that’s whacked

Friday, Dec 31. 2004  –  Category: Photos

more catchup

Thursday, Dec 30. 2004  –  Category: Musings

so our project integrated on time… yay for NUMA support in Solaris. t’was a hectic weekend of trying to manage Christmas celebrations, go skiing, and check on all the tests and make sure everything was running well.

we hit up Kirkwood for a quick day trip on Sunday. Wendy went off with her friend Peter all day leaving me free to go hit all the intermediates & black diamonds with Jesse & Dan. wow, what a blast. it was icy…but very very fast. lots of fun.

this week i’ve been working on my two winter break projects. one was to lay down some new hardwood floor in our master bathroom. my dad came up to help, and we ripped out the carpet only to find there was already some oak hardwood underneath. it’d been sitting there for the past 82 years under the carpet. go figure. anyway, we’ve been refinishing it (sanding, staining, varnishing, etc.). lots of work…

my other winter break involves the tivo. does anyone out there use the ‘remote scheduling’ feature of tivo? if you do, drop me a line… i could use a couple of testers to help me with my project.

sigh

Friday, Dec 24. 2004  –  Category: Musings

everything was looking good…. stress tests had been running all morning, functional tests looked alright. the plan was to leave stress tests running all weekend, check up on it sunday evening and make sure everything was still up, and then integrate on monday.

i was about to go home, seeing as how it’s just about 5pm on christmas eve and i felt pretty good about the state of our work.

and then BAM. a whole bunch of output scrolled by on one machine’s console window.

panic: entering debugger (continue to save dump)

Welcome to kmdb

sorry if i sound bitter, but merry f-ing christmas indeed.

happy engagement to vu & lucy

Thursday, Dec 23. 2004  –  Category: Musings

so we went to Taiwan last week for a quick 5 day trip to Taipei, primarily to celebrate Vu & Lucy’s (Wendy’s younger sister) engagement with a fun ceremony/banquet. our secondary reason? probably to eat tons of good food.

we stayed at the huge and impressive looking Grand Hotel. i actually ended up spending half my stay working on our NUMA project still since we were near deadline. it’s always fun for me to go to a new Sun office to work at, and the Taipei office was no exception. i got to meet some friendly admins/sales engineers/service engineers.

aside from the ceremony, the rest of the weekend was packed with a quick trip to Taipei 101 to see just how impressive the world’s tallest building is (very impressive…and i like the stacked “Chinese take-out boxes” look), and a day of shopping/wandering around the streets while Vu & Lucy took care of their wedding photo arrangements.

alright, time for me to get back to work. Solaris 10 doesn’t take a holiday even if the engineers do… have a happy and safe holiday break everyone! happy christmakwanzaanukkah, or whatever else it is that you celebrate. happy boxing day all you canadi[ae]ns.

Zac and i attempting to take the boat where it shouldn’t go.

Wednesday, Dec 22. 2004  –  Category: Photos

os/2?

Tuesday, Dec 7. 2004  –  Category: Computers

thunderbird-1.0-os2.zip 07-Dec-2004 10:30 12M

from the contributed builds directory for the new Thunderbird 1.0 release.

Thunderbird is great, I’m a huge fan. After all the years of Pine, Elm, & mutt - Thunderbird was the first client that was able to convince me to switch back to a GUI email client. I’m still a big mutt fan and user though (I use it when I ssh into grommit). But in terms of features, Thunderbird is awesome.

What impresses me more though is the diligence of whoever is building those OS/2 Thunderbird builds. They are consistently among the first ‘contrib’ builds tossed up whenever a new release of Thunderbird/Firefox is done. Who is this mysterious OS/2 builder? I can’t believe people still use OS/2…

Don’t get me wrong, I loved OS/2. I went from DOS+Windows to DOS+Desqview to OS/2, and never looked back. I loved OS/2… it was only after Warp went down in flames (ring the klaxon!) that I finally was forced to accept Windows had won the desktop…

sigh. OS/2… good times..good times

grin that grill

Monday, Dec 6. 2004  –  Category: Linkage

Poorna pointed out to me that it can be hard finding Jaime & Zac’s practice on Google.

I’ve set out to rectify this…. for all of you people out there along the peninsula looking for a dentist - if you’re looking for a good dentist - go see Drs. Jaime & Zac in San Carlos! All their info (address, phone #, map, directions, email, etc.) are at their website (greatgrin.com).

And yes! They take Sun’s MetLife insurance program, as well as many others.

And for everyone else… please link to greatgrin.com and help me bump up my sister’s rank on google.

… 1 monkey cloned 10,000 times….

Monday, Dec 6. 2004  –  Category: Linkage

Wired News: Squeezing Out Monkey Clones

University of Pittsburgh researchers have cloned the first monkey embryos from which stem cells could be removed

This could be huge given Bush’s clampdown on creating new human stem cell lines. At first I thought they were saying we could use monkey stem cells in humans - but after RTFA again I see the part where they say this is a good MODEL for studying human cells. Given how restrictive and controversial human stem-cell research is, this is great…

I’m really enthusiastic about this kind of research… and the quote from Gerald Schatten (the lead researcher on this project) sums up my feelings perfectly: “Using this to derive stem cells for therapies I think is perfectly fine, but everything we know about cloned animals is they are all abnormal. That is why I’m so unalterably opposed to any attempt at human (reproductive) cloning. It ought to be illegal everywhere.”

The real question of course is… if you cloned 1 monkey 10,000 times… would they eventually produce the works of Shakespeare? or would they all just type the same “To be, or not to be” over and over and over….

China’s suicide crisis

Monday, Dec 6. 2004  –  Category: Musings

(saw this in Wired News’s Furthermore section, from Reuters)

Nine out of 10 Chinese calling into a suicide-prevention hotline in Beijing are getting a busy signal, the China Daily reported on Monday, adding that nationwide four people were killing themselves every minute. So far, more than 110,000 people had called in to the Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Center hotline since it was set up in Beijing last year, the paper said. It quoted an expert as saying poverty, unemployment, bereavement, breakdowns in relationships or legal and work-related problems were all causes of the country’s growing suicide rate.

Witness the affects of a country growing up faster than it (arguably) should. Poverty, unemployment, legal, and work-related problems are all direct consequences of a country who is rapidly joining the rush to “first-worldness” when the majority of it is still stuck in second or even third-worldness. Bereavement and relationship breakdowns can also be chalked up to indirect consequences of the same mentality as well.

I see China as being pulled in so many different directions, it’s confused about its own destiny. Parts of it are trying to be like traditional western powers (i.e.: Western Europe, or, god forbid, the US). Other parts of it are trying to maintain traditional Chinese culture/values. Still others are trying to pursue something akin to what Japan has: its own eclectic mix of traditional culture with a good dollop of western culture thrown in for good measure (geishas walking down busy Tokyo streets).

China, in a decade, is going to be more than just an amazing worldpower (it is already)…. it’s also going to be an amazing world influence. Once China starts figuring out how best to take the best parts of other worldpowers (Europe, Japan, the US), keep the best of what has made them the worldpower they are today, and keep a hold of their self identity (culture, values, etc.) - they will be an unstoppable power.

… in the meantime, they can start by improving their phoneline capacity.

justblogit

Friday, Dec 3. 2004  –  Category: Musings

JustBlogIt with a simple right-click. What is JustBlogIt? JustBlogIt is a Mozilla / Firefox extension to allow easy right-click posting to a weblog. From any website your new blog post is only a right-click away.

just started using this ‘JustBlogIt’ plugin for Mozilla/Firefox. i was envious when Geoff showed me his blogging whatchamacallitwidgetgadget thing, and this seems to be an equivalent tool for Firefox that makes it super easy to blog stuff.