Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Today is 4th of July...which means fireworks everywhere. Yesterday evening, Jackson, MI had a rather nice display. Here are some of the photos I took:

I've resumed watching Stargate Universe. I'm more or less convinced that it's crap. The plot is painful (well, the tiny bits of plot that are there), the characters are annoying, and there are a few "issues" I have with the production. This is going to be my short rant about one aspect of the production.

At some point, someone thought of making a device so that you can hand-hold a camera but still have it stable & steady. This invention is commonly called a Steadicam. Anyhow, I would like to know when it became artsy and cool to not use steadicams, and instead have this unsteady shot. I find this motion distracting and even un-natural. SGU isn't the first show to do this. I vaguely remember BSG doing the same. Why are you doing this?

Of course, not doing silly things with the camera will not fix the other issues with the show - like annoying characters and lacking story lines.

So, if you are responsible for the production of SGU, use those steadicams! They'll improve your show!

I've had the following draft for a very long time. It's time to publish it already, isn't it?

Yesterday, I came across a site dedicated to Cake Wrecks - in other words, cake decoration attempts gone wrong.

The best ones I've found on this site include:

Dear Facebook,

I tried to use your @ name completion feature in Opera, and it didn't work...at all!

Love, Jeff.

I was just looking at the source for Postfix, when I came across this function:

/* mail_conf_read - read global configuration file */

void    mail_conf_read(void)
{
    mail_conf_suck();
    mail_params_init();
}

It turns out that mail_conf_suck reads in the config file, and then mail_params_init does all the dirty work of initializing the internal data structures based on the config.

Anyway, that's the random thought of the day. I found it marginally amusing.

Edit: the code in question is in src/global/mail_conf.c.

Some time ago, I stumbled across a Wikipedia article about a book: Eternity's Missing Children.

Apparently, it's some obscure book that no one really cares about - at least that's what the "this article may not meet the general notability guideline" box implies.

Anyhow, here's the entire description from the wiki page (copied because I wouldn't be surprised if it got deleted on Wikipedia).

The Devil and Jesus sit down for a cocktail in New Orleans, with a myriad of shared worries and personal relationships to resolve. These two historic gentlemen find themselves in the One Wheel Louisiana, a New Orleans bar on the outskirts of town, where an aging black bluesman finds his soul and Jesus is reminded of a former romance. As the night roles on, with libation and song consumed, these half-brothers of biblical proportions find a world in peril with genuine faith shaken and manipulated by our earthly guardians of organized religion; but they both agree with belief in their hearts and their futures in question that New Orleans never looked so good.

At some point, I came across this wonderful bit of history - the IBM RAMAC. Even though I'm a System/360 fan, I think this is too cool not to share.

First, the memory:

Second, the whole "CPU":

And third, a video about it:

A while back, I described the Trinity bell tower, and as I promised here is the follow up post that talks about change ringing itself. This post is going to describe the process of ringing a single bell.

Let's start from the beginning. In a tower, there are several bells (12 at Trinity) of various pitches (tuned to make them sound pleasant).

Each bell has a head stock (red in the above photo), and a wheel for the rope. A person uses the rope to make the wheel turn, which in turn makes the bell itself move.

The headstock and the bearings are designed in such a way that the bell can freely turn 360 degrees. This might sound unsafe, and it can be. So do not just assume that you can handle it without proper supervision. There is something called a stay, which prevents the bell from going more than ~380 degrees, but it is just a piece of wood - wood can (and does) break.

The bells start off in the most unlikely position - up side down! That is, they open upward. When a tiny bit of energy is applied on the rope (by pulling), the bell goes off balance and thanks to physics, swings all the way around stopping more or less right at the top again. At some point during the swing, the clapper strikes the bell, and everyone in the neighborhood knows that someone is ringing.

Here is a great animation that I found on the internet that shows exactly what happens:

Now comes the hard part :) Since you have multiple bells, you can ring them in various orders. Suppose you label the treble as bell number 1, the tenor as 12, and all the other bells in the obvious way. You could ring them one at a time, one right after another (you want to have 12 people, one per bell). Easy enough, right? Well... go ahead an look at this video of some ringing at Trinity:

What do you think? Pretty cool, eh? There isn't much time between each bell strike, and you want to make sure that you make your bell sound at the right time.

You might have noticed that right before the end of the video, the pattern changed. More on this in the next post.

What does it look like when the bells are moving? Well, there's is another video. This one is about how the bells were made, and all the other good stuff. It opens with a shot of the bells swinging around:

Anyway, that's it for the mechanics of ringing a bell, you will have to wait for the next post to find out about the patterns. I will try to write it before the 2010 is over ;)

I finally decided that enough was enough, and I ordered the parts for my new server. This means that in the next week or two, I will be replacing the good ol' dual Athlon (see below for specs), with a shiny new quad-core Xeon.

Current setup - baal:

New setup - odin:

I've "stolen" some images of the case from NewEgg:

Baal gives me about 40 GB of disk space (I use RAID 1 across the two drives). Odin will give me about 6TB (RAID 6). This will finally allow me to do a few things I wanted to do for a while; one such thing is to provide a Hercules image with Linux set up to do HVF development.

From 3 days ago:

This morning in arctic Norway, onlookers were stunned when a gigantic luminous spiral formed in the northern sky. Veteran observers accustomed to the appearance of Northern Lights say they have never seen anything like it. It was neither a meteor nor any known form of atmospheric optics. Rumors that the spiral was caused by the botched launch of a Russian rocket have not yet been confirmed.

(original)