Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Another Enterprise Rant

Hello all! Sorry, but I must comment on some photos I found on StarTrek.com’s site from the recent protest of the Enterprise fans.

I think I’ll use a very simple format for my rant. For each photograph, I will write a comment. In other words, if I had a directory structure such that there are two subdirectories, one called photos, and the other called comments. In each directory, there is a file with identical name but different extension. To write it out in something simpler to understand than English, here’s a small bash script:

for x in `find photos -type f` ; do
	echo photos/$x
	cat comments/$((echo $x | sed -e 's/jpg$/txt/g'))
done

Anyway, enough of this…here’s my rant:

Exhibit 1:

WWKD?

I have to agree with this poster, Kirk would save Star Trek. Conincidentally, that’s what’s going on. UPN doesn’t want Enterprise because it is not profitable. It would be if it was real Star Trek.

Exhibit 2:

Star Trek is Responsibility

Yes, and I think it is irresponsible to protest against stopping the production of Enterprise.

Exhibit 3:

Honk if..

It must have been relatively quiet day at Paramount…

Exhibit 4:

Best couple

You’ve got to be joking. Yes, even Vulcans have emotions, but they are _SUPPOSED TO_ supressed them. As for the other member of the “best couple”…urgh…

Exhibit 5:

Mistake

Yes, Paramount made a mistake in 1969. But let’s face it, Original series wasn’t too much of a hit when it was first on the air in 1966-1969. Its popularity was much greater in 1970, until it lead to the Star Trek:The Motion Picture, which lead to 9 more movies, 14 seasons of good Star Trek (1 season = about 24 episodes), 7 seasons of mediocre episodes, and 4 seasons of Enterprise. What a bad way to end this series of series. :-(

Note: Now we are getting to the more bizarre photos…

Exhibit 6:

Face

Let’s save Enterprise because the dog is cute! What a brilliant idea!

Exhibit 7:

Porthos

No comment.

Disturbing Imagery

While eating my dinner, I turned on the TV and I noticed that they were playing ST:VOY. I decided to keep watching. I noticed few things…

  1. The plot was completely ripped off from ST:TNG (spaceship dragged along in space by space creatures)
  2. Tuvok, the resident Vulcan, sounds like a cheap Text-To-Speech synthesizer running on a 100MHz Pentium
  3. Janeway, the so-called captain, doesn’t fit the role, she is too emotional

  1. When she was discussing the possibility of the crew having children, she just question everything with a "Are you crazy? We can’t provide them education! We can’t…"-attitude.
  2. At the end, she made a really cheap remark. Chakotay, the first officer, managed to save the ship by using his knowledge of animal mating "psychology," and Janeway said something like, "If I ever need any of [that] knowledge, I know where to find it."

After the episode ended, another one started, this time, it was Enterprise - the crappy series, not related to anything else with the same name. I decided to see at least the begining of the episode since I know the series has been written off an unprofitable (I think that’s the reason). I noticed several blatantly obvious stupidities..

  1. As you all know, T’Pol is supposedly a Vulcan. Well as usual, she doesn’t act like it.
  2. The theme song is stupid, and unlike any other Star Trek theme song _EVER_ recorded. (I think this is actually good, this and the fact that Enterprise - the series - doesn’t anywhere say it is Star Trek, except the brief "Based on Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry.

Bleh, I’m getting sick of taking about Enterprise…:-/ Time to post this and forget I ever watched ENT.

Programming Competition

Let’s start from the begining…

It is Saturday 19 February 2005, the clock says that it is 4:03 UTC. I receive an email, informing me of a competition on Techkriti. The competition’s name - IOPC. It seemed like a good competition, and I still had 7 hours and 53 minutes to register. So I did. I had a hard time deciding the team name (even tho I was the only member). In the end I went with "Linuxy" to show my fondness for this great OS. Next day, I woke up at 17:30 UTC which was one hour before the competition started. Wonderful, I ate quite a bit of highly caloric food, and hour later I went to my computer. The competition was already in progress (yeah, I miseed the first minute and a half). So I started coding. 19 hours later, I decided it would be best if I got some rest, since a rest refreshes the mind. I took a nap for about 1.25 hours. Then I went back to coding. After the 24 hours elapsed, I learned how well I did….85th out of 789 registered teams! That’s in the top 10.773%! I finished 4 problems to the judges’ liking. But I think I got another one right, which would have placed me 79th (10.01%). Oh well. Other than that, I lost some time because the judges had a bad test file :-/, they fixed it, but I lost time checking and rechecking the code. So that’s that. I expect that I am going to fall asleep very early today (1 hour of sleep isn’t much).

To make the coding more interesting, I decided to use a Subversion to keep track of changes I made to the code for the competition. Under normal circumstances, I would have used BitKeeper, but Larry is being an ass about the license, so I’m preparing for the worst case scenario - migration from BK to SVN. I wish I didn’t have to, BK is wonderful, but I won’t be signing away a year of CMS hacking time nor my first born male child.

I also noticed that I have survived with minimal food and water for a looong time. Maybe I should write a HowTo….hmm..

Anyway, that’s that. I am looking forward to IOPC2006.

ACM

Today I stayed in school for quite a lot of time. Classes were from 9:35 EST to 18:00 EST, and then I stayed for a special school’s ACM chapter meeting. We designed the bulletin board. We decided to make a 3D computer model and staple it to the board. It worked quite well. I worked on the keyboard and the speakers. I can’t claim that I did everything on the keyboard, on the contrary, I did only about a third of the work (the VP did the other 2/3). I also took some photos. They look kind of crappy because I didn’t really post-process them.

Here’s an artistic shot of the keyboard:

The Keyboard

And here’s the whole shebang:

The System

Feel free to criticize, but you must realize that it is not easy to make a decent looking computer out of:

  • cardboard
  • color foil
  • some markers
  • construction paper
  • stapler with some staples
  • 2 hours of time

BTW, There is also a box that’s the tower itself, but it is not in the above two shots.

Enterprise is caput!

I just read an interview with Scott Bakula, who did a great job in Quantum Leap, but sucks in Enterprise. Here are some tidbits from the interview along with my comments.

stasakeru828: Hey Scott! What was it like working with Brent Spiner?
SB: Spiner and I had entirely too much fun. He is such a funny, dry, clever person and obviously was very comfortable on the set with the crew. It was kind of like old home week for all of them, so we all mostly just kicked back and watched Brent do his thing, which was pretty amazing to watch. He’s a great actor and we were very fortunate that he agreed to do the show and bring that character to life, which I thought he did amazingly well.
My comment: lazy bums

GreatThor: All of Scotland would like to know how did the ladies look in the mirror universe in their retro uniforms? As we have to wait a long while to see it because Season 4 doesn’t start for us until March.
Scott Bakula: Let me just say … it’ll be worth waiting for.
My comment: more soft porn from B&B

JWolf: How do you feel about Enterprise being cancelled, and what were the reasons for the decision to cancel the show? I am a life long Star Trek fan as are many others and this is a total shock.
Scott Bakula: Well, I’m disappointed, and everyone involved with the show is disappointed. Obviously we’re all very emotionally attached to the show and we’re all having a great time making the show. So you would like that kind of a situation to continue.
Unfortunately we don’t fit into UPN’s business plan and really haven’t for the last two and a half years. So that’s a situation that’s out of our control and ultimately has no reflection on our show or the quality of our show. Or the commmitment of all of our fans.
My Comment: Hahaha!

Well, there you have it. ENT is something that attempts to imitate the coolness of TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY, but fails miserably…Here’s a little chart:

TOS
3 seasons, 7 movies
TNG
7 seasons, 4 movies
DS9
7 seasons
VOY
7 seasons
ENT
4 seasons, and it was almost canned after the first 3

This means that if it wasn’t for few determined individuals at Paramount, there would be only 3 seasons of ENT. For those that do not know, TOS had only 3 seasons, because CBS didn’t see it as something worth pursuing. Later on, Paramount made 7 movies with the TOS crew!

Q&A

Q: What you call a condition which causes immense fear of computer clusters?

A: Clusterphobia!

Clustering, clustering, clustering...

Ok, today I presented at LILUG about clustering. Unfortunatelly, the whole talk sucked! Here’s what happened….

  • I had about 66% of the talk prepared, which was fine considering that I didn’t have to talk about _everything_ I planned, but…
  • I decided to make few last minute changes, which worked at home. They caused me to be a little late (15 mins, that’s not too bad, I didn’t intend to start until 30 mins into the meeting anyway..)
  • I got there, set up the network, etc., etc.
  • I boot my laptop, everything goes fine, except the projector & Adobe Acrobat Reader
  • I tried making the resolution useable, but acroread insisted on using the secondary display to do the full screen mode.
  • 15 minutes later, I gave up on it, and tried the KDE PDF viewer, that worked, great.
  • I boot my desktop which served as a DHCP/DNS/TFTP/NFS server
  • I tried to ssh into the desktop - no luck
  • Checking the network cables yields nothing
  • I hook up the desktop to the projector and reboot - aha! Lilo doesn’t work
  • I put in a debian install cd, get a shell, chroot, and run lilo
  • reboot, it works
  • I connect the projector to the laptop again, and I’m ready to start, this is 1 hour after the meeting started, and there is 1 hour left.
  • I go through the slides, which were really great looking thanks to LaTeX and D. E. Knuth
  • I finish with the slides in 20 mins, and I want to demo something, but the technology failed me agian…
  • I just take 40 mins of Q & A

I guess you’d call it a success, since I think I had about 8/50 people understanding at the end of the talk. Someone also noted that clusters are fragile enough that mostly they barely work if you don’t touch them, if you do (like moving it elsewhere) they tend to break big time.

Anyway, that’s it for today…I’ll send the mailing list some of the materials tomorrow, and we’ll see.

I should add that as always, I tried to present about too much at the same time :-)

A, B, C, C++, D

John: have you looked at the D Programming Language?
John: ?
Jeff: I have briefly…
Jeff: it looks like a good idea gone bad..
Jeff: but I should really look more before saying anything
John: I honestly get the impression you will one day write the world’s greatest programming language.
Jeff: really?
John: And you will call it KNR.
Jeff: I think I’m more of a C dinosaur
Jeff: hehe
John: An homage to the dinosaurs your love.

New Computer

Interesting thing happened today, my mom got a new computer. 2.66GHz Celeron, 40GB HDD, 128MB RAM (PC2700). Pretty basic, but nice for what it will be used for. The interesting thing is, it did not come with Windows, but it did have an os. Yes, it came with Linux. Linspire is the official name of the linux distro (originally known as Lindows, AFAIK). It is based on debian, so it has all the cool programs like dpkg and apt-get. I’ll try to resize the reiserfs partition to only 20GB, and install Win 2K on the other 20. Once I’m tired of the restrictions of Linspire, I’ll put real debian onto it. We also got a printer with the computer for free. Total price? $150.

Cluster Talk Preparation - Day 1

Today in my MAT204 class (trig and such) I wrote down about a page of ideas for my clustering talk which I’ll give on Tuesday (February 8th) at LILUG. Once I got home, I decided to set up a practice node with all the goodies necessary for the talk. The final node will actually be my desktop with the HDDs removed and replaced by one 40 GB that will contain several installations of linux (Debian Sarge.) Anyway, I managed to only install the os (Woody) and dist-upgrade it to Sarge. This took me about an hour (time which I could have spend configuring bind :-( ) because my ethernet cable wasn’t in properly, and I was trying to figure out why the packets were getting lost. :-( After I figured it out, apt-get update & apt-get dist-upgrade worked like a charm.

Tomorrow, I’ll configure bind, dhcpd, tftpd (in that order) and test the network boot. If it works, I’m pretty much done with MPI. OpenMosix will take some more effort, PVM I might skip. Failover is too app specific for me to demonstrate. distcc is VERY simple to set up, I’ll be sure to present it.

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