The Lone Sysadmin

I just cleared out my voice mail box, and I made some observations about voice mail messages:

• First, I hate voice mail. Email me instead.
• You don’t have to tell me what time it is. Voice mail is time-stamped, and it usually doesn’t matter that much.
• You do need to say who you are, because voice mail doesn’t record that. Do this in your first sentence. If you are with a vendor you should say that, too, especially if I’m waiting for a call from you.
• Please use your full name. You might be one of my closest friends but sometimes phones make people sound weird, cell phones cut out, and background noise sometimes makes it hard to figure out which “Bob” you are.
• If you called to have a conversation with me just tell me to call you back. A conversation is where two people talk to each other. My voice mail is not me, so you’re just talking. Talking != a conversation.
• Tell me why you called, using one sentence or less. Extra points if the whole message is a sentence or less.
• Tell me where you want me to call you back. Don’t assume my phone or voicemail has a log of your missed call, though if you’re sure I have your number it’s fine to tell me to call your cell, etc.
• Don’t leave me a message saying only that you’re going to try calling me somewhere else. Not useful.
• If the message includes an address or a phone number say it twice, slowly, so I can write it down. The first time you say the phone number I’ll be scrambling for a notepad, and replaying the message just for a missed number sucks.

That’s about it. *Seems* simple. Thanks for listening. :-)

So far I have nothing but good things to say about doodle.ch, a site that helps groups make decisions or figure out dates for activities. I always hate finding a time when everybody is free, so a tool like this helps immensely.

The nice thing is that you don’t need to register, log in, or give up any personal information (besides your email address) to participate. I had my poll up and running in less than two minutes. Well done!

• Detecting Multi-Core Processor Topology in an IA-32 Platform
  Yay! Sample code!
• Chad Vader provides the voice of Darth Vader on tonight’s “Deal or No Deal” | Dane101
  If you haven’t seen the Chad Vader clips go to YouTube and check them out. They’re filmed around Madison. Extra congrats to Matt Sloan, who does an excellent Darth Vader impersonation.
• Trapped in an Elevator: Online Only Video: The New Yorker
  “This week in the magazine, Nick Paumgarten writes about the lives of elevators, and tells the story of Nicholas White, who was trapped in an elevator in New York City’s McGraw-Hill building for forty-one hours.” Awesome video.
• Trapped in an Elevator…With Diarrhea Video
  Parody of the “Trapped in an Elevator” video, funny as hell. Mildly NSFW as things go.
• AT&T to Provide $200 Subsidy on 3G iPhone? - Mac Rumors
  I hate subsidies, mainly because my contract isn’t up and so I won’t be able to get it. Charge me for phone service separate from the phone itself.
• The Golden Iris: Baby Ducklings
  I had rabbits this year, in a planter box outside… In other years it’s been ducks. Mallards are kinda dumb, but then again maybe not, since they survived here.

I decided yesterday that I need a new ring for my iPhone. The venerable CTU ringtone just wasn’t cutting it anymore, and since tons of people have iPhones now it’s hard to use a built-in ring. Given that I also refuse to use a song as a ringtone I thought Star Trek sounds might be appropriate. These seemed best:

• Star Trek TNG - Alarm Klaxon.m4r
  
• Star Trek TNG - Photon Torpedo.m4r
• Star Trek TNG - Tricorder.m4r

If you have an iPhone, enjoy.

I got this from mmk_kobayashi’s Flickr photostream, which is an amazing collection of images. Some are somewhat NSFW but it isn’t too bad. Regardless, I thought this was absolutely appropriate for today.

Update: I removed the link to Flickr, because apparently the account was removed almost immediately after I linked to it. More proof that this is perfect for today.

• Interviewing Six Conservative Women On Dating - Right Wing News (Conservative News and Views)
  LOL, going to a dump to shoot rats is pretty good. That and Kit Lange’s story about the guy and the coffee shop. Wanting a quickie after being an hour late and penniless? After an hour I’d be too embarrassed to show up. They do make great stories, though.
• Hans Reiser Guilty of First Degree Murder | Threat Level from Wired.com
  Guess I should steer clear of those filesystem guys… :-) Just kidding. And mail order brides. Not kidding so much there. Glad this is over so we can get on with our lives.

I saw “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay” tonight. Pretty funny, but not as good as “Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle” in my opinion. The end is terribly anticlimactic. NPH does a good job, though. Mmm, unicorns.

Kumar does recite a poem by David Feinberg, “The Square Root of Three,” which I thought bears more attention since it’s my kind of dorky. Props to FilmChat for having a copy.

I fear that I will always be
A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine

For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic

I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality

When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three

Has quietly come waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed

:-)

I have a script I want to make decisions based on the number of CPU execution cores in a machine. Of course, in order to make a decision the script first needs to find the number of cores in a machine. Problem is: how exactly do you do that? What an OS thinks is a CPU isn’t always a CPU, thanks to HyperThreading.

You could look at /proc/cpuinfo, but there isn’t anything there that tells you if a CPU core is real or a HyperThreading fake.

You could use dmidecode, but that’ll just count sockets, and you won’t know about the cores or HyperThreading.

In the end, you could just leave it to Intel to write sample code for you and call it a day. Save it as cpucount.cc and compile with “g++ -DLINUX -o cpucount cpucount.cc”. For my purposes I removed all the printf() statements except one that prints the number of physical cores. So all I get is:

$ ./cpucount
2

Seems too easy, right? Yeah, it doesn’t work right under VMware. But then again, under VMware you can just count the number of CPUs, ignoring the complexities of the physical world. :-)