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).
Archive for the 'Work' Category
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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).
Was just down to the basement in CSL to buy a soda only to find they’ve jacked the 20oz price up to $1.25. Lame. They don’t provide us with free espresso-based beverages, they don’t provide us with a convenient places to buy espresso-based beverages, and now they’re mugging us on the sodas. How are grad students supposed to work into the wee hours without a cheap source of caffeine? 
Might have to just start bringing my own.
I hate stupid people. I can accept that the population at large is generally clueless about all things tech, and so I have a fairly high tolerance level when they do annoying newb things. The people that really tick me off are the ones who are clearly in a technical field (say, a whole bunch of people in academia on a FPGA research/education mailing list), and are clearly clueless about very basic concepts such as email…
The trouble all started this morning when some Computer Science and Engineering associate prof at Penn State (funnily enough he got his PhD from a Florida institution…) accidently tacked the address for the aforementioned massive FPGA-related mailing list as a CC on a email intended for some prof about his proposal for an upcoming conference. This email was clearly intended for members of the program committee, but ended up being sent out to I don’t know how many hundreds of people. I can forgive that as a relatively honest mistake (not sure how he managed to tack on a completely unrelated address, but I suppose it could happen if you weren’t careful). The real problem is the flood of idiots on the mailing list that feel the need to reply to the entire list asking why they’ve received this email… Someone a few hours ago posted “hey, this guy screwed up, not meant for this list, please stop replying about it.” But it keeps on coming. And there’s this stupid .gov address that keeps marking some of the messages as quarantined and proceeds to send yet another email to the list letting everyone know that it didn’t like that email…
Now if I can only figure out how to get off this damn list… I didn’t actually subscribe to it… went to a conference with the guy that runs it and he automatically added all the attendees, and I think it’s more of an old school distribution list than a full-on automated mailing list. Hasn’t been too bad in the past, but this is just ridiculous.
Been rather busy lately. Went to my cousin’s wedding 3 weekends ago in Missouri/Kansas. Then flew down to Amanda’s cousin’s wedding in Texas 2 weekends ago. My folks have been visiting this past week and just left on Sunday morning. To top that off, I’ve had some sort of nasty sinus infection for the past week. Next weekend we’re off to Iowa for Amanda’s coworker’s wedding and on the way back I’ll be going to ISCA ’05 in Wisconsin for a few days.
Looks like Apples’s released Java 1.5 for Tiger. Not quite sure why people aren’t talking about this (was released same day as Tiger’s “official” release date) since a lot of people had mentioned it being present in the Tiger developer test releases and that it was absent from the final version released to the public. Looks like I can finally see about getting Liberty’s LSE up and running on OS X. Now I’m wondering if Apple bothers to provide separate packages containing the stand-alone Java runtime and the SDK…
Edit: Just did a little googling and discovered that not only is OS X 10.4 codenamed “Tiger”, but Java 1.5 is also codenamed “Tiger”. Weird.
Wouldn’t think I’d be complaining about how hot it is in winter. Truth be told, it’s ass cold outside. But when I came into the office today it was close to 90 degrees in there! I’ve propped the door open and tried to get in touch with Dan the friendly building manager guy any way possible. I think they’ve tweaked something since it’s started to come down (about 86 now), but it’s taking a while. I actually sat out in the hallway for about an hour waiting for it to cool down enough that I could sit in here. Granted, by cool enough I mean I’ve also taken off my shoes and socks and rolled up my jeans so they look super stylish, but at least I can work at my desk for a moment without passing out now.
Edit: Turns out it’s some building-wide issue with the steam heat… but my office is one of the more obvious ones since we have all these space heaters (read: computers) in here. A quick headcount says there are around 20 machines in this office. Not bad seeing as there are only 8 grad desks in here. And a few tiny undergrad ones that are little more than a monitor stand.
So this update is long overdue. I’ve been really busy recently with… well, life. First there was the big annual ISCA crunch where I helped Jim get his submission from 0 to paper in less than a week. Part of that was help getting him up and running on NCSA’s Itanium-2 cluster (Teragrid) so that he could have results to write about. The other part was helping him get an actual paper together the day of the deadline since Nick was focused on the other project he wanted to submit for. Whole thing was pretty exhausting, but we got an 18 page paper out somehow. The text was definitely rough, and I didn’t really get a chance to go over Jim’s results section because Nick kept pulling me off to do figures for his other submission, but I’m glad we managed to get something sent off. Figure Jim could do without the disappointment of working his tail off up to the deadline only to be informed that Nick was pulling the plug because he didn’t have enough of a paper to submit. Oh well, what the hell, and he flew his plane into a mountain.
So that was all wrapped up Thursday night (week before Thanksgiving). Amanda had Friday off, so we headed up to the Chicagoland area to look at furniture. She ran across Room and Board somehow, and we really liked what they’re stuff looked like on their website and in their catalog. Since they had a couple of stores in the ‘burbs we decided to go up and have a look-see to determine if the stuff was as nice in person. Looked like really nice furniture for the most part (actual wood as opposed to particle board with wood veneer). I would figure based on price, but it’s nice to know for sure. So I guess we’ll be ordering a bunch of stuff from them (we really like the “Asian-influence” stuff). Conveniently enough, they’ve got a flat shipping price regardless of how much stuff you’re buying and will deliver each piece into the room of your choice (white glove service I think it’s called?). While we were up there we managed to hit some places we don’t have down here in CU on our lunch stop (Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, and Restoration Hardware), with the eventual goal of going to see IKEA. Bizarre store.
So last week was pretty packed with house stuff. Got tile put in the bathrooms and kitchen to replace the yucky vinyl (finally got the last of the toilets reinstalled yesterday and the doors for the upstairs bathrooms trimmed to clear the now higher floors). We’re still waiting on the tile guy to come back and put up fresh black baseboard underneath all the cabinets, but that’s pretty minor (and doesn’t prevent use of the bathrooms or kitchen). We also got the rest of the carpeting replaced including the last of the pink carpet that was on the stairs. So we’ve got nice new snazzy floors just about everywhere now. Gonna be real nice. I’ve got some of the photos up at the usual place, but have been too lazy to put up the most current stuff yet. I should mention that we worked on moving all of last week too, culminating in a big move on Saturday with a 14′ Uhaul to get the big furniture and such that won’t fit in my car. Amanda’s family were a big help getting that all taken care of.
So now we’re actually living in our house which is exciting. We’ve got a bed set up (mostly), and are slowly getting our lives in order again. I’ve been working on trying to get various services killed off at the apartment and set up at the house (ie landline phone, internet, tv, garbage… the essentials). At some point I should figure out what to do with… well, lots of things on the todo list (which only seems to get longer and never shorter). Boy, isn’t life as a home owner grand. 
Got some more info on all of yesterday’s hub-bub. Apparently, one of the Lieberts (air conditioners) blew up in the server room yesterday, spraying cold water everywhere. The admins spent all day yesterday cleaning up the mess (disassembling the servers, cleaning them out, drying everying, testing them, etc). The main servers are all back up as of this morning, so email, home directories, and the firewall are all available again. The bad news is our group fileserver was directly in front of the Liebert when it blew up. Both power supplies are toast, but it sounds like the hard drives might be ok (they started to spin up during testing shortly before the second power supply failed). Replacements have been dispatched from the company that made it, so with any luck it’ll be back up and running by the end of the day tomorrow. As such, it’s going to be interesting getting much work done until then. For example, if I accidently try to do a directory listing in Linux, it’ll choke since it can’t talk to our NFS server and I’ll basically have to close that terminal.