Was this on the job description?

He was inebriated, his hands were tied and he was gagged with a rubber ball in his mouth. In spite of his drunken state, the naked figure was reportedly able to identify himself by his full name and job title.

Life, organisation, and the war against entropy

I hate the second law of thermodynamics. The one that trashes my desk, dirties my apartment, and reduces my life to a disorganised mess. Barring a complete breakdown in standards of hygiene and work, I am doomed by the universe’s freakish sense of humour to constantly enter energy into aspects of my life that should Just Work.

Unlike Sisyphus however, I have two choices: I can either wait until “stuff” accumulates until I have to do something about it, or I can try to rework my habits to keep everything going on a day-to-day basis. So far, I’ve taken the first approach, and although periodic spring cleans of mind and space are good, they really don’t seem to cut it any more. I’m lost in my workload, depressed by my apartment, and bemused by my life. I’ve experimented with aspects of the second, and I feel they’ve given me quite a lot of mileage. So, over the past few months, I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the second mode of continuous operation may be worth a shot.

Now, the death-knell of any resolution is its requirement of massive change at an arbitrary time-point. However, at some point there comes a time where systems must be switched, habits realigned, and behaviours reordered. Mine was a couple of weeks ago, when I switched over to Getting Things Done. I’ve since lapsed, of course, but this time I feel determined to stay on top of things. My difficulty here is two-fold: I’m not a natural list-maker, and my work is largely data driven, in the sense that one analysis will then engender material for the next, without a priori knowledge of what the second should be. Trying to implement a system based on lists of next actions therefore poses a challenge.

Nevertheless, I’m giving this a whirl: the prize of comfort, productivity and lack of clutter are too much to resist. Let’s see where we go.

The case of the leaking memory

I’ve been having memory issues on my server/cruncher box [1]: available RAM seems to disappear. At first I thought it might be the well-known Firefox memory leaks, so I did a little (unconscious) experiment. I rebooted yesterday and never fired up FF. Today, I notice:

bobo% free -m
                        total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:                     3943       3673        270          0        161       3253
-/+ buffers/cache:                   257       3686
Swap:                    6000        110       5889

Something appears to be caching to buggery. It turns out to be the kernel. The trick here is to interpret the second line, which tells you what programs “see” when asking for memory. In this case, it’s 3686M free, so all is well. A little scary there for a second…

I shall have to be a little more sanguine next time.

[1] dual amd64, 4G RAM, Ubuntu Dapper clean install.

Working with databases

DbVisualiser is a nice tool to view large, complex databases graphically. It’s a Java-based GUI client with built-in sql query composer and nifty tricks. Good for us Oracle newbies who (i) hate sqlplus and (ii) want a quick rundown of a complex database to write perl::DBI scripts for.

You’ll have to provide your own drivers, though, which in Oracle’s case are downloadable after registering and swearing to uphold the constitution.

Enabling Firefox plugins on amd64

It appears that proprietary plugins (Adobe Flashplayer, RealPlayer, JRE etc) are generally built against 32-bit architectures. So, you have to cheat and run a 32 bit version of FF. Details on the Ubuntu fora.

Adobe Flashplayer 9 for ubuntu dapper

The absolute simplest way: download the script half-way down the page, run as root. Done! Uses alien to debianise the Adobe rpm.

Adobe’s own installer doesn’t seem to work, nor does manually copying plugins to /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox (if that’s where they are supposed to live).

Paranoia + memory loss = bad week

I have data. Lots of data. Lots of unpublished, unanalysed data. Other people’s data. It cost money and blood and sweat. And politics. So one of my worst nightmares is where my laptop gets stolen, and some dumb schmuck decides to mirror my harddrive on the web.

Unlikely, isn’t it? They are much likelier to simply wipe the drive and go on their merry, thieving way. Data loss isn’t the problem – everything is backed up on my server at work. At most, I’ll lose a day’s work. And yet, I worry. So, like all paranoid freaks, in addition to the BIOS, I password the hard drive. The really uncrackable, serious-hardware-cracking-required password level, which won’t let you access the drive’s electronics without the key. The one without which you are, to a first approximation, up shit creek without a paddle. Guess what happens next…

Now, I’ve been around long enough to make most mistakes: sudo rm -rf * , losing passwords, etc. So I keep everything backed up, and I keep a file of passwords. Naturally, being rather paranoid, that file is PGP encrypted. So, I think, no problem! I’ll just open the copy of the password file on my server, look up the HD password, and presto! problem solved. Except…

There is no HDD password in the file.

I must have decided, at some point in the rapidly darkening past, not to store critical passwords! The strong ones, with mnemonic phrases, the ones I remembered by the key sequence rather than the key, the ones that I never wanted broken and would never forget.

At this point, damage limitation kicks in: is the whole laptop dead, or just the drive. Data recovery isn’t a problem, so the drive is expendable. Google informs me that the password is, indeed, uncrackable. It also informs me that a company in Canada provides a basic cracking service for a reasonable fee (data recovery costs much more), but I have to ship them the whole laptop. It’s cheaper to buy a new drive, but there’s a chance the BIOS chip will still insist on a password.

Fortunately, that turns out not to be the case, so I don’t have a very expensive doorstop. After a week of serious connectivity withdrawal, I now have a fresh drive, a fresh Dapper install, and a fresh appreciation for the importance of record keeping. The old drive? Well, an attempt to wipe it with a magnet crashed the heads into the disc, so it’s on the way to an electronics graveyard somewhere…

Oooh!

So wordpress’s new little gadget is very cool. Mouse over a link and get a snapshot of the linked page. Not fully cutting edge, but very cool, none the less.

Magic!

One of the things that generally bugs me is superstition. Every culture is rife with them, and the greeks are no exception. Salt shouldn’t be passed from hand to hand at the table; bread should be the right way up; exit a house the same way you entered. Other, more subtle ideas permeate everyday life, even in a lab.

So why do we indulge in wishful thinking? Is it sloppy logic, intellectual laziness, or an organised religion conspiracy to control the masses? I prefer to think something more genial: we all want to think that there’s order in the universe; that there is some way we can influence events, above and beyond our normal input and effort. After all, we all want something…

Doomsday approaches

The Bulletin for Atomic Scientists has moved its Doomsday clock to 5 minutes to midnight – the closest to symbolic annihilation of mankind it has been since the Star-Wars era arms races of the mid 80’s. The only other time 5 minutes was breached was during the aquisition and development of thermonuclear technology in the late 40’s and early 50’s.

The combination of causes, however, is unique. It’s not just the threat of global nuclear war. This time, it’s also global warming.