tcpip | Entries tagged with friends

Work has been hellishly busy for me the past week as we're preparing for an outage on the supercomputer from Monday to Wednesday with a great variety of operating system upgrades, storage improvements (from CephFS to GPFS), network upgrades, and the addition of some 3,000 cores, and the removal of around 2,000 cores worth of older system units. For my own part, not only do I have new courses to run on the Thursday and Friday following the outage (which were filled in under 48 hours after the announcement), I spent a lot of time working my way through some fifty-plus example job scripts, modifying the existing ones so they would be compatible with the old build system, and writing new ones for the new build system. Unsurprisingly, there were a number of bugs and deprecations discovered along the way.

In the evenings I have been writing an article related to BLM, COVID-19, and Fake News; plenty of material of course. It's almost complete, but I was a little distracted by the Australian Prime Minister arguing against an elimination strategy; die on the altar of the economy, apparently. I responded with an Isocracy 'blog post entitled Elimination, not Suppression, which has generated some interest, and then shortly afterward, a call to arms following the Trump administration deciding to suppress CDC data from the public. I have suggested that all means; fair, foul, and illegal, should be used to ensure that the public has access to said data.

Despite the cool and overcast weather, I took to the bike today, hurtling my way some through the luscious green forests alongside the Main Yarra trail from Kew to Templestowe and eventually reaching Birrarung Park, where I caught up with Liana F., whom I hadn't seen for close to 25 years. Liana and I were old friends back in WA from the 80s, so we had plenty to catch up and talk about. In the recent decades, she's become the mother of four children, most now in their teenaged years, and has spent a number of years in northern New South Wales. It was good to meet up in the great outdoors, and the Birrarung was quite a beautiful setting - but so was the journey there and back.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Willsmere
Crossposts: https://tcpip.livejournal.com/303846.html

Was pleased to finally receive my MSc dissertation grade yesterday, a fairly convincing 80%, notification arriving whilst I was in the midst of teaching a workshop on Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting for HPC (the Intro version of the workshop was held the day before). It would have been a couple of percent higher I suspect if I hadn't uploaded the wrong version as my final, which had a misnumbered chapter and a page formatting error. That did not seem to matter to my examiner who gave a rather positive report. Nevertheless, I've fixed those errors on the "final final" copy that I have on my website. Now it's a case of waiting for the stiff piece of cardboard to arrive in the mail. Also started classes for my third paper for my masters in higher education, which is on academic leadership. I've done a previous course on leadership as part of my MBA, so it should be interesting to see how this differs.

There has been no definite diagnosis of my stomach issues. Visited a radiologist during the week who conducted an ultrasound and chatted with my GP a day later about the results. The liver slightly enlarged, a credit to its resilience after many decades of enjoying a drink, and there a small simple cyst that nobody seems concerned about. The gallblader has a number of very small gallstones and microlithiasis, but nothing blocking the duct. This is also an indication of my body's resilience given a lifetime consumption of dairy products. I've been referred to a gastroenterologist at the Alfred and go on their waiting list to have a gastroscopy, and I expect this will all take several weeks before there's an answer. My GP recommended I check myself to their ED if I have another attack: "it should bump you up the waiting list!"

I was rather saddened last night to hear of the passing of my Facebook friend,

alexlaw65 had died of a heart attack. He was a person who had plenty of quality time for opinionated fools and would brilliantly stir the possum to aggravate them to such a frenzy that they looked even more foolish in their pronouncements. But also, he was a person who had great respect for a carefully informed opinion that took into account principles and just outcomes. Having cut his teeth as a leftwing pagan in regional Queensland during the Joh Bjelke-Petersen days he obviously was not afraid to take on conservative opinions from a minority position. His health had not been good for a while, and nor had his finances; it gives me some pleasure to say I helped him out a couple of times on the latter. The world is going to be a lesser place without him.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Willsmere
Crossposts: https://tcpip.livejournal.com/303541.html

Although I've been fighting off a cold the power of modern medicine has enabled me to conduct three days of teaching this week, Introduction to Linux and High Performance Computing, Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting, and Regular Expressions in Linux. In an attempt to cut down on the waiting list of some several hundred who have signed up to my courses I've selected a larger tutorial room and have increased the class size to 30; not that number turn up, of course. A perpetual problem in the space as there is so much content and by the end of the second day you'd have be pretty smart to be absorbing it all. The researchers are pretty smart of course, but this is usually a little outside their domain, so I do try to provide as much structure and reference material as possible. If there is any empirical measure of the success of these courses it is the degree that the system is being used (usually close to 100% node utilisation) and the improved quality of the help-desk requests.

About twenty minutes ago I handed my MSc dissertation, with the snappy title Is the Future of Business Software Proprietary or Free and Open-Source? A Macroscopic Information Systems Investigation. It's a day or so early, but I've pretty well finished as much as I can on the subject with the word limit allowed - and even then I made good use of figures, tables, and some extensive quotations from select material. The two main research components were a trend analysis of major software products according to function and form (server, desktop/laptop, mobile device) which does illustrate a trend towards FOSS, with proprietary cloud services acting as a temporary sandbagging attempt. I also had an interview with several engineers who have been involved in the process of license changes and there's definite difference between the decisions of "enterprise" managers and "technically aware" managers. Anyway, it's done now, and hopefully, I'll be able to stick the letters "MSc" after my name (along with all the others).

It has not been just a week of teaching and research however; I threw caution to the wind and ventured out into the suburbs on Wednesday night for Brendan E's birthday. Being his special day we decided to take him wherever he wanted and his mind became very focussed on the idea of pancakes, specifically, that suburban icon, the Pancake Parlour, which contrary to urban legend is not a front for the Church of Scientology but does have some historical connections. In any case, the quasi-Pythonesque decor was an amusing setting, the food was far from terrible, and Kerrie H., amused with stories of how it was a favourite haunt for local youngsters in her teenaged-years as it was open 24-hours and came with a fully stocked bar. It's been at least ten years since I've ventured into those doors, and it will probably be another ten years since I do so again, but it was quite a fun evening.

Current Mood: sick
Current Location: Willsmere
Crossposts: https://tcpip.livejournal.com/296050.html

Insofar that traditional Yule was from December 22 to January 2, it is appropriate to take stock right in the middle of it all. Plus, I'm on an actual holiday, of sorts. Universities in Australia miss out on all sorts of state-based holidays but get a break between Christmas and the New Year to make up for it. Of course, I have done anything but have a break. There is a neurotic psychological imperative deep within me to get as much done from my own personal agenda before the year is done, much of which (as

caseopaya is want to tell me, is work of my own choosing. This is true of course, and I should moderate any levels of stress that come from it, and rather derive satisfaction in the engaging in vita activa, the highest form of human endeavour according to Hannah Arendt, in its own right. In any case, this does mean that I have been writing like a possessed demon the past several days, including throwing away a lot of text that isn't needed for various publications (as Ken Thompson once said, "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code").

There was, of course, some Christmas events, primarily an orphan's Christmas, as it is called, from assorted migrants from Western Australia, including namely Brendan E., nephew Luke, and

funontheupfield. As one who enjoys playing host, I had a thematic natale, being a three-course Italian meal, with antipasto, a parmesan and garlic loaf, salmon with pesto with a tomato sauce, gatto di patate ("cat's potatoes"!) and, of course, a tiramisu, this time with added cherries, all with matched wine; I even printed out menus. It was a pretty good day all up, and people had the opportunity to delve into many matters of conversation. Like many people in Australia at the moment, there was broad agreement around the table on how our Prime Minister took taking an overseas holiday whilst the country was on fire. I've taken the opportunity to pen a few works on the subject, Smoko The Saviour Has Returned!.

The following day we trekked off with Brendan E., to visit our mutual friend Kerrie H., in her new abode, that's very well located in terms of amenities. She's had a bit of a rough year with a shortage of spoons (the metaphor of D&D spell slots is even more appropriate), and our company was appreciated as we helped give the place a bit of a tidy up. Anyway, I get the impression that with new-found employment that they will satisfy at least one part of the triad of happiness, and that they've turned a corner somewhat. Also, they're not far from us now, so we can check-in with greater regularity. A little remiss on our part for not doing so this year.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Willsmere
Current Music: Space Disco Session 1-3, Simplexia
Crossposts: https://tcpip.livejournal.com/291911.html