The bandwidth between squyres.com and nd.edu is great in the morning (particularly since we're currently an hour apart). I can edit, CVS, and type with ease -- very little latency. Within about 2-3 hours, it all goes to hell, though. I attribute this to undergraduates waking up and realizing that their napster clients are no longer downloading free music. Even in a groggy wake-up state, experienced napsterphiles can restart downloads in 3.7 seconds or less.
Truly, a sight to behold (but not a pretty one -- they did just wake up, after all)
Hence, I have been forced to switch down to "emacs" for my coding on
-nwnd.edu machines. Regular GUI emacs was just too darn slow after 9-10am. I suppose I'll live, but I really do miss the context color highlighting...
In the universal scheme of things, I guess I'm helping prevent the heat death of the universe (using the rationale that X interfaces generate more heat, 'cause, well, they make the computer think more). Plus, I'm freeing up cycles for my distributed.net client. So all things being equal, and all colors being black and white, all is well.
Emacs interface
Bandwidth forces termcap mode
Save the universe
So I'm working on making my thread booter skip failed nodes today (yesterday, too). It's easy to do stuff to skip nodes where rsh/ssh is rejected -- they return right away, and you can just go to the next node in the list. But when you try to rsh to a node that is down, rsh takes a long time to time out... What to do here? I don't know yet. Perhaps playing three songs at once through my speakers will help me understand...
Sidenote: this is a trick that I found that I can do -- run grip for each of my 2 CD devices and xmms to play an MP3. They all send their output to the same device -- my speakers. You can have interesting musical deathmatches this way. Consider: Amy Grant vs. Metallica vs. John Denver (clear winner here). Or The Matrix vs. Enya vs. a data CD (a tough call).
Tracy has lots of soft music CD's for me to draw upon whenever I wish to "fix" the competition and increase my winnings (shh!). The gambling commission is starting to snoop around, though. May need to lie low for a while.