Saturday, November 21, 2009

IronMax

On Sunday, my friend Max (aka IronMax) will be participating in the IronMan Arizona 140.6 triathlon. To me, this is amazing. Max is a nerd, just like me, but over the past few years he has become my physical training inspiration. His success inspired me to sign-up for plyometrics at the Ice Chamber, and to keep pushing myself even though it often is excruciating.

So here's wishing good luck to Max. I hope he completes the full 140.6, and achieves a time that he's happy with.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Week 16: Spin This

The Spinner bike (aka. Hell-on-Wheels-That-Dont-Take-You-Anywhere) reared its ugly head again. Are people not aware that all of modern society has been built upon one single premise: "climbing hills sucks"? Trains and cars to climb them for you, road grading machines to remove them, aircraft to fly over them -- you name it -- all these things stem from the human desire to avoid climbing f***ing hills. What kind of a sick mind invents a device to simulate climbing hills? Had the Spinner bike folks been alive during the Spanish Inquisition, it's obvious what their vocation would have been.

After riding a Spinner bike I am so exhausted and incoherent, I have no idea what is happening afterwards. At least, that's usually the case, but today we did another push-up like thing that involves supporting all your weight on one arm. My left shoulder does not want. Perhaps eventually I'll get strong enough and loose enough in the arms and shoulders that push-ups, and especially one-armed push-ups, don't feel like having a spike driven through my shoulder -- but until then, these are the worst thing ever.

And next week being Thanksgiving means I'll come back the following week even fatter and wimpier. Damn you Pilgrims!

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

In Defense of Custom Computing

The Top 500 List of supercomputers has quite a number of Intel CPU machines running Linux on the list. These are considered commodity supercomputers, even though they use custom backplanes and highly modified Linux kernels.

But several of the Top 10 do not meet that criteria, including the 3 IBM BlueGene systems that have custom chips. But the most interesting to me is the NEC Earth Simulator. This machine is well off the Top 10, in mere 31st place, but the thing that jumps out when you look at the chart is that it only has 1280 processors. In the Top 100, there are no other machines with fewer than 2048 processors, and most of the machines with under 5000 processors are based on the IBM PowerComputing architecture.

Simply dividing Rmax (which is in tflops) by the # of processors, we get 0.95 for the Earth Simulator, or about 95gflops per CPU. The #1 machine, Cray's "Jaguar" XT system, is 0.0078 or about 780mflops per CPU. Though there are other conflating factors in supercomputer design that make a CPU-to-CPU comparison difficult, a rough estimate of 100 times faster per CPU ought to pique interest in the NEC architecture. But it hasn't.

The Earth Simulator is the only machine in the Top 100 running the NEC Vector architecture and Super-UX operating system. The Intel-Linux pairing is quite cost competitive, and therefore often wins out on bids. But this is still the main advantage of Intel's commodity CISC architecture. The per-CPU compute rate is still a lot better when R&D dollars are applied to other computing architectures. By always going with the cheap solution, as an industry we're holding ourselves back. We've been stuck with the same Intel x86-ish architecture now for a while. RISC machines officially left the desktop mainstream in 2006 when Apple dumped the PowerPC architecture, but x86 dominance of the chip market has been a reality for a while. As of 2009, Intel has about 80% of the CPU market (including the mobile market, according to TGdaily), and its biggest rival is x86 clone maker AMD.

Most people don't need more computing power, more efficient CPUs, and less bloated / more compute efficient operating systems. But for those of us who do, it's a shame that so few resources are going into RISC CPU, whole-system architecture, and OS R&D in favor of trying to solve the problem with hacks on top of commodity systems. It's not like the industry is at a standstill, far from it. And sometimes those hacks work, which has all sorts of interesting results. But just imagine a 224162 CPU Earth Simulator instead of a 224162 Intel-based Cray XT, and what kinds of complex physics and earth science computations that could do.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Week 15

We're getting back into the groove at The Ice Chamber. And by "The Groove" I mean "The Pain". Aches and pains in my arms and legs are reminders of the SS-style workout that is plyometrics, and what a fool I am for doing it. Chance of death by heart attack is now at about 98.8%.

This week we did lunges, squats, lunges with weights, squats with weights, squat-to-press with weights, and of course horrible, horrible things like push-ups (aka. arm-destroyers) and mountain climbers (aka. vomit-inducers). All that made the rowing seem less horrid by comparison, but I know that's just my mind playing tricks on me. It's like people who say prison isn't that bad: they know they're not getting out, might as well make the best of it.

On the plus side, now my bicep, tricep, and hamstring pains can distract me a bit from the pain in my perpetually-RSI-injured trapezius.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Nimby needs your help

NIMBY, the very cool art colony in Oakland where I rent a space, has been through a lot financially and emotionally. The space needs financial support to keep going, especially due to the trouble their fundraising events have run into due to complaints from new fancy-loft neighbors who are trying to gentrify the area and run-out the artists, businesses and lower-income people who were there first.

Here is a missive that was just sent out by the NIMBY crew:

While NIMBY is financially sound as an art space - we need the greater community to once again step up and help us through this crunch. NIMBY is setting many precedence for art spaces as we go through this process with Oakland. We are dotting every i and crossing every t, creating a solid foundation for future art spaces to build upon.

Watch our short video, lend your support if you can, and please pass along this message. It is your support that makes this all possible.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1362561841/nimby-industrial-art-and-diy-space

How to lend your support:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1362561841/nimby-industrial-art-and-diy-space
PayPal: NIMBYLLC@yahoo.com
Tax Deductible Donations - email rachael@nimbyspace.org

Keep up with NIMBY:
NIMBY Announce List - http://www.nimbyspace.org/contact/
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/edit/?id=171530301726#/pages/NIMBY/171530301726
Twitter - NIMBYSPACE
(And as always more detailed updates on our progress can be found at http://www.nimbyspace.org)


If you can help, it'll be appreciated by a number of Bay Area artists, art lovers and Burning Man devotees: those who have spaces at NIMBY, those who attend the NIMBY events, those who enjoy the projects constructed at NIMBY, and those who are trying to follow in NIMBY's footsteps and get other arts venues up and running.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Special Needs

I was sorting through some photos this evening, and I found this shot I took of my favorite Austrian signage. It's a sign indicating special needs seating on the tram.


The seats are reserved for fat women with thick rubber gloves, Sigmund Freud, Socialist welders, and women with baby Hitler.

Friday, November 6, 2009

I Adore My 64, And So Must Everyone Else

Though the Apple ][ scored the #1 slot, the Commodore 64 did not even make it onto the PC World 25 Greatest Computers of All Time list at all (it, along with the PET, made it onto the "near greatest" list in favor of barely innovative, and (except the iMac) marginally culturally significant computers like the Alienware, Shuttle, Sony, and Apple iMac boxes on the list).


This is preposterous. The C64 sold 17 million units, making it the best selling model of personal computer of all time. In its heyday, it had between 30% and 40% of PC market share.

The C64 essentially defined a generation of computing, becoming a major force in popularizing hobbyist programming and PC gaming (many programmers I meet who are my age or older either owned a 64 at some point, or hacked on them in school -- even some who were primarily Apple ][ or Atari 800 hackers).

It defined a generation in part because it was the first computer that was truly affordable yet as good or better than its more expensive contemporaries. Families like mine couldn't afford $1200-3000 Apple ][s or even $1000 Atari 800s, but the initially $600 Commodore 64 dropped to $400 a year after its release, making it truly a people's computer. That alone is a major accomplishment in the history of computing, worthy of note (unless you think only rich people contributed to the history of computing).

And even though the Apple ][ and Atari 800 had sound and color graphics, it was really the C64 that was accepted as the the first prominent consumer/small business proto-multimedia-workstation. It was used extensively on TV especially for low budget chargen apps, helped define and popularize the demo scene, and the SID chip is still coveted today by electronic musicians.

Furthermore, only the Amiga, Apple ][, and Atari 800 machines can even compare to it in terms of long-term user loyalty. Many people still use C64s today, either the real hardware, or emulators to run beloved old games (and rediscover one's own early programming projects).

Personally, I think the C64 should have been #1 on that list. Objectively, it should have at least been in the top 10 -- not an also-ran.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Week 13/14: Just like starting over

I missed 2 weeks of workouts, and week 13 became two one-session weeks, due to illness and travel. This week became week 14, and it's just like starting over: I'm back at 99.9% chance of heart attack during the workout, and have put back on several pounds thanks to the patented "mostly booze diet" I stuck to during CineStory and Austin Film Festival.

We did some horrible thing called Bear Walks, which should have been awesome since you get to pretend you're a bear, and I'm working on a movie at work with "Bear" in the title to boot. But it wasn't awesome. It was as un-awesome as marching presses which, like most things that involve marching, make you understand what a miserable little worm you really are, Private. It also finally dawned on me: rowing is a form of torture. I was so incoherent most times we've worked on the rowing machines it never fully occurred to me until now just how awful it really is.

On the plus side, I allow myself to eat peanut butter after the workout, and everyone knows peanut butter kicks ass.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

#27

The Yankees have won their 27th world series championship.

Many people do not know that I am a baseball fan, but I am. I have been a Yankees fan since I was a child. I started watching their games when I was about two years old, though my earliest actual recollections of Yankees games are from when I was about four or five. As a kid, I played in Yumas A.C. in Mastic Beach, NY, where I was an All Star. I then had my dream of someday playing for the Yankees permanently shattered as (unbeknownst to me at the time) my vision started going bad and my performance as a member of the Rotary Club team in East Hampton, NY dropped from All Star to flat-out terrible. Yet I still root root root for the home team, which for me is still the New York Yankees. Each time they win another one, I wish my father were still alive to share in the excitement. But I'm glad that the rest of my family, and Anu's family as well, are also Yankees fans and thus the family tradition goes on.

So congratulations to NY City, Joe Girardi (maybe now they'll stop saying he's a poor manager), Hideki Matsui (series MVP), Andy Pettite, Mariano Rivera, and the rest of the NY Yankees team on their win.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Lunch = Food

Working into (or, even worse, through) the lunch hour, and having lunch meetings, is an American affliction desperately in need of a cure. Our shoddy eating habits are compounded by our inability to stick to a reasonable eating schedule, and the fact that most situations that require working through lunch are stressful ones certainly doesn't help with digestion.

Personally, I think working into or through lunchtime should be made as socially unacceptable as coming to work in a Nazi SS uniform.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Jason and Frédérique's Wedding

Halloween night I performed a wedding ceremony for my friends Frédérique and Jason, at The Enchanted Forest, in Fallbrook, CA. Since I got my ULC ministerial credentials 17 years ago, I've planned to marry several couples, but this is the first one that actually happened. And it was a wonderful, fairy tale wedding -- Tim Burton style. Many of the guests were in costume, and the bride and groom exited in a hearse at the end of the evening.

Me and the groomsmen (photo courtesy Philip Wilburn)



Me and the happy couple, Jason and Frédérique, during the ceremony
(photo courtesy Dan Hoffman)

A fantastic time was had by all, and people said I did a good job performing the ceremony, so I felt pretty good about being able to help make their special day as magical as they'd hoped.


Me and the happy couple, Jason and Frédérique, after the pronouncement
(photo courtesy Philip Wilburn)

Here's wishing Jason andFrédérique a long, happy life together!