By popular request of her mother’s doctors, my daughter has rescheduled her arrival for tomorrow morning. There may be some interruptions to the normal programming schedule over the next few weeks.
New Doctor Who posts will still be dropping on Saturday at least through the beginning of April, but there might be some slippage after that. Tomorrow’s War of the Worlds post has been bumped back to next week for a special post.
From my Askimet stats:
So yeah. I think the amount of spam incoming may be once again edging up to the point where it’s causing my (admittedly somewhat flakey) web host’s database server to crash.
To keep my blog on the air, I’ve dialed the spam retention window WAY back. So if you happen to comment and it gets flagged as spam, it might no longer exist when I go to check on it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Due to my webhost doing I don’t know what because they never tell me ahead of time, A Mind Occasionally Voyaging was down from about 2230 (10:30 PM) to 2330 (11:30 PM) Eastern Daylight Time. It wasn’t just you.
Sorry.
If you had a sheepdog who ripped the throat out of a sheep on the assumption it was really a wolf, you’d have it put down. The first time it happened.
If your sheepdogs mistook sheep for wolves on a regular basis, or even just did it, say, two or three times a year, you’d fire your dog trainer.
And no one would call you unreasonable. No one would demand apologies to the sheepdog’s family. No one would go on Fox News and describe the sheep’s death as an unavoidable tragedy where no one was to blame. No one would go digging up dirt on the sheep, or suggest that the sheep brought it on themselves by acting aggressively.
If it turned out that it was pretty much only ever the black sheep your sheepdogs mistook for wolves, no one would say that it wasn’t about color.
And if you decided to plant a tree in memory of the sheep, no one would vandalize it.
To accompany today’s article on The Great Martian War, I’ve put together this:
History Documentary Pitch Generator
A sample:
In 1912, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, and sunk, among the mistiest occurrences of recorded history. Or so it seemed. Now, 3D printing and a new-age religion challenge long-held assumptions, and may just rewrite the story of the Titanic forever.
http://trenchcoatsoft.com/cgi-bin/history.cgi?id=q24.5gcp111
So here’s the deal. I actually have a Captain Power post all queued up and ready to go. For reals.
But as it turns out, Halloween is happening this week. So I was thinking that instead of doing that post today, I’d like to do a special Halloween post instead. And since I’m doing a special Halloween post, I’m going to do it on Halloween October 30. For reasons.
And because this is pretty much the fastest I am capable of writing, I am going to move Article Day to Wednesday for a bit after that to give me a chance to build the buffer back up. So check this space on November 5 for my analysis of “Gemini and Counting”, and stay tuned this Thursday for a special Halloween Treat.
See you then…
Dear Maddy:
Congrats and good luck. It’s not easy being the older sibling, believe me I know. There’s going to be like three years where you’re totally going to want to do stuff with this awesome little sidekick, and she’s not going to be old enough to be any use at all. And then suddenly you’re going to want to start doing things where a three-year-old would be a total drag to have around, and there she’ll be insisting she gets to come with you. And because you’re bigger, you’re not going to be allowed to hit her, no matter how much she deserves it.
Even worse, over the next few years, you’re going to be doing all sorts of amazing things. Reading. Writing. Drawing pictures that actually look like things. But however impressed Mommy and Daddy are, five minutes later, your sister is going to burp, or smile, or urinate on something, and they’re going to be every bit as impressed by that, and all she did was roll over. Everyone will be all like “Awww! She’s so cute!” to her, and all like “Yeah, that’s nice whatever,” to you.
But I’ll tell you what. Some day, probably about thirty years down the road, you’re going to have the distance and perspective and have gotten your life all together, and you’ll be able to look at your sister, and it’s going to turn out that she’s pretty okay. And just maybe a little bit of that “pretty okay” is going to be because she learned a thing or two from growing up with a good big sister.
Dear Abby:
Congrats and welcome! It’s not easy being a younger sister. If you don’t believe me, ask your mother. The first three years or so, pretty much all you are ever going to want to do is have fun with your big sister, but she’s going to be all “Let’s go walk upright and leverage our sense of object permanence,” while you’re all like “I can no longer see mommy, and am therefore concerned that she doesn’t exist.” And then when you finally sort out things like hand-eye coordination and stairs, she’s still going to be all “Aww, we don’t want to take the baby along!”
Even worse, every single accomplishment you have over the next decade or so, she’ll have gotten there first. You’re going to burp, or roll over, or sing, and everyone will be all excited, sure, but then someone’s going to say, “Of course, Maddy was already doing that by the time she was two.” Anything you have trouble with, it’ll be all “Maddy had such an easier time with that,” or worse, “Why can’t you be more like your sister?”
But I’ll tell you what. Some day, probably about thirty years down the road, you’re going to be a grown-up, having a fantastic life, and it isn’t going to matter one whit that you did it a couple of years behind your sister. And if you’re very lucky, maybe one day your big sister is going to find a way to tell you that she’s proud of you.
Love,
Uncle Ross
Scene from the Maryland Renaissance Festival.
I’ve been running linux at home for a few years now. One of the things I like best about it is that things tend to be built up from lots of little command line component programs instead of big GUI programs. This may seem like it makes it harder to use, but that’s only true for things you only plan on doing once. If I want to, say, resize the 500 pictures I took of my little boy over the weekend (He is darned cute), I can do it with some big GUI tool where I load each picture, click resize, move some sliders, hit OK, click Save Aa, type in a new file name. Five hundred times. Or I can write this:
for x in *.jpg; do convert -geometry 1280x1024 "$x" output/"$x"; done
Having a rich command line available to me lets me do operations on large sets of data in batches, and that’s a good thing because that’s what computers are good at.
But that’s a bit of a tangent. When I am working in linux, I often find myself dealing with big numbers. File sizes. Free memory. Free disk space.
Because I rip all my DVDs to the hard drive, I’m very concerned about free disk space. So I’ll run “df“:
| Filesystem | 1K-blocks | Used | Available | Use% | Mounted on |
| torchwood:/mnt/store0 | 4326436544 | 3654545536 | 671891008 | 85% | /mnt/store0 |
| saxon:/mnt/store1 | 2130562560 | 1073968640 | 1056593920 | 51% | /mnt/store1 |
| saxon:/mnt/store2 | 2145245184 | 467011584 | 1678233600 | 22% | /mnt/store2 |
| badwolf:/mnt/store3 | 5768575488 | 4445833216 | 1322742272 | 78% | /mnt/store3 |
But those numbers start to get blurry after a while. Fortunately, df has an option that makes its output “human readable”, “-h”:
| Filesystem | 1K-blocks | Used | Available | Use% | Mounted on |
| torchwood:/mnt/store0 | 4.1T | 3.5T | 641G | 85% | /mnt/store0 |
| saxon:/mnt/store1 | 2.0T | 1.1T | 1008G | 51% | /mnt/store1 |
| saxon:/mnt/store2 | 2.0T | 446G | 1.6T | 22% | /mnt/store2 |
| badwolf:/mnt/store3 | 5.4T | 4.2T | 1.3T | 78% | /mnt/store3 |
A lot easier to read. Several of the standard linux commands have a “-h” option — ls, du, free has a similar “-m” option.
The disadvantage to using the human readable numbers flag is sorting. The standard command for sorting output, sort, has a flag (-n) that will make it handle numbers correctly. But if the numbers have been mangled into ugly human-readable form, this breaks, and suddenly 1G sorts below 10k.
So I wrote this quick-and-dirty little perl script which sorts the lines in a document, properly ordering numbers which have been converted into “human readable” format in the style done by df and du.
In case anyone finds it handy, This is hsort.