Cured?

Well, I got to thinking about what I might do to put the Cyrix through its paces, pushing electrons through places that don't see much traffic when Windows is just sitting there, so I decided to reinstall my SETI@Home client. (I'd uninstalled it a while back because the machine could not run the software for more than several hours, typically, without a hang, crash, or a spontaneous reboot.)

The software puts a considerable, steady load on the CPU as it crunches a quarter-meg or so of data collected by a radiotelescope in, if memory serves, Arecibo, Puerto Rico. The analysis is designed to identify telltales in the data stream that might indicate something other than the normal "background" signal that a radiotelescope receives from space.

(What do I mean by a considerable load? Well, without putting too fine a point on it, when I first tried to process a unit of data on my old 486SX, it took over 100 real-time hours to get through less than one percent of the work required to do the whole unit. By comparison, the Cyrix has progressed just over 8 percent of the way through the unit in just under 8 hours.)

In fact, the SETI@Home software has been running for 7 hours and 49 minutes as I write this, and the box has logged just over 36 hours overall (assuming a start time of 2 am yesterday), and - knock wood - no reboot or other objectionable behavior. As an aside, I noticed that all record of the units I'd processed before uninstalling the client have disappeared, and I'm back at the starting point. (No biggie. It's not as if was a bragging point for me to begin with; if it were, I suppose I'd be upset.)

On the television news front, I paused in front of the local news a few moments ago and have again had the edge taken off of what has started out as a pretty good day. The steady stream of reports about every major bad thing that's happened to people overnight (e.g., traffic accidents, gang-related shootings, suicides, fires, plane crashes) certainly isn't inspirational, and I'm sure it doesn't serve to make me a particularly better-informed citizen.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not asking for a steady stream of candy-coated, feel-good news stories, but it sure would be nice to hear about things that go right in this world, at least once in a while.

Cheers...

Visible progress...

on a number of fronts, all of them pretty mundane, only two worth mentioning.

The more visually pleasing is the removal of the stuff that had accumulated on the "ledges" of my bookcases (you know, those narrow strips of shelf real estate that remain after the books are in). Sometimes, these ledges are only wide enough to handle a CD or cassette or two sideways; in other cases, they are wide enough to accommodate a second "layer" of books. On the average, they will accommodate a pile of paperbacks, stacked sideways, in such a way that the center of gravity is just inside the shelf edge. This makes the pile looks stable, but just let a fly light on the outboard side of the stack and...well...it's all over (as in: the floor). In any event, all of that stuff is gone, distributed to proper places, and I've even eliminated most of the other miscellany that lived in the space above the books and under the shelf above.

The tools in the garage got a good rummage, as well. Now, at least, I have a better idea of where things are, to within a foot or so, instead of that uneasy feeling that accompanies the knowledge that the long Phillips-head screwdriver is somewhere in the garage. Galina helped out, and was rewarded by the discovery of a perfectly serviceable piece of luggage for her trip. Between the two of us, the free volume in the garage is beginning to expand noticeably every time we devote a couple of hours to the task.

In the course of my rummage, I ran across an old outdoor/indoor electronic thermometer, sans the outdoor probe, which had been chewed off by one of our animals a long time ago. It so happens I found the probe a while back and stored it, in my packrat fashion, in one of the multicompartmented plastic boxes I bought when we moved into this house. So...I rewired the probe, added a battery, and voilà, another small piece of technology resurrected. Now I can tell you not only that it is hot outside right now, but also how hot (94.1 deg F).

In checking the Windows box periodically during the day, I recalled I reinstalled the SETI@Home software on my C drive, whereas the previous install lived on D. A quick look showed that some of the files from the previous incarnation remain, and one of them in particular told me that the e-mail address I'd used way back when to register with SET@Home wasn't the one I've been using lately. (This leads me to believe my one SET@Home user name has two e-mail addresses associated with it. Go figure.) Checking the status of the "other" account showed my accumulated 5 units completed to date, which places my efforts just above the 50-th percentile of participants. That sounds pretty pathetic, although the overall stats as shown on their web site are pretty impressive. No E.T. yet, though.

The Windows box continues to defy the odds, with an uptime of almost 38 hours, almost 14 of which have been spent crunching numbers for SETI@Home. Ultimately, there is no way to guarantee that the machine will never crash or hang - I mean, after all, it is running Windows - but if it manages to complete an entire SETI data packet without dumping bits all over the carpet, I'll consider the problem solved...and will start to think seriously about cranking the CPU clock speed back up to what a 333-MHz chip oughta be able to handle.

Cheers...

Confidence is rising...

"Computing for blood" is what I call any time I sit down at a keyboard and do something that, ultimately, helps pay bills. I am back up for air right now, after two hours of such activity, editing a telemetry protocol on the Windows box.

The box continues to perform like a champ. The only glitch I've run into thus far is an apparent problem printing from IE 4.x, which causes Explorer to fault out and kill everything in the system tray. To be on the safe side, I rebooted the machine and found the problem was reproducible...but seemingly only trying to print this one particular page using the browser. Weird.

At any rate, the reboots killed my uptime, but the major goal of the exercise is to see if spontaneous reboots go away, which thus far, they have.

My redesigned eBay ads have thus far achieved mixed, extreme results. The redesign consisted of posting shipping charges in the ad, as opposed to waiting until the bidding was over to exchange e-mails with the buyer, find out how they wanted to ship, etc. I give two alternatives: U.S. Priority Mail and the so-called "Special Standard Mail" rate, also known as "Book Rate."

In one auction that just ended about six hours ago, I've already received a PayPal payment and the item is wrapped and ready to go. It is entirely possible that the package will be in the mail before I get the official end-of-auction notice from TPTB at eBay. Chalk one up for the redesign.

In another auction, though, I got an inquiry from the winning bidder asking how much the shipping was going to cost, despite that cost appearing quite clearly in my original posting on eBay. Biting my virtual tongue, I replied with the requested information, but it would appear that there is no level of proactive communication that can't be circumvented with ease.

Cheers...