bytex64.net/blog

A couple of weeks ago, the hard drive in my laptop finally gave up the ghost. It had been a little wonky for quite a while, occasionally needing a loving reboot to get it working again. This time, it would consistently go out to lunch during or shortly after booting, so it was time to put the drive in a shoebox, bury it out back, and teach the kids an important lesson... wait, no, I got off track there. It was time to proceed with my Netbook Refurbishment Plan and get a flash drive.

As it turned out, the better option was compact flash. The T23 is an old machine, so the only PATA SSDs I could find were made by Transcend, a company that, when I think about data integrity, makes me feel like I've swallowed a greasy hairball from the kitchen sink drain trap. Amazon had a sale for a pro-level 8GB SanDisk CF card for $65, and I picked up a dual CF adapter from Newegg. That's right, dual. I have room for another CF card in case this one fills up (which is not likely as I'll explain in a moment).

After cleaning up my home directory and reinstalling Slackware 13, I'm sitting with about 3.9GB free out of a usable 7.4GB. The amount of data I actually need to use on a daily basis is tiny — basically just configuration files and some documentation. To extend the life of the flash, I've turned off browser caching and I'm not using swap. This does of course put me in some peril of invoking the wrath of the OOM killer if something gets out of hand, but usually I'm sailing along with over half a gig unused (which of course means it's sitting as disk cache or buffers).

Slackware 13 is, as usual, a solid piece of work. Most of my favorite apps are stable nowadays, and with the help of slacky.eu I've had to compile very little to bring my desktop back up to speed. I've even set up a build system on yomiko so that I can compile faster and not wear out my flash drive.

I had a little trouble getting the CF card working at full speed. The chipset driver detected it as having a 40-conductor cable and thus limited it to ATA/33. I told the chipset this was poppycock (ide_core.ignore_cable=0) and it's now zooming along at ATA/100. The drive will actually only sustain about 50MB/sec, but it's a solid improvement over its 25MB/sec ATA/33 speeds.

After a week or so of running on flash, I can say that it's a huge improvement over spinning disk. Not just in transfer speeds, but there is an overwhelming improvement in latency. Hard drives, especially laptop drives with slow rotation speeds, must wait on heads and platters to align before a sector can be read. Flash drives have no such limitation, and can bring you sectors with a low upper bound on latency even if the sectors are on opposite ends of the disk.

The advantage of low latency is apparent whenever you're doing things that access many files at once — system startup, source code compilation, running scripts — the sort of tasks UNIX systems do all day. It's a noticeable improvement. For some tasks, my humble T23 beats my Athlon 64 wintendo machine. Starting Opera cold after a boot, for example, is about twice as fast on my laptop.

But of course, the start that burns twice as bright burns but half as long. I now begin the waiting game to see how much abuse a CF card will take. Oh well, that's the price of speed.

This year we had Christmas at my house. My family stayed the night, and we did the usual routine in my living room. In some ways, this was a return to old traditions; the tree in my living room is the family's old tree, which has been around for over two decades. I actually got something for everyone this year. The most expensive gift I gave was taking Danielle to and from Chicago, a couple of late-night journeys that tested the limits of my nerve. I got Tim a copy of Left 4 Dead 2, Andrea got a Neil Gaiman visual novel, Mom got a usb DVD drive, and Dad got a hoodie.

Here's what I got:

• Stocking stuffers: wasabi peas, pocky, orange juice, dark chocolate bar, and a sticky bun.
• Clothes: pants, underwear, socks.
• A 2010 Demotivator calendar.
• Programming C# 3.0 5th edition.
• A 5qt cast-iron dutch oven.
• Small sealable containers and small bowls for mise en place cooking.
• Brick baseplate shirt.
• Mr Beer Home Brewing Kit, with enough materials to produce eight gallons of beer (Pale Ale, Blonde Ale, Golden Lager, and Red Ale).
• Zombie Driver, a videogame where you drive around a city killing zombies.

On a somewhat related note, I have had an artistically collaborative project going called Collabstrophe! The idea is that people produce and submit artwork every month on a theme. This month is winding down, but I encourage anyone who is artistically inclined to give it a shot. The main page explains in more detail how it works. There are already a few submissions up in this month's gallery.

Thanks, everyone. Looking forward to next year. :)

I went to my parents' house to change my oil yesterday. I overfilled it a bit, and when driving home, my car developed a worrying problem: it wouldn't idle below 3000 RPM. After driving it around today, it seemed to be fine, so my guess is that something in the ignition system got wet and was unhappy.

Today, after getting out of the shower, I noticed a peculiar sound of rushing water as I walked up the basement stairs. Further inspection revealed that the sump pump had blown one of its rubber connectors to the PVC pipe, and was spraying water all over the basement like a fountain. I braved mild hazard unplugging the pump, and fixed the connection (it was just a loose clamp). For those of you counting, I am two for two on basement flooding with the last two houses.

After researching the effects of extra oil in my car, I became a little worried. Half of the advice suggested that this was a benign problem; the other half stressed that it was urgent that the excess oil be drained or else oil frothing and blown seals would result. Erring on the side of caution, I got a siphon pump kit with a handy dipstick tube and set about correcting the issue. The pump itself proved to be completely worthless, but I continue the process by manually siphoning some oil with the supplied tubing. For those of you unfamiliar with this process, it means I sucked oil out of the engine with my mouth. After finishing, I realized that I had previously overfilled my car in Wyoming due to my car being on a slope, and absolutely nothing bad happened. :-/

Somewhat predictably, I now know what motor oil tastes like. I fixed that by washing my mouth out with Dawn, followed by vodka. I am now removing the taste of vodkasoap with a well-deserved New Belgium Abbey. Unfortunately, after a few sips, I have realized that I forgot to eat dinner, so if the past few paragraphs aren't completely lucid, it's because I'm half-drunk right now. Oh well.

Cheers, and Merry Christmas (or other winter solstice celebration of your choosing)!

Chrissy: you need to come to hawaii
Chrissy: every girl you have ever drawn is live here
Me: Even the one with the blue hair?
Chrissy: YES

Apparently Chrissy is in Hawaii running the Honolulu Marathon. I knew about the marathon, but I was a bit surprised to find that it was actually in Honolulu, because I thought it was just a name (like Hawaiian Punch or Malibu Bay Lounge). So Chrissy's there, and it is currently 35°F here. On balance, though, I'm not running a marathon, so I'm happy to call it a draw.

I've been taking the cooking segments out of Astro Fighter Sunred and putting them up on Youtube. Yes, that's a violation of copyright, but since it's unlicensed in North America, I feel that the educational value of these segments outweighs their illegality. Also, to mitigate damage when the inevitable cease and desist comes, I've put the videos on a different account. In the segments, the main antagonist of the series, General Vamp, shows the viewer how to make simple tasty dishes. The dishes are geared towards the single men watching the show, and Vamp often asks the audience if they've been eating well.

Related to this is a great resource called Cooking With Dog, where a poodle named Francis walks you through making Japanese dishes like gyuudon, okonomiyaki, and taiyaki. (You will be forgiven for thinking those sound like enemies of Godzilla) One popular class of cuisine is donburi, which is basically cooked things over rice in a bowl. Cooking With Dog has a recipe for oyakodon (親子丼), literally "parent and child bowl." The name puns on the fact that it contains both chicken and egg. The joke continues with tanindon (他人丼), or "stranger bowl."

Last night I made a similar dish with precooked meatballs over long-grain rice. I'm calling it gaijindon (外人丼), or "foreigner bowl." :D

If you're interested, here is the recipe.

Right now I'm watching Maria Holic, an anime about a lesbian at an all-girl Catholic school who is tormented by a cross-dressing guy. No, I'm not ashamed of myself. It's entertaining in a quirky way, and has an art style that is similar to a favorite series of mine, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. After a little research, I discovered via the highly informative Anime News Network that both shows had the same guy for their character designer and chief animation director: Hideyuki Morioka. Looking through the shows he has worked on also turned up another favorite of mine, REC.

Anime News Network's information database is scarily complete, and perhaps better organized than even imdb. I wound up on a "six degrees" journey that took me across a lot of things I'd seen. After a while, it became a game — I would create a perfect circle of links across as many things as I could. The record of this journey was too exciting to keep in the realm of text, and soon I was throwing around text and images in Inkscape. I got a little carried away. I present to you, my journey through the Animenets:

[I do, of course, claim copyright on this image, but I am licensing it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. It contains copyrighted images, but I assert that these images are used fairly for (barely) educational purposes.]

And I'm still not ashamed of myself. :-P

Erickson: There was this hot girl in a schoolgirl outfit, and we were talking about VIDEO GAMES.
Me: Oh really?
Erickson: Yeah! She plays World of Warcraft.
Me: Uh oh.
Erickson: Which Final Fantasy did you say was the good one?
Me: FF6.
Erickson: Ah. She likes FF7.
Me: Eugh. You can have her.

And for anyone who disagrees, I have only two hyperlinked words to say to you: Opera motherfuckers!

We had not one, but two kickin' Halloween parties at my house this past weekend. Yes, it was so awesome that we couldn't fit it all in one day.

Party the first, on Friday, was for Stephanie's entomology department folks. Stephanie went all out on snacks with pumpkin bread, muffins, cookies, and a witches brew that actually did look too disgusting to drink. Much fun and geeky costumes were had. Erickson and Alex did gangster costumes, Stephanie was a German maiden of some sort, and my new old friend Megan came dressed as a Trill. I dressed up as Yamada Tsuyoshi, better know as Densha Otoko. Yes, there are pictures, and no, they're not up yet. :P

Oh, wait, they are up, now! Erickson's pics can be found at his Picasa page, and Rahul's are found at his website because Rahul is cool.

Party the second, on Saturday, was for Atmospheric Sciences folks. This party featured a re-designed layout with booze and food in the basement so that the party would stay in the more open second kitchen and TV room. We also got a keg of 312. Also, Erickson and Rahul set up a photo studio in the office. Later in the night, lots of people came upstairs to have their photo taken. Rahul photographed like a madman, taking over 1500 photos over the course of the night. I helped him out by playing character-appropriate music to get people in the mood. That's right — I was the DJ. :D

As an added bonus, my friend James and my brother Tim were here, as well. Much fun and booze was had by all. We in the house are still having booze — an eighth barrel of 312 is apparently enough for an entire party and some left over. Oh, well. Who really needs sobriety, anyway?

I leave you with this fun fact: 61 of my blog entries have an opening sentence that is too long to be posted on Twitter. That's 12% of my posts.

I solve problems.

Problems like, "Why is this Acura Integra dropping out of torque converter lock at highway speeds?"

[For non-technical folks, the lock-up torque converter is a device put into automatic transmissions since the 70's that locks the driveshaft to the engine at highway speeds. This eliminates the power losses typically exhibited by a torque converter due to its fluid coupling, and thus increases efficiency.]

At first, I thought that maybe the transmission was going out, and that maybe it was just low on transmission fluid. I stopped at a gas station, got some Dexron V, and put about a third of a quart in the tranny. Several miles down the road, it happened again. I had places to be, so I forgot about it until I was driving home.

On the way back, the car wouldn't even go into locked mode, and then it hit me — it's temperature related. The engine temperature gauge had always been low at highway speeds. Perhaps it was over-cooling? After stopping at a rest stop, I let the engine idle. 1500 RPM. Returning to my car after hitting the restrooms, the temperature gauge had actually gone up, and it idled at the normal warm 800 RPM. Somehow, the cooling system on the car was working so well that it was putting the car into fast idle at highway speeds.

So later, at a Wal-Mart in Kankakee, I bought some duck tape and ripped off a cardboard piece from one of the large boxes I had. Sitting in the cold, I fashioned an air dam and taped it to the front fascia. After a little testing in the parking lot to make sure it wouldn't fall off, I hit the road again. On the entire way home, the engine stayed warm and the torque converter never unlocked.

Problem solved. :D

"Black Rock Shooter" is one of Hatsune Miku's most popular songs, partly because of the song, but also because of the fantastic artwork and animation that accompanied it. Apparently is is popular enough that the original authors or the song and video are working with an animation studio to create a full-blown anime based on the concept.

It's really hard to express in words how excited this makes me, but I'll try.

:D

That is all.

If you want a cheap meal, here is a classic that's hard to beat. Buy:

• 2 lbs. Spaghetti - $2
• Jar of spaghetti sauce - $3
• Pack of 5 italian sausages - $3.25
• Small head of Romaine lettuce - $2.00
• Leftover bread - Free (if you bought some yesterday)

Cook the spaghetti as you normally would. Cook the sausages, then add them to the spaghetti sauce while heating it. Cut the bread into small pieces, coat with olive oil and salt, then brown for a few minutes under a broiler. Turn them over (you can use your hands, they have a very low specific heat), then brown for a couple more minutes. Shred the lettuce, add croutons, and serve with your sausage spaghetti sauce. Dinner for four, total cost:

(2 + 3 + 3.25 + 2) / 4 = $2.56 per person

Now that's eating cheaply.

I first heard about Jeffrey Friedl from his rather good web-based Japanese-English Dictionary, which helped me get through two years of Japanese language class. The domain name for that site belies his more common notoriety — he is an expert on regular expressions (or regexes for short). Mastering Regular Expressions is the book for regexes; nobody else even comes close. I have a copy on my shelf, and it's been an invaluable resource for work and play. Yes, I play with regexes, don't look at me like that.

Now, you may be wondering why a renowned author of a famous programming book is doing making a Japanese-English dictionary. To answer this, you need only look at the dedication for his book: 文枝, Fumie. His wife is Japanese.

Jeffrey Friedl, you are my idol. :-D