dimator | head

Extreme Cryogenics

dimator — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 21:35:13 +0000

Here’s something I was thinking about. Let’s say cryogenics intrigues you. But you don’t just want to be around in 100 years, what if you want to be thawed out in 1000 years? What about 10,000 years? If you were a billionaire with all the resources in the world, how would you go about constructing you’re own private cryogenic chamber for such a purpose?

First, it would have to be dug into the side a mountain or something, to keep it completely isolated from everything, impervious to bombs and earthquakes. To make it impenetrable to any nosey explorers, it would have to be built like a bomb shelter, like in the fifties. It would have to be self sufficient as well, so it would have to be powered by some form of radioactive decay. Some kind of computer would have to be able to exist without breaking for 10,000 years, so that it could launch the “thaw” procedure for you. After that long, you really have no idea if the world you emerge into would have any kind of food or water for you to find either. How could one go about keeping food inside your lair for that long? Perhaps a little garden inside the shelter could be set up, and your computer/robot friends would have to start planting and growing a few weeks before your thaw time. (Would plant seeds even last that long? Perhaps the garden would have to exist and be maintained right from the beginning. And if we’re talking about gardens, why not animals too?)

I wonder if this is at all possible with today’s technologies. Everything has to work perfectly, the first time, because you can’t really test how things will hold up after so long. Imagine the technical issues! For example, the lubricant in your gardener robot’s arm would surely dry out after 100 years, let alone 10,000. Any clothes you pack for yourself would be next to disintegrated by the time you wake up. What if a disease breaks out among your animals?

So perhaps my idea is evolving into a little sustainable artificial ecosystem, your own little Biosphere, of computers and robots that would be able to repair themselves, maintain the facility, conduct error checks, and of course not revolt against their master, who is completely dependent on them, frozen in a cryogenic slumber. Doctor robots, farmer robots, gardener robots, facilities robots, all working restlessly, for many millenia.

Wow, what a concept. All this effort for one end result: when you poke your head out of the giant slab of a door, what kind of shit will you see? I wonder if there’s any good fiction along these lines.

Changing Gmail Settings

dimator — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 14:53:57 +0000

GMail can show a minimum of 25 messages on the screen at once. 25 is too tall for me, because I rarely have that many conversations going on at the same time. It turns out that GMail doesn’t validate that value in the settings to be one of 25, 50, or 100, the GMail options for that field. Using the DOM Inspector in Firefox, find the “Maximum page size” drop down, and change the value attribute on the selected option to be something else, say 15. Click Save Changes and GMail will gladly take your new value.

Ubuntu

dimator — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:07:02 +0000

I finally made the switch to Ubuntu on my server machine. It was running debian before, and I don’t know whose fault it was, but over the years, upgrading packages became more and more impossible. apt would routinely fail, to the point where I said screw it. I’ve heard that Ubuntu’s package managers (as in, humans) are much more careful about package rot.

Smashed a great uptime in the process (although not my record):

$ cat UPTIME 20:48:49 up 342 days, 22:37, 1 user, load average: 6.00, 6.05, 6.05

Erlang

dimator — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 12:59:36 +0000

Erlang seems totally sweet. The biggest “wow” I got was from its concurrency features, which are built-in and stupid easy. Code is also hot-swappable. Hot swappable! Supposedly, Erlang is used by all kinds of heavyweight telco bigwigs, including Ericsson, where it is developed. Here is the getting started guide.

Even sweeter, here is an article about a real-world application, OpenPoker, a MMO poker game written in Erlang. Highly cool, although I couldn’t find the tarball to poke at anywhere.

Wii Decision Time

dimator — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 12:00:47 +0000

Yes, I’ve heard the news. Twilight Princess is the second greatest game ever, and I’m stuck Wii-less. But I think I’ve made a decision. I think I’ve sniffed out Nintendo’s next Gamecube, and I think I’m going to steer clear. First party games, like Zelda, Mario, and Metroid all look amazing, but 3 games does not make a console. (And I’m not exaggerating by saying 3 games. Go look at the reviews for release titles.)

So, it was not an easy thing to do, but I believe I’ve said “no” to Nintendo’s latest. (However, this opinion could change on a whim, when I see a Wii staring at me in the store one day, a few months from now.)

News flash!

dimator — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 20:59:11 +0000

The president used a word that I didn’t know. I think I knew it once, but had forgotten it.

I’m stunned and ashamed.

Best. Movie trailer. Evar.

dimator — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 22:43:45 +0000

300.

This kicks so much ass. If you pause it and go frame by frame, each frame is like a work of art. Reminds me of Kubrick. So good looking, I had to order the book it’s based on.

Forcing applications to run under Rosetta

dimator — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 16:41:57 +0000

For some reason, this piece of info was difficult to find through the normal channels. Basically, I had the need to run a PPC-only python interpreter, mainly because recompiling all of the PPC-only binary modules we depend on was out of the question. So to get the modules to work on Intel, I was trying to force the PPC part of the universal python executable to run. You can set how a Universal app runs within the Get Info panel, but on the command line, ditto does the trick.

Restoring Google Groups Link with Greasemonkey

dimator — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 12:28:28 +0000

Recently, Google removed the “Groups” link from the top of their search results page, in favor of a link to Google Video. Why would they do that? Their schemes for capturing the emerging online video market should not interfere with my work. I saw this link which uses something called Chickenfoot to restore the link, but I couldn’t find a Greasemonkey script to do the same, so here is my attempt at one. I even made it the first link in the row, because I think Groups is that important.

On Business

dimator — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 15:34:49 +0000

I had to do a little road trip for work. It was kind of fun saying to everyone (waiters, hotel front desk people) “Ya, I’m here on business.” I could see myself doing more of such trips. The charm of staying in a hotel room runs out, once you turn a certain age, but for me, the fun is going some place I’ll never be again, eating at their restaurants, meeting people I’ll never talk to again. Kind of weird, but I dig it.

This trip was to Los Olivos, a tiny townof about 5,000 people surrounded by wine country just north of Santa Barbara. At night, you could hear so many crickets and frogs that it sounded like you were camping in the woods. After I had gotten my work done at the site, I asked a local about what restaurant I should go to. It turns out that the restaurant from Sideways was just a block from me, so I went, and ate, and drank a bottle of really good wine. That’s the fun part of these business trips.