RSS for Rich Knepper's Status

rlwrap

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 05:13:56 +0100

rlwrap just made my stata day, I think.

Support in Illulissat

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:23:00 +0100

We arrived in Greenland today, and I've spent most of the day in the airport hanger in Illulissat, helping work out some of the bugs of the systems. I haven't yet seen a musk ox (apparently they hang out in Kangerlussuaq more than Illulissat, and at airports not at all), but I have seen advertisements for burgers made out of musk oxen, which is a little creepy. At the moment we're about two hours closer to the North Pole than we are to New York City, or Copenhagen. The weather is quite nice, I'm enjoying the 50's temperatures. Greenland is extremely rocky and gray, and the only ice I've seen is in the water, but there are huge amounts of that.

We've got jobs up and processing pretty well down, still working on getting the full range of processing options running without problems. Most of the concerns have been dealt with, but we want to make completely sure that we're up and running as well as possible.

Heading out this AM

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:04:37 +0100

Equipped with a ridiculous amount of gear and orange suitcases, I am headed to Illulissat, Greenland today. Via Copenhagen. To talk to people about how well our computers are doing for them. Yes, I will be back very soon, meaning our travel time will nearly double the time we're on the ground in Illulissat. No, I will not bring you a musk ox, even though I think they are cute, too. I will indeed take lots of pictures, although Link's pictures will undoubtedly be better than my own, so I will provide links to Link's pictures.

Mosquitoes
Customs Officers (I'm guessing you get some funny looks trying to cross borders w/ 72GB of high-quality ram in your briefcase)
Skraelings (don't tell them I said that)

Mermaids
Vikings
Friendly Skraelings
Faxe Beer

I will update this with less fantastical silliness later on.

Summer Reaping List

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:04:45 +0100

It was not long ago that Ula and I were in the local StarBookstore and I was lamenting not being able to find anything I like. My favorite shelves at McBooksRUs are filled with new fantasy and science fiction, which I'm sure has a lot of fine literary qualities, but I'm feeling a little skeptical about. Thank the solstice, those days are over. I'm actually in a surfeit of books, with nary a lycanthrope in sight. Maybe one or two.

In the ecstatic early summer of May and June, I've had the opportunity to rip through a number of books that have really made the cravings go down.

I finally found some of Kathe Koja's work (at the library, natch). Extremities is a fantastic story collection that has all of the great creepiness you'd find in The Cipher, which is where I first found Ms. Koja's work. Neither of these books appear on http://www.kathekoja.com, despite the fact that they are ~~not~~ exactly the type of things that Koja's new target audience of young adults should be reading.
I forgot this until I saw it on the nightstand the other day, but The Raw Shark Texts was probably the first thing that I ran across this summer that made me think it would be a worthwhile one for reading. Thought fish that live in texts, feeding on humans in the conceptual stream? How could you turn it down?
Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors is differently creepy and a fast read. Everyone else but me has already probably read it. Bargain bin. Worth it.
Also in the category of "everyone's already read" is Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon. I picked this up during one of the lamenting times, thinking "everyone else says this is pretty good, maybe it's time that I read this". Everyone else is freakin' right. One time.
Peter Watts' Starfish, yea, unto the entire Rifters series is available at http://www.feedbooks.com. I read this before, didn't realize it, and I'm having an awesome time picking it back up. Crazy people at the bottom of the sea. You can't go wrong with biomodification and bathyscaphes. Holy crap, there's a lot of good stuff on that Feedbooks.com, more and more varied than on http://www.gutenberg.org, which is still good.
Geek Love, picked up at an antique store selling out of business, sadly. A fine tale of carnival life and love and evil.
Kirby, comics artist biography that hits the spot.
Edogawa Rampo's stories collected in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. It's more than just a play on words, it's a fantastic festival of terrifying and mysterious stories.
HPL's Dreams in the Witch House and other Weird Stories. Published by Penguin, Edited by the Joshi, whose footnoting borders on the obsessive-compulsive.

Best of

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:59:13 +0100

Circus Circus hotel has a channel when you can watch the dog kennel, with music over it. When I turned it on (it was the best channel available, natch) it was playing Depeche Mode ("Shake the disease"), followed by the Cure ("Love Cats")...it was so absurd I had to leave it on for the whole duration. There aren't any dogs in the kennel right now...you just see empty cages.

Impressions from the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 06:07:37 +0100

A terminal holds the world's most frightening Au Bon Pain, I mean anywhere. You walk up thinking, "Oh great, fresh bread around something tasty and maybe a muffin or something." The counter over which you submit your order is queerly stained with fingerprints as if this were the world's most-traveled ABP, not just some outpost at the very end of A terminal.

Selmon, the cashier, is polite with the kind of politeness you get from people who are keeping their dignity in tough circumstances, she dispatches your order to a silent man behind the sandwich counter who has your sandwich eerily ready before you can even make it down to his station. The sandwich is wrapped up tightly, inexpertly, so that when you bite down you get fragments of paper, if you're not careful to unwrap. Unwrapping the sandwich causes it to spill apart across the back of your hand, staining you with sandwich juices.

As you eat you notice a barrier of paper towels around the pepsi cooler, feebly holding back condensation. Odors pass through, some delectable (cooking bacon), some distasteful (toast burnt to pure carbon). A girl in those giant suede boots skateboards down the concourse, wheels announcing her presence from far away across the tiled floor. She carries a cardboard box in her hands as she skates implacably past.

I bet there's weed inside.

Google notes

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:51:19 +0100

I grabbed Patrick's suggestion of using vi keys to navigate searches, but I've found I have muscle memory that goes like:

CTRL-T
CTRL-L
Tab
some search stuff
grab for mouse

It's that last part that really doesn't work so hot, since the right hand (my mousing hand) is the one that hits j,k,/,Enter.

I don't care

Because I have started using google notebook. And aside from slight slowness, it's extremely handy, sitting down there in the cat litter box of firefox, I can bring it up whenever, switch between notebooks and sections in notebooks, dump in links and whatever, annotate them, without another application getting in my way, and pick it up again on my laptop if necessary, or on the home machine...I'm really taken with it so far.

mobility sucks

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:42:02 +0100

So I spent a truckload of time trying to get everything hooked up to blog via phone to this blog.

It works for crap...most of my stuff doesn't get in, and it's not able to parse non-text content.

So I'm going to mail photos straight to flickr, over there on the left, and you can see them there. Text...uh, I'll just have to think of something else, since I can't even appear to get a regular mail client to send something that doesn't just show up as emptiness.

Blargh.

music search

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:00:43 +0100

I'm pitiful at finding new music. I don't get out, there aren't a lot of people who I interact with on a daily basis that share my musical tastes, and in general I don't invest a lot of time in it, I guess.

Until now. There's a new Black Francis and a new Les Savy Fav album out this fall.

I have to go now, I just broke my monitor with my forehead.

Laptop woes

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 18:48:53 +0100

So, I ordered one of the shiny Dell m1330 laptops the Monday after they came out (would've been earlier, but they didn't show up on the IU site until Monday): July 2.  I got a ship date of August 20, the longest I've ever had to wait for a piece of computing machinery in my recollection.  I don't think it took a month and a half to get two 4TB Fibre Channel storage systems on site after the order was put in.  Today, with no updates in sight, I mailed our local sales rep, who told me that it would "ship in 4 days (confirmed with factory)".

There aren't a lot of really specialized parts in this machine, except apparently for the LCD-backlit display.  The real problem is paint.  Dell can't paint the machines (red and white, I ordered black) and have them come out reliably good-looking.

With machine specs and visuals out as early as June 4th, you'd figure they'd have things down by now.  No such luck.  EP, I request your "$PRODUCT SUCKS" images, the one with your tongue lunging out as if it's just barely making way for your liver, eyebrows atavistically arched up in utter disgust, since clearly with the release of this machine, Dell sucks.  System76 for the next laptop, I think.

I just hope they don't push my order back another month and a half...

Update I got the laptop on Friday.  The much-vaunted paint job isn't so hot, but so far the rest of it is.  It's pretty darn new, and I've had a couple of issues with it so far, so I'm going to put my stuff into a Linux on Dell m1330 page for future reference.