Running

It's been ages since I've posted, so this is maybe not the deepest thing I've put up here.

I had a great 5-mile run today, despite getting rained on at the beginning. I did 5-mile runs on monday and tuesday too. Thursday I got stuck cleaning up a user's computer (he managed to find a new virus that Symantec had only heard about as of thursday AM), and left work late, so I had to bike rather than run.

Tomorrow, my little sister turns... um... (2008-1972=... um...) 36! I'm feeling kind of old. I turn 40 this year as well. Getting ancient!

For an obligatory funny - watch the Mythbusters guys explain why GPUs (the primary expensive, hot chip on your video card) are different from CPUs (the primary expensive, hot chip on your computer). It's quite amusing, and is a good illustration of parallel processing. 

Codeweavers Lame Duck presidential challenge

CodeWeavers, a generally cool company to begin with, is hosting a "great american lame duck presidential challenge". If Bush is able to meet clear, specific, and reasonable goals, CodeWeavers will give away their software for 24 hours - fully functional, fully supported, no charge. One copy per customer.

I hope they're able to give away a lot.

Sailing with Laurel and Ella

James and I went up to the boat this past weekend, to do a bunch of projects with my dad. Laurel and Ella were at my folks, attending a nature camp at Hartley Nature Center in Duluth. On Saturday, we went for a sail. We had really nice winds at the start, but then a thick fog came in from the lake. Laurel and Ella were a bit cold, and Laurel provided a demonstration of why kids and expensive digital SLR cameras don't mix. Luckily, I don't have an expensive digital SLR camera - I've got an olympus C-8080. Clearly, I'm missing an important filter - but what kind of filter do you use to filter out kid spit? 

Major Time waster coming... when?

Ironically, I just started re-playing Diablo II with a paladin - a character class I had never played when the game was relatively new. Turns out it screams on modern hardware. ;-)

Re-reading the mythical man month

I've been re-reading The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks (20th anniversary edition), in particular the "The Mythical Man-Month after 20 years" chapter. I'm amazed that he basically presages large parts of The Agile Manifesto - which was written down in 2001 and was viewed by some as radical. 

The manifesto states, in short:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 
  
• Working software over comprehensive documentation 
  
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 
  
• Responding to change over following a plan
  

We value the things on the right, but we value the things on the left more.

In practice, these are often realized with practices like iterative, incremental development, automated unit tests, daily or continuous integration, empowered teams (a la scrum), daily short stand-up meetings to keep everyone in synch, among others.

Some of the section titles in Brook's essay are:

• An Incremental-Build Model Is Better - Progressive Refinement
  
• Microsoft's "Build Every Night" Strategy
  
• People Are Everything (Well, Almost Everything)
  
• The Power of Giving Up Power
  

I think it's wonderful that a lot of the ideas that "agile development" pushes in fact have very very deep and old roots in the history of software development.

Alas, amazon - we hardly knew ye

I've never seen this before, and it's a little scary. Amazon.com is down. This was taken on 6/6/08, at 12:20 PM central time.

Seeing rush again

Rush played in St. Paul on 5/22/08. I went to see the show with Len and James. Here's the set list:

Limelight
Digital Man
Ghost of a Chance
Mission
Main monkey business
Larger Bowl
Red Barchetta
Trees
Spinning Wheels
Dreamline

"What's that smell?"
Far Cry
Workin' them Angels
Armor and Sword
Spindrift
Way the wind blows
Subdivisions
Natural Science
Witch Hunt
Malignant Narcissism
Drum Solo
Hope (guitar solo)
Spirit of Radio
2112 Overture/Syrinx
Tom Sawyer

One Little Victory
Passage to Bangkok
YYZ

Troubleshooting SPSS 16 uninstall for Mac OS/X Leopard

SPSS 16 EVAL is EVIL.

I've been using SPSS 16 for Mac OS/X for a quantitative analysis class. I had been using a licensed copy on my mac book pro, and recently installed the eval version on my mac pro - more and faster CPU cores, more and faster memory, more and faster disk; seemed like a good idea to run it where it'd go faster, but I didn't want to pay for two licenses.

Well, the 14 day eval expired, and so I uninstalled it. And then Finder crashed. And crashed. And crashed some more. And kept on crashing. And continued to crash even after a reboot.

I was able to get into System Preferences, turn on sshd, and log in remotely, and look at /var/log/system.log. There were a ton of messages that looked like this:


May 5 15:33:32 lennybruce Finder[208]: [QL ERROR] Can't get plugin bundle info at /Applications/SPSSInc/SPSS16EV/SPSS16.0.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/SPSSQL.qlgenerator/
May 5 15:33:33 lennybruce ReportCrash[196]: Formulating crash report for process Dock[207]
May 5 15:33:33 lennybruce ReportCrash[196]: Saved crashreport to /Users/pclark/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Dock_2008-05-05-153331_lennybruce.crash using uid: 501 gid: 20, euid: 501 egid: 20
May 5 15:33:33 lennybruce com.apple.launchd[115] ([0x0-0x44044].com.apple.dock[207]): Exited abnormally: Bus error
May 5 15:33:34 lennybruce ReportCrash[196]: Formulating crash report for process Finder[208]
May 5 15:33:34 lennybruce Dock[209]: [QL ERROR] Can't get plugin bundle info at /Applications/SPSSInc/SPSS16EV/SPSS16.0.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/SPSSQL.qlgenerator/
May 5 15:33:35 lennybruce Spotlight[123]: [QL ERROR] Can't get plugin bundle info at /Applications/SPSSInc/SPSS16EV/SPSS16.0.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/SPSSQL.qlgenerator/
May 5 15:33:35 lennybruce com.apple.launchd[115] ([0x0-0x45045].com.apple.finder[208]): Exited abnormally: Bus error
May 5 15:33:36 lennybruce ReportCrash[196]: Saved crashreport to /Users/pclark/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Finder_2008-05-05-153332_lennybruce.crash using uid: 501 gid: 20, euid: 501 egid: 20


The solution was to blow away the /Applications/SPSSInc folder that the uninstaller had left in place. This could be done either from a ssh connection, or from another login, or perhaps even by booting from the install DVD. Once that folder was gone, Finder came right up. Problem solved, back to crunching numbers on the MPB.

Adding insult to self-inflicted injury

So, yesterday (April fools day, no less), Microsoft held their Windows Server 2008 product launch event in Minneapolis. I got there late, since I had class, and got the software bundle they were handing out. These events usually include free copies of the products being launched - in this case, Win Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008. Much to my surprise, there was also a copy of Vista Ultimate with SP1. This is a $289 product if you were to buy it from Amazon.com. And there it was, right in the software bundle. I've been to a number of other Microsoft software launches, and they've never included a free copy of XP - not even for the XP launch!

I guess vista's market presence is so bad, that although it would be unfair to say that Microsoft can't give it away, giving it away is what they're doing.

That's the self-inflicted injury part.

The insult part is that I'd actually be happy to have a copy of Vista Ultimate, and I'd use it in place of the Vista Business installation that I'm running now. Unfortunately, Microsoft only gave out 32-bit vista ultimate, and I'm running 64-bit Vista Biz at home. I'm not really all that interested in running 32-bit OS if I can help it anymore (other than that copy of XP I've got floating around for gaming).

So tired of winter

Don't get me wrong - I love winter. I love snow. I love skiing. Earlier this year, Laurel and I went skiing and she progressed from being scared of the "magic carpet" conveyer belt to riding on the chairlift and bombing the hills.

But it's nearly april, and there's still snow on the ground. I want to go running. I want to bike to work. I want the snow to melt and have spring.

In other news, Bea and I went to see the new Horton Hears a Who movie. Good fun - I especially liked the anime-like scene where Horton is fantasizing about his strong kung-fu. And very appropriate for a 3-year-old.

Bea has been interested in reading The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, which isn't a particularly interesting story until you make the (rather obvious) connection to recursion. If you haven't read the book but you know what recursion is, go read it and chuckle knowingly to yourself.

Dual Monitors rock

The Wall Street Journal has cited some research from Utah that dual monitor rigs are significantly more productive for knowledge workers and engineers than single monitors. Turns out, Al Gore already knew this.

Office 2008 on the mac is slow slow slow

But you can maybe fix it, according to this post at bbold.com.

1. Launch word (and wait for it to eventually launch)


2. In the menu bar, go to: “Word” > “Preferences…”


3. In the preference pane, click “General”


4. Uncheck the box called “WYSIWYG Font and Style Menus”


5. Uncheck “Show Project Gallery At Start Up”


6. Click “Ok”


7. Quit Word


8. Re-Launch Word.

This does seem to help quite a bit. Dumping some of the fonts that I have installed that I never use anyway might help even more.

On the occasion of turning 39

So, I'm sitting at Caribou Coffee in St. Paul, waiting for my wife to call to say it's time to come home. She's putting the kids to bed (although she should be done by now...)

OK, that was weird. She called, just as I was typing the above sentence. Freaky.

Anyway, so I'm now 39. My kids made a bit of a big deal about it being my birthday, because they get so excited when *they* have birthdays. And when I was little, I wanted it to be a big deal - I wanted lots of presents, I wanted to be the focus of attention. But I don't really want to have a big deal made of it; in the grand scheme of things, the gift-giving and singing and cake aren't all that significant.

However, it does make me think of a comment from Meister Eckhart:
"If the only prayer you ever said was, 'Thank you.' that would be enough."

And so, on this day, I find myself thinking mainly - "Thanks, Mom & Dad. Thanks for having me. I'm glad I'm here, and I hope I can make the world a little better for it."

Diggin' Ruby

I'm taking a data mining class at the U of Mn, and for one recent problem set, we had to determine some cluster shapes that present reasonable clusters but score poorly on the silhouette coefficient (see page 541 of the PDF). I had some ideas of cluster shapes that wouldn't work well, but I wanted to validate that. It didn't take that long to whip up a bit of ruby code that explored the two shapes that I wanted to test out, and sure enough, they behaved the way I wanted them to.

Laying down the code went very quickly; the only issues I had were because of my lower level of familiarity with the Ruby class libraries compared to Java. However, I never had to leave TextMate to do this; doing it in a java IDE would have taken longer. Of course, this is old news to lots of people, but it was nice to have an excuse to play with ruby a bit more than I usually get to.

Pleased with Apple's Applecare service

I've got a original 17" Core Duo MacBook pro, which I purchased when they were first announced, and I purchased AppleCare with it when I got it. I wasn't sure if the applecare would be worth the money at the time, but this week it's proven to be worth the expense.

First, the hard drive failed. The hard drive was a 7200RPM Seagate - I don't have the exact model number, but I think it was a ST910021AS - a Seagate Momentus 7200.1. It started spitting out messages like this:
disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED) to the system.log. However, Disk Utility reported that the S.M.A.R.T. status was Verified. I thought "this can't be good", and backed up all my stuff. I then nuked the machine and reinstalled tiger. (as an aside, I backup at least nightly using rsync to a file server at work. If I do this before I leave for the day, it generally takes less than 5 minutes.)

Much to my surprise, things got worse. The install went fine, as did installing all my stuff. However, when I put the machine to sleep, it got really hot, there was a clicking noise from the lower left-hand side of the case (where the hard drive lives), and the little LED in the latch never started throbbing, it just stayed lit. It also refused to wake when I opened the lid - I had to hold down the power button to get it to reboot. Interestingly enough, when I changed the sleep mode from "safe sleep" to just sleep (see discussion at macworld and the manpage for pmset(1)), then the machine slept fine. So, I started to suspect that there was a bad sector allocated in the /private/var/vm/sleepimage file, that S.M.A.R.T. wasn't picking up as a problem.

I was able to verify this by running sudo cksum /private/var/vm/sleepimage. This command reads in that whole file and computes a checksum for it. I don't care about the checksum, I just wanted to read it. Bingo! The hard drive started clicking, and after a minute or so I started getting the same disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED) messages to the system log.

Time to call applecare. They asked me to reinstall tiger again to verify that the problem wasn't from a third-party app. I did this, and had the same effect. It's interesting that the bad sector got allocated in the same sleepimage file. I was all prepared to write a script using mkfile(8) and cksum(1) to make a bunch of files to fill up the drive and then get one of them to fail again, but that turned out to not be necessary.

Wanting to have a bit more understanding of what was going on, I found a program called Mac Helpmate, which, buried inside it, contains universal binaries of the smartmontools suite for digging into the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive, and having the drive run self-tests. I had the drive run an "extended offline" self-test, which took two hours. At the end, it indicated a bunch of uncorrectable read errors, but reported that the drive was healthy. Seems wrong to me...

So, a Genius Bar reservation was made at the Apple store at Rosedale, walked the tech support guy through what was happening (including the nice little cksum experiment to get the drive to click), and he said "yep - sounds like a bad drive. I don't know if we've got that in stock, but we can get one. Should have the machine ready for you in 2 to 4 days. Do you have a backup of the data on the machine, or do you need us to try to save it?" Thankfully, everything is backed up and I don't need them to worry about trying to preserve anything.

The next evening, I get a call around 8:30 PM, saying "Mr Clark, your repair is complete". I ask how late they're open, and they say "10:00 PM, but the leopard launch is going on now - it's a little crazy". Nevertheless, after the girls are in bed, I head up to fetch the machine. I've now got a happy new Hitachi HTS721010G9SA00 hard drive in my macbook pro, which may actually be somewhat faster than the seagate it replaced.

Then, on saturday, I noticed that my spare laptop battery was bulging. Evidently, bulging is what they do before they combust. There's some discussion at the Apple message forums about swollen batteries too.

I really didn't want to think about having the mac be on fire, and there was some history here; Apple did a recall of batteries from the 15" macbook pro.

Same deal - went to the apple store with the battery, went to the genius bar, did some paperwork and walked out with a new battey. No hassles at all. Evidently, others have had the same problem and the same level of pleasant service.

I'm not thrilled that the machine had these problems in the first place, but I'm happy that Apple took care of them without complaint. The applecare warranty has more than paid for itself.