published on gemini – Page 12

Could Be A Lot Worse

At least my week’s getting better towards the end. Extracts from an e-mail from my mum:

…work – complete nightmare, back-to-back meetings most days with no time to implement the outcomes and so much work looming I don’t know where to start… …XXXXX is pregnant and leaving in a month or two (not to be replaced) and XXXXXXX’s contract is finishing soon which leaves….. er…. ME to do Banner support for the University (a task undertaken by teams of up to 20 at other Unis)… …One of the puppies is seriously ill with Juvenile Cellulitis and currently has a head twice the normal size and filled with pus… …antibiotics four times a day…. which means I have to go home every lunchtime… …we were raided by foxes and all the chickens have been taken… …to cap it all XXXXX is terminally ill (cancer) with only a few months to live…

My week seems just peachy by comparison. Hang in there, mum!

Spellcasting: A-L-C-O-H-O-L

Last night, Paul, Claire, Pete and I sat down, beer and gin and Dooley’s to hand, and watched the entire first series of 80’s kids TV game show Knightmare, taking a drink every time:

Team gives directions to dungeoneer that they can’t possibly follow. (“Go through the door.”)
Team gives wrong directions to dungeoneer. (“Turn left… no; I mean right…”)
Dungeoneer forgets how to differentiante between left and right. (“Take a small step to the right… I said RIGHT!”)
Dungeoneer gets to the next level.
Dungeoneer dies horribly.
Dungeoneer dies as a result of having not picked up a particular item in a previous room, but having been given no clue that they should have. (“You brought the silver bar, but you should have brought the gold bar; idiot.”)
Dungeoneer picks up an obvious red herring. (“On the table is a key, a ruby, and a small red fish.” “Take the fish! The fish!”)
Dungeoneer does something patently stupid. (“I know I can carry two items, but let’s not bother – let’s leave the obvious clues right here in this room we can never come back to.”)
Particularly clever riddle; one which none of us manage to solve.
Merlin.
Knight brutally killed by magic.

This, coupled with a gratuitous amount of shouting things like “Spellcasting! M-O-R-O-N!” whenever teams did anything particularly stupid lead to a fun evening for all.

Thrashing

Thrashing is a computer science term referring to an undesirable occurrence in multiprocessing systems.

When a processor is given multiple jobs to do, it services them a little each in a round-robin fashion (assuming that no priority system is in effect), until each is done. This is, of course, actually significantly less efficient than doing each job one at a time, but doing a little of each job, a little at a time is more productive when dealing with humans, who like – for example – their web page to download at the same time as they write a Word document.

Unfortunately, optimizations to this system can cause it to go wrong. By giving the processor more and more jobs to do, it eventually passes a critical point at which it is spending more time performing administrative tasks and managing it’s ’round robin’ scheme than it is actually performing the tasks you want it to. You’ve probably seen a system doing this. The solution, of course, is to either stop giving the system jobs to do until it can finish some of those it already has, or, better still, to kill some of the running processes to enable the processor to catch up on it’s workload. The solution is not to click irritably on the buttons, or repeatedly demand more and more of the processor.

Today, I feel like a thrashed processor.

Letters After My Name

Results day today, and so I finally get to find out whether or not I get a degree in exchange for my last five years at University. And I do. I’m now entitled to put letters after my name, which is nice.

I’ve got a lower second, which is (I know) less than I’m capable of, but considering my resits and other lark last year, it’s exactly what I expected, so that’s great. Was damn pleased to see that my dissertation got a first.

Now I suppose I’d better get on with the rest of my life.

Warning: Extreme Geek Humour

Sat in Burger King…

Bryn: So many nice things come in .deb packages…
Dan: Yeh. Except for some nice things which still come in nasty RPM-shaped packages.
Bryn: I’m not even sure I have an RPM package manager installed.
Dan: I’m sure you can ‘apt-get’ one.

Oh; how we laughed.

Windows Longhorn Continued

It turns out that Windows Longhorn is a lot like the child of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but (at this early stage) less stable. Just what we’ve come to expect.

On the other hand, it’s a lot faster than I might have expected (considering its dependency on the .NET framework). If you play with the pre-release version, though, be warned: you can turn off the themes and make it look like good old Windows 2000 (yay!) if you like but doing so isn’t very well implemented and it’ll make at least a little bit of a mess of all your Explorer toolbars.

Internet Explorer 6.05 introduces (at long last) some of the features that all of the other popular browsers have had for ages – including a download manager, security features, and pop-up blocking.

The ‘sidebar’ sucks. It really does. Lots. And it leaks memory all over the place.

I couldn’t actually find anything new in Internet Information Server 7.0, but then: I couldn’t check the documentation as they haven’t finished writing it. It’s existence, however, does lend weight to the suggestion that Microsoft will be making a Longhorn-powered platform for the Windows Server family, too.

Anyway: enough geekspeak.