Turned in a job application last week, haven't heard anything yet. Asked about it yesterday... "person responsible" wasn't in last week. Supposed to call Monday.

Per instructions (from my Doctor {Sigh}), I'm supposed to apply at USAJOBS. Not real enthusiastic about that. Sometimes the fact that I exited the Navy over ten years comes to mind... do my skills still count? Do I matter?

Yeah, depressed, alone, somewhat suicidal, frustrated, tired of fighting. Sometimes I do wonder if I even matter? Rather amazing how quiet it gets, how long it is between anyone calling, stopping by, how alone one truly is.

{Shrug} Another day...

I played with the proof-of-concept page... it's done through flash... gee, how novel.

Pundits report that to prevent being "clickjacked", you need to either use the 'noscript' extension, disable flash, javascript and your brain, or use lynx, a text only browser usually found on linux systems.

I found that 'flashblock', an extension I use on all my systems, thwarts it very well. If the flash can't execute, it can't do bad things. Since I use it already, it's not something else to install and slow down things with. Besides, it's been reported on CNN and MSNBC websites... why would I go to THOSE places?

My advice? Install 'flashblock' for firefox, don't visit questionable websites. Pretty simple. Oh yeah, and try to avoid the herd mentality.

The old setup (serendipity) would work, but it was seriously taxing to the unit, mysql isn't the nicest application to low-memory machines. Wanted to try the 'nanoblogger' setup, so here it is.

So far... it's alright. I find the interface frustratingly clumsy in the usability department (my apologies to the Author), I just don't see why it needs to be so awkward to do things.

I'll tinker with it, rewrite parts here and there.

Now to get email shifted over... {Sigh}

I don't think so.

It still involves recompiling the source code to be able to turn on the joystick/spacenavigator code. This isn't something most people are going to be able to do.

When I (or anyone) can go to the download section, download the SL Viewer for Linux, install it, log in and then enable the Joystick or SN controller from the Preferences menu... THEN it'll be "fixed".

I played with the code myself some (referenced previously)...

What is up with all these big projects using weird and offshoot type programming extensions? To be able to compile SL would involve me finding and installing 10 or 12 additional libraries (in addition to the 50-60 I already have), most of which I've *never* heard of... And I write code myself, so I consider myself somewhat fluent in "what's out there".

Get it in the downloadable tarball... THEN we'll see if it's fixed.

Even if it were still partially broken, there would then be many more people testing and improving it. This was my initial rant to begin with.. it's disabled on linux builds by default. We didn't even GET A CHANCE to use a joystick, broken or not.

Loni

Of course, this machine here isn't the powerhouse saturn is... so the limits are correspondingly lower. duh!

2GB per process on the 64bit AMD machine with oodles of ram. Makes sense.

Will be a while until I can really test this, since saturn is currently down, stress testing my backup/restore system. The root drive has been in there a while, guess it's only natural that it would begin slowly fading... Essentially, the last 'stress' I did... the huge swap file usage, hard drive pounding quaking terror I seemed to have put it though earlier this evening has caused the root drive to begin to give up. SMART began screaming at me during restart, sda is failing! sda is failing! the sky is falling! run for your life!

So a little while later, the system is restoring the backup onto a partition on another drive, rebuild grub and it should be back up within the hour or so. A pain, but that's what good backups are for. Right? And since I use volume labels, nothing needs to be changed since I formatted the new partition with the label 'root' again. taadaaa! (kinda slick that!)

Of course, I have this machine to play with while saturn's restoring, the webserver and email is handled on another machine... waaay too many computers in this apartment. {Grin}. Keeps me off the streets.

And, I remember seeing a sym-link loop in there somewhere in the /var/lib area in the past, so I did rather expect it to get caught and whirr away for a while on that... probably abort with a memory malloc error or something similar.

Well, it *did* abort... but at exactly 16,777,216 items. Doesn't that number ring a bell? Yeah... exactly 16 Meg (16*1024*1024).

Kinda eerie. I've got 4GB of ram, 6 GB of swap... it ate up nearly 7GB of storage real/virtual before it coughed and died. So of course I had to enable core dumps and see....

<run it again!>

Yup... 16,777,216 entries, then:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
what(): std::bad_alloc
Aborted (core dumped)

Strange... does 'vector' have an upper limit on how many it can index (beyond memory/ram limits of course)?

So whip up a little test jig, using 'vector <int> tst' just to see how many it can create before it dies...

This time... 536,870,912 items.... gee,that number's familiar too... That's *exactly* 512 Meg (512*1024*1024). Very Weird.

The test jig just stored 'int's, 4 byte values. The original program (dedupe), stores 'md5file' classes...

Hmmm:

512 Meg items @ 4 bytes = 2 GB of storage....
16 Meg items @ ? bytes = ... 2 GB?? (this is a theory...)

Implies the Class is 128 bytes... Let's go add up things and see...

Well... drat. sizeof(md5file) says it's 88 bytes, I'm 40 bytes shy. One-Third too low. Darn. And just for good measure, I verified that the test jig is using 4 byte int's too. Trying 8 byte double's now... testing the theory again. I predict... 256Meg items. Now to see if my theory holds true.

{jeopardy music plays softly in the background}

HEY! 268,435,456 items... 256*1024*1024... 256Meg! The theory seems to hold true...

So what's using the other 40 bytes? {Sigh} Use the Source Luke! Dang-it! I *WROTE* the source...

Not that my machine has anywhere NEAR 16 Million files to tinker with... but still!. Actually, considering that I can predict what it's going to do... maybe it's a feature now. {shrug} dunno.

Had an epiphany while recovering from the last coredump... Efficient memory usage / allocation is usually done by powers of 2... and since 88 > 64, then the next size up is 128. Which would explain the 128 byte per allocation usage predicted by my theory above.

So yeah, it all works. There's not a 16Meg limit to number of items, there's a 2GB limit on the amount of data stored.

Taa Daa!

(Not that this really explains anything, but at least now I know why it's dying at exact 'power-of-two' boundaries.

Loni

(Edit: I figured out the 2G limit too... see next post)