JeffJournal

Without running this, anyone care to tell me what this does?

# ...beginning of program...
$str .= "\n"; 
if ($str =~ m/((.*\n){5})$/) {
    $str = $1; 
}

- www.squyres.com crashed last night for a few hours due to hyperactive spamassassins and some scripts that didn’t properly check for concurrency
- Best quote from yesterday: “If that sentence were a mineral, it would be a diamond.”
- Best error message of the day:

GFORTRAN module created from mpi.f90 on Thu Nov 10 08:05:40 2005
If you edit this, you'll get what you deserve.

I’m surprised to see that this is literally my first post in the “Open MPI” category. I guess I should post more here. :-)

Stolen directly from Brian’s blog:

“After 726 days and 8,187 commits, Open MPI v1.0 has left the building.”

Join the revolution!

Lotsa random quickies:

• SC 05 was this past week in Seattle. It was crazyfranticbusy, but good. Much was accomplished, and, literally at the last second, we released Open MPI v1.0 (see prior entry). Woo hoo!
• Brian was on the phone with someone talking about the release. The best quote from the conversation was, “I’m not sure what we’re going to do now, but it’s going to involve fried stuff and beer.”
• Kathryn likes to walk with you holding her hand; Kaitlyn rarely wants you to hold her hand.
• My Aunt was mentioned in the same paragraph as Slashdot. I don’t know what the rest of the paragraph means — it’s all doublespeak that means nothing — but that’s still remarkable. It’s remarkable because she consistently says “Slapshot” instead of “Slashdot.”
• I think my cell phone is dying; a bunch of the voice memos I recorded had lots of static and some were unintelligible. [Update: it died. I got a new one, after waiting 1.5 hours in the Verizon store (you have to sign in when you get into the store, and wait for them to call on you). Sigh. Luckily, I qualified for the “new every 2” program so the phone was free.]
• Another funny moment at SC: I took a red-eye home, meaning that I got to the airport around 8pm Seattle time (2-3 hours after we released Open MPI). As I was zombie-walking to my gate (I was exhausted after a week of SC), I literally got flagged down in the middle of the terminal by some Mellanox employees holding their blackberries saying, “Hey, you just released Open MPI v1.0 — we got the announcement mail! Congratulations!”
• Kathryn likes her milk cold; Kaitlyn likes her milk warm.
• DirectTV has changed all of its music channels to be a subset of the XM satellite radio channels. The only thing we’ll miss is that the previous DirectTV “soundscapes” channel (i.e., the one with white noise / nature sounds / water music) was better than the XM equivalent. Meaning — there is no XM equivalent. The soundscapes channel was good at calming down the banshees when thet were upset and fussing. Bonk.
• Tracy and I are going to see Drew Cary and the Improv All Stars tomorrow night; should be a hoot and a half.

This is truly amazing:

Yes, it’s totally useless. But totally amazing.

I sent this around to several people. One of the replies I got:

“Pick out a good song. I’m going to Lowes to get some lights.”

I just recently had to get a new cell phone because my old one was dying (the microphone was giving out). The Verizon store didn’t have the one model that I was really interested in, so I settled for another model (an Audiovox phone).

After spending nearly 2 weeks with it, I really came to hate it. Here’s why:

• It had no “one-beep” ring option (great for meetings; I never feel my phone when it vibrates)
• It only stores 10 voice memos (this is a deal breaker for me; I record oodles of voice memos when driving back and forth to Bloomington)
• When you delete a voice memo, it jumps back up to the first voice memo (this is quite annoying that you have to scroll all the way back down again)
• It takes 7 clicks to make a voice memo
• Closing the lid automatically aborts just about everything (like a voice memo — as opposed to finishing and saving a voice memo)
• dialing from addressbook always defaults to the cell phone entry — you can’t have a different default (E.g., home phone) for each addressbook entry

This made that phone unworkable for me. So I exercised the “you can return/exchange your phone within 15 days” policy and got a Motorola phone. It was a bit more expensive, but it has a lot more of the features that I wanted:

• 1-touch voice memos
• Voice memos are bounded by memory capacity, not the number of memos
• The addressbook is a little different; you actually have a different entry for cell/home/office for each person, but I can get used to that — at least I can easily pick which one I want to call
• It doesn’t have a one-beep ring, but I guess I can get used to that (I couldn’t find any phones that had a one-beep ring, actually) — it does have different “profiles” of ring style (loud, soft, etc.)

And last, I accidentally found out today that my phone actually has Bluetooth. I’ve long disdained Bluetooth because it’s fundamentally insecure, but it does allow one signficant feature that I plan to use frequently — the fact that I can sync my Mac addressbook to my phone. YES!!! Tiger’s iSync natively supports talking my phone, so now all the phone numbers in my phone exactly match my Addressbook (and I can activate Bluetooth selectively in my phone so that it’s only on when I synchronize with my Mac; that’s secure enough for me).

I FINALLY have one and only one addressbook (Mac had previously allowed me to consolidate IM, E-mail, and PDA, now I finally can share it with my phone). Waaaa-hoooooooooooo!