Finished Cryptonomicon this morning. A mostly good book, but I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed by the ending. It was too vague, and tried to imply a lot of answers but really left a bunch of things unanswered definitively (but not in a "wait for the sequel" kind of way). Plus, some of the things that were tied up in the last few pages of the book were (IMHO) plainly obvious by that point, and it was just a relief to get to the point where they actually stated what you had been assuming for the last 100-200 pages.
It's a monster of a book -- over 900 pages long. There's a bunch of good WWII storyline in there, as well as a somewhat-weak storyline about setting up a data haven in the modern world with a bunch of cool crypto stuff trying the two together. So my review: the first many-hundred pages were ok (indeed, the style of the book takes a few shifts a few hundred pages in), but the ending was decidedly week. Still, I'd recomend it to others.
I spent most of yesterday reading and answering e-mail, but spent a few hours with Jeremiah discussing what he wants to do for a master's project. He was initially leaning towards doing STL in OOMPI (to which end he's been cleaning up OOMPI and gearing it up for 1.0.3 release -- a nontrivial task!). It's been good, I think -- it was an excellent introduction to "real world" computing, and how hard it really is to write Quality Software.
In the past few weeks, he has been running regression compiles and tests on all kinds of combinations of platforms, operating systems, and compilers. He hacked up a bunch of shell scripts to do this, and has generally learned a lot about it (try it yourself -- it's a lot harder than you would think). But this has inspired him to move away from STL/OOMPI and to tackle a long-standing issue for the LSC: a rock-solid regression compiling and testing agent that can be used to perform compiles and runs on all manner of combinations of setups such that it can be used to test software before it is released. We talked about this for an hour or two last night and brought up all kinds of issues. He seems pretty interested in it, and it could be a great project for the lab as well as a good master's project.
Had to fix up some weirdness on wedding.squyres.com today -- it seems that the Apache's were spinning endlessly and creating a huge load. Dunno exactly what caused it, but Ed and Don have been working on their fantasy football pages, so they may have tickled some PHP bug or something. Restarting apache seemed to fix the problem. Gotta setup virtual hosting for their hostname, though. Will do that tonight.
Heading down to Looieville soon -- taking the latest Mandrake CD with me, and will bring my SBN router with me. The SBN router will become the router down in Looieville (hence, the web server, router, mail server, and soon, the DNS server). The current Kentucky router will become my desktop workstation and just sit behind the firewall. Might do other services from that machine (i.e., DHCP, NFS for home dirs, etc.). I plan to setup bind in a week or two, too -- Darrell and I will be secondaries for each other. Hence, my router machine will likely become squyres.com as well.
I'll probably keep the mail services on pennyhost, though. Who knows -- I might take that over as well, but I'd want to find some web-enabled email management software first (i.e., a good webmail client, ability to change forwarding/storage, etc.). A project for a future day.
Just found out that the OIT Solution Center sells W98 CD's, but only the first edition -- not OSR2 (hasn't OSR2 been out for 1-2 years now?). How much do they suck?
Do you know what do I like about the OIT Solution Center? Nothing at all.
Answered some IMPI mail apparently from the guy at HP who is working on their IMPI implementation. Looks like we may have left a sentence or two out of the IMPI standard -- he raised a valid clarification issue. Oops. I've pinged Judy and Bill at NIST to see what they want to do about this (i.e., how to fix the doc).
Tons of LAM and other MPI messages remain in my inbox -- will have to start getting to them tonight...