Author Archives: bbarrett

Oh, I’m sorry. Did I break your concentration?

Computer People Suck

I’ve been filling out applications to a couple of grad schools this week. All four schools have some form of online application. And all four online applications suck. USC has two different online applications, both of which are impossible to follow. Cal’s is actually reasonable, except for the fact that it asks the same question multiple times and doesn’t automatically load the question set that matches your department – there are some instructions, but they are in about 4 different places. And Stanfords is, well, painful. You would think that people would be able to write decent software.

Computer People Really Suck

Someone actually managed to get OS X to return two lines from running the “hostname” command. I’m really not sure that is possible, and it really annoys me. I’m trying to figure out how this is possible, but it is breaking LAM’s configure script. I really don’t want to fix what is clearly not allowed (you can’t have multiple hostnames – it just isn’t right). Anyway, it looks like we will be releasing LAM 7.0.3 sometime in the next week. It wouldn’t be a Super Computing conference without a LAM release. No huge new features, just some bug fixes.

Poker Night

After watching Notre Dame finally win a game (woo hoo), went up to Santa Barbara to play poker with the ND crew. Dave came up with some crazy ass games – not all that surprising I suppose. I had about one good hand the entire night, but managed to hold on to end up a bit on the night. I was happy to find some entertainment for the night.

That’s not a theory of physics pretty much disproved by Wyle E. Coyote?

I’ve been writing code this week. It’s great! I should do it more often. Did some work on LAM so that it can run on very, very large clusters. There should be some great fun at SC this year (assuming I’m going, of course). Design work for the logger code is going well. I hope to have something working well by the end of this week.

And I leave you with these inspirational words:

“The process by which an American stamp enters into circulation begins with the American Public”
“Well, that’s always a mistake”

Fish are our friends, not food

Football

11 days. Woo hoo.

MPI

Repeat after me: “I will always match datatypes when sending messages. I will not send 4 MPI_CHARs and receive 1 MPI_INT. I am fully aware that this will completely hose my application if the friendly MPI implementation happens to be helping me out in running in heterogeneous environments”. Ah well, it only wasted 2 hours of my life.

I finally got the mesh routers working. Took much longer than it should have, but oh well. Tonight will try to get code compiled on USC’s cluster. Tomorrow, collect some data. And life should be good. Or something like that.

Join the Tivo nation!

I have joined the Tivo nation. I know own a 80 hour Series 2 Tivo. Life is very good – I can now record all the CSI I want. And in browsing through shows on the network, I discovered that MacGyver reruns are on TV late at night! Although the exact time they are on really doesn’t matter all that much, does it? :).

So life is good – I may eventually have to add a second hard drive for some extra space. Keep more back episodes around or something like that.

Survival, Engineering, and something I’ve forgotten already…

I survived my first “event” at ISI. Every couple of months, the project I’m working on has what amounts to really big, week long demos of our project. These demos are for the funding people, which means they are a tad bit stressful on every one involved. It doesn’t help that the project starts at 9:00EDT, which is 6:00 local time. Getting in that early is not a good thing. But I survived.

And I got my first paycheck this week. Woo hoo!

Apollo 13 was on USA tonight. I’m convinced that every engineering undergrad should be required to watch either Apollo 13 or The Right Stuff before being allowed to graduate. If said engineer does not feel the need to go do something “because we decided to do it”, said engineer should not be allowed to graduate.

Apple rocks!

Ok, so I’ve started using Mail.app because it somewhat sanely deals fairly well with the multiple mail servers I have these days (ISI, .Mac, and OSL). One feature I’ve been longing for is the ability to have multiple From addresses for a single mail server. Since brbarret@{osl.iu.edu, cs.indiana.edu, lam-mpi.org, indiana.edu} all end up in my OSL account, it made sense that I set things up this way. So, while trolling through the Mail.app help trying to figure out how to make a mail list I found out that you can do this already!

All you have to do is put a comma separated list of from addresses in the “address” field for an account, and you are good to go. Amazing. Why didn’t I read the help months ago. This was always my major complaint with Jaguar’s Mail.app.

Sadness

First, the Concorde is about to be no more, which is kind of sad. I always wanted to fly on the Concorde. Looks like I’m either going to have to get really rich in the next couple months or miss out. 🙁

It amazes me how bad some computer science grad students are at writing code. Well, not just writing code, but understanding basic design principles. I used to wonder how Windows could be so bad and buggy, but more and more, I’ve had to face reality. Our profession sucks and has no quality control at all. And it really pisses me off. I spend way too much time working on production quality code to be willing to deal with code that isn’t up to par. It’s one thing to let a free() slip or the occasional dereference of a NULL pointer. But to just hack at it until it works is just not acceptable for anything but prototypes.

But I’m still happy as can be right now. I’m fully caffeinated (some may say a bit over caffeinated).