I have RCN. Comcast disconnected my internet service. They disconnected it earlier in the week as well, but I caught them at it and made them put it back together. So after waiting four days for the RCN guys to show up, they found a Comcast audit tag on my connection, and my disconnected cable. Gotta love that. That lost me a good chunk of work this weekend (hourly == $$) and slightly pissed off a client. Wickedly not cool. The fact of the matter is though, calling Comcast to complain does no good since I am not their customer.
Only giving your computer a soft reset is a sign of too much balls on the part of Apple. Dear Apple, you are not perfect, your software will crash. Give me an easy way to recover. When your keyboard and mouse stop responding, and the screen just stays frozen that is the first sign. When you go to another computer and try to ping your computer and it has stopped responding that is the second. When you go back into your room and all 7 low rpm fans are running at high rpm in your computer you know it is time for drastic measures. So you hold down the power button to engage a reset. Unfortunately it is only a soft reset button. There is no hard reset button on a G5. I had to resort to the human prerogative when dealing with machines: pull the plug.
Fortunately journaling filesystems are already part of os x, I don’t need to wait for zfs to not lose a disc in the process. Also to my mac’s credit, it had been running non-stop since at least Christmas and possibly longer. More than I can say for my poor twice this month BSOD PC. (On the other hand, I can just restart that without yanking the battery.)
I have been working so much lately that I haven’t had much time to read random news for fun, but I took a break tonight and read some. It appears that Apple is dipping its toe into ZFS. Man, if apple stuck the option to use ZFS in OS X I would be pretty awe struck. Forget the iPhone (what 10 days away now?) this is what I’m talking about. I can’t tell you how a silly gadget will change your life, but I can tell you how this would. Mmmm… atomic write operations. Hierarchical checksumming. In place cloning. I haven’t been this excited about a technology for a long time.
I think the reason I love it so much is that it doesn’t require newer hard drives. Use the same old ones, just use them better. That’s the future for you. It’s like figuring out how to build concrete using everyday materials in an environmentally friendly way. Oh wait, that was last week.
Some materials engineers did some electron microscopy in order to determine the makeup of the stone used to build the pyramid. The shocking answer? Parts of the pyramids were cast stone. Ancient concrete. This makes the whole process of building the pyramid make a lot more sense. Also explains why they have never found the quarrying tools that would have been needed to carve the blocks out of the ground. I love that the cast blocks have many of the same properties, from a visual appearance level, of actual limestone.
This is too amazing, and makes me feel much better about the future of modern construction. Making portland cement, which is what is mostly used today, is an energy intensive process, producing plenty of pollutants, and generally consumes a fair amount of oil as well. This process, which uses universally found materials and little or no energy, produces excellent limestone style building materials that could be used in many places where concrete is currently used. Very cool. Here is a movie of some french dudes using the process to demonstrate the different types of blocks that could be made:
Coding is a strange thing with me. I have to be in the right mood, or it just doesn’t come out right. Unfortunately this means that sometimes I end up getting into the groove just when I am about to finish working for the day. This leads to disasters where I look up and realize that it is two in the morning, and I have been working for the past 16 hours straight.
On the plus side that more than makes up for the days that I am unable to get in even five hours in a row thanks to dealing with the business side of working for myself.
I’m still trying to decide if this is a positive or negative of working from home.