Progressão

A progressão da nossa vida é realmente curiosa: dantes não tinha dinheiro para comprar muitos livros mas tinha (quase) todo o tempo do mundo para lêr. Bons tempos de escola/universidade…; hoje tenho dinheiro para comprar todos os livros que queira (haja é espaço para mais prateleiras) mas eles vão-se empilhando na fila de espera sem que lhes consiga pegar…

Senão vejamos, na lista de espera temos agora:

• “Wee Free Men” (Terry Pratchett);
• “Monstrous Regiment” (Terry Pratchett);
• “Quicksilver” (Neal Stephenson);
• “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” (J. K. Rowling);
• “Armageddon: The Musical” (Robert Rankin);
• “They Came and Ate Us - Armageddon II: The B Movie” (Robert Rankin);
• “The Suburban Book of the Ded - Armageddon III:The Remake” (Robert Rankin);
• “Programming Jabber” (Adams);
• “Mac OS X for UNIX Geeks” (Jepson & Rothman);
• “Perl 6 Essentials” (Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski, Leopold Tötsch);
• “Building Cocoa Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide” (Simson Garfinkel, Michael Mahoney);
• “Cocoa Programming” (Scott Anguish, Erik M. Buck, Donald A. Yacktman).

Uff! (E nem pensar em linkar isto tudo!) Alguns já estão à espera à uns mesitos, está mesmo a dar luta…

The power of a name

When I started showing some interest in a Mac a friend who was instrumental in turning me into a Mac-head told me something I found quite bizarre about people who used Macs -that they developed a relationship with their computers. People had a connection with their Macs and generally couldn’t part with them when the time came to upgrade or something.

Now I’ve always been happy to turn in my elder PCs or PC-parts whenever I upgraded in order to keep the junk at home to a minimum so this didn’t make any sense to me -was he joking? Developing a relationship with a computer, a machine? Come off it!

But hey, I got my iBook (the cutest, sexiest laptop ever made ;)) and I really liked it. I like (almost) everything about it and those things I do perceive as shortcomings I tend to look upon them more as “character traits” rather than actual faults. And the more I work with it the best it feels. I really, really love my Mac. And being a geek I am always looking at what is newest, best, faster, so I know there will come a day when I will just have to upgrade. This day is probably far away, but it will come and when I think about it now it makes me sad. Yes, it actually makes me sad to know that I will have to part with my trusty laptop, the one I carry around everyday, the one I work with, I play with, I use as my digital media box, that goes away on vacation with me…

So it slowly dawned on me that I had <gasp> developed a relationship with my Mac. Just like that, it didn’t even take too long for it to happen, it was just so natural. Oh Apple designers are truly the devil incarnate! Or maybe just devilish good. :)

But then this disturbing fact happened today: as I was talking with my wife about this, explaining how I had actually been caught in this crazy Mac-love thing she asked me a simple, innocent and yet disturbing question:
-“so what’s it called?”

Excuse me? What’s it called? Well, it does have a name on the network but it is merely for identification, it doesn’t count as a name… So I guess it doesn’t have a name.

-“But everything we care deeply about has to have a name, it is just part of the process and it makes it even dearer to our hearts.”

Boom! Just like that with that feminine logic which is just always right she brought me to a halt.

When I think about it I have to admit that I had in fact though about giving my Mac a name, I though it was special, different than any other computer I had ever had so it might be fun for it to have a name (after all some people name their cars…) but I had dismissed it as just a crazy though and forgot about it. Until today.

So what should I call my Mac? I’m really bad at naming things (any thing, from a project to a person to a service) so this should prove to be quite a challenge, but I am decided and I will not be led astray from my quest: my Mac has to have a name, it deserves a name, and so a name it shall have…

Only not just today. In fact it might take a while… Hum… I’ll let you know! :)

General geekyness

Late last week I had to reboot my server because of a breakdown in Portugal Telecom’s ADSL service which also affected the other operators running their offers on PT’s infrastructure (which they do because the telecom market liberalization in Portugal is a joke and the regulatory entity is an even bigger joke and the conditions for the unbundling of the local loop were not even a joke but just plain sad until very recently —but I digress, I don’t want to get into this rant right now).

Actually I didn’t have to reboot but I was in a hurry and made a bad call… OK, so I screwed up but hey “it’s my server and o reboot if I want to, reboot if I want to…”, etc, to the sound of a very well known tune. :)
Anyway the point is that I did reboot and since I had a pretty decent uptime until then some strange things happened during the weekend and I didn’t have the time to devote to them until now.

Rebooting a system which is running for a long time and is being changed constantly is always a scary thing to do and I should know better by now than to let changes that need to be taken into account at reboot time half-way through (“I’ll add it to the startup sequence latter, I gotta go now”). I don’t do this kind of stupid thing with the servers at my job but hey, at home it is a whole different ball park, right? I mean, it’s not even the same sport! :)

Well, anyway, I’ve added temperature monitoring to my server (which incidentally is the home desktop machine and the network server where this —and some other sites— are hosted and yes, this is why they where unavailable this last friday) and I had to tweak the kernel modules somewhat in order to get the sensors to report the right temperature instead of all those other values that would either turn my CPU into a blazing inferno or give it the potential to go superconductive. Well, after rebooting the PC the graph I got for the temperature was this:

[This image has been lost inthe ether. All the bits have been duly recycled.]

Notice the time that I remembered to load in the modules. Notice also that although I got the power source temperature (blue) OK I continued to have the CPU (green) at 0°C (actually it was at -180°C) but mrtg doesn’t show it. Sloppy, sloppy! And the reason for it is that not only must I load in the modules, I have to load them with the correct parameters for them to know what kind of sensors they are actually dealing with.

And I had done it all, I had discovered all the correct values for the required parameters after painstakingly trying lots of different combinations (this is an area where documentation is scarce at best, especially where the hardware is concerned) but did I put it in the startup scripts where I should? No! I left it out to do it “some other day” because I was, quite frankly, tired of dealing with the stupid sensors and their modules. And did I even do a simple script that loaded everything neatly into place in order to remember the correct parameters? Well, darn it, I just completely forgot.

I bet if I where a lawyer or a baker or an accountant or something else my own personal computer and webserver would get a lot better treatment…
Oh well, life goes on, the regular programme will continue shortly after this and this entry will be here for ever to remind me that I should be more thorough with my server’s configuration. And I will be, honest. Until next time, that is… :)

Diversão em situação de constrangimento

Panorama desta tarde:
[Imagem perdida nas brumas do tempo. Os bits foram devidamente reciclados.]

Com a Tuxa doente neste estado não tivemos hipótese de sair para comemorar o aniversário dela, apesar de ter estado um belo dia. Tínhamos pensado almoçar no Hard Rock Café (que a Tuxa ainda não conhece), mas vai ter de ficar para outra vez.

Valeu-nos um dos presentes dela. E não foi nada mau, apesar de ser a preto e branco o Manhattan não perde nada por isso, aliás o Woody Allen tem uma maneira muito monocromática de se exprimir mesmo… Sobretudo se tiver muitos, muitos tons de cinzento à sua disposição.

O filme foi particularmente apropriado com a aproximação da nossa próxima aventura pelo “outro” continente (já em Dezembro)! Ainda ontem estivemos a fazer mais planos com os nossos companheiros de viagens pelas Américas, pelo meio das sandes que ainda faltava acabar para a festa.

A parte interessante é que acabo por bloggar (cruzes credo, eu disse mesmo isto?!?) mais assim, ter WiFi na casa toda e um portátil genuíno (ao invés de um simples transportável) torna muito mais fácil e atraente escrever mais coisas.

Também recebi ontem as fotos que os meus tios tiraram quando estivemos com eles na praia de Altura no algarve em Agosto. Foi só mesmo há dois meses? Como é que é possível?

Bom as coisas estão a ficar interessantes para o concerto de amanhã, a Tuxa nem sabe se vai conseguir sair de casa para trabalhar, quanto mais ir ver o Robbie Williams à noite… E assim vejo-me na situação engraçadíssima de ir ver o concerto com o Vasco e a Sofia sem a Tuxa. Sim, como se pode calcular ver este concerto não foi propriamente minha escolha, embora não me repugne, mas agora ir sem a Tuxa é irónico, no mínimo.

Por outro lado a nossa heroína já está a jantar duas tostas, (esperem…) com geleia! Yes! O que dá um total de 5 tostas e um monte de chávenas de chá durante o dia inteiro! OK, está a ficar tudo bem, quando ela já come duas tostas sem refilar e ainda por cima com geleia já posso ficar descansado que amanhã já deve estar bem melhor. Mesmo!

Aniversário

O aniversário da Tuxa é hoje, mas a festa foi ontem com os parabéns, bolo, presentes etc depois da meia-noite.

E o resultado é que hoje no dia do aniversário propriamente dito a Tuxa está doente… Demasiada animação (mesmo faltando 10 pessoas eram mais de 30 convidados cá em casa), agitação e comida deram um resultado um bocado mau. Bom, para o ano que vem corre melhor.

Entretanto como a aniversariante está a tostas e chá fico eu com a missão de acabar com toda a comida que sobrou (e sim, a tradição aí mantém-se e vou ter comida para uns dias largos). Ah, os sacrifícios que se fazem de vez em quando… :)