Because Dan said so…

Dan, now online.

Archive for November, 2006

You know the night time…

Posted by Dan Hertz on November 30, 2006

is not really the right time to try to be able to concentrate on getting work done.

I discovered earlier today that one of the main reasons I couldn’t get anything done while I was here last night was that a database crashed, and it’s not possible to run any computing jobs when this database isn’t running. So that explains one mystery that had confused me a bit.

Tonight I’ve managed to make a bunch of plots, which counts as being productive, I think. But I’m fast losing the ability to think clearly. But I don’t want to drink more coffee lest I be unable to sleep when I get home.

Incidentally, I should give credit to JP for the category for this and the preceding blog entry. I have shamelessly stolen the category from him, as I think I may well have done with a number of others, come to think of it.

Needless to say, I am not getting anywhere in my attempts at thinking about ideas for the upcoming online Amber game, which was something I was hoping to sort of give some thought to while here with nothing to do. Creativity seems to be somewhat beyond me just now.

Two and a half hours to go… And then there will be a bed. I think today I’ll let myself sleep until I wake up. Bliss.

Posted in News Flash | 1 Comment »

Night shift fun?

Posted by Dan Hertz on November 29, 2006

Well, I’m wrapping up the first of two night shifts I’m doing here at work this week.

Monitoring the data taking, making sure that things aren’t screwing up, calling people if needed, etc. It’s not very interesting at all, actually. But at least the first night of it is almost over. And then I get to go home and go to bed. And wow, that will be sweet.

Posted in News Flash | 1 Comment »

Blog fame and stats

Posted by Dan Hertz on November 27, 2006

So I only comparatively recently discovered that wordpress has a “blog stats” page, which allows me to see a variety of things about my blog. Not just how many times my blog has been visited by different people, but lots of other interesting information about it as well. So I can see where people found my blog by searching online, or where they clicked to my blog from if they were on some other webpage and clicked a link to get to here. I can see what posts have been read more than others, and all sorts of fun stuff like that.

A logical question that any sane person might ask is, why is this interesting information? Well, it’s interesting because I was a little surprised at how many people come and visit my site. The counter is clever enough not to count multiple hits from the same person on the same visit. In fact, it seems to be clever enough that if you quit your browser and open it again, it won’t count that as a new visit, so I guess it’s tracking things by IP or something. Maybe it will allow one visit per day to count, or something like that.

The interesting thing is that my site gets hits from random people, in addition to the friends whom I would expect to be reading it. And a whole lot of these are still people reading about the tetanus shot reaction I had back in August. That post has had about ten times as many reads as any other post on my blog and it seems like a couple of people find my blog every day by searching for tetanus shot reactions. I’m still near the top of google’s hits if you type in “flu reaction tetanus shot” or some other permutations thereof. I’m not sure how the google search engine works, or why I ended up so near the top, but I did. My favorite thing about that whole tetanus shot business is that the blog entry on that ends with comment about how I’m contemplating what my character concept should be for JP’s Amber game. So Infinite Amber is getting lots of publicity as well, although it’s probably with people who haven’t the faintest idea what Amber is, or even what roleplaying is. Still, it amuses me a lot.

But it seems like quite a few people are getting to my site from my friends’ blogs, which I would expect. Some people are getting to it by doing image searches for types of fish, as far as I can tell. That seems to bring up stuff from my Eleutherea Journal entries, I guess. Anyway, maybe I can’t really imagine that the Eleuthera journal is of interest to anyone who doesn’t know me. But what do I know. Much the same goes for anyone who looks at the ‘crime scene’ photo of my seizure from last winter. I guess they were looking for information on seizures or something? Clearly they will have learned that Ernie’s involvement should not be overlooked (click here for the picture).

Anyway, I don’t know if you can do this kind of tracking with wordpress if you’re not hosted by them, but it’s well worth checking out if you can. And if not, there are a number of free services that do a smiliar kind of thing. Maria has a link to one that she uses on her blah-g (since she’s still in the dark ages using blogger rather than being with the cool kids using wordpress).

Thanksgiving report and pictures to come.

Posted in Blogging, Fun | 4 Comments »

New Toy!

Posted by Dan Hertz on November 20, 2006

After years of saying that I was going to buy one, I finally got around to actually buying a digital camera, and today it arrived. It’s a Canon SD700 and is very shiny. I haven’t had too much time to play around with it but so far it seems very nice indeed. Hopefully this means that this blog will soon start to feature some pictures as well as my exciting prose.

Posted in Fun, Photos | 1 Comment »

Are you protected?

Posted by Dan Hertz on November 14, 2006

So in a discussion on the ASOIAF message board, someone ended up putting up a link to this website, which sells Armor of God pajamas. Now if this were a joke, it would be awesome. As it is, it’s just kind of scary and disturbing Apparently it’s inspired by Ephesians 6, 10-18, which I will quote here:

10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. 11 Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. 14 Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, 15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. 18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.

Now, I guess, if your mother had read that to you when you went to bed every night as a little kid, you might have grown up to think that you needed some kind of actual armor to keep you safe as well. But are you really safe once you grow up? Or would you need this kind of pajamas for life? Alas they don’t seem to have adult sizes.

I’m not sure why the Armor of God bears the coat of arms of St. George, incidentally. Perhaps it’s because of some sort of kinship with England? But I feel like there could just as easily have been a connection to any other Saint. Why not Saint Patrick, for instance? Oh well, they designed this fabulous product, so I guess they get to pick the arms.

Posted in Fun | 4 Comments »

Big Red Victory!

Posted by Dan Hertz on November 11, 2006

Well, after last year’s Harvard Game, this year was a  tremendous relief. It was also tremendously exciting.  The important thing that was re-established was of course that Harvard Sucks!

Things started off very well with us getting an early goal, but they relatively quickly got back to 1-1. Then things sort of settled down, although the main noticable feature of the game seemed to be that the ref wasn’t calling any penalties against Harvard regardless of how their players were tripping ours whereas they were calling penalties against us for they tiniest of infractions.

Things took a turn for the worse in the third period when they got another power play goal (which was basically due to sloppy defense, although there may have been some Offensive interference as well). The crowd was getting a little bit out of it for a little while, but right after a face-off Doug Krantz flipped the puck nicely into the Harvard goal to even things up. And that got everyone, including the Cornell players, energized again. So things were suddenly looking a lot more hopeful.

Then there was yet another seemingly pointless  Penalty call against Cornell, which we once again killed. And we got control of the puck just as the penalty was ending. So our player was coming onto the ice, got the pass, was wide open, skated up and was all alone with the goalie and scored. So then there was about two minutes left and we were up 3-2.

I’ve been sick for the past two weeks with a cold and what little voice I had is pretty much completely gone what with all the screaming and shouting.  But wow, it was an exciting game.

This weekend is kind of fun because it’s the all-color teams weekend. In addition to playing the Harvard Crimson, we’re also playing Dartmouth Big Green. What is it with universities wanting to have team names that are colors? I guess the blame should go to Oxford, where they just refer to the team as Blue. Cambridge calls theirs Light Blue, as far as I know. And then you have all the US universities copying that. Stanford changed their team name not too long ago to be Cardinal. Not the bird, the color. The amusing story there is that they had a poll among the undergraduates and the overwhelming choice of the undergrads was The Stanford Robber Barons. Which I think would be a fabulous name. And the mascot could have a little sidekick who could beat up the other team mascot and stuff (no robber baron would stoop to doing that himself, of course). It would be great! But apparently the administration didn’t like this idea, and so they decided to try to emulate Harvard and these other places instead.

Posted in Hockey | 1 Comment »

Triumph!

Posted by Dan Hertz on November 7, 2006

On a personal level, in any case, was achieved this evening.

I have spent the last few days trying to get Root (a histogramming software package used for High Energy Physics) to bend to my will and work properly, with little success, which has been extremely frustrating. However, in all my various lookings into of things, I did determine that the version I was using was not the most recent version and that there have been some updates made which might help solve some of the problems I have been having (like frequent random segmentation faults). So, I thought, I’ll just update to the most recent version of Root.

Alas, no. Because for some reason the most recent version was not available in binary form for OSX for the powerpc (meaning my computer architecture). They have it for every other type of OS and architecture, but not mine. For mine the link goes back to the older version. But you can just download the source code and compile it yourself.

I should mention that there is in general a caveat about running the most recent version of this software, which is that it is a ‘development’ version, meaning it probably still has quite a few bugs in it. The older version is more stable, but it has some known bugs in it which were causing me serious headaches, so I thought I’d put up with some instability over that.

But downloading the source and compiling it wasn’t working. For some reason it kept failing. I tried it time and again and it just kept failing, inexplicably. I sent an email to the software support people here at the lab, and did not receive any kind of response. Today someone recommended that I send an email to the developers of Root, to ask them about it. Which I did. They had no helpful advice.

Finally this evening I managed to figure it out. The problem was that when you download the source, it comes as a gzipped tar-ball. You then extract this tar-ball, but how you extract it is important. If you extract it on the command line by first doing gunzip, then tar -xf, it will extract only the top level. This is a pretty crude way of extracting things, granted, and most people nowadays will tend to have a program like StuffIt, or something like that that runs so that when you double-click on the icon, it extracts the tar-ball and unzips the file. But these programs are smart. And they extract everything in the file, all the way down. And it turns out that Root, for compiling, relied on the fact that certain files remained as .tar files further down in the directory structure.

First of all, that’s pretty damned stupid to have your build system depend on that. And second of all, that’s really stupid to have your build system be so fragile that it breaks if you extract the source code in a different way than from a command prompt.

Anyway, right now I’m torn between being incredibly happy that I managed to triumph over this stupid stupid problem, and still being really annoyed that it was such an incredibly stupid problem. Although I think it’s mainly the former.

And for anyone who’s not a total geek and thus not interested in most of what this post was about, the point is that I should be able to start getting some work done again. So it’s good news :)

Posted in Academics, Computer, Software | 3 Comments »

More appallingness

Posted by Dan Hertz on November 5, 2006

My mother sent me a link from the Washington post about this little wonderful part of the war on terror that our country is engaged in.

The short version is that the CIA and the administration want to prevent detainees in various secret (and no longer quite so secret) prisons in various places from being able to tell anyone (including their lawyers) about how exactly they were interrogated and questioned (read tortured). The supposed reason is that we have such super-secret techniques that we can’t risk anyone finding out about lest they train their operatives in defending themselves against them. So, apparently these are super-effective techniques, but if you were to know what they were, you could defeat them by practicing beforehand. So they’re not really too super-effective. I guess they must be some sort of secret new technique that no-one else has heard of, as well.

Another potential interpretation would be that the administration doesn’t want these people saying that they’ve been tortured. This is particularly relevant now that the US has greatly expanded the list of allowed methods of interrogation for use on detainees. Anything that doesn’t cause organ failure or risk of death is pretty much alright, so you’re allowed to beat someone black and blue as long as you don’t mess up their internal organs too much. Similarly, I believe we’re quite all right with the idea of strapping electrodes to genitals now as well (although I’ll have to double-check to be sure), if I’ve read the new law properly and how it modifies the Geneva Conventions. To be sure, the exact reading the Geneva Conventions is up to the President, of course.

I guess it might be seen as a bad thing if people were to be telling stories of how they were tortured in US prisons, and so the government is trying to stop that. One way of preventing it from happening would of course be to… not torture people in US prisons… but apparently that’s not an option. It’s sort of like the situation with the Abu Ghraib scandal and the revealing of the secret CIA prisons overseas when the administration’s position was: “Shame on you journalists for sullying the image of the US by revealing that these terrible things have been going on.” Clearly the problem lies with the people revealing that things have been going wrong, not with the people who have been doing the bad things.

I really hope that we’ll see some changes after Tuesday.

Posted in News, Politics | 1 Comment »

I want one…

Posted by Dan Hertz on November 2, 2006

While I don’t generally care much for Star Wars in a lot of ways (a heretical thing to say, I know but that’s a discussion for another post), I do have to admit that Light Sabers are, by their very nature, inherently cool. And so I was very impressed by this little nugget of a movie I found on YouTube: Three in the Afternoon. Some exceptionally cool FX, particularly given the budget they must have been working with. I’ve decided therefore that I want a light saber for my birthday. Well, maybe not really, but, you know, it would be very cool. Anyway, I think that’s pretty much exactly what a bunch of guys would decide to do if they suddenly got some light sabers. Because… what else are you going to do? :)

I’m particularly looking forward to the sequel these people are working on making. I feel it has a lot of potential.

On another note, there’s no update on an episode 5 of Chad Vader yet, but I expect it will come if we have patience.

Posted in Fun | 1 Comment »