An Introduction to Cluster Ballooning

An Introduction to Cluster Ballooning

I saw this on slashdot.

It only goes to show what you can do with clusters. :-)

My schipperke - a pretty good picture

schipperke_security.jpg (JPEG Image, 648x487 pixels)

Here's a picture of my schipperke, Zim.

David Monaghan took the picture and did the photo manipulation for the final product.

It's surprising difficult to take good pictures of a schipperke, due to the hair. It's an intensely deep black color, with seemingly no highlights of other colors. Outdoor lighting seems to work better than others. Interestingly, David took the picture using a digital camera set for indoor lighting. The picture came out with a blue tint, but was adjusted in post-production. The final picture still has a slight blue tint, but the subtle tones in the fur are nicely visible.

A Joyous Return from a 4-day Weekend

Ok, so here is how it works. I spend a very nice 4-day weekend at home. Since I didn't want to be cheated out of one ounce of the weekend, I didn't end up getting to sleep until 1am. Ok, so Monday morning arrives. I drag my butt out of bed, and somehow manage to navigate to work. How that works is still a mystery.

I arrived at work a 6:45am, or so. I somehow manage to handle a user problem related to a duplicate IP address. I think the same mysterious part of my brain that handled the morning commute is somehow at play here, but I was too tired to ponder it at the time. I manage to catch up on my email, then I checked my calendar for the day.

Egad! I got two all-day meetings with out-of-town visitors. Neither group has a solid agenda for the day, but it's ok with me if it's ok with them. I spend all day bouncing between two all-day meetings. One would think that this little bit of excitement would be enough to vanquish my fatigue...

But no... For some reason the lights seemed slightly dimmer than I remembered. I'm sure it was all in my mind, but this is a pale consolation when you're praying for something that stops you from outright sawing logs right there in the meeting. Don't get me wrong - the topics in the meetings were all important to at least some portion of the attendees, but none of the early-morning material was relevant enough to lift me out of my fog.

Oh ya - I forgot to mention the coffee. How can four 16-ounce coffees not do *something* to remove the stupor?!? It's probably some type of plot. If I drank that many mugs of my home-brewed coffee I'd be bouncing off the walls. As is, it probably only prevented me from falling sound asleep in the meetings.

At any rate, I survived the day, to make it home. But wait! No no - seriously - wait until you hear this. I get home only to find my wife sound asleep. Even the sound of four dogs barking with glee was not enough to wake my wife upon my arrival. So I grabbed a beer and posted this blog entry.

They unbroke the recent copyright bill

Wired News: A Kinder, Gentler Copyright Bill?: "Digital rights groups said while there is still cause for concern in
the bill, it is a vast improvement over the previous version."

Yea! It almost restores your faith in humanity and government to see things like this. This could have been catastrophic to digital media.