1. Linux machines run much better if you turn on DMA for your disks.
2. PERL, when using foreach on a file handle, will actually slurp the entire file into memory, even though your code appears to processing the file one line at a time. This is ok as long as you have enough memory. I did not.
3. When my wife throws random programming questions at me it somehow makes me find the problem in my code, even if the questions have nothing to do with the problem at hand.
4. In the next few weeks I may begin to yearn for the days when I did embedded programming and didn’t talk to anyone for hours at a time.

Lot’s-o-stuff going on here, little time to blog about it.

Work has me busy with some interesting data conversion stuff which has allowed me to dig into PERL again. It’s been long enough since I programmed that I miss it; perhaps I should get back into it. Well, I get to do a lot with it – 36 GB of data to slog through from this customer.

Looks like I’ll be travelling to California again this month. This is good and bad… warm(er) weather, good! Travel right before Christmas, bad.

Hopefully I’ll have some time to post my results as I’ve tried to find the best RSS Reader I can for the Clie, the Mac and Windows machines.

Oh, yes: Congratulations to Pam.

I currently live in Illinois (AKA “New Jersey West”), and I feel perfectly free to comment on it – and few of my comments are complimentary. For example, you cannot – by law – buy a car in Illinois on Sunday. I guess that means The Lord doesn’t want you to buy a Chevy on the Sabbath. How 19th century of them.

Normally I avoid making fun of or speaking badly of Indiana – many people I like live there and I don’t wish to upset them – but come on, folks!

This is too embarrassing to ignore. Apparently you can do worse than Dan Quayle.

It seems that during the 80’s the Soviets created and launched a “star wars” battle platform for low orbit battle – it would be used to intercept missiles and other, similar craft.

Ok, due to a software error they managed to pilot it right into the atmosphere. One little mistake…

This site has some of the pictures of the craft and the launch. Amazing that we haven’t heard about it until now.

At this site (all in Japanese, sorry) you can find pictures of the newly minted runoff system that Tokyo is bringing online.

This system, designed to handle runoff water from typhoons, is powered by 18,000 horsepower turbines and can pump 200 gallons per second.

The pictures and scale make you think that this is CG, but it is real. Imagine the amount of enviro-weenie hassle one would go through if you tried to build something like this in the U.S. now.

Speaking of Japan, here is a very nice site that can give one some insight on Japanese culture and things Anime related.

Oh, and if you want some of the very cool Japanese electronics that we don’t get here you can go to Dynamism.com – they even have versions that have been ported for us non-Japanese speaking types.

Perhaps I should make a “Japan” category.

The classes in California went well; I stayed with Valerie and it was very nice to see her.

I also got to see Andrew Downie’s cousin, Peter (AKA “Pedro”), and we toured the newly minted Emeryville Bay Street shops. Pedro wanted to go to P.F. Changs, so we did. My advice: avoid P.F. Changs – it is lousy food for way too much money.

There was a band playing Christmas music, and a snow machine was throwing snow around so that it looked like a very light flurry. We walked around the two-story Barnes and Noble bookstore. I’ve added a number of the books I saw to my Amazon wishlist. (hinthinthint)

We did not go through the Apple Store as that store is very, very dangerous to my budget. Mmmm… 17 inch Powerbook...

So, I will admit that while it is nice to be home and again with my family, I’m not thrilled that “home” is in Illinios where it is currently too cold for my tastes.

I must also admit that despite the statements in this post it seems more and more likely that our eventual destination is California. While it would be nice to live in a state that has a reasonable cost of living, I do not relish the idea of what would happen to me if I were to be laid off while living in that state… a state that pays far, far less (on average) to employees than I would find acceptable.

And, yes, the lower wages are related to the lower cost of living. Yet I cannot fail to notice that goods and services that I might want to buy and/or enlist (such as new laptops, etc.) do not scale their prices based on the cost of living in your state. Also, I might wish to travel to states that cost more than Florida and I doubt they’re going to say “Oh, you’re from Florida! Let me charge you only 60% of what we normally charge our customers.”

But, there are a lot of other things to get done before moving is on the schedule. Updates as they are warranted.

In other news, it appears that the Samsonite Gorilla is alive and well. Our largest duffel bag has had a hole punched in it, and as a result I lost a rechargeable AA battery.

Unacceptable! Time to purchase Kevlar duffel bags, methinks.

Finally, this is not why we shop at Target. In fact, it might tend to prevent us from going there. I’m not sure how they do this for the online store – how do they handle shipping with this product, anyway?

Update: (via BoingBoing)

“Mystery solved: A little poking around in the item information for Target’s”Anal Massage item reveals an ASIN. This is because Amazon and Target are business partners and ASINs are the unique identifiers used by Amazon. So if you go to Amazon and search for this item’s ASIN (B0002KPIBO) you learn that (unfortunately) the item in question is not an actual anal massage, but rather an instructional DVD called “Anal Massage.”

Says one reviewer: “It is appropriate for housewives, lovers, massage therapists and everyone interested in deepening the experience of relaxation and pleasure for themselves or for others. The DVD presents an easy to follow hands-on format that is comfortable for all types of viewers.” Hands-on and comfortable!

So, I was bored today.

Sitting on my desk was an 8 MB Compact flash card and and 8 MB Multimedia card. Too small to be of real use… so I decided to make them into a RAID array.

Since I run Mac OS X this is easy; simply plug ‘em in and add them to the RAID set. After formatting I get this:

However, once I’m done there is a fair amount of overhead – I only get 5.9 MB of usable space. I suppose I should have simply left well enough alone.

It appears that some on the losing side of the recent presidential election are having some serious issues, up to an including making threats or having violent fantasies.

You can view some of them on the discussion board for Bill Maher’s show.

In case they (wisely) decide to delete them you can view a screen shot here.

This is also discussed here. The formatting is a little weird for me so you may have to scroll down to find the content.

Apparently some people at Democratic Underground are a little embarrased about some of the things they’ve said as DU is offering to allow you to change your username until the end of the month.

But, some of this venom is understandable considering the problems that parents in blue states are having where their children are falling prey to Red State Culture.

I will be traveling for work so things here may be a bit quieter than they have been the past week. I can’t help it – the ‘blog doesn’t pay for my living expenses. (yet?)

In the meantime try to behave yourselves, ‘kay?