Poofy Goof Rant-O-Matic

http://www.poofygoof.com/~agrier/computers/ contains a list of most of my computers. it's static (much like my collection) but it might be updated more frequently if it were easier to manipulate, say, in a database. per-computer histories perhaps? cycle counting? a "last-booted" date?

many of the older, slower machines that run NetBSD (pretty much all of mine) build programs very slowly, especially those that use autotools. it would save some time if a subset of config.cache could be created and used as cache for all invocations of the configure script.

before fiber optic was the rage, coaxial and microwave transmission systems were used to move data around. mostly voice, occasionally video. they were designed to work after being subjected to nuclear strikes. http://long-lines.net/index.html http://www.thecentraloffice.com/ http://coldwar-c4i.net/

Read an email on the PNWR mailing list about a green goat coming through town. I missed it as it came through Tigard, and wanted to see what route it was taking to its destination in Salem, so I looked at a PNWR route map. In small letters and greyed lines is "EPTC", the East Portland Traction Company.

sure, Ctein has all sorts of shots of rockets and inner-space planetscapes, but one of the shots of his that grabs me the most is Ivy on Brick Wall, George Eastman House, Rochester NY -- 1978. the computer version doesn't really do the dye sub print justice. the contrast is so deep you feel like you're going to fall in. I can't really justify putting down $1k on the larger prints, but since I haven't forgotten this shot since seeing it at the last worldcon I went to, I figure I can at least get an 8x10.

At work we're finally retiring the in-house mail server. There's only so hard you can push a 450MHz PIII, only so much tuning you can do with a 384MB RAM cap, and only so much time you can spend on the care and feeding of something that should have never been your responsibility anyway.

back in college I wrote a program to search through possible factors of fermat numbers. I never discovered any new factors, but the program was verified through test cases, and was given an unofficial blessing by Richard Crandall. Crandall later went on to show in 1999 that F24 is composite, and a composite cofactor of F23 in 2000.

ever taken a phone trip across the telephone network? (the best quality recordings are at ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/ as zipped mp3s.)

an idea I've been rolling around in my head for a number of years has been to write a standalone app (using RTEMS perhaps) that would turn a PC with a soundblaster into a standalone MIDI-driven synthesizer for some FM and low-fi sample action. the combination of the two was used to good effect by the Renaissance demo group for a few of their productions.

as of FYM 2.7, logging of train movements in and out of yards can be logged. I'm not sure what the log format is, but I assume at the very least it will contain a datestamp and train name. this should make it possible to generate some traffic reports without having to parse train files.