Wings Over the Pyre - January 20th, 2005

08:34 am - Love Me, Love My Repulsive Listening Habits

Technorati Tags: redoubt, playlist, music, shoutcast

It occurred to me as I listened to the musical ebb and flow that is the Redoubt's normal operating wash, that since the database rebuild, songs had been cycling without really shifting around much. Then I realized ...

Yes, I'd added all the music back in at the same priority rating.

Insert facepalm here.

I have since juggled things around a bit so that the newer albums are bumped into the higher, and thus more often played, musical categories. However, you, the Redoubt faithful listener, can help out. How, you ask?

Request songs. Go to the Redoubt's Playlist, and put in requests for your favourite songs of all time. Every time a song is played, its value decays by 2. Every time you put in a request for a song, its value goes up by 5. With playlist bands being about 20 points wide, 4 requests can pop a song right up into a higher class in no time. It'll decay faster as its played more, but that's part of the fun, right?

Right now, every listener can make 10 requests an hour, up to 60 requests a day! So, get in there and start voting for your favourite songs, and listen!

(The request scheduler schedules blocks of songs which are waiting in the request queue every 20min. If a given block is longer than 20min, another request block will often follow it directly. Keep in mind, play schedule may hinge on how often that artist, album, or song has been played; individual songs will not be heard again for 90min, and songs from the same album will be spaced at least 30min apart. Every request goes into the request pile, however, and will get played when its eligible. Keep those requests coming!)

Current Mood: creative

09:17 am - The Call of the Damned

Technorati Tags: Deadbolt, music, rockabilly, eMusic

Damn you, Eric the .5b, I just popped over to eMusic to see if they had something interesting to pull down for the Redoubt, and what do I see? That's right.

Two absolutely unavailable elsewhere live albums from, who? Frickin' Deadbolt!

Its as if they caught word that I was headed in, and decided to lie in wait for me with an insidious trap. Evil, evil people!

Well, enough said about that. Both albums are now safely ensconced on the playlists. Request at will!

Current Mood: impressed

10:28 pm - The Danger of Warmed-Over Science

Technorati Tags: global_warming, science, dinosaurs, ecology

LiveScience is good enough to send us this:

Despite some controversial evidence that an asteroid or comet caused the worst mass extinction in history, most researchers now believe a combination of volcanic activity and a warming climate was the cause.

New research announced today further supports this majority view.

The Great Dying, as it is called, occurred 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Era. More than 90 percent of all species were wiped out. That much is well documented in the fossil record.

In previous work, scientists led by Luann Becker of the University of California, Santa Barbara claimed evidence for impacts by space rocks in layers of Earth dated to the end-Permian event. Several experts on asteroid impacts have doubted those results, however.

The new study, reported Thursday in the online version of the journal Science, found no evidence for impacts. It indicates the culprit was probably atmospheric warming linked to greenhouse gases from erupting volcanoes.

"Animals and plants both on land and in the sea were dying at the same time, and apparently from the same causes – too much heat and too little oxygen," said University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward, lead author of the latest paper.

It is the second study in less than two months to reach a similar conclusion.

Ward and his colleagues examined Permian-Triassic vertebrate fossils, including 126 skulls from reptiles and amphibians.

They found evidence for a gradual extinction over about 10 million years leading up to the boundary between the Permian and Triassic periods, then a sharp increase in extinction rate at the boundary that then lasted another 5 million years. That's not what you'd expect from a catastrophic asteroid impact, which theorists say could obliterate a lot of life instantly and set up a global winter that would kill off other species in mere months or years.

A search for material expected to be left by an asteroid or comet impact in the same layers of Earth turned up nothing. If there was an impact, it was a relatively minor contributor to the extinction, Ward's team contends.

Now, if you were one of the broad field of eco-nazis, you might suddenly be doing a horrid little watusi, doing the finger-pointing thing, and generally gloating in the eventual downfall of humanity at its own depraved and terrible hand. After all, greenhouse gasses are being thought to be at the root of the worst death throes in the history of this meaningless little planet! How much worse is Man?

Of course, the obvious issue jumps up: you know, 250 million years ago, there was no Man. In fact, there weren't even any mammals. Mammals hadn't even been thought of yet. There weren't any dinosaurs; the great, terrible lizards were the inheritors of all the open eco-space left by the Great Dying. The only thing there was a relatively oldish Earth and the reptile and amphibian precursors to the saurians we've come to know and love.

The issue that occurs to me, however, is that there is definitely a threat wrapped up in this pretty little bundle for the folks advocating that human action is solely responsible for the "rise" in global temperatures (and I put it thus because you've all already seem my post on what I think of "global warming" as a function of human action). If we can establish, securely, that the planetary temperatures can fluctuate over relatively short times purely as a function of natural processes, it casts the shifting temperatures of the planet at present into a much different light. If planetary vulcanism and other events can shift the climate, how do you establish, or can you establish that current events are the results of human activity?

Short answer: you can't.

I look forward to seeing the first cite of this particular study as proof that the Earth's climate can and has been affected by greenhouse gases, and as such we must cripple Mankind's ability to control his environment and go back to the mud huts.

Current Mood: aggravated

10:51 pm - The Conuing Travails of a Squid Who's (Not) Gone ... To the Kowai

Technorati Tags: cars, handicaps, modifications, dealerships

Its just not my day. And when I say its not my day, I mean its really not.

I woke tonight to the sound of my dealership calling me to say that they'd finally looked at the car, and that the sound is coming from the secondary power steering pump system. Now, this is a problem, because that system was not stock on the system, but installed by a company called Handicapped Driver Services for me, pretty much against my better judgment ... but at the time they said the federal mandate was that if the main power steering went out on the car, I had to have an assistive back-up. OK, fine, I can live with that.

So, now, the shuddering and the loud noise? Coming from the secondary. I ask this as someone who designs redundant computer cluster solutions for a living ... What the fuck good is a backup system that takes down the whole system if it fails? You're now dependent on a single point of failure again.

Sigh.

In any case, this just puts a bigger pile of effort on my head. In the morning, before I can sleep, I need to call HDS and see if they have an agreement with a towing service, so I can get my car from Colonial to HDS. And this is unlikely to be cheap, as from Lawrenceville to HDS is roughly 39.2mi. This is going to be problematic if they don't have such an agreement.

If not, looks like I'll call AAA and see if I can upgrade to the Plus membership. $30 extra but far, far cheaper than the $100+ it'd cost to pay the extra towing mileage.

And then --- phoning the dealership to tell them a tow's coming.

My brain hurts. And I hate to have to deal with all of this crap. Its troublesome and annoying. If the dealership had just looked at the goddamned thing the other day when I took it into the shop for the oil change, it'd be a different story.

I'm annoyed.

Current Mood: annoyed

11:01 pm - Don't Cross the Streams. It Would Be Bad.

Technorati Tags: mad_science, Canada, x-ray, Grizzly, vision

enGadget brings me the most useful things:

Canadian inventor Troy Hurtubise, who some of you may know as the creator of the grizzly bear-proof suit and fire-resistant paste, claims to have built a device that sees through walls. Doc Brown-style, Hurtubise says he saw the entire device, called the Angel Light, in a dream and built it without any blueprints or schematics. He later showed the device to representatives from the French government who were so impressed they gave him $40,000 on the spot to finish it. After talking to some contacts at MIT, he also discovered that the device could also detect stealth material and cause electronic devices to stop working (or, so he says). And, like any good mad scientist, he tested the device on himself. Sticking his hand in front of it, he claims to have been able to see muscles and blood vessels, but now says he has no feeling in a finger on that hand. Ah, the perils of science.

Far be it from me to suggest that the Canadian winter is somewhat too long and dark to sustain a sane, human society, but ... Mister Hurtubise is pretty much the exemplar of what happens when you spend just a little too much time running around in the dark and cold, wishing you could see naked women right through their three-foot thick parkas.

Not that such is not worthy investment, but ... Man, look at the size of that bulgy metal Mad Science Phallus!

Current Mood: geeky

11:29 pm - A Wish For Servers That Work: Birthday Suggestions #8987668898

Technorati Tags: myth, xeon, blades, cabinets, servers, birthday, present

Looking for something for April's greatest holiday? Feel like spending a truly minor amount of money on me? How about the server they intended to run Wish on?

System description
Verari (formerly RackSaver) Megadense BladeRack: http://www.verari.com/megaDense.asp

BladeRack cabinet 7' with 88 nodes
44 nodes on each side, with about 6U of utility space (at the bottom on one side) for switches and other equipment.
Bottom to top cooling, with fan trays under each row of blades.
The cabinet is wired with 176 CAT5E cables (2 per blade).
Comes with front and rear locking doors, 1 spare fan tray and 2 spare circuit breakers.

88 blades, each with

• Intel SE7501WV2 motherboard
• RackBlade RS-1100V chassis
• RackSaver PS 1U 300W SPI power supply
• 2 Intel Xeon 2.8GHz CPU
• 2 RackSaver Blade Xeon Heatsink
• 2 x 512MB Registered ECC PC2100 RAM
• 60GB/7200RPM/8MB cache Western Digital EIDE hard-drive
• 1 available PCI slot, riser card included
• Current image: Linux Fedora Core 2 (with hyperthreading enabled)

The Intel SE7501WV2 motherboard (http://www.intel.com/design/servers/se7501wv2) features 6 memory slots, 2 Gigabit NICs, and a BMC that supports IPMI v1.5 and serial-over-LAN "lights-out" management.

Switches
2 HP Procurve 2650: 48 10/100 ports + 2 Gigabit ports.

Power requirements
5 208-240V x 30A circuits with L6-30 receptables.

This system was purchased in September 2003, has been thoroughly tested and is fully functional. We used to run the first "Ultra Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game", Wish. The Wish project was cancelled on January 9th, 2005. See www.mutablerealms.com for more information.

Memory Upgrade Option
The system can be delivered with 2GB RAM per blade (44 blades with 4x512MB, 44 blades with 2x1GB of Registered ECC PC2100 RAM, all fully tested) instead of 1GB per blade. Additional cost: $14,000.

Yeah, go on ahead and get the 2 GB upgrade. I'll be happy with abother 160GB of RAM of my makeshift hypercube ...

Current Mood: horny