanni, an Italian man who emailed me after finding it on my website.

Today I figured out how to edit Wikipedia with emacs. This is amazing. It's so easy; it makes editing fun.

I wore sandals to school today. I forgot one universal truth, here expressed in the predicate calculus:

Fx: x is a pair of sandals.
Gx: x gives me blisters when worn.
∼∃x(Fx ∧ ∼Gx)

Isn't that sad?

Also: My email posts don't work lately. And I'm pissed.

Thanks to tsukiyomijapan I now have a paid account! This is, like, the fulfillment of my dreams in life and all that. I'm posting from email, authenticated using my GPG key.

I think I'll create a custom journal style based on my website's style.

When an entry on your facebook news feed falls off the end, it's gone for good. Pity.

I switched away from Firefox yesterday. Now I'm running Opera.

Other observations:

• Opera shows pop-up windows as children of its main window, so (a) you can't manage them with your window manager, (b) they get moved along with the main window much more easily (e.g. when transplanting to another virtual desktop, hiding the window, et cetera), and (c) each pop-up also has its own tab.
• On Facebook, Opera displays some URLs with Unicode "unknown character" hex-boxes.
• Opera displays some Unicode characters which Firefox doesn't, e.g. ✡ (U+2721, a.k.a. STAR OF DAVID). At least for me Firefox doesn't display that one and some others used in an i18n blog I read.

This post is made from within emacs. I'm using the ljupdate elisp package. It's pretty neat.

Get Your Cyborg Name

It's all about the nullification.

this = null;

The harddisk in my laptop has a whole passel of bad sectors in the swap partition (/dev/hda5). What this means:

• I need to go buy a new HD and transfer my datas to it. (pain-in-the-ass)
• I am restricted to 512 MiB of allocated memory in my applications. (no-big-deal)
• No suspend-to-disk until I replace the disk, because the kernel will just panic on hitting an I/O error during resume. I might as well just pull the battery out. At least that way it'll save me the time to suspend/resume. (ruins-my-month)

I think I'm going with an 80G this time around. (I've presently got a 60G.) Or perhaps I could go for the lowest-power model I can find. Suggestions?

I don't know how to read SMART output. Help?

eldritch:~# smartctl -A /dev/hda
smartctl version 5.32 Copyright (C) 2002-4 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000b   100   100   062    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  2 Throughput_Performance  0x0005   100   100   040    Pre-fail  Offline      -       1467
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0007   126   126   033    Pre-fail  Always       -       1
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       788
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   005    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000b   100   100   067    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  8 Seek_Time_Performance   0x0005   100   100   040    Pre-fail  Offline      -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0012   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       710
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   060    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       378
191 G-Sense_Error_Rate      0x000a   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       65541
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       11
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0012   095   095   000    Old_age   Always       -       53597
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0002   144   144   000    Old_age   Always       -       38 (Lifetime Min/Max 16/52)
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       1
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0022   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       1
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0008   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x000a   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0

Take a peek at this one.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,C:H:E:C:K  O:U:R  S:P:E:C:I:A:L  O:F:F:E:R !!!,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

ah  us    ty    mm      al  td  ep  vh    ag
su  ga   zeee   ok      yk  ch  eq  jrg  ymp
fd  vj  tg  yc  jv      yo  vp  km  zgdadmrv
dh  kr  lclyea  fp      wv  ja  au  ln bh bn
 gmdu   nw  vs  he  kb  ay  nq  ak  fa    ko
  lt    er  pu  kqvyfs  pz   ovsc   dn    oj


ri  lh  yp    jc     fvzw   zogle     kq
an  tq  wj   egpk   kz  se  fv  vp   hblm
cr  ju  ls  zr  ji  uj      jj  ko  nc  ji
wd  rf  sw  cwwrqj  ui ecx  mvhue   lexkdx
 evnu   fz  ha  ei  gc  ef  og  py  lc  dk
  mf    fl  qd  bp   puom   ot  vk  si  po


 fypp   xi    ze    ki      qz   lwgy
in  pt  xq   gevp   bq      ke  at  zj
hp      ym  mh  pq  pe      ur  kik
tc      lj  ptecon  lt      iq     iui
nr  qq  nm  it  lo  cw  bt  bo  ly  qt
 rlpn   is  ii  pk  nteynd  fa   wpti


rv   lg    pa    dn  gt    jj    hu   wu
 vf ju    gfmp   xlj bh   bifl    fp ly
  bfr    wq  ij  xgnbzk  xo  kp    aqx
  tiu    ffrdpe  btzppp  cbisjv    lus
 os pa   fq  re  vq zdh  zq  lq   au ac
ov   db  oh  el  od  nj  qa  qs  ll   mb

Mood: giggly

(18:52:51) me: Hey frank, what's going on in California?

(18:52:51) LJ Bot (Frank): I don't know what that means. I'm actually pretty stupid. Type 'help' for help.

I'm intending to make a Facebook-email gateway so I can throw a message at Robert Friel <1582560077@msg.facebook> and it'll get sent to Rob as a facebook message, and his reply will show up as an email in my inbox. Similar implementation for wall posts, status updates, notes, note comments, and so forth.

Expect all future email from me (with some exceptions) to be signed. If I have your key, I'll encrypt it too.

If possible, I request that all email I receive be signed/encrypted as well.

Mood: nerdy