I have only this to say: I could not be happier in a year not divisible by four.

I've been feeling pretty bummed since Steve Jobs announced, earlier this week, that Apple would be moving from PowerPC to Intel x86 CPUs. I'm not sure why I'm so upset, or even if I should be upset. Part of me is sad because I genuinely believe (even in the face of little or no empiricle evidence) in the superiority of RISC architectures, or, possibly, in the obvious (again, without empiricle evidence) inferiority of Intel architectures. The rest of me, however, knows that, so long as

We got back from our trip to Istanbul last night (Thursday, 26 May 2005) after an unexpected stay in Frankfurt Germany. We appear to have planned our vacation to conincide with two important soccer games also being held in istanbul, one derby match between Galatasaray and Fenerbache the day after we arrived (19 May), and the other championship match between Liverpool and Milan the day we left (25 May).

Lina and I are finally going to visit my friend Ozan in Istanbus, Turkey. We've been planning to do this ever since Ozan went back to Turkey two years ago. Unfortunately, we'll only be there for six days (actually, only five days, since about one day will be eaten up in air travel) so we won't get to see much of the country: just Istanbul itself. While this is disappointing, I'm not too upset about it, since the main reason to go to Turkey, for any length of time is to see Ozan again.

I read this comment on Friday and was completely blown away by it (as, aparantly, were other folks, based on the Score:5, Insightful rating).

After posting this comment to the article Why Microsoft Should Fear Bandwidth I wanted to write a little bit more about making system administration easier: I didn't want to leave the topic as vague assertions.

I've been in a deep funk for the last four months: At the end of August one of our cats (Prudence) died suddenly, then there was the 'election' and my ongoing (and increasing) dissatisfaction with my job. I just can't seem to pull it together, so I tend to do neurotic web-surfing late at night. Tonight, I tried to look up some old, old friends. In the process I stumbled across the alumni page for my highschool.

Just some thoughts on an abstract checkpointed file library:

The interest in checkpointing comes from the desire to preserve a known good state of an actively read or written file in the face of unpredictable system failure. We would like to be able to resume processing from the last known good point.

It seems that we only really need a small set of operations to support checkpointed files:

First, we need routines to open and close a checkpointed file:

Ok, again, not much has happened since last October, but a bit of progress has been made in the last few weeks:

Ok, either the state of support in the Linux community has gotten a lot worse in recent years, or I've gotten a lot grumpier. Since I was pretty grumpy to begin with, I'll have to lay the blame at the feet of the Linux community.

We are beset by a multitudinous terror. They have arisen from the long sleep to reclaim the world we, mistakenly, call our own. The stride a century as if it were a week. Their long, slow march treading patiently back into dark prehistory and forward to the unknowable future. A crawling horror with a million legs, lofted on chitonous wings. Their red eyes peering from every corner and crease, from the sky above our heads and the ground below our feet.

I was a bit peeved today to find out that a google search for my name didn't turn up my web-page. It turns out, at least in part, that the problem was in the search. I searched for the string "Jeffrey Dutky", because that's what I call myself, but it appears that I wrote my page using the name "Jeff Dutky" because that's what I'm usually called by others. The search using

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine gave me an old Athlon CPU chip he had lying around. It's nothing exciting (800MHz K7, 200MHz FSB), by objective standards, but when you compare to what I'm using as my current Linux desktop (350MHz K6), it doesn't look half bad.

I haven't done too much on the project since October of last year (the holiday season was pretty distracting), though I've put a little work into the power supply for the LCD. A friend, however, gave me a better name for the project than I am currently using: DayTripper, becuase the device is meant to be able to run for a full day (at least a full work-day) on a single battery charge.

At least I won't have to think too hard about what the product's theme music should be.