What an unbelievable waste of time. Some state law passed last year (at least I assume last year… I started having to do this last year anyway) requires that all state employees must go through ethics training every year. Interesting how grad students are considered employees when it means additional requirements/constraints be placed on us and students when they’re talking about salary/benefits/parking/etc. Fortunately it’s done through the web instead of requiring us to attend an actual class. So you have to read (click) through a bunch of training crap, and only after you’ve clicked through it all will they give you access to the quiz. If I remember correctly, you need to answer all 10 questions correctly before they’ll consider you trained. Now I have a stupid HTML certificate that I can opt to print out and hang on my wall if I want to prove I’m certified ethical. What a crock.
Monthly Archive for October, 2005
I’ve been suffering from some bad computer mojo as of recent.
- First our group fileserver tanked. Not that I really came into physical contact with it, but I talked to it over the network all the time.
- Then my brand spankin’ new NAS drive (got a Buffalo LinkStation, basically an external hard drive enclosure with ethernet instead of USB/Firewire) had some sort of catastrophic firmware failure while I was using it and I was forced to RMA it. Fortunately they would do an advance RMA where they’d ship me a replacement, I’d put the busted one in that box and return it to them (with the assumption that they’ll charge my credit card if I fail to return the busted one within 2 weeks).
- Now, I’ve somehow managed to kill the USB/Firewire interface in my normal hard drive enclosure (the one I leave at work with my music so I have good tunes to listen to). The drive is ok (ie I put it in my desktop and my data was still there), and the enclosure will power up and spin up the drive, but the computer can’t see it when hooked up to either USB or Firewire. Guess I’m in the market for a new enclosure.
On a related note, one of the guys in another research group (who also happened to get wonked by our fileserver crash) pointed me at the following PhD Comics yesterday. Seems amazingly poignant right now.
Heard this great quote from the late/great Seymour Cray: “If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?” Apparently he said this in response to a question about the growing use of large clusters of commodity PCs for supercomputing applications. Traditional wisdom would suggest it’s much better to design the heck out of two very powerful processors and ease the parallel programming burden to achieve high performance. Historically it’s been much more difficult to parallelize an application over large numbers of less powerful processors, and equally difficult to beat out the oxen.
This was brought up yesterday in the context of IBM’s Blue Gene line of supercomputers. The NEC Earth Simulator previously held the crown with 35 gigaflops or something absurd like that (and required an equally absurd custom building to house it), and have 5,120 processors. IBM through sanity to the wind and dreamt up Blue Gene which heads in the opposite direction: very large numbers of low-power embedded processors. At the moment, Blue Gene systems hold like 5 of the top 10 slots (including #1 and #2) on the list of the Top 500 Supercomputers, and go up to 65,536 processors. They’d even mentioned a Blue Gene with 131k processors. And they’re actually managing to parallelize programs on these beasts using 100k+ processors at once (when no one else in the industry has accomplished this for even 10k?). Wild stuff. Oh, and if I understood correctly, two Blue Gene racks equalled the number of flops churned out by that full building worth of the Earth Simulator…
Looks like Apple has finally realized that there are a lot of people who would like a high res notebook. Previously, their “pro” line of notebooks (aka PowerBooks) topped out at a piddly 1440×900 on a 17″ LCD. Just think about that a moment. My Thinkbrick (that’s a couple years old at this point) does 1400×1050 on a 14″ display. Their 15″ was equally pathetic at 1280×854. They’ve just bumped up the 15″ model to 1440×960 and the 17″ to 1680×1050. Still not as high res as Lee’s 17″ Dell with 1920×1200, but a good step up at least. The 12″ model is still a dinky 1024×768, and who knows how long it’ll take for this to trickle down to the cheaper iBooks…
In addition, they’ve finally released Power Macs based on the dual-core G5 including a dual-chip, quad-core model. I’d also recently heard on TWiT that Apple had a “Photoshop killer” lying in wait in case Adobe ever dropped the ball on Mac support in favor of Windoze… And it looks like they may have released it in the form of Aperture.
So far everyone in our bunch (Amanda, yours truly, Katie and Amanda’s Mom) seems pretty pleased with Verizon. My phone actually tanked this morning… Picked it up to head off to work when I noticed it wasn’t on. Tried to turn it and and it wouldn’t. Figured battery’s just dead. So I plug it in real quick and it powers up. Starts the charging procedure and quickly says the battery’s fully charged?! As soon as I pull the AC power, it turns itself off. Pop over to the Verizon store and aside from the wait to get a customer service person, they checked it out, popped in a new battery, it worked as it should so they did an exchange with no money changing hands.
That may not seem like much (ie in my world, that’s the way it should be when the battery in your 3 month old phone calls it quits), but since I’ve seen how so many other businesses fail to operate… this was impressive. Whenever Amanda would go into Cingular about problems with her phone, they’d just give her crappy “solutions” like removing and reinserting the battery or ripping up some paper and jamming it in the battery compartment. If pressed to do more, they’d just shake their heads and offer to let her trade it in and buy a new phone for $300+.
While I’m not exactly pleased the old battery tanked like it did (I can see DOA issues with tech hardware, but failures like this make me wonder), I can’t really fault Verizon. They certainly handled the situation better than I could have hoped.
I should really pay closer attention to who joins our department. Nikita Borisov apparently just started here this semester and is currently doing work on anonymous peer-to-peer networks. Nick introduced him to Jeff and I today with the intention of giving him some of our spare computers to get his group started.
Afterwards I took a look at his past work and realized he was one of the primary architects for Off-the-Record Messaging that I use in Gaim (Linux/Windows) and AdiumX (OSX). I actually previously mentioned this back when I saw the changelog for AdiumX 0.80. Pretty slick stuff. Provides encryption, authentication, deniability and perfect forward secrecy. All open-source and ties in nicely with the IM clients I was already using. Now if only I could find someone else to use it with me. 
Regardless, Nikita should be an interesting addition to the department. I certainly look forward to seeing what he’s got to say at seminars and such.
What’s the deal with stupid people getting union secretary gigs in Universities? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some great and helpful secretaries in my time. But so many of them are just so useless! I’ve been dealing a bit with one in the business office for our department trying to place orders for my students in senior design. Here are my two experiences so far:
1. Took a couple of days to get my first order placed. Some of this lag (ie an hour or two) was me trying to figure out what all info they really needed on the form. Apparently they’ll order stuff off the web, but want you to write down the company’s address and phone number and such anyway (not like they could possibly look that up the same way I did on the company’s website). Get a call a while later saying there’s been some problems with the order. Drop by there to find out she’s leaving for the day at 12:30 (and it’s 12:15 and I’m in a hurry). For some reason that she wouldn’t explain she couldn’t order from the website I’d given her and had to order through a distributor. Not sure why she couldn’t order it… I gave her the web address that led directly to the product, and there’s an “add to cart” button prominently displayed on that page, but I’m figuring maybe she’s using a corporate card and they want her to go through a distributor or something. So she’s randomly selected Cabela’s outdoor goods and tried searching for the part I’m ordering and has the good sense to ask before submitting the order. It’s a good thing too since I’m trying to get an OEM GP S sensor and Cabela’s (being a consumer store) only carries the little handheld GPS units with lcd displays and so forth. I’ve got to go so I tell her I’ll find a distributor that carries it and place the order again the next day when she gets back into the office. Find 1 place in the US that carries it and they want $70 more for it than the manufacturer. So I figure I’ll press the issue the next day and ask why she can’t order it from the site I give her. I sort of watch what she’s doing and it’s clear she’s only entered the blah.com part of the address (instead of going directly to the link I’ve given her) and cluelessly tried to search around their site for the part in question. She apparently had better luck that day since she actually found it and confirmed it was the right thing and actually placed the order.
2. Second order hasn’t been much better so far. I’d grabbed another form on my way to meet with one of my groups. Filled out the info and tried to drop it off at the office. Turns out they’re out for the day by 4:30. Not really surprising I guess, but you’d figure a big office that has to have at least 5 or 6 secretaries might be open till the end of the business day. But there’s a drop box outside the door for purchase orders so I stupidly drop it in. Haven’t heard anything in the following few days so I assume there haven’t been any problems and I’ll be notified when it arrives. Go to double check the order’s been placed after meeting with a group yesterday to find out she has no idea what I’m talking about (not entirely true, she tries to tell me baout the order I’d placed 2 weeks earlier). I confirm that the drop box is where I should put orders when they’re closed and she says she’ll double check the box. Turns out they only do a cursory visual inspection of the box to see if it has anything and don’t actually bother to open it unless it is overflowing with orders (only way I can see that they’d notice there was anything in there without actually checking). Sure enough my order was still sitting in there from when I dropped it off 5 days earlier. In theory the order’s been placed… now.
3. Guess we’ll wait and see. Don’t have high hopes that my third encounter with this woman will go any better than the last two. I can understand having an off day, but it seems to be the only kind she has.
Sanjay’s in this month’s issue of CPU Magazine talking about life at AGEIA. Pretty neat! For those not in the know, Sanjay’s a professor in the ECE department here at UIUC and has been working as chief architect at AGEIA for a while now. AGEIA has been developing a custom physics processor to improve gaming performance/experience by pushing all such calculations onto a dedicated chip thus freeing up the cpu and the gpu to do what they do best (ie handle the ai and such and push pixels).
What a relief! Just got news the RAID card has come in, was installed, and with a fair bit of manual tinkering the admins managed to restore access to our unbacked-up mount. They’re in the process of migrating the data elsewhere and we should have a temporary workaround up and running in short order. Looks like we haven’t lost anything since some files have access times from last Friday. Will have to do some testing to see if anything was corrupted, but I’m feeling a whole lot better about it than I was earlier today. They’re starting to look into replacing the fileserver with a more reliable box, but at least in the interim I’m going to start synching my own offsite backup on my home machine as soon as the dust settles from moving the data off the now flaky server.
Fairly recently, the company that made our group fileserver was bought up by Sun. So we’re not really sure whether we’ll be able to renew our service contract (which runs out October 20th), or if we’ll be forced to buy a new Sun fileserver at a discount. The cynic in all of us should know what’s coming next…
On Friday, our group fileserver sorta flaked. Took the admins an hour or more to get it back up and running, and when it did our current group mount (ie the one with all the stuff I really care about right now) did not come up with it. The admins contacted tech support and apparently this sounds like a “relatively common error” associated with a failing RAID controller. A new one is en route and slated to arrive some time on Tuesday. In the interim, another group’s mount suddenly disappeared, which led the admins to actually shut down the fileserver to avoid any further damage.
Here’s the real kicker though. Apparently when the admins created our current group mount, they failed to add it to the list that gets backed up to tape every night. So there is no current backup beyond whatever’s on the drives in the fileserver. And with a flaking RAID controller, I’m not so certain what sort of shape that will be in when they install a new controller and bring the machine back up. My data might all be there, or the controller may have done all sorts of nasty things to it. Not really sure. I used to keep my own offsite backups that I’d synch up every week or so, but haven’t done that in a while. I may have some version of our subversion repository, but it’s not exactly current. And since I’ve been working fairly feverishly as of recent, that kind of sucks.
Here’s hoping my data comes back up when they install the new RAID controller, and that Nick rips the admins a new one for their flakiness. I certainly don’t blame them for hardware failure, and some of them are very effective and know their stuff and are able to recover from failures pretty quickly. But a lot of them are just complete dumbasses who can only administer machines as long as someone else has written up a step-by-step guide to what they need to do (and then they slip up and leave out steps like adding new mounts to the backup list).