It’s another Triops picturepalooza (with video!) It shed a pretty large piece of shell last night.

“Hi, I’m a Triops. My likes are: swimming on my back, carrots.”

Triops Backstroke - 30 second video - 1.8MB

Triops With Carrot - 30 second video - 1.8MB

I am now officially over the Space Pen. See A Letter To My Pen for my list of gripes and complaints. The new pen, a Cross Ion, is great. It is a bit more chunky than I’d like, but it writes well and has a good visual indication of how much ink is left. Plus, both the pen and the ink cartridges come in a variety of colors. I have a silver/black one with black ink and a silver/red one with purple ink (so my writing can look like that of a 14 year old girl, of course!) Here it is in comparison to the space pen:

They are about the same length closed, both quite usable when open, with the Ion being more fat.

In unrelated photos, this Nerf gun is sitting on a shelf outside my office…

This is the current scene on top of the coffee machine at work.

Eight years ago, I worked at a company where I had both a Linux desktop machine and a Linux laptop.  The laptop was the primary machine–for coding, documentation, and carrying around to meetings (back when WiFi was cutting-edge technology that few people knew about.)  The desktop was the workhorse for large builds and a network file store.  At that job, I learned about a little application called x2x.  It lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between two X-Windows machines, similar to a Keyboard-Video-Mouse switch.  When you drag the mouse off the edge of one screen, it appears on the edge of the neighboring screen.  Effectively, you have what appears to be one large desktop spanning both machines.  It is not really a huge desktop–you can’t drag files across, but the pasteboard works across the machines.

At the current job, I have a dual-headed Linux desktop, with my PowerBook sitting off to the side (handling email, documentation, and that sort of thing.)  I discovered an app called X2VNC that does a similar thing–giving me a nice three-screen, two-machine “desktop.”  From the X-Windows box, you can drag the mouse off-screen and on to the screen of a machine running VNC.  It’s the same concept–the main machine must be X-Windows (and therefore Linux), but the remote-controlled machine can be anything that runs a VNC server.  It mostly works, but there was a particular case (when you use the mouse and keyboard to remotely shut down VNC) in which the mouse and keyboard are rendered inoperable on the Linux machine and requires a reboot.  (Technically, no, you can ssh into the box and start killing processes, but still…)

The other day, a coworker (hi, Daniel!) pointed to an application called Synergy that does the same thing, but is totally cross-platform.  Both the client and server can be run on all major operating systems: Windows, OS X, and Linux!  It also seems much more stable than X2VNC.

powerpc-linux-gcc -I../linux-2.6.19.1/arch/ppc/include -I../linux-2.6.19.1/include -D__KERNEL__ -m32 -Wall -Wundef -Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -O2 -msoft-float -pipe -ffixed-r2 -mmultiple -mno-altivec -mstring -Wa,-maltivec -fomit-frame-pointer -g -fno-stack-protector -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wno-pointer-sign -c -o cheese_main.o cheese_main.c
In file included from ../linux-2.6.19.1/include/linux/sched.h:51,
from ../linux-2.6.19.1/include/linux/module.h:9,
from cheese_main.c:2:
../linux-2.6.19.1/include/linux/jiffies.h:18:5: warning: "CONFIG_HZ" is not defined
../linux-2.6.19.1/include/linux/jiffies.h:20:7: warning: "CONFIG_HZ" is not defined
../linux-2.6.19.1/include/linux/jiffies.h:22:7: warning: "CONFIG_HZ" is not defined
../linux-2.6.19.1/include/linux/jiffies.h:24:7: warning: "CONFIG_HZ" is not defined
../linux-2.6.19.1/include/linux/jiffies.h:26:7: warning: "CONFIG_HZ" is not defined
../linux-2.6.19.1/include/linux/jiffies.h:28:7: warning: "CONFIG_HZ" is not defined
../linux-2.6.19.1/include/linux/jiffies.h:30:7: warning: "CONFIG_HZ" is not defined
../linux-2.6.19.1/include/linux/jiffies.h:33:3: error: #error You lose.

The Linux kernel developers, in their mysterious and infinite wisdom, decided that between version 2.6.17 and 2.6.19 they would change the naming scheme for accessing Flash chips.  I am sure the change is documented in a footnote somewhere, but it is not terribly obvious.  It is obvious that things that formerly worked are now broken, though.  It took me 2 to 3 hours of debugging to track down the fact that:

physmap_flash

…should now be called:

physmap-flash

Once a kernel parameter was changed slightly, everything magically started working again.  Why the change?  Who knows!?  Would you have noticed the difference if you were not looking for it?  I didn’t see it for a very long time, personally.

Back in September, I asked about noise canceling headphones.  I finally got around to getting some.  They are not the fancy-schmancy super-expensive ones, but some basic JVC ones I found at Fry’s.  The ear cups are nice and big, which by themselves block out a good chunk of sound (”passive” noise canceling.)  They are also a lot more soft and comfortable than the $20 Radio Shack Optimus headphones I had been using.  With these new JVC headphones, you can activate the noise canceling circuit, which blocks some more noise, but it does not work so well for me.  I think it is mainly aimed at low frequency sounds (like airplane engines–which, actually, I find kind of soothing) and everything I have to deal with at work is higher frequency fans.  Plus, after a while, it gives me a feeling somewhere between stuffed up ears and vertigo.  Overall, I am happy with them and their comfort and noise isolation, even without the canceling circuit.

Lately, I have spent a small amount of time looking through people’s resumes.  Without fail, every one has a section at the end that shows what flavors of Unix and what flavors of Windows they are proficient in.  It struck me today that if I was the one being interviewed, I could say that I was proficient in Windows 3.1 (and actually I could probably go further back and say Windows 386 or even Windows 1.0) up to Windows 2000.  Although Windows XP is supposedly obsoleted by Windows Vista, I would end up having to say “I could probably figure out Windows XP or Vista if I had to.”  I do not believe I have ever used Windows XP hands-on and have never seen Vista outside of screenshots and videos.

I find this all a little bit shocking and surprising, although I have no idea why.  I’ve never had the desire or necessity to run Windows XP, nor have I really had the hardware.   I have an almost fanatical dislike of the company and the OS  …yet…  I feel a little weird that I have never used it and know next to nothing about it.

Interesting terms heard at work over the past few weeks.  Some of them have specialized technical meaning, in context, but have entirely different meaning if heard elsewhere.

• Perishable Skills - Skills that you have to practice, otherwise they get lost over time.  I am an Eagle Scout and used to know how to tie all sorts of knots.  These days, I remember a handful–square, clove hitch, lark’s head, bowline–but, for the life of me, cannot remember the figure-8 knot because it has been too long.
• Alchemy - Used to describe my tea making ritual.  I scoop some loose-leaf tea into a funky Adagio Teapot, fill it with water, wait, and later set that on top of my mug, releasing tea through a valve in the bottom.  Everyone else just drinks from the office coffee machine or uses tea bags.
• Soft Core - No, not porn.  A chip with reprogrammable gates that can be instantly configured to emulate any number of processors via software.
• Endian - Not dots, not feathers, but something as boring as byte-ordering of the numbers used by chips.