JeffJournal

After the whole hydra time sink, got some good things done today...

• Officially re-opened the hydra for business today.

• Someone noticed a minor error with parallel bladeenc last week, and I finally got around to checking it out (in between compiles of real work today). Turns out he found a bona-fide bug in the shutdown routines -- it only showed up under MPICH because LAM rocks (i.e., if you do a singleton init with MPICH, you get MPI_COMM_WORLD == MPI_COMM_NULL, which is icky). I noticed that I had a few unreleased things in parallel bladeenc, but I didn't release them -- I just edited a 0.92.1b4 tarball with the fix, and called is 0.92.1b5. Freshmeat announcement in in their queue. Maybe someday I'll test and release the unreleased stuff that I have in CVS, but not right now...

• I hooked John up with SSL/IMAP on www.squyres.com (a.k.a. shipman.ws -- my first non-.com hosting!). I also hooked him up with authenticated and SSL-encrypted SMTP access -- pretty cool stuff. So he can relay through www.squyres.com to his heart's content, because he's fully authenticated using SASL, and all of his traffic (not just his IMAP traffic) is SSL-encrypted. Gotta figure out how to make pine do that (encrypt and SASL-ize SMTP traffic); he's using Outlook Express.

• I hit the RedHat guys up for some free stuff for SC'2000. I hope it's not too late to get stuff from them...

• Talked to Regina today, more about buying a house. She had some good advice.

• Called and volunteered at my church. I'm such a great guy. ;-)
  

Turns out that I'll be leaving for ND Thursday morning and staying there for about 1.5 weeks. The Stanford game is this weekend, and then I'll be staying on to meet Rusty when he comes to campus next week, and for various meetings, etc., etc. Larry Augustine is coming to ND this Thursday, and I might get to meet him. Should be fun and interesting.

Had a pleasant experience with headsetzone.com today. I ordered a new telephone headset the other day (once you start using headsets, you'll never go back. They're geeky looking, but, man, they're fantastic! The telemarketer-grade ones are truly awesome [which is what I have]) since my current headset is getting fritzy. They called me today about my order because I ordered an AC adapter, not realizing that the amp already comes with an adapter. So they kindly whacked the extra adapter from my order before sending it on its merry way.

I think that .com's are starting to realize that service is very important -- you can't just put a bunch of products up on an https and expect people to buy.

Random question: what happens when you put version control meta directories under version control? Apparently, that's what one former LSC student tried to find out. I ran across this directory today by accident (line broken up for web/browser display purposes, and name changed to protect the guilty):

~lsc/ccse/lums/Archives/Students/STUDENT/xmpibackup/RCS/RCS/RCS/RCS/\
RCS/RCS/RCS/RCS/RCS/RCS/RCS

Do you think that God uses CVS? If so, what version are we? Are we a branch, or the main trunk? Can you imagine meeting a later version of yourself? Just think of all the new, cool features that you'd have!

A: "Ah yes, this is Jeffv1.7. The current version, Jeffv13.2 is much more advanced -- it has additional pincher claws, direct audio/visual/pseudo-senseing input feeds, extra-sensory perception (v7.2), electro-skeletal implants for strength and flexibility, web slingers (not spider-man like, these are the real thing), he's on the Space Football team as first string quarterback, etc., etc. Oh, and it can code like nobody's business."

B: "But Jeffv1.7 can already code 'like nobody's business!'"

A: "Yeah, but this is better."

B: "How much better?"

A: "11.5 better."

B: "Ah, so he goes to 11 then, does he?"