[ from the could-be-better-or-worse dept. ]
I have joined the gym in town and been for an assessment. They are pretty good actually and are producing a complete plan for me to follow, including diet and workout programme. I need to lose some weight and my fitness level could have been much better but then, it could have been much worse actually – and my blood pressure is surprisingly low. Interesting.
Let’s see if I can do this fitness thing then… 
Jon.
[ from the jcm? dept. ]
Well, I am joining a Gym in Nottingham as of tomorrow. At least – I am going for an introductory session which hopefully will go well and be encouragement to press on with a sensible excersive programme. It may not last, still I want to give it a go, and get a new bike for additional new year exercise. [Read more]
I am preparing a seminar on Post’s Problem (Recursively enumerable, undeterministic Turing incomparable Languages and set theory)…great. Actually it is an interesting topic indeed but just not the kind of thing that really turns me on the way some other stuff quite blatently does.
I am lying on my bed at the moment with the laptop, I love this freedom to do work wherever and whenever – I really could have been much more productive over the last few years if I had done this sooner. As some know, I am on a permanent high at the moment and suddenly am very motivated to do work!
I have been playing with Amoeba and SMX (SunOS Minix) on Solaris. I will be installing an Amoeba cluster over Christmas and messing with Mach also. The interim report work is my main project concern at the moment but there will be real downloadable code in CVS after Christmas…really.
Jon.
[ from the pet-shop-boys dept. ]
I am in Reading now for the remainder of the weekend. I was in London on Friday, and yesterday for variously varied work reasons. Had coffee in Paperchase on TCR and then went to the British Computer Fairs (aka consumer land) but they were lame. Went to Wagamama and met friends so it was all good in the end. [Read on]
I am playing with Amoeba. Hopefully I can get a small cluster installed at the house in Nottingham for experimental reasons. I am trying to get a Datacenter cabinet though the shipping costs more than the cabinet itself!
It feels so good to be in Reading again! Wow, and I have been keeping semi reasonable hours (04:00-22:00) so the sleeping pattern is slightly better. This will all be warped by visiting the States next year – I hate flying but I look forward to this particular trip very much indeed
I am in the process of writing an essay on Grid Computing Technologies for one of my degree courses (which makes for a positive change). I need to prepare a seminar for this coming week and continue to ponder my interim project report. Back to work I go.
I am going to be unavailable from the 12th of December for a few days and seem to have a lot on at the moment, but am looking forward to seeing certain friends very soon indeed!
Jon.
[ from the travel-is-good dept. ]
I am travelling down for the weekend, and stopping off for some business on route. While I am in the area I think I need to go shopping. Also, I am planning a State side trip early in the new year and am after some decent birthday gifts from me to me [Read more]
The beginnings of a plan to visit California are underway at the moment, hopefully this would take place early in the new year. Some project research, some fun, one complementing the other (though in what order who can say). More details when I figure out exactly what is happening.
I am after an Ultra 5 or Ultra 10. I currently have a lot of 32 bit kit however need a non-emulated real physical UltraSPARC I/II to play with. These things are quite reasonably priced on ebay so I should be able to sort a box as part of a little birthday present to myself.
I finally finished some writing I have been doing and am catching up on general work as a whole. I went to an excellent talk on Grid technology on Wednesday in the department and there was a meeting for the new Computer Science Society. I am maintaining envolvement as an effort to keep things moving more than anything – it was a terrible shame that it was not easy to establish a society a long time ago, but things are looking good now.
I have been keeping strange hours again, this time running from morning until afternoon, sleeping, up most of the night and then down again. Thus the day now consists of 4 logical sections. Clearly this is screwed
Jon.
[ from the getting-back-on-track dept. ]
I have successfully managed to be in hiding for about a week now. Slowly I realise that this is because I have been feeling crappy – this culminated in severe headaches the other night which forced me to sleep for a long time.
The good news is that I feel better today [read on].
Today I feel much better. Having been up all night finishing off and catching up with a backlog of work, it leaves a positive attitude. I’ll probably sleep quite early today and hopefully be back to “normality” from tomorrow onwards.
I finally got the AUI adapter and now have an IPC which does not rely on “Hussein Technology”. The 3GB disk is rapidly filling with data my housemate needs to shift somewhere in a never ending quest for additional storage. I think I may get a few more disks over Christmas and set up a RAID5 array for increasing data storage requirements.
I was early to a lecture today (a sure sign I have been ill) and am catching up with email. If you emailed me recently then you will notice a longer delay in reply than is sometimes to be found from your local jcm. This will hopefully get fixed automagically over the next day or so.
Jon.
[ from the it-is-not-funny-or-a-good-idea dept. ]
Today we learn an important lesson concerning long term exposure of fruit to the power of modern microwave ovens.
Jon.
[ from the oh-dear dept. ]
The new IPC (called arrow – 25MHz, 48MB RAM, 3.2GB HDD, 2xcolour SBUS framebuffers, 1xb/w built-in framebuffer) plays music. I have to encode it using the following sox string prior to playback using the SPARC playback utility called tplay (with command line argument -l for loop ):
The playback is not bad for such a wonderful machine. It is also running GNOME and various other applications which one might think would overload it – but then I seem to not care about the time required to use them The sound driver spontaneously has issues with other kernel components and crashes the machine but that can be looked at to create the ultimate Debian SPARC 3.0 (Woody) IPC box.
I saw the new James Bond (Die Another Day) on Wednesday night. It is ok. I also just found the perfect location for using my laptop and working with mains access, network and coffee. No CSiT PAT testing required
Jon.