soapbox

Courtesy of my very awesome friend Liz’s blog, I present you with these good pages:

The Hunger Site

The Animal Rescue Site

The Rainforest Site

And, for double-goodness, a vocabulary game that feeds the hungry! I’m guessing Michael will love this:

FreeRice!

This past week at work I’ve fallen into the routine of coming in and analyzing the output files from a program that ran overnight, then trying to figure out what worked/didn’t work, then doing some more fiddling, and then right before going home, starting another long-ish run of 6-12 hours.

The problem is that it’s a pretty beefy desktop model, with power-hungry CPUs, high speed hard drives, and lots of cooling fans. So I wanted to figure out how to put the computer to sleep after it finished. Naturally, since it’s a Mac this is actually possible - the answer is pmset. So now I just type

$: ../Path/Path/Path/executable.x [stuff] file.dat

date

pmset sleepnow disksleep

———-

and that’s it. Note that since there’s no & at the end of the execution command, it runs in the foreground, and so the other two commands have to wait until the prompt is active again. This is really basic stuff, but it’s still kinda fun.

The more useful aspect of this post is the use of pmset on my laptop, since I’ve had problems with it coming out of sleep at random times and/or not waking up properly. So I’ve switched off the “wake up when i open the lid” command (lidwake=0) and so far so good.  Note that you can also dynamically change the processor speed depending on the system load (dps).