soapbox

I have a new favorite, iStat, which provides computer/system data similar to Activity Monitor but also includes temperature data - for my powerbook it lists CPU bottom, CPU top, trackpad, battery, power supply, and hard drive temperatures.   The temperatures that are reported actually make me feel better about using my cooling fan base, since I didn’t know if I was being too silly.  Currently, having been used lightly for an hour but sitting just on a placemat the kitchen table, the temps range from 38 C (trackpad) to 51 C (CPU top).  If I were making it work I’m sure those would be higher, and that’s not going to make hard drives happy. 

I just wanted to tell people about some heavy duty lifting that dactyl’s been doing lately.

1.  Wordpress, the blog software, has been updated since the old version had some security holes.  Let me know if you find anything that you particularly like or want changed. 

2.  The underlying linux distribution running on dactyl has been completely refreshed.  This actually took 5 solid days of compiling with dactyl running at 100% the entire time.  You might have noticed that the blog seemed a little slow.  Anyway, everything is now completely up to date and the compile itself had no problems.  That says very good things about dactyl’s stability.  Again, if there is any special software that you’d like to use on dactyl, just let me know. 

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).

Just a link to another blog, but this doesn’t seem like a good way to carry your dog.

Dog Rides Comfortably in Sack on Running Board

You have more RAM than I do, you run 10.5, your emacs colors are awesome, and yet I’ve been treating you like crap the last few days. I’m sorry.

Arthur C. Clarke passed away.

The quote I borrowed from in the title above is further explained here.

I read a good bit of sci-fi growing up, and Clarke’s work was really influential to me. I cut my teeth on the Asimov catalogue, as I’m sure many of y’all out there in blog-land did (and I still enjoy re-reading a few of his really top-notch short stories). That being said, I really felt I had arrived when I wrapped my mind around some of Clarke’s works, which often felt more intellectually rigorous.

For those of you who only know him through 2001 (film and/or book), I’d encourage you to check out some of his other works, particularly Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood’s End, one of my absolute all-time sci-fi favorites.