A pointelss rant on my irritation with Apple

I hate Macs. I can't really back this up except on the grounds that they use a proprietary operating system, but anyway.

While attempting to figure out what sort of student discounts Apple offers, I discovered this whole section on their website devoted to convincing college students that Macs are the correct choice regardless of one's major. Much of their reasoning seems to be: for x major you will need to do y. y works better on Macs.

I find that incredibly hard to believe, fortunately they provide no actual evidence to back up the claims, so I'll just dismiss them. Coincidently, though, they claim that Safari offers "light speed" web browsing. For all this talk of light speed browsing Apple's servers seem to be running very slowly. This entire post was written (and proofread!) in less time than the stupid student discount page took to load through Columbia's website. In all fairness this might be a problem with the CU end of the operation, but I doubt it. Or maybe this is the evidence that Safari provides light speed browsing and Apple has just rigged their website to be tempremental for non-Safari users.

Damnit, I hate Macs.

Back from LI

So I finished up at BNL on Friday. I spent the weekend wishing I was still there in my ACed room instead of at home. Oh well. The result of my eleven weeks out there was an 18 page paper. If anyone would like to read it send me an email. If anyone would like me to translate it into non-technical English, mention that in the email :-)

This week, instead of hanging around doing nothing, I'm hanging out... eh hem, I mean working... at Miller Theatre. There's a rental that involves a bunch of primary school teachers doing writing workshop things. It's painfully boring, fortunately it's giving me lots of time to do a complete 6-book Harry Potter reread. Also, today I made several interesting observations about elementary school teachers:

1) They're either morning people, non-New Yorkers, or completely insane. Several of them replyed to my request that they finish their food/coffee in the lobby by smiling and saying "thanks." Yeah, and this was before 8am. I spent the morning scratching my head over that one.
2) They clean up after themselves. One of the few times that there has been a shortage of seats at Miller when I've been working and the only time (regardless of the crowd size) that I've picked up fewer than 4 pieces of garbage when walking the entire balcony and half of the downstairs.
3) They were far worse than the average audience about closing the doors softly when they got up to go out. I would have really liked them, except for the 3 dozen people who went out to the bathrooms in the middle of the morning session without closing the door softly as they left. This left me to grab the door knob from my seat and hold the door myself. Since I was sitting in front and a little to the side of the door this had the unpleasant effect of ripping my shoulder out of its socket (not really... but it did hurt). I suspect there was a correlation between the large number of people getting up and the large number of people who had happily chugged their caffeine without giving me a hard time earlier. Oh well.

Hmm... that's not right

So at work there's a computer cluster that can be used by people who have bunches of time/resource consuming programs to run. The idea is that you submit the job to one node and it decides which of the processors to set it running on. Usually, when one submits a job it includes a time limit... if the job isn't finished by the end of the its alloted time it's automatically killed to make room for other people's stuff. Last night I submitted about 20 jobs with 20 hours each. For some reason two of them didn't finish in the 20 hours I gave them and they should have been deleted. Strangely, they weren't. I noticed when I checked the queue shortly before lunch that they seemed to be running on negative time. It had sent me a few (dozen) system mails saying that the job had run out of time and been deleted but that it would be tried again later. This was definitely wrong, but I assumed it was some freak occurence that would sort itself out after a while. Three hours and 486 system mails later I decided it was probably not going to work itself out. I told my mentor/boss about it and he eventually figured out how to fix it. Excellent.

Then, I went to submit a few more jobs and noticed a considerable delay between when I typed something and when it showed up on the screen. Apparently, someone else had started a job running on the cluster that hadn't been submitted the right way, so it was running on the node that's supposed to be used to submit jobs, and it was using 100% of the memory and all the swap space. Geez. If it weren't Friday...