More weather...

[altivo]

There really should be a mood "wet" and one for "dry", especially since they have "hot" and "cold". ;p

More heavy rain, more thunder, more alarms and warnings and watches. Everything is like a swamp here now, including the temperature. Low 80s becomes low 90s with the humidity.

Because we couldn't work in the garden, I "wasted" much time working on a programming project, namely getting output from the M80 assembler (a Microsoft product, but a very old one) under CP/M that can be used on the TRS-80 Model 100 computer. This may sound weird, but I have no working assembler for the Model 100 and need to build some custom code for it. I have several decent choices of assembler on CP/M, and since CP/M uses the same CPU family, it seemed logical. Turns out it can be done, but you have to sorta stand on your head to make it work. Still, it's a start. (The big issue is that CP/M is very primitive and assumes that all programs load at one fixed address at the bottom of memory. The Model 100, on the other hoof, wants them to load at the top of memory and won't let you go low at all. I ended up using an assembler pseudo-op that I've never in my life had to use before: .PHASE and .DEPHASE are made to do more or less just what I need.

BOINC is giving me so many little irritations that I'm about ready to just kill it. Several of the projects I've been participating in are generating defective work that puts the computer in a loop for hours and hours or else locks up and won't release the CPU for other uses. It requires constant attention to purge these bad work units when they show up.

Anyway, before the power goes out for yet a third time this evening (it just flickered again) I'll stop here.

Comments

[corelog.livejournal.com]

The BOINC issues you mention seem to come and go, usually when the scientists at the project start a new series of workunits. Then they get all the kinks ironed out, and the rest of the series goes without as many errors.

Certainly I always check my farm about once a day or two, sometimes more often. And I kick anything that looks like it's really bollixed up.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I've been checking as often as four or five times a day. While I've come to expect this stuff from the Milkyway project, right now WCG, Cosmology, and SIMAP are all doing it too. The looping ones are especially bad because they overheat the CPU and run the fans continuously at full bore. Not to mention the fact that in doing so, they lock out all the other projects that are sharing time on that machine. I consider that pretty inexcusable and cavalier.

Milkyway released a huge lot of bad work units last week that are like that. Apparently on Windows machines they just error out immediately, but on Linux they loop forever. It has taken them a whole week to get the damned things out of the data, if they're even gone now. Every time some user would catch one and abort it, the server would just hand it out to another unsuspecting victim.

As I've said before, when you have a volunteer work force, you owe them better treatment than some of these folks seem to realize.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Model 100 eh?

Hmm...I considered it once, not long ago, for dedicated
WP. Of course the way laptops are made like popcorn now
that quickly went aside.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Modern laptops suck. I don't usually use that expression, but in this case I'm serious. They are crap made of tinfoil and old newspaper, and about as durable. The displays are fragile, the keyboards are obnoxious and unusable. The battery life is the shitz, and gets worse fast unless you keep buying replacement batteries at $90 apiece or so.

The Model 100 survives being dropped down the stairs, runs 20 hours on four AA cells, and has a REAL keyboard. The keyboard alone is worth it. They can be had on EBay for well under $50, still in good working order. ;p No, you can't have mine.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

I gotta have my openoffice.org though.

>.<

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I'm losing my taste for OO. It has already grown as bloated and unreliable as the Microsoft product it was supposed to replace. It behaves unreliably and unpredictably at times, and is full of baggage I don't want and don't need, like spelling and grammar "checkers" that don't know plain English, a huge pig of a presentation manager that I never use, a database that is, as far as I can tell, unusable and anyway doesn't measure up to MySQL or PostgreSQL, and a million "formatting" features that I will never use and neither will anyone else who is concerned with content rather than fluff.

I'm just about back to good old WordStar. Does what I tell it to, and never tries to correct my spelling on words it doesn't know anyway.

[cetasdolphin.livejournal.com]

I could really use the rain where I am, not so much the thunder or tornadoes but definately the rain. First week of June and now second and I am suffering though temps I would have at the end of summer and it isn't really summer to begin with. Highs of upper 90s a few 100s on some days as well.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's raining again today. You're welcome to it.

[cetasdolphin.livejournal.com]

heh as I was typing that earlier I was getting storm alerts on my weather radio and a few peels of thunder but sadly still not a drop of rain. It went more to the east of where I live.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

And here I thought you took it away. It seems to have finally stopped raining here for at least the next couple of days.