Never been one to let the carrier drop

When I worked at OnAir, I had a boss who will remain nameless (I’ll call him PHB) because this story is a bit embarrassing for him. We had been sent to PAIX in northern CA to install a Sun enterprise server 1000. After uncrating and racking it, we turned it on and watched as the boot console scrolled through various things, finally ending at a repeated attempt to BOOTP.

Now, at this point, I was all set to sit down at the keyboard and start hacking away at the firmware settings, because obviously the unit had no idea it had a hard drive, much less a operating system. However, PHB was utterly convinced that if we just waited long enough, the thing would boot. Really. Honest. He made me wait a hour, repeatedly telling me not to touch the keyboard.

I went to the hotel room that night and looked up the relevant page of the sun hardware guide. Then, the next day when we returned to the data center, I went straight to the machine, told it to list devices attached to it, then told it where it’s boot disk was. After which, no big surprise, it booted right up.

The thing that really annoyed me was that he wouldn’t listen to me, and I think the problem was, he had no idea what I was saying. Concepts like BOOTP and DHCP and network booting and boot device and whatnot were entirely foreign to him. So, when we got home, I printed out the sun firmware console guide and left a copy on his desk.

People have from time to time done this to me – I remember getting a copy of the Sendmail guide with a post-it saying “see page 53”, for example. I don’t remember ever being upset by it, and neither was he. However, it’s a lot trickier in a interactive face to face setting to figure out, how do I clue this guy in to the fact that he has no idea what I’m talking about and what he’s suggesting is never going to work – I’ve never figured out a really good answer.

I remember when I was at ASP repairing people’s houses, one woman’s water pump got hit by lightning. Now, in fact, all it had done is blown a hole in the metal piece that attached it to the feed pipe, but we didn’t know that. Anyway, we pooled up our ice cream money and bought her a pump (ASP disavowed all knowledge of anything relating to replacing a water pump), dug up her wellhead, and pulled out the old pump. I did some cut&splice&whatnot, and put the new pump where the old one was, and we lowered it back down. Of course, when the pump hit the top of the water, that was the end of lowering.

At this point, I made a suggestion. Let’s turn the power on to the pump, and it will lift water up the column and thereby pull itself down. However, the adults (I was about 16 at the time) decided that was too dangerous and radical, so instead they tried to force the pump into the hole.

Not suprisingly, this was not easy. In addition, grinding the pump’s power wiring against the side of the shaft cut the power wiring, and so once the pump was in place, it didn’t work. We pulled it back out, I patched the cut power wiring, and the second time it was decided we would try my way, which worked. (I bet it’s what all the installers do.)

Again, I don’t know what to do in situations like that. It’s obvious the other person is not in possession of all the facts, but it’s also obvious that they think I’m not either. I don’t want to say things that make them think I think they’re a moron, but I also don’t really want to sit and watch while they demonstrate why their technique is not going to work.

The other question, of course, is how to accept the reverse situation – when someone has to clue me in that my airspeed really shouldn’t be 110 knots at touchdown, or that .net console apps use a connection pool and so it really is okay to throw away a database connection after each query (well, it’s not the most optimized thing in the world to do, but it doesn’t involve reconnecting to the server) – without having my feelings be hurt by the fact that I’m apparently clueless.

As I get older I’m finding it easier and easier to accept being wrong without there being any judgement on my value as a person or my skills or anything being involved. This is sort of the opposite of what I would have expected to have happened.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpS1_Z0SJeA

I also enjoyed their stint on the West Wing, which I recently saw for the first time. 😉

So, like many programmers of my generation, I grew up reading usenet posts like the Story of Mel. I had always assumed it was apocryphal, because the idea of a computer made by the Royal McBee typewriter company sounds unlikely.

Except that it’s all true. Here is the beast in question, complete with a lovely 50’s control panel that reminds me of a metal vacuum cleaner I had when I was young: LGP-30

Recently, Vinnie made me aware of a student who has been suspended for writing somewhat dark poetry (http://dailycaller.com/2012/12/31/san-francisco-high-school-senior-suspended-over-grim-poem-about-conn-shooting/.

I think that if we proceed down this path, we are doing our children a grave disservice.

My suspicions are that people who write about the dark things going on in their mind.. suicide, violence.. are the people who don’t act on those thoughts. Getting things out on paper actually helps some of us clear them from our minds, and also gives us the ability to see them in context. That’s not even going into the freedom of speech issues involved. I think it would be very unhealthy for us to insist that high school students not talk or write about the darker sides of the things they think, especially since they are immersed in a culture of violence. [It still angers me that you can show someone getting blown into tiny pieces in a PG-13 movie, but not people having sex – even though pretty much all healthy people have some sexuality in their lives and normally it is a happy thing that does not hurt people, whereas very few of us are gunning people down and whenever it does happen it’s certain to be a tragedy]

I don’t have anything but intuition to go on but I’m thinking that people who bottle up their dark thoughts instead of facing them (possibly by writing about them) are far more likely to go postal.

I no longer believe in evolution as the sole force that created my genome.

Now wait. I am not necessarily saying that I believe that some aliens or God has swept down and created my DNA by compiling a few libraries (although I do think the reuse of code in DNA is suspiciously library-like) – I think that there’s a viewpoint that we’re not hearing from in defense of intelligent design.

The most likely source of intelligent design that I see is the organism that is running the code.

No, I’m not aware of any way I can edit my DNA. On the other hand, I’m not aware of any way that I can do any number of things that my body does and I take for granted, and I certainly don’t know what the limitations of individual cells in my body are. A cell is a very complex thing, far more powerful than I think we usually give it credit for.

I really have to wonder why we find it more believable that we were either created by a external force or evolved by flipping bits at random and seeing what happens than that we – a species who has shown the ability to understand machine language, write and debug programs, and research the world around us and use that information to make decisions – have been improving ourselves.

The idea of being evolved by flipping bits at random sounds kind of awful to me. What happens when you have a design implementation that accidentally sets the gain too high on pain receptors? One can imagine all sorts of random bits one would rather not experience being flipped. On the other hand, if we were designed, that brings the question up of who designed us? Some religious adherents would say we were created by God and God was, is, and always will be but we’re different somehow – okay, but how did God get to the lofty position of knowing how to code? (Face it, writing DNA and writing code are not that different..)

Lately, I think that I miss out on a lot because I don’t believe it’s possible. I have experimentally verified that what you believe controls what you experience. I have a feeling that if you have a completely unshakable faith in *anything*, you’ll experience it as true.

This isn’t that surprising, given that we really live in a world of information. Us I.T. guys understand intuitively that a arbitrary string of data could turn into a sound or a image – it’s not a big leap to see that it could also turn into a touch, or a smell, or a taste. Even the kinesthetic ability to know what position our bodies are in can be looked at as the exchange of information. While the physicists talk about matter and energy and the quantum guys talk about particles, to a I.T. guy it soon starts to sound like the most fundamental thing in the universe is not matter or energy, but information. This may just be a case of “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail..” – but I don’t think so.

We are in Plato’s cave. Our minds have sets of rules that turn information streams into things we can map into our higher experience, like a blue ball or a furry puppy. Some sources of information behave like objects (like a blue ball) while others clearly have minds of their own (your coworker who keeps beating you at Quake). I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I have no way to know how that information is being mapped into the experience of anyone but me. For all I know, I might look like a dog in your view. Or the sky might be green. Or any number of similar things. All I can experience is my own reality. I don’t think this is built entirely out of my mind (I’m not a extreme solipsist) but I do think that my mind takes the data coming in and puts a spin on it based on my beliefs in order to build the experience I’m having in the “real world”.

In defense of my earlier comment, whether or not our genome is being edited by us to improve upon our current situation – and I have no reason to think it’s not – clearly the evolution of the way our minds think is something that is under our conscious control. When I was just coasting, doing whatever it seemed to make sense to do at the time, my life either stayed the same or got worse. Now that I’m constantly trying to improve the functioning of my mind and my experience, my life has been improving in all sorts of measurable ways.

Now, I’d like to bring out a side point here. We’ve all had the experience of seeing someone ignore data that did not agree with their personal beliefs. I think that at times there are things that are happening that we just can’t experience because we don’t believe in them. I am sure that the adherents to top-down creationism and to evolution find all sorts of data to back up their beliefs. I’m sure I’ve said before on this blog that every adherent to every religion finds data to validate their choice of religion – experiences it as being true. This explains why so many religions are convinced they are the one truth and everyone else is going to hell. You are deluded, but I am perfectly correct.

In my particular case, what I have is a meta-religion. I think that what I believe affects how I experience the world, and I’m in search of the best things to believe. I do not want to put my own experience above the happiness of others, so I don’t want to believe I’m the only person that matters – so I need a belief system that successfully integrates with the world I’m experiencing while giving me the flexibility to have the experiences I want to have.

Now, at times parts of me – especially the parts of me programmed from childhood with Christianity – argue with this view. However, it seems to me that if I am a top-down creation by God (and I’m not ruling that out, it’s just not my current working hypothesis) God granted me the freedom and handed me the experiences to learn all this, so *e must approve of the idea of me figuring out what I need to believe in order to have the life I want to have. *e has all sorts of opportunities to communicate with me the error of my ways and I am open to communication. However, I am skeptical that any message that appears in front of my eyes or in my mind comes from God – God is going to have to authenticate *self pretty carefully, because I have lived for a while in a universe that appears to have beings with hostile intent, not all of which are immediately visible and apparent.

What I find improbable in the extreme is that God created me to be *s slave. If you do postulate a top-down creator with omnipotence and omnicience in this frame, that creator would have any number of ways of communicating that concept to me, and *e does not seem to have done so. I do not see any signs that I am being discouraged from my current lines of spiritual inquiry. (This is not inviting all you out there to join in the fray by trying to convince me that I am – please, let’s keep this simple. Trust that if God does exist, *e can communicate with me without needing you, whoever you might be who are inclined to do so, quoting scripture of various religions at me.)

Looking at the Bible, it does not stand up for me as a source of sole spiritual enlightenment. There is signal there, but there’s also a awful lot of noise. I’m convinced one needs to be somewhat crazy to read it as the word of a supreme being. (Not that I’m saying I’m not crazy, because clearly from time to time I am)

If we were a top down creation, there’s one thing that stands out: Whoever created us must have been *very* patient. Even assuming that DNA is a compiled (binary) output and we are written in a high level language, *e still would have had to find or create the compiler for it. And whether we’re creating ourselves, or a top down creation, I hope we can all agree we are a work in progress. If you can’t imagine a life much better than this one (or much worse, for that matter), your imagination’s broken from lack of use.

Anyway, back to my original thesis. I think we are a product of intelligent design – and the intelligent designers were our progenitors, and are us. This does not mean I don’t believe in some sort of diety – the model I favor for this at the moment is that life sums – that together you and me are more than we are separately. But I’m also open to the idea that there are other types of beings than us humans and cats and dogs and dolphins, and that some of them might be much more powerful – both in a affecting-reality and a information-processing sort of way – than we are.

So, from time to time I tell people this, and I’m trying to work out a really good way of putting it for a upcoming album.

Our minds have, according to wikipedia, 100 billion neurons. A typical high performance computer, capable of producing very-nearly-real experiences, has about 2 billion transistors – our minds in fact have 20 times more neurons than the most powerful microprocessors made. In addition, a neuron is not a transistor. A more accurate approximation for a neuron might be a small microcontroller, or about 50,000 transistors.

This leads us to conclude, without even discussing things like synaptic interconnections, that our minds are vastly more powerful than the computer systems we use. If you believe the above approximations, the amount by which our brains could hypothetically outperform a computer system are astonishing. And yet, while the computer in front of me has no trouble simulating any sort of reality, my mind has a very hard time feeding me anything other than nightmares when I am asleep.

What is missing – or wrong – is the software that I am running. It is completely reasonable to think that my mind should be able to handle the day-to-day business of survival (work and the like) as a background task, while leaving my conscious foreground experience free for whatever adventures I would like to have, and should in addition be able to give me experiences that are not consistent with, for example, the physical laws of this universe (since my mind is trading in information)

It is a little late for me to post this, but I realized I hadn’t – I recorded a CD of christmas music for my friends – it’s solo piano, and available for download at http://www.sheer.us/stuff/xmas2012. It is all traditional holiday songs except for track 8, which is a impromptu jam that was recorded between other tracks, in one take. Personally, I’m the happiest with track 8 – I’ve already started my next album, which will be more electronic and have many more layers to it.

I have recently started to use lsyncd to support automated replication of data for web servers. Because of the particular requirements of one of my customers, I needed to set up bidirectional syncing between two servers on two different coasts. This presented a good deal of trouble initially because the lsyncd on one coast would react to files being written to it by writing those files back to the other coast. This was fine for writes that happened quickly, but for writes that happen slowly, like large files being FTP’d, it would lead to file truncation and file permission issues.

The solution I found was to update to the latest lsyncd (2.1.4) which permitted specifying the rsync binary, and then provide a “wrapper” binary written in perl that would verify that all of the files to be synced were not currently being written to (via lsof). Below is the perl script (placed in /usr/local/bin/rsync-wrapper):

#!/usr/bin/perl

$args = “”;
while($arg = shift) {

        $args .= $arg . ” “;

        push(@z, $arg);

}
slog(“args: $args”);
$dest = pop(@z);

$src = pop(@z);

slog(“dest: $dest src: $src”);
if($args =~ /–force/) {

        # exec

        slog(“delay list”);

        $delay = 1;

}
$list = “”;
while($in = <>) {

        $list .= $in;

        if($delay) {

                $file = $in;

                chop($file);

                $filepath = $src . $file;

		if(-f $filepath) {

                $count = 0;

                	while(0 == ($result = system(“lsof $filepath”))) {

                       		slog(“$count – result: $result path: $filepath”);

                        	$count++;

                        	sleep(1);

                	}

		}

        }

}
slog(“Exec rsync”);

open(LIST, “|/usr/bin/rsync ” . $args);

print LIST $list;

close(LIST);
sub slog {

        my $msg = shift;

        open(LOG, “>>/var/log/rsync-wrapper.log”);

        print LOG $msg . “\n”;

        close(LOG);

}

and the config file for lsyncd:

settings = {

   logfile    = “/var/log/lsyncd.log”,

   statusFile = “/tmp/lsyncd.status”,

   maxProcesses = 5,

   delay = 0,

}

sync {

        default.rsync,

        source=”/home”,

        target=”www.east.omitted.net::home”,

        excludeFrom=”/etc/lsyncd/exclude”,

        rsync = {

                binary = “/usr/local/bin/rsync-wrapper”,

                owner = true,

                group = true,

        }

}

Note that this is only one of several solutions I identified for this problem. If you are having similar problems and this doesn’t help, feel free to contact me for a list of them.

As many of you know, I have been involved with a new band for the last few months, Fraud In France. On Dec 8, we performed a show at Cafe Racer, and I’ve extracted some of the best clips from it for your listening pleasure: Dec 8 at Cafe Racer. I’ve also been working on a couple of solo projects, one of which is done and will be revealed here in a few days, and the other of which I’m just getting started on, but I’m excited about.

I’m also looking forward to going to the Oracle Gathering Reunion on Dec 21st. And no, I don’t think the world is going to end. I hope it will change for the better, but then, I always hope that.

I’ve been asked by a couple of people what I want for christmas. This list isn’t serious, because some of the items on it cost as much as a used car, but here’s my current wishlist:

(Side note: I am just fine with used gifts / re-gifts of things I actually want-need. I have no need for new merchandise and I would rather my friends not spend the money.)

(Side note #2: Please don’t feel that you need to send me anything. Most especially, don’t send me “filler” gifts i.e. gifts that you would buy at a drugstore because you hadn’t gotten me anything and felt like you needed to – seriously, I have enough of a problem with hoarding without help 😉 If you can’t think of something that specifically fits me, your best gift is to not send me something. I hope this doesn’t sound harsh or mean. )

(Side note #3: In the vein of #2, if you’re trying to think of a gift that won’t add to my hoarde and have to be at some point gotten rid of, think of things like software or movies / media, which are always small and eminently regiftable if I already have a copy, or things like experiences.. a trip somewhere with you or a jam session with you.. which take no physical space and add to my treasure trove of memories)

*) A 12″, 300W RMS or more subwoofer module with a line in for my office
*) Amiga Forever
*) Blu-rays of the following movies:
Who framed roger rabbit
The matrix
Hackers
Pink Floyd’s Delicate Sound or Pulse tour
Any minds-eye-esque eye candy 😉
*) Kindle books.. anything you think I’d like to read. (Don’t bother sending Heinlien, Asimov, Prachett, or MacDonald though, or any of the Callahan’s series by Spider.. I already have them)
*) A copy of the basic ($1000) version of Vienna VST strings
*) A 61-key varient of the Access Virus
*) A basic six-string accoustic guitar (used is preferable but it must still be possible to tune it ;-))
*) Donations to any charity feeding the homeless or taking care of our four-footed friends which does not spend all the money on mailing repeated requests for more money. [Lately I feel like when I donate to a charity I’m wasting my money because they use my entire donation to spam me repeatedly asking for more money]
*) A Alesis AI-4
*) A small 4-track USB (OSX compatible) audio interface with two XLRs with phantom power and two 1/4″ inputs
*) A gig bag or light case for a low-profile 88-key keyboard
*) Double-layer jeans (now, if only I knew what size I was .. ;-))
*) For musicians: The best gift you can give me is a jam session.